Word: musil
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Vienna before World War I was a heart of decadence in a glittering shell. The fusty Emperor Franz Josef ruled over a sprawling, ramshackle empire, weakened by corruption. By spending lavishly on his army, he managed to maintain the empire as what Austrian Novelist Robert Musil called "the second-weakest great power in Europe...
...empire was a satirist's paradise, as Musil demonstrated in his mammoth novel A Man Without Qualities, it was also the most exciting intellectual center in Europe. There were Mach and Boltzman in physics, Bruckner, Mahler and Schoenberg in music, Adler and Freud in psychology. There were also dozens of writers and journalists, including the brilliant, mordant social critic Karl Kraus, whose anti-paper Die Fackel (The Torch) was dedicated to making its readers "morally aware of the essential distinction between the chamber...