The Garden and the Workshop : Essays on the Cultural History of Vienna and Budapest

A century ago, Vienna and Budapest were the capital cities of the western and eastern halves of the increasingly unstable Austro-Hungarian empire and scenes of intense cultural activity.

Vienna was home to such figues as Sigmund Freud, Gustav Klimt, and Hugo von Hofmannsthal; Budapest produced such luminaries as Bela Bartok, Georg Lukacs, and Michael and Karl Polanyi.

However, as Peter Hanak shows in these vignettes of fin-de-siecle life, the intellectual and artistic vibrancy common to the two cities emerged from deeply different civic cultures.

Hanak surveys the urban development of the two cities and reviews the effects of modernization on various aspects of their cultures.

He examines the process of physical change, as rapid population growth, industrialization and the rising middle class ushered in a new age of tenements, suburbs and town planning.

He investigates how death and its rituals - once the domain of church, family and local community - were transformed by the commercialization of burials and the growing bureaucratic control of graveyards. He explores the mentality of common soldiers and their families - mostly of peasant origin - during World War I, detecting in letters to and from the front a shift toward a revolutionary mood among Hungarians in particular.

He presents snapshots of such subjects as the mentality of the nobility, operettas and musical life, and attitudes toward Germans and Jews, and also reveals the relationship between social marginality and cultural creativity.

In comparing the two cities, Hanak notes that Vienna, famed for its spacious parks and gardens, was often characterized as a "garden" of esoteric culture.

Budapest, however, was a dense city surrounded by factories, whose cultrual leaders referred to the offices and cafes where they met as "workshops".

These differences were reflected, he argues, in the contrast between Vienna's aesthetic and individualistic culture and Budapest's more moralistic and socially engaged approach.

Hanak's book paints a portrait of life in Central Europe.

Its particular focus on mass culture and everyday life offers insights into cultural currents that shaped the course of the 20th century.