The most recommended books about Vienna

Though written in the 1930s, Am I a Redundant Human Being? was not published until 2001, several decades after Hartwig’s death in 1967 (the English translation appeared in 2010).

The novel’s narrator, Aloisia Schmidt, reflects on her desire for external validation and a more exciting life, as well as the constant feeling of invisibility. Though she is only about thirty in 1930 Vienna, her ambition is constrained by disappointment, and the coming decade promises more of the same. 

Much has been written about the Holocaust but enough can never be said. Tom Stoppard was born in Czechoslovakia in 1937 to a non-observant Jewish family forced to flee the Nazi terror. 

In his play Leopoldstadt Stoppard follows the history of a family living in that Jewish suburb of Vienna, from the turn of the 20th century to today. The story of the prejudice and restrictions they experienced, as well as the hopes they had of transcending them through business success and assimilation, are heartbreaking. A friend of mine came from such a family and from his recollections I know that Stoppard has described the situation accurately.

This play (as the family) is full of characters you care about deeply, and knowing about the coming Holocaust, we want to cry out a warning to them.  We can’t. But this is a warning about the future.

This is a novel that is tender and sad, and it relates in a language that is simple and poetic to the atmosphere of the Habsburg Empire during its final days. The novel takes place in the provinces rather than in the capital.  Every line of the book can be savored, with every sentence laden with nostalgia for a world that seems like another, kinder planet. It is the world that pre-dated one of my other recommendations, The Strudlhof Steps, in its presentation of people with a sense of purpose, duty, and loyalty, even if not blessed with an abundance of acumen.

These were well-intentioned people trying to hold an empire together of disparate people and cultures. The empire represented an ideal world of Habsburg paternalism to Jews, Slavs, and Hungarians. It is difficult to conclude the book without tears. No cinematic version has done it justice—nothing captures the… show more.

A century after German scholars developed art history as a highly conservative meta-theory well suited to the study of the broader categories of “civilization” and “culture,” the Viennese psychoanalytic movement developed a highly radical meta-theory that posited civilization and culture as fictions meant to curb individual desires. 

Art historian Mary Bergstein illuminates photography's rich role in Freud’s thinking. Bergstein deftly reminds us that Freud’s interdisciplinary approach to the history of art and the new science of psychoanalysis was specifically meaningful to his time and place. During the brief period when Vienna would be recognized as the capital of European modernism, psychoanalysis developed as a meta-theory—a radical one—with the cult of individual desires and fears at its heart.

I know I’m allowed to recommend books from any year, but I’m going to keep myself to books published in 2023.

It was a tough year for me – my mother died, my husband lost his job, my sister was nearly killed by a drunk driver – and this epic, unforgettable novel reminded me about what outlasts all adversity and allows us to go on living: love. It tells the story of two soldiers in the First World War who escape the front and survive as refugees by their wiles, their humanity, and their solidarity with one another.

This is a novel of mysterious power and staggering beauty that, for a few weeks, allowed me to live a parallel life when I really needed one.   

A well-written novel about a Jewish family from Vienna who escapes the Nazi regime and finds refuge in Bolivia. In a world so different from their own, the parents long for the music and culture they left behind, while their young daughter finds joy in the differences and in the people she meets. A lesson for all of us who face life-changing changes.

I love Edgar Allan Poe. His stories are so visceral and yet so simplistic in their scares. Of all of the stories by Poe, however, I think this book was a bit of a sleeper agent for me. It wasn’t until COVID-19 happened that I really saw how terrifying this story really was.

The idea of the rich hiding out from a plague that’s destroying the world was much too relatable in 2020. Just like in other titles in this list, the actual ghost itself isn’t necessarily what’s scary. It’s what the ghost represents. Not just death but pride, privilege, selfishness, guilt, and apathy.

Re-reading this book back in 2020 was an experience much too understandable, and it really scared me in a way it hadn’t before. The message Poe was trying to convey stuck with me in a new and horrifying way.

There are so many histories of fin de siècle Vienna that this book is a welcome, long-awaited postlude. It explains how the city’s creativity did not die with the fall of the Habsburgs but became the source of everything we think of today as “modern”, from shopping, to cooking, to economics, to housing, education and the interaction of state and society.

Berlin may have been livelier in the 1920s, but the new ideas that would take root across the world and shape modern society were still coming out of Vienna. 

Elfriede Jelinek has many anti-heroines in novels and plays, but I pick Erika Kohut, a repressed Austrian piano teacher who in her late thirties is still living under the power of her stifling elderly mother. Vienna, the city of music and great composers like Franz Schubert, is seen not only through the Vienna Conservatory but inside peep-shops that Erika frequently visits to escape from her mother. Although she is a masochist and self-mutilates, she begins a relationship with Walter, a new student, and gives him the instructions through an atypical letter. Jelinek's work makes me feel many things, not only due to her stories and characters but also the depth of her writing! The importance of her voices in novels and plays is extraordinary, her prose is satirical and very critical. She looks at their characters psychologically, from the deep of human behavior.

This was, hands down, one of the best historical romances I've read this year. Great characters, engaging mystery, excellent sex scenes (one of the best depictions of gaining consent that I've ever read), a heroine who just won't quit, and a hero who is the quiet strength she needs at her back.

In addition, there are well-drawn secondary characters and a setting in Vienna at the beginning of the Austro-Hungarian Empire that's as sparkling and rich as a sachertorte set to a background of waltz music. I've enjoyed all the Diana Biller books I've read, but now she's an auto-buy author for me.