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My essay is a reflection on how my work developed and how my discovery of Robert Musil was decisive for my thinking. I concentrate primarily on Robert Musil and the Crisis of European Culture: 1880–1942 (1980) and Eros and Inwardness in Vienna: Weininger, Musil, Doderer (2003). I also discuss two translation projects: Musil's essays, with Burton Pike (1990), and Hugo von Hofmannsthal's essays on the Austrian idea (2011). Much of my work appeared as essays, which I hope to publish as a collection under the title Decentering Central Europe. Perhaps the most important of these essays, \"Schopenhauer, Austria, and the Generation of 1905\" (1983), set the direction for my research and writing after Musil, while my \"Bohemia and Austrian Intellectual History\" (2007) pointed toward Hugo von Hofmannsthal and the Austria Idea and The Austrian Dimension in German Intellectual History: From the Enlightenment to Anschluss.

Although we usually think of the intellectual legacy of twentieth-century Vienna as synonymous with Sigmund Freud and his psychoanalytic theories, other prominent writers from Vienna were also radically reconceiving sexuality and gender. In this probing new study, David Luft recovers the work of three such writers: Otto Weininger, Robert Musil, and Heimito von Doderer. His account emphasizes the distinctive intellectual world of liberal Vienna, especially the impact of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche in this highly scientific intellectual world. According to Luft, Otto Weininger viewed human beings as bisexual and applied this theme to issues of creativity and morality. Robert Musil developed a creative ethics that was closely related to his open, flexible view of sexuality and gender. And Heimito von Doderer portrayed his own sexual obsessions as a way of understanding the power of total ideologies, including his own attraction to National Socialism. For Luft, the significance of these three writers lies in their understandings of eros and inwardness and in the roles that both play in ethical experience and the formation of meaningful relations to the world-a process that continues to engage artists, writers, and thinkers today. Eros and Inwardness in Vienna will profoundly reshape our understanding of Vienna's intellectual history. It will be important for anyone interested in Austrian or German history, literature, or philosophy.

Although we usually think of the intellectual legacy of twentieth-century Vienna as synonymous with Sigmund Freud and his psychoanalytic theories, other prominent writers from Vienna were also radically reconceiving sexuality and gender. In this probing new study, David Luft recovers the work of three such writers: Otto Weininger, Robert Musil, and Heimito von Doderer. His account emphasizes the distinctive intellectual world of liberal Vienna, especially the impact of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche in this highly scientific intellectual world. According to Luft, Otto Weininger viewed human beings as bisexual and applied this theme to issues of creativity and morality. Robert Musil developed a creative ethics that was closely related to his open, flexible view of sexuality and gender. And Heimito von Doderer portrayed his own sexual obsessions as a way of understanding the power of total ideologies, including his own attraction to National Socialism. For Luft, the significance of these three writers lies in their understandings of eros and inwardness and in the roles that both play in ethical experience and the formation of meaningful relations to the world-a process that continues to engage artists, writers, and thinkers today. Eros and Inwardness in Vienna will profoundly reshape our understanding of Vienna's intellectual history. It will be important for anyone interested in Austrian or German history, literature, or philosophy.

In 1960, Robert A. Kann pointed out in A Study in Austrian Intellectual History: From Late Baroque to Romanticism that “[h]istorians of the future will still have to meet the challenging task of writing the comprehensive German-Austrian intellectual history.” The value of the project Kann called for is generally acknowledged, but there is no clear agreement in the field about what a survey of German-Austrian intellectual history should look like. In 2007, I argued in an article for The Austrian History Yearbook that the scope of Austrian intellectual history still needs to be circumscribed and characterized adequately—geographically, linguistically, and comparatively. Rather than concentrating on Vienna or extending the field to the whole of the Habsburg monarchy, including Hungary and Galicia, I proposed that we concentrate our approach to this question on the historic core of the Austrian state: the Austrian and Bohemian Crownlands, a unity from at least 1749 to 1918. This was the region where state-building, centralization, and reform were most coherently pursued in the century after 1749, when the German language was dominant in education and public life. I contrasted this view to the disembodied approach to the German intellectual life of the entire Habsburg monarchy, which relies on conventions that were developed for dynastic and diplomatic history, conventions that also work quite well for economic history or even for cultural history, neither of which is so directly dependent on language. The region I have in mind is the southeastern part of the German Confederation that was included in the Frankfurt Parliament in 1848 but excluded from Bismarck's Germany in 1866. The very existence of this region, let alone its long and rich history since the Middle Ages, often gets lost in political narratives of German nationalism and the Habsburg monarchy (Figure 1).

This is an essay about the cultural, political, and geographical location of Austrian intellectual history and the special place of Bohemia and Moravia in that history. A great deal has been written about the multinational and supranational quality of Austrian culture and intellectual life. In practice, however, the Austria referred to in such arguments is usually the Habsburg monarchy of the two generations before World War I. Austrian intellectual history has generally been either strongly centered in Vienna or oriented to a very broad concept of Austria that includes the monarchy as a whole in the late nineteenth century. What is lost between the metropolis and the vast monarchy of many peoples is the centuries-long relationship between Austrian and Bohemia that was the basis for Austrian intellectual life in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. I argue here that we should think of Bohemia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as part of Austrian intellectual history in a way that other regions and historic lands in the Habsburg monarchy were not.

Luft reviews Vienna in the Age of Uncertainty: Science, Liberalism, and Private Life by Deborah R. Coen.