Recommended Books

Biography

Gay, Peter. Freud: A Life for Our Times. Norton, 1988. Gay's biography is a good introduction to the life of one of the seminal figures of the 20th century. Freud was a Viennese until he fled from the Nazis in 1938, settling with his sofa in London.

Geiringer, Karl and Irene. Haydn: A Creative Life in Music. University of California, 1963. This is the best biography of composer Joseph Haydn, friend of Mozart, teacher of Beethoven, and court composer of the Esterházys.

Gutman, Robert W. Mozart: A Cultural Biography. Harvest, 2000. Music historian Gutman places Mozart squarely in the cultural world of 18th-century Europe.

Fiction

Brandstetter, Alois. The Abbey. Ariadne, 1998. The search for a missing ancient chalice results in an insightful (and often humorous) assessment of post-World War II Austria.

Greene, Graham. The Third Man. Viking Penguin, 1949. Greene based this novel about intrigue in postwar Vienna on his screenplay for director Carol Reed's famous 1949 film starring Orson Welles and Joseph Cotten.

Hill, Carol de Chellis. Henry James' Midnight Song. Norton, 1993. Psychoanalysis meets feminism in this murder mystery set in Vienna around 1900 and involving such historical figures as Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Edith Wharton, and Henry James.

History

Brook-Shepherd, Gordon. The Austrians: A Thousand-Year Odyssey. Carroll & Graf, 1997. The author looks at Austria's history to explain the people and their nation, how they got there, and where they're going.

Morton, Frederic. A Nervous Splendor: Vienna 1888-1889. Viking Penguin, 1980. Morton uses the mysterious deaths of Archduke Rudolf and Baroness Marie Vetsera at Mayerling as a point of departure to capture Imperial Vienna at its glorious height.

Schorske, Carl E. Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture. Vintage, 1981. This landmark book takes you into the political and social world of Vienna at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries.

Wheatcroft, Andrew. The Habsburgs: Embodying Empire. Viking Penguin, 1996. Here is the full sweep of the Habsburg dynasty, from the Middle Ages to the end of World War I, focusing on such remarkable personalities as Rudolph I, Charles V, Maria Theresa, and Franz Joseph I.