“Thinking with History”: it is not the same as thinkingabouthistory as a general form of meaning-making. That is what philosophers or theorists of history do. Thinkingwithhistory implies the employment of the materials of the past and the configurations in which we organize and comprehend them to orient ourselves in the living present. In one mode, we think with the substantive yield of historical inquiry, with the images we form of the past, in order to define ourselves by difference or by resemblance to it. Here history is an object for us, and appears as static, a...

My first encounter with the world of learning took place, if family account is to be believed, when I entered kindergarten in Scarsdale, New York. To break the ice among the little strangers, my teacher, Miss Howl, asked her pupils to volunteer a song. I gladly offered a German one, called “Morgenrot.” It was a rather gloomy number that I had learned at home, about a soldier fatalistically contemplating his death in battle at dawn. The year was 1919, and America’s hatred of the Hun still ran strong. Miss Howl was outraged at my performance. She took what she called...

During two hectic centuries of social transformation, the problem of the city pressed relentlessly upon the consciousness of Europe’s thinkers and artists. The response of the intellectuals to this pressure was infinitely varied; for social change brought in its train transformations in ideas and values more protean than the alterations in society itself.

No one thinks of the city in hermetic isolation. One forms one’s image of it through a perceptual screen derived from inherited culture and transformed by personal experience. Hence the investigation of the intellectuals’ idea of the city inevitably carries us outside its own frame into myriad...

Basel in the nineteenth century can best be understood as a viable anachronism. Surviving from the medieval era as a city-state, it managed to maintain a substantial measure of its political autonomy and much of its patrician-dominated social structure. From the Renaissance era it retained a humanistic cultural tradition within a new world of powerful modern nation-states, big cities, big business, and technological culture. Determination to remain small was essential to the Basel elite’s successful defense of its civic tradition and, for a long time, its social power. In a modern world that worshiped growth as health and bigness as...

Karl Marx opened his Communist Manifesto with an arresting, not to say chilling, announcement: “A specter is haunting Europe—the specter of Communism.” By 1847, when the “social question” had become a major concern not only in industrial England but as far east as the Germanies, the specter of revolution indeed weighed heavy on the European consciousness. But there were other, older ghosts that stalked the land as well, sometimes allied with Marx’s futuristic specter, sometimes in conflict with it. One of these is the concern of this paper: the specter—or spirit—of medievalism.

A ghost is a protean...

Is it justified to yoke together two artists so different as Richard Wagner and William Morris? By what warrant shall one compare a musician with a designer and craftsman, a German nationalist with an English socialist, a child of the age of Metternich with a son of the Victorian era twenty-one years his junior? All these incomparabilities make an effort at reciprocal illumination suspect. Yet history often reveals patterns in seemingly disparate phenomena. Although Wagner and Morris were indifferent to each other’s work and even to each other’s existence, they were joined by many ties. Both became artists in an...

Austria’s construction of a capital complex within an existing city was surely one of the great achievements of nineteenth-century urban planning and bureaucratic imagination. To modern eyes, Vienna’s circular Ringstrasse district, with its splendid monumental buildings of politics and culture and its vast, luxurious apartment blocs, appears as a coherent urbanGesamtkunstwerk(total work of art). The many styles of its buildings seem welded into a harmonious unity by the common commitment to monumentality and the agreed symbolic meanings of style in the lexicon of historicism shared by their makers. Even to its builders, the very modernity of the Ring...

No one who has investigated the high culture of Vienna in the era of liberal ascendancy can fail to be impressed by the sturdy integration of its components. Not only were political, scientific, and aesthetic culture closely related to each other in principle and in practice but the very social life and cultural forms of the elite sustained the synthesis achieved. Yet by the end of the nineteenth century, this complex was breaking apart, with aesthetic culture often going its separate way from the liberal-rationalist political and academic culture with which it had been linked. The character of this union...

Doubtless Greek myth-makers and modern psychoanalysts touched an eternal verity when they documented the troubles that beset the relations of fathers and sons. Eternal verities, however, do not express themselves uniformly in historical life. In Sophocles’s Thebes, an Oedipal situation produced a political crisis; in Hamlet’s state of Denmark, an Oedipal tension coincided with political rottenness. Among the intellectuals of Freud’s Vienna, Oedipal tension first received reenforcement from a political crisis, then became generalized as a cultural phenomenon and finally was swept away by the Expressionist culturemakers of the early twentieth century.

The object of my concern here is not...

The rapid, confused emergence of modernism in the late nineteeth century as a broad cultural movement self-conscious of its break from history drew architecture into its wake everywhere in Europe. But nowhere more than in Vienna. The reason is not far to seek. It lies in the city’s great mid-nineteenth-century redevelopment, the Ringstrasse. There Austrian liberalism, as is the way of triumphant movements, built after 1860 its city on a hill, celebrating in stone its victorious values of rational ethicalRechtand historical aestheticKultur.The Ringstrasse area was built into the old imperial capital like an Austrian Canberra or...

In 1897, Gustav Mahler was named conductor and director of Vienna’s Court Opera. In the Habsburg Empire, no career success in the arts could compare to that which the thirty-seven-year-old Mahler achieved with this appointment. That one of Jewish origin should be named master of Austria’s most prestigious cultural institution seems even more remarkable, for the Opera was the artistic organization most closely bound to the Baroque tradition, the Catholic culture of the court. Moreover, 1897 was the year when the anti-Semitic Karl Lueger, leader of the Christian Social party, became mayor of Vienna.

That Mahler became a totally devoted...

In March of 1933, a new patient came to Freud. She was an American poet, Hilda Doolittle—better known to us by her pen name, H.D. The clouds of Nazism hung heavy over Europe that spring. H.D., severely traumatized by World War I, was frightened. She came to Freud, as she tells us, “in order to fortify and equip myself to face war when it came.” “With the death-head swastika chalked on the pavement leading to the professor’s door,” she wrote in her brilliantTribute to Freud,“I must calm as best I could ... my own personal little dragon...

History is one of the few disciplines to boast a muse, Clio, thanks to the academic intelligentsia of Alexandria who assigned her to our craft. The muses are, of course, female. If any among them has partaken more than others of the nature and destiny of woman in a man’s world, it is Clio.

In 1988, a conference was held at Scripps College which dramatized the degree to which Clio’s life has been dependent. The title of the symposium was “History and . . .”¹ Participants of various nonhistorical disciplines were asked to examine their relations with history in a...