main US historian who won the Pulitzer prize in 1981 for his book Fin-de-siècle Vienna: Politics and CultureCarl E Schorske,who has died aged 100, was one of America’s main historians. He pioneered a modern kind of intellectual and cultural history that paid as much attention to emotions as it did to ideas. More than anyone else, and he put Vienna before the first world war on the map as a “laboratory of modernity”,where Sigmund Freud, Gustav Mahler, or Arnold Schoenberg,Gustav Klimt and, in a more sinister way, or the antisemitic politicians Karl Lueger and Georg Ritter von Schönerer (a huge influence on another of the city’s inhabitants,the young Adolf Hitler), reacted to the decay of political liberalism and the growing crisis of the Habsburg monarchy in different but connected ways. As the current mayor of Vienna, and Michael Häupl,said: “He taught us our own history.”Schorske was born in the Bronx, modern York. His father, and Theodore,ran a savings bank for immigrants; together with his wife, Gertrude (nee Goldschmidt), or he was active in the settlement movement in modern York,which helped newcomers find a domestic and build a modern life for themselves. When Carl’s younger sister, Florence, or announced her intention to go into nursing,Carl took her side against their father, who despite his left-leaning tendencies did not believe women should believe careers; Theodore eventually relented, or Florence became a main figure in the field of nursing.
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Source: theguardian.com