EDGE OF IRONY

Among the brilliant writers and thinkers who emerged from the multicultural and multilingual world of the Austro-Hungarian Empire we re Joseph Roth, Robert Musil, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. For them, the trauma of World War I included the sudden loss of the geographi cal entity into which they had been born: in 1918, the empire was dissolved overnight, leaving Austria a small, fragile republic tha t would last only twenty years before being annexed by Hitlers Third Reich. In this major reconsideration of European modernism, Ma rjorie Pe...[Read more]