A Soviet tourism advertisement for Odessa.
Boston Public Library

How many ways can you say “They killed everybody”? Historians have measured with increasing meticulousness the degrees of eagerness or reticence, popular fervor or bureaucratic discipline, with which the various regions of Europe collaborated in the murder of their Jews during the Second World War. Sometimes they outstripped their Nazi occupiers in the zeal with which they killed. Sometimes they merely acquiesced in the roundup of every man, woman, and child of Jewish ancestry they could find. A few places defied or obstructed the machinery of death.

Odessa was not one of those places. No surprises here: The city had distinguished itself, in 1905, as the site of the deadliest pogrom in Russian history. Its inhabitants, as Charles King observes in his survey of that remarkable city’s wonderful, horrible life, also acquired the habit, under Soviet rule, of tattling to the secret police. After the Romanians and Germans rolled into town in 1941 and the Romanians set themselves up as the new bosses, the language you would use to denounce your real and imagined enemies changed (where once the Jewish merchant was a capitalist expropriator, now your Jewish neighbors were crypto-Communist subversives), but “the paranoia, the self-serving indictments, and the mania for unmasking, exposing, and rooting out potential enemies of the state,” remained the same.

King quotes a series of these denunciations, which document the demented projection that allowed victimizers to cast themselves as righteous victims. “I would like to bring to your attention,” wrote one Valery Tkachenko, “that in the basement of 13 Tiraspol Street a group of yids get together and discuss political issues, and they say that the Romanians and the Germans are drinking our blood by the glassful but that we will drink theirs by the bucketful.”

The destruction of the Jews of Odessa, and in the Romanian-occupied region of Transnistria of which it was a part, executed through “mass shootings with rifles and machines guns, immolation with blazing oil and gas, and the bombing of buildings packed with Jewish citizens,” wasn’t even one of the primary goals of the occupiers. The Romanian dictator Ion Antonescu refused Nazi orders to deport Romanian Jews to the concentration camps and killing factories of Poland and Lithuania. He did this even as his brutal campaign of counter-insurgent pacification in the formerly Russian lands he controlled erased the distinction between partisan and Jew, yielding “the largest wartime program of planned killing committed by a country other than Nazi Germany.”

To the victims of Romanian terror, these contrasting motives and means are a distinction without a difference. But it meant in practice that the scale of killing of Transnistrian Jews was “orders of magnitudes” smaller than in other parts of German-occupied Eastern Europe. Where 90 percent of the Jews in some areas of German occupation were killed, 40 percent of Jews under Romanian occupation died. But between the killing, expulsions, and those who fled in advance of the invasion, the Romanians left the city of Odessa, where one out of every three residents had been a Jew, entirely Judenrein. Soviet officials counted 48 Jews living there in 1944.

Odessa: Genius and Death in a City of Dreams traces the familiar trajectory whereby a “mixed and rambunctious city” situated on the periphery of the old world’s great multinational empires splinters into genocidal faction on its path to modernity. After a long detour into political extremism and massacre that left it free of its Jews, the city found itself stripped of its roiling diversity and aching for the memory of what its Jewish spirit, now long snuffed out, had meant. It is a carefully judicious work that indulges in nostalgia for the lost world even as it identifies the dark undercurrents that portended the loss of the delicate equilibrium once maintained by that “island of difference perched between sea and steppe,” that teetered “between genius and devastation.”

King waxes lyrical over the “golden thread that bound Odessa’s quilt-like population together,” in the 19th century, creating a special Odessan identity based on a shared marginality. In Odessa, one became “a progressive Jew as opposed to a traditionalist, a German farmer on the far-flung Eurasian steppe rather than the floodplains of Northern Europe, a free-holding peasant working one’s own land rather than toiling exclusively for a distant noble landlord; a Greek or Italian, clinging to the same seacoast once visited by ancient Aegean seaman and medieval Genoese merchants.”

