If you take one of Vienna’s classic red-and-white trams along the length of the Ringstrasse, the street that surrounds the city’s historic first district, the grandeur of the former seat of the Habsburg empire is on full display: the wide expanse of the Heldenplatz, the stately facade of the Vienna Opera House, and the manicured grounds of the Volksgarten.
With its grand, gilded buildings, Vienna feels almost a bit too big to be the capital of an Alpine nation of only 9 million people. Compared with other major European capitals such as Paris, Berlin, and Rome, Vienna can today sometimes seem like an afterthought.
In , the British historian and writer Richard Cockett seeks to correct that impression. He argues that Vienna has had an outsized—and underacknowledged—impact on Western thought. In his telling, thinkers who grew up in the intellectual climate of pre-World War I Vienna and the fiery, change-filled 1920s and ’30s planted the seeds
