The German Genius

“deliquescent tangle” of bodies that appear to drift past the onlooker, a kaleidoscope of forms that run into each other, and all surrounded by a void. The professors were outraged, and Klimt was vilified as presenting “unclear ideas through unclear forms.” Philosophy was supposed to be a rational affair; it “sought the truth via the exact sciences.” Eighty scholars petitioned that Klimt’s picture never be shown at the university. The painter returned his fee and never presented the remaining commissions. The significance of the fight is that it brings us back to Hofmannsthal and Schnitzler, to Husserl and Brentano. For in the university commission, Klimt was attempting a major statement. How can rationalism succeed, he is asking, when the irrational, the instinctive, is such a dominant part of life? Is reason really the way forward? Instinct is an older, more powerful force. It may be more atavistic, more primitive, a dark force at times, but where is the profit in denying it? This remained an important strand in German thought until World War II.
     
     
    Theodor Herzl (1860–1904) was a Hungarian Jew who studied law at Vienna. As a pupil in his Gymnasium he had written a poem praising Luther as a champion of Germany and in Vienna he helped organize a German-National student group. A handsome man who wrote comedies, he became more successful as a journalist in the 1880s, contributing feuilletons to the Wiener Allgemeine Zeitung and the Neue Freie Presse . (The feuilleton was originally a French idea, an article—often below the fold on the front page of a newspaper—that eschewed “hard” news in favor of wittily written comment, bouncing off the news, posing awkward questions about what was, and was not, being revealed.) The crucial change in Herzl’s life came in 1891 when he became the Paris correspondent of the Neue Freie Presse and arrived in France to witness a tide of economic anti-Semitism brought about by the Panama scandal. 24 Three years later, in 1894, Herzl was aghast when France formed an alliance with Russia at the very time pogroms were killing thousands of Ukrainian Jews. It was the indifference—not just of the West, but of Western Jews—to the fate of the eastern Europeans that caused him, in 1895, to publish his proposal for a Jewish state. Although he continued with journalism and wrote yet more plays, the rest of his career was devoted to realizing this one idea, that the governments of Europe should grant to a Jewish stock company sovereignty over a part of the colonial territory under their control to be turned into a refuge for any Jews who wished to take advantage of it. From 1896 until his death in 1904, Herzl organized a series of six world congresses of Jewry; among their aims was to persuade the sultan of the Ottoman Empire to release part of Palestine for the purpose of establishing a Jewish state. Failing that, Herzl would have accepted areas in Africa or Argentina (which many of his supporters would not accept).
    Herzl knew he probably would not live to see his dream realized but never had any doubt that, one day, his vision would come about (this is evident in his copious correspondence). When he died, the Zionist bank in London, the Jewish Colonial Trust, had 135,000 shareholders, “then the largest number financing any enterprise in the world.” More than 10,000 Jews from all over Europe attended his funeral in 1904.
    T HE P RIMACY OF P HYSICS AND P SYCHOLOGY
     
    At the same time, there was in Vienna a strain of thought that was wholly scientific and frankly reductionist. The most ardent, and by far the most influential reductionist in Vienna was Ernst Mach (1838–1916). Born near Brünn, where Mendel had outlined his theories, Mach, a precocious and difficult child who questioned everything, studied mathematics and physics in Vienna. He made two major discoveries. Simultaneously with Breuer, but entirely independently, he discovered the importance of the semicircular canals in the inner ear for bodily equilibrium. 25 Second, using a special technique, he made photographs of bullets traveling at more than the speed of sound. In the process, he discovered that they create not one but two shockwaves, one at the front and another at the rear, as a result of the vacuum their high speed creates. This became particularly significant after World War II with the arrival of jet aircraft that approached the speed of sound, and is why supersonic speeds (on the