The city prospered hugely as “the breadbasket for much of the Western world” but also played host to a demimonde seething with “criminality, disease, conspiracy, and revolution.” It was incubator to the maskilim, exponents of the Haskalah, or Jewish Enlightenment, which eschewed the self-imposed insularity of traditional Jewish life, but also to the “culture of self-confident thievery” chronicled in Isaac Babel’s Odessa Tales. The “preeminent port of the Yiddish speaking world” was home to “a special community of progressive, optimistic, and economically successful Jews,” who were never confined to a single neighborhood prior to the fascist occupation, but also to the machinations of one of the sons of the city’s Jewish middle class, Lev Bronstein, later known by his nom de guerre, Leon Trotsky, apostle of permanent class warfare.

The easily penetrated port, with its notoriously corrupt customs officials, was a congenial operating base for Greek, Italian, Russian, and Ukrainian nationalists, who taught an attentive Jewish journalist—Vladimir Jabotinsky—that “the veneers offered by assimilation, imperialism, and cosmopolitanism could not disguise the age-old yearning for nations to express their own unique genius.” Jabotinsky would become the champion of the “right wing, antisocialistic, militaristic, and uncompromising commitment to a Jewish homeland on both banks of the Jordan River.” Though Ben-Gurion reviled Jabotinsky as “Vladimir Hitler,” today his vision is part of the Israeli mainstream. “I learned how to be a Zionist from the gentiles,” he wrote.

When the Jews were free to leave post-Soviet Odessa, most of them did. They left behind a city that had, by means of popular movies and songs, become “an object of schmaltzy and melodic longing.” Decades of propagandistic history had effaced the collective memory of what the Romanians had done to the Jews, with the help of native Odessans. The exuberant, ribald Jewish heritage of that city was “celebrated mainly in code,” King writes, “in countless stories, novels, plays, films, jokes books, concerts, musicals and other ribaldries”—that evaded the fact that it “had been actively erased in the living memory of those who now sought to re-create it.”

Their survivors and descendants were elsewhere—in many cases, at the far end of the Q line in Brooklyn. King closes his book with a Proustian evocation of the “fishy sea air, a whiff of old cooking oil, the sweetness of overripe fruit, dark traces of motor oil and axle grease, the tang of dill and parsley, the alcoholic sting of cheap perfume, and the assertive revival of vintage sweat, all braided like a garland of garlic, silent as to source or cause,” that greets the olfactory apparatus of the visitor to Brighton Beach, also known as “Little Odessa by the Sea.”

Alfred Dreyfus being stripped of rank in a public ceremony, 1895

As the 19th century was ending, Europe engaged in a series of dress rehearsals for the calamities awaiting it in the 20th. The Dreyfus Affair was the most conspicuous of these portents of the terror and inhumanity to come. The conviction of a French artillery officer of Jewish extraction for a treasonous act committed by another exposed virtually every ailment that threatened the modern state—justice perverted by those charged to uphold it, the institutions of a free society turned against the rights they were designed to preserve, and the explosion of Jew-hatred that would, in a later decade, rally the mediocre to the banner of universal murder.

“Death! Death to the Jews!” resounded in the courtyard of the École Militaire as fellow soldiers ripped the decorations off of Captain Alfred Dreyfus’ cap and sleeves, tossed his badges of rank onto the ground, and broke his saber in two. This was during the ceremony of degradation that preceded his internment in the penal colony of Devil’s Island. Dreyfus, a recent graduate of the nation’s elite military academy assigned to the General Staff, had been convicted on the basis of a resemblance, controverted by one of the experts assigned to evaluate it, of a single scrap of his handwriting to that of a document seized by a spy from the German embassy enumerating a list of items (the infamous bordereau, as it came to be known) delivered by a French agent to his German handler. The rest was prejudice, guesswork, and group-think: his accusers were never able to establish any motive (Dreyfus was a devoted family man and the inheritor of a large industrial fortune), and the character testimony adduced against him consisted of the aimless tittle-tattle of resentful classmates assured by their superiors that he was a traitor. The army rallied around documents brazenly altered by one of their agents to buttress a fabricated certainty. These documents were secretly presented to the military jurors who would go on to convict him, in defiance of the most basic courtroom propriety. Overcoming the army’s intransigence and its deceptions would take more than a decade, and a struggle for truth and justice of unprecedented scope.

