Narrating modern crisis and acceleration: re-reading Carl Schorske’s Fin de Siècle Vienna

In the late nineteenth century, the economic, social and cultural accelerations of western modernity triggered intensifying reactions, including racism, nationalism and communitarian politics, that sought refuge in tradition from the threat of change. Conversely, cultural movements emerged that embraced the dynamics of innovation. Carl Schorske’s Fin de Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture, immersed in the complexity of these contesting responses enacted in a critical cultural and intellectual milieu of the period. Schorske sought resolution of fin de siècle crisis and acceleration through catharsis, presenting at least the possibility of a restoration of cultural unity; yet his narrative more convincingly described forces of disintegration generated by the drive for progress. Drawing on the work of Reinhart Koselleck and the debate on modern crisis and acceleration stimulated by it, Schorske’s seminal work is explored to develop a reconsideration of the intellectual and cultural energies generating progress and crisis at the fin de siècle and resonating into the twentieth century.