- The Naked Truth: Viennese Modernism and the Body by Alys X. George
The historiography of the Viennese fin de siècle has been profoundly influenced by Carl E. Schorske's Pulitzer-winning collection of essays, Fin-de-siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture, originally published in 1979. But Steven Beller, Allan Janik, Pieter Judson, Scott Spector, and others have recently called for a rethinking of the Schorskean thesis that the failure of political liberalism caused Viennese intellectuals to turn to the subjective realm of the psyche. Alys X. George's excellent interdisciplinary study is [End Page 449] an answer to that call. By placing the body at the center of the modernist landscape, George accomplishes three extraordinary feats. First, drawing inspiration from the works of Foucauldian feminist scholars Judith Butler, Susan Bordo, and others who have conceptualized the body as not merely biologically predetermined but also a site of sociocultural, political, and discursive construction, George writes the long-ignored story of corporeality into the larger arc of Viennese modernism. Second, George highlights the profound impact of the medical discourses emerging from the Second Vienna Medical School on the cultural construction of the body, thus incorporating medical culture into the history of modernism. Finally, George effectively demonstrates the continuity between the modernism of the fin de siècle and the interwar period. What emerges is a far more diverse portrait of Viennese modernism—an account that includes several forgotten literary and artistic figures and representatives of popular culture.
Chapter 1 examines the construction of the "Other" and the "Self." In an exploration of exhibitions, fiction (especially works by Peter Altenberg), newspaper articles, and dance performances, George juxtaposes the construction of the bodies of the Ashantis and other African peoples against the bodies of local people and illuminates how scientific and medical discourses of the age permeated Viennese modernism. The sciences and medicine, George argues, "were deeply implicated in the objectification and instrumentalization of the body—its display, exoticizing, documentation, eroticizing, comparison, and classification" (24–25). The health reform movement in particular underscored the importance of dietetics and hygiene to the "human motor." Chapter 4 returns to the "staging" of the body, casting its lens on the performative aspects of modernist Viennese culture. George analyzes the interplay of gender, class, race, and nation in the body language of the cultural productions of pantomime, modern dance, and silent film and argues that "the central tenet of all three genres was the body as a crucible of expressive potential" (204). The works of Hugo von Hofmannsthal and the Wiesenthal sisters take center stage in this chapter.
The focus in chapter 2 is "literary depictions of … abject bodies" (69). Exploring the works of Viennese physician-writers Marie Pappenheim and Arthur Schnitzler, as well as the writings of Joseph Roth, Carry Hauser, and Ödön von Horváth, George uses the leitmotif of the corpse to explore the sites of its construction: the morgue and the dissecting room. George contends that Schnitzler was inspired to write through the encounter with the cadaver in the liminal space of the dissecting room (88). She further traces the shift in the corporeal perspective after World War I, when many soldiers returned from the front with mangled bodies. The cultural representations of the body changed drastically, from one brimming with potential to one in need of reconstruction. George concludes that this seismic shift "guaranteed that the Viennese could not lay their dead to rest" (114). In chapter 3, George dwells on the theme of motherhood, particularly on the [End Page 450] bodies of working-class women in medical clinics around Vienna. George contends that the works of Pappenheim and Ilka Maria Ungar "give authentic voice to overlooked subjects in fin-de-siècle Vienna: working-class women, many of them expectant" (127).
The timbre of George's voice, in my view, emerges most powerfully between pages 127 and 167 of chapter 3. From her examination of Egon Schiele's visual art of patient-subjects in clinical settings...