Present in that crowd of onlookers was the Paris correspondent of Vienna’s largest newspaper, the Neue Freie Presse. Writing five years after the event, that writer, Theodor Herzl, who had in the intervening years recast himself in the role of political visionary, lamented that such an event could occur even “in republican, modern civilized France, one hundred years after the declaration of the Rights of Man.” He discerned in those bloodthirsty chants “the wish of the enormous majority in France to damn a Jew, and, in this one Jew, all Jews,” and concluded that in that call “the edict of the Great Revolution”—which had granted Jews full citizenship rights more than half a century before any other country—“has been revoked.” The implied question was clear—if this is what is done to a Jew in France, what will they scruple to do to him in Austria, Germany, Poland, and the Ukraine?

The call for Jewish blood would resound throughout France in the years to come, inflamed by a rabid right-wing press ascribing all the efforts to secure justice for the condemned to a diabolical “Jewish syndicate.” The syndicate, in the paranoid vision of its antagonists, was composed of Jewish international bankers and all the venal politicians, journalists, Socialists, Republicans, and anti-clericalists whom they had bribed or found common cause alongside in the assault against all that was traditional, decent, honest, God-fearing, virile, and orderly in the French nation.

These were the chauvinist, nationalist, and anti-Semitic notions that would someday metastasize into the mass political movement known as fascism. But the Dreyfus Affair was only a symbolic enactment of the infamies to come. Dreyfus survived his ordeal on Devil’s Island and lived to see his total vindication. The French military that re-convicted Dreyfus in 1899 for a crime that its highest ranking officers knew by then he had not committed awarded him, in 1906, with its highest decoration. The countervailing forces that rallied to Dreyfus’ cause, by the end of the affair, had effected a total rout of their opponents; indeed, this rout was a condition of his vindication.

The Dreyfusard party began as a party of one—Dreyfus’ brother Mathieu. One by one, men of talent and energy were converted to the cause. Among them were the great novelists Anatole France and Émile Zola, who penned, in the wake of a military court martial’s exoneration of the crime’s true culprit—a penniless adventurer and rake named Count Esterhazy—the most consequential work of crusading journalism ever published: the open letter to the French President Felix Faure in defense of Dreyfus that went by the name of J’accuse. The men of science and letters who emerged as a new force in society during the affair—the “intellectuals,” as they were first dubbed by Georges Clemenceau—were joined by a voice that ought to have been decisive. Lt. Col. Georges Picquart, former head of the Statistics Section, found evidence implicating Esterhazy in the course of his investigations. “What do you care if that Jew rots on Devil’s Island?” his superior asked him, pointing out, as Louis Begley puts it in his elegant summary of the affair Why the Dreyfus Affair Matters “that if Picquart did not tell anyone, no one would know.” To which Picquart responded: “What you are saying General, is abominable. I will not in any event take this secret with me to the grave.”

As Dreyfus’ enemies heaped ever greater stakes on the defense of his conviction, so the Dreyfusard cause came to stand for all of the values against which his enemies inveighed—the accountability of the military to civilian rule, the legitimacy of the Republic to represent the nation of France, and a renewed commitment to the French Revolutionary principles of equality before the law. Eventually the Dreyfusards swelled to include the most powerful men in France, who used the affair to assert greater civilian control over the military and to break the independent power of the Catholic Church—whose newspapers had called for the expulsion of the Jews from France.

The story of how a case of petty espionage and skulduggery in the Army came to polarize all of France into two warring camps is among the most copiously documented events in world history. In its labyrinthine complexity and its many novelistic flourishes, it seemed to anticipate, and indeed to provide the template for, all subsequent political scandals, miscarriages of justice, and abuses of government secrecy that followed it. Wherever truth and fairness are sacrificed on the altar of national security, wherever a legal contest expands to become a political or cultural struggle—an echo of the affair resounds.

It is for this reason among the most frequently referenced events of recent history. The trial and execution of the anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti, the nuclear espionage conviction of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, the Wen Ho Lee case—even the OJ Simpson trial, have drawn, with varying degrees of plausibility, comparisons to the Dreyfus Affair. The Weekly Standard even had the chutzpah to call the acquittal by the U.S. Senate of Bill Clinton on the charge of high crimes and misdemeanors for perjuring himself on the subject of his sexual dalliances with the White House intern Monica Lewinsky “Our Dreyfus Case.”

