586. How Does the Lost World of Vienna Still Shape Our Lives?

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🗓️ 2 May 2024

⏱️ 57 minutes

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Summary

From politics and economics to psychology and the arts, many of the modern ideas we take for granted emerged a century ago from a single European capital. In this episode of the Freakonomics Radio Book Club, the historian Richard Cockett explores all those ideas — and how the arrival of fascism can ruin in a few years what took generations to build.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Once upon a time there was a place that was so dynamic that it seemed as if the future had already arrived.
0:14.0	They were trying to take all the most modern disciplines,
0:20.0	physiology, medicine, mathematics statistics. and apply all these new disciplines to building a new civilization.
0:23.0	You may think I'm talking about
0:26.0	all these new disciplines
0:28.0	to building a new civilization.
0:32.0	You may think I'm talking about someplace like ancient Athens or Alexandria,
0:37.0	but no this was much more recent during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. And it didn't last. This dynamic place turned out to be a
0:47.1	volatile place and then a violent one.
0:51.2	In a most comprehensive ruthless manner, the Nazis basically destroyed Vienna as a centre of scientific progressive opposition to national
1:05.3	socialism. The great Viennese writer Stephen Zweig, who killed himself in
1:11.8	1942, left behind a memoir called The World of Yesterday.
1:16.5	It is a heartbreaking book about a Vienna that in retrospect didn't stand a chance.
1:22.8	It was a city built on modern thinking.
1:25.6	In its art and its politics, in its embrace of science as a foundation of society,
1:31.4	it was more modern than many places today.
1:35.0	That Vienna was wiped out, but as described in a new book, its legacy lived on, especially in the United States, in many areas of daily life.
1:46.0	From music through philosophy to nuclear vision, biology, art therapy, the whole of psychanalysis and psychology and free market economics.
2:00.0	Today on an episode of the Freakonomics Radio Book Club, we speak with the author of this new book.
2:05.7	We will ask why it's worthwhile to explore this vanished Vienna.
2:11.6	We'll talk about which of the city's rhythms still move us today.
2:16.0	Also, we will discuss, to paraphrase the investment industry, why a city's past performance is no indicator of its future results.
	...

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