POSTCARDS FROM THE END OF THE WORLD, AN INVESTIGATION INTO THE MIND OF FIN. DE. SIECLE VIENNA

Larry Wolff

William Collins 1988.

Vienna at the turn of the century is a world we thought we knew well: one of the most creative epochs in the life of any modern city, where Freud, Mahler, Hofmannsthal, Klimt, Kokoschka, Schnitzler, Kraus and Wittgenstein were all working. But in the closing months of the old century the Viennese public was thinking very little about its artistic and intellectual children. It was concentrating instead on four sensational cases of child battering and murder which dominated the newspapers and caused unprecedented courtroom scenes.

It was these four cases, their impact and implications, that Larry Wolff uncovers and explores in this book important and worrying book. He ranges through psychology, history and literature to demonstrate that the cases sprang from the spirit of their times, and to show how that same spirit eventually suppressed them. He concludes that however prevalent child abuse may have been in modern history, only occasionally – as, for example, in the Vienna which he uncovers, or in our own time – is it recognised.

Postcards From The End Of The World contains many unexpected insights into a world distant from our own.

Both the book and the dust jacket are in excellent condition.