Flirting with Culture

Abstract

Stefan Zweig’s World of Yesterday, written from exile in 1937, recalls the years before the Great War as a “world of security,” where Vienna was a cosmopolitan city alive with ubiquitous eroticism, intellectual splendor, and, above all, a unique love for the arts. “Only with respect to the arts,” he writes, “did everyone in Vienna feel the same entitlement, for love of art, in Vienna, was considered a common obligation.” Art transcended origins and class; art replaced the privilege of birth. No wonder, then, Zweig continues, that the real lovers of the arts, the real audience, came from the Viennese Jewish bourgeoisie, for here was a social group fuid and unburdened by traditional values, whose members could become, everywhere, “the patrons and champions of all new things.” In many ways, Elana Shapira’s impressive book Style and Seduction refects Zweig’s frsthand observations, adding color and nuance to a by now well-trodden feld of Jewish patronage in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It is also a timely book whose publication coincides with the 150th anniversary of the Vienna Ringstraße Boulevard and the resurgent interest in, as it were, Ringstraße studies, inspired by both scholarly and popular inclinations. Only a year ago, a veritable furry of exhibits celebrated the history of the “Ring” in various museums in Vienna, including the Jewish Museum, which featured The Vienna Ringstraße: A Jewish Boulevard, anticipating some of the material and observations Shapira has developed on her own. But Style and Seduction is not only about the Jewish presence on the Ringstraße. It is a book about Jewish art lovers and the way they helped shape Vienna’s cultural scene from the 1860s to the years just prior to World War I. Shapira’s organizing principle is a chronology of dominant stylistic periods. The story she tells unfolds logically from “The Historicists,” a chapter that focuses mainly on the