2024-05-02
57 分钟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.
Once upon a time, there was a place that was so dynamic that it seemed as if the future had already arrived.
They were trying to take all the most modern disciplines, physiology, medicine, mathematics, statistics, and apply all these new disciplines to building a new civilization.
You may think I'm talking about someplace like ancient Athens or Alexandria, 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 volatile place, and then a violent.
One in a most comprehensive, ruthless manner.
The Nazis basically destroyed Vienna as a center of scientific progressive opposition to national socialism.
The great viennese writer Stefan Zweig, who killed himself in 1942, left behind a memoir called the World of yesterday.
It is a heartbreaking book about a Vienna that, in retrospect, didn't stand a chance.
It was a city built on modern thinking, in its art and its politics, in its embrace of science as a foundation of society.
It was more modern than many places today 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, from music through philosophy to nuclear fission, biology, art therapy, the whole of psychoanalysis and psychology, and free market economics.
Today, on an episode of the free economics Radio Book Club, we speak with the author of this new book.
We will ask why it's worthwhile to explore this vanished Vienna.
We'll talk about which of the city's rhythms still move us today.
Also, we will discuss, to paraphrase the investment industry, why a citys past performance is no indicator of its future results.
So is this episode a celebration of lost history, or is it a cautionary tale?
Maybe its both.
This is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything, with your host, Stephen Dubner.
I recently visited Vienna for the first time, just for a few days.