The Garden and the Workshop (ebook)

Argumento de The Garden and the Workshop (ebook)

A century ago, Vienna and Budapest were the capital cities of the western and eastern halves of the increasingly unstable Austro-Hungarian empire and scenes of intense cultural activity. Vienna was home to such figures as Sigmund Freud, Gustav Klimt, and Hugo von Hofmannsthal; Budapest produced such luminaries as Béla Bartók, Georg Lukács, and Michael and Karl Polanyi. However, as Péter Hanák shows in these vignettes of Fin-de-Siécle life, the intellectual and artistic vibrancy common to the two cities emerged from deeply different civic cultures.

Hanák surveys the urban development of the two cities and reviews the effects of modernization on various aspects of their cultures. He examines the process of physical change, as rapid population growth, industrialization, and the rising middle class ushered in a new age of tenements, suburbs, and town planning. He investigates how death and its rituals--once the domain of church, family, and local community--were transformed by the commercialization of burials and the growing bureaucratic control of graveyards. He explores the mentality of common soldiers and their families--mostly of peasant origin--during World War I, detecting in letters to and from the front a shift toward a revolutionary mood among Hungarians in particular. He presents snapshots of such subjects as the mentality of the nobility, operettas and musical life, and attitudes toward Germans and Jews, and also reveals the striking relationship between social marginality and cultural creativity.

In comparing the two cities, Hanák notes that Vienna, famed for its spacious parks and gardens, was often characterized as a "garden" of esoteric culture. Budapest, however, was a dense city surrounded by factories, whose cultural leaders referred to the offices and cafés where they met as "workshops." These differences were reflected, he argues, in the contrast between Vienna's aesthetic and individualistic culture and Budapest's more moralistic and socially engaged approach. Like Carl Schorske's famous Fin-de-Siécle Vienna, Hanák's book paints a remarkable portrait of turn-of-the-century life in Central Europe. Its particular focus on mass culture and everyday life offers important new insights into cultural currents that shaped the course of the twentieth century.

Originally published in 1998.

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"Hanák always writes well, is always absorbing, and is consistently receptive to the latest trends in historiography.... [The volume particularly] succeeds in those studies that describe the variety of intellectual responses to the challenges of capitalist transformation in Budapest and Vienna--those two very different urban centers of the two halves of one country. Hanák's account of this will continue to fascinate as long as people read cultural history."--Gábor Gyáni, The Budapest Review of Books

"The Garden and the Workshop is not only for lovers of Vienna and Budapest, it is for history buffs of all stripes. But it is likewise for anyone interested in seeing what Hanák implicitly shows time and time again, namely the many points that postmodernist fin-de-siécle relativism shares with our own fin-de-siécle (or should I say fin-de-millennium?) postmodernist variety of same."--Michael Henry Heim, Washington Post Book World0List of Illustrations Foreword Acknowledgments Introductory Reflections on Cultural History Ch. 1 Urbanization and Civilization: Vienna and Budapest in the Nineteenth Century 3 Ch. 2 The Image of the Germans and the Jews in the Hungarian Mirror of the Nineteenth Century 44 Ch. 3 The Garden and the Workshop: Reflections on Fin-de-Siecle Culture in Vienna and Budapest 63 Ch. 4 The Alienation of Death in Budapest and Vienna at the Turn of the Century 98 Ch. 5 The Start of Endre Ady's Literary Career (1903-1905) 110 Ch. 6 The Cultural Role of the Vienna-Budapest Operetta 135 Ch. 7 Social Marginality and Cultural Creativity in Vienna and Budapest (1890-1914) 147 Ch. 8 Vox Populi: Intercepted Letters in the First World War 179 Notes 213 Index 241