“City of Ideas”: New book about the ingenuity of the Viennese elite

The author Richard Cockett dedicates his book to the influence of Vienna on the modern world. At the center are brilliant minds such as Lise Meitner, Karl Popper and Victor Gruen and other economists, technicians and Hollywood greats.

VIENNA. Can a single city be responsible for most of the West’s intellectual and cultural aberrations in the 20th century? This question is at the heart of Richard Cocketts Book “City of Ideas” about Vienna’s influence on the modern world, which has just been published in German for the first time Molden Publishers has appeared.

Cockett is a historian, author and senior editor of The Economist, a business and news magazine. In his book he brings Viennese economists, psychotherapists, social scientists, technicians, designers and architects to later Hollywood greats and the inventor of the modern shopping mall into the spotlight. Because her work has so far remained hidden from the wider public.

It spans the time period from the Belle Époque around 1900 to the simmering interwar period with the achievements of Red Vienna to the neoliberal researchers of the Austrian School of Economics.

New, original look

Cockett describes the fate of this colorful elite who called Vienna home, were murdered by the Nazis or scattered across the globe, and whose ideas continue to shape us today. “The book provides an original view from the outside, but does not stop in the past. It’s about our now, because many of the mistakes have returned to us and we can no longer imagine our lives without them. It is an encouraging book, a “book for forward thinking,” explains Stefan Schlögl, program manager at Molden Verlag.

“As soon as the original English version was released in 2023, social media was overwhelmed with enthusiastic reviews. I just had to read it and was immediately hooked,” says Schlögl. “I was aware that there would be an enormous amount of work ahead of us. A book like this not only needs a gifted translator, but also someone who can trace each of the 60 or so English quotations back to the original German quotation on which they are based. Stephan Gebauer mastered this task brilliantly.”

And then there are the 130 images in the book. In the original it was two thirds less. The publisher spent months searching archives around the world to give the people in the book a face and “to visually honor their achievements.”

Why Vienna?

“From the turn of the century to the interwar period, Vienna was characterized by interdisciplinary thinking and action. “Technicians, philosophers, doctors, politicians and artists sat together to develop common ideas,” assured Schlögl. Unique conditions that produced such brilliant minds as the nuclear physicist Marietta Blau, the philosopher Sir Karl Popper, architects such as Richard Neutra and Rudolph M. Schindler, who shaped the Californian lifestyle, and Victor Gruen. The latter is actually the inventor of the modern shopping mall, an idea that comes from red Vienna.

“Green wanted to show solidarity with consumption and create a low-threshold place where everyone can pursue their needs equally. He realized this in the USA in the 1950s and early 60s. From there, the concept of the shopping center came back to us.” A separate chapter in the book “The Muse’s Enough” is dedicated to the brilliant women of Vienna, their fantastic discoveries and biographies.

“City of Ideas” has 432 pages and was published by Molden Verlag. It is available in stores for 40 euros. Anyone who would like to find out more about Cockett’s work has the opportunity to do so with the book Vienna. The author will read there on Thursday, November 21st, from 7 p.m. and on Friday, November 22nd, from 11:30 a.m. Tickets are available at www.buchwien.at.

You might also be interested in:

City of Vienna renews “Digital Agenda” until 2030

Vienna receives new fast catamaran made of Lego bricks