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Fin de Siecle
| Article
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15800 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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1 / 1989 |
3,639 Words |
| Author
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Lee Congdon
Lee Congdon writes regularly on modern literature. He teaches
eastern European history at James Madison University. |
BUDAPEST 1900
A Historical Portrait of a City and Its
Culture
John Lukacs
New York: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1988
288 pp., $9.95.
Despite the confidently prophetic talk one sometimes hears concerning mankind's "limitless" and computerized future, I suspect that we are far more conscious of approaching the end than the beginning of a century. This is understandable in light of the fact that we know the twentieth century experientially; it is real to us in ways that the next hundred years, should the planet survive, cannot possibly be. Little wonder, either, that the more reflective among us evince a by no means idle curiosity about the last end of century or, to borrow the more sonorous French term, fin de siecle. In his recent, and superb, France: Fin de Siecle (1986), Eugen Weber reported that he came to his subject because "the discrepancy between material progress and spiritual dejection reminded me of our own times."
We have more reason to be spiritually dejected than our forefathers had, for we have lived through a century that has produced, among other horrors, two world wars, Auschwitz, and the Gulag Archipelago. Now, as we ask ourselves how matters stand at the close not just of a century, but of a millennium, we are apt to dwell upon what went wrong. Why did the Liberal Age, the Era of Progress that looks so golden in retrospect, meet what historian George Dangerfield called a "strange death"? How many of those who lived during that age had premonitions of the end? Could the devolution of
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