BUDAPEST 1900
A Historical Portrait of a City and Its
Culture
John Lukacs
New York: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1988
288 pp., $9.95.
Despite the confidently prophetic talk one sometimes hears concerning mankind's "limitless" and computerized future, I suspect that we are far more conscious of approaching the end than the beginning of a century. This is understandable in light of the fact that we know the twentieth century experientially; it is real to us in ways that the next hundred years, should the planet survive, cannot possibly be. Little wonder, either, that the more reflective among us evince a by no means idle curiosity about the last end of century or, to borrow the more sonorous French term, fin de siecle. In his recent, and superb, France: Fin de Siecle (1986), Eugen Weber reported that he came to his subject because "the discrepancy between material progress and spiritual dejection reminded me of our own times."
We have more reason to be spiritually dejected than our forefathers had, for we have lived through a century that has produced, among other horrors, two world wars, Auschwitz, and the Gulag Archipelago. Now, as we ask ourselves how matters stand at the close not just of a century, but of a millennium, we are apt to dwell upon what went wrong. Why did the Liberal Age, the Era of Progress that looks so golden in retrospect, meet what historian George Dangerfield called a "strange death"? How many of those who lived during that age had premonitions of the end? Could the devolution of liberalism have been prevented?
It was, we now know, the Great War, not the mere insistence of the calendar, that brought a close to the nineteenth century. The fin de siecle might be said, therefore, to have extended from the 1880s to 1914. I say "might be" because there are those who argue with some force that the years 1900-1914 were different, and more promising, than the two preceding decades. That is why the French refer to the immediate prewar period as the belle époque, and the Austrians speak with misty eyes of "Gay Vienna." In The Great Illusion, 1900-1914, a volume in the respected Rise of Modern Europe series, Oron J. Hale wrote that "the posturing of the 'decadents' at the turn of the century should not be given undue weight, for the real mood was broadly optimistic and anticipatory."
One thing, though, is not in question. The fin de siecle was a period of almost unparalleled cultural creativity. It witnessed the birth of modernism as well as a host of avant-garde movements such as Cubism, Futurism, and Expressionism. Probing explorations of fin de siecle culture have already appeared. Carl E. Schorske's Fin-de-Siecle Vienna: Politics and Culture (1981) is more theoretically ambitious, and no less learned, than Weber's tellingly anecdotal book. The same can be said of Renato Poggioli's The Theory of the Avant-Garde (1968). John E. Bowlt's pioneering studies of prewar Russian art are themselves miniature masterpieces. It does not stop there, for interest in the period extends beyond the scholarly world. In New York, Washington, Chicago, and other major cities, exhibitions of fin de siecle Viennese, Russian, and French art consistently attract large and enthusiastic
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