In the period after 9/11, one began to hear of new Dreyfus Affairs, linked to the resurgence of anti-Semitism among Arab youth in Europe. The New York Times called the murder of Ilan Halimi —in which French Arab youths kidnapped, tortured, and killed a young French Jew—“today’s Dreyfus Affair,” while The New Republic attached the headline “Dreyfus Affair 2.0” to an account of a story in which a French court had vindicated the charge made by an online media critic that a French television report about the killing of a 12-year old Palestinian refugee by Israeli soldiers had relied on stage footage.

Both of these attempts to channel the legacy of the Dreyfus Affair cast the significance of that event solely as a matter of anti-Semitism and Jewish self-defense. But Jewish self-defense, narrowly construed, was only one of the many aspects of that multifarious event. The Dreyfus Affair awakened Herzl to the need for Jews to answer aggressive nationalism with a self-empowering national movement of their own. But the assault against the Jews was always also an assault against the universal values of the Enlightenment, of which the Jews had been the special beneficiary.

Begley was a successful lawyer at a major New York firm when he published his first novel in 1991, at the age of 57. Wartime Lies was fictionalized account of his own flight from the Nazis, made at the age of seven. In Why the Dreyfus Affair Matters, he acknowledges the faults of the assimilationist creed of Dreyfus’ and Herzl’s day, laments the “tendency of French Jews to minimize the importance of anti-Semitism, remain passive, and avoid speaking out against outrageous behavior,” and deplores the resurgence of anti-Semitism in the Halimi case and other events like it. But he opens his book by drawing a direct parallel between Devil’s Island—where Dreyfus was held in solitary confinement for five years for a crime he did not commit—and Guantanamo Bay.

The choice amounts to an implicit insistence that Jewish self-defense and the defense of the rights of despised minorities everywhere are always one and the same cause, and that any ostensible pursuit of Jewish interests that countenances the violation of due process and Constitutional protections for the accused, or that winks at lawless behavior in our government or intelligence agencies, is a betrayal of the memory of the Dreyfus Affair. Thus Begley’s riveting account of the affair—as clean, poised, and concise as any yet written—is also an intervention in the politics of the moment and a reminder that though the Jews must be for themselves in a time of great tension and danger, they must not be for themselves alone.

Begley begins his case in the most confrontational way possible, with an act of empathy that many Americans will be reluctant to undertake. He begins by hailing the Obama Administration’s decisions to end “an era of dragnet detentions and mistreatment or worse of alleged enemy combatants, and secret CIA prisons,” and to “bring the United States back under the rule of law.”

“One supposes that the news of Senator Obama’s victory on November 4, 2008, must spread from cell to cell in Guantanamo—except perhaps to those in which detainees, some of them shackled, are held in solitary confinement—and one can imagine the stirring of hope among the prisoners. One can even more easily imagine the joy with which the news of the stay of the trials before the military commission has been greeted.”

Here Begley is extolling the effect of Obama’s election on the morale of Guantanamo inmates. One reflexively imagines—as the writers of the Dreyfus’ time must have had to wonder about the next broadside from La Libre Parole, the scurrilous anti-Semitic newspaper owned by Edouard Drumont, author of La France Juivie—what our scurrilous American right-wing press will make of such an utterance. But though the invitation to empathy seems politically impermissible in the current environment, Begley insists that it is precisely in our reluctance to extend empathy to the enemy combatants imprisoned in Guantanamo that we most resemble the French public that turned its back on Dreyfus. “Just as at the outset of the Dreyfus Affair the French found it easy to believe that Dreyfus must be a traitor because he was a Jew, many Americans have had no trouble believing that the detainees of Guantanamo—and those held in CIA jails—were terrorists simply because they were Muslims.”

There were 800 detainees in Guantanamo Bay in 2001. The claim made by Donald Rumsfeld that they were “the worst of the worst” has been decisively rebuked by the subsequent release of 600 of them without trial or charge by the Bush Administration. Most of them really were just bumbling nobodies who happened to get in the way of the wrong venal US allied warlord after 9/11. But some of them—particularly the “high level detainees” in CIA jails—have the blood of thousands of American innocents on their hands. Not that Begley doesn’t know this, but it bears repeating simply because of a structural problem built into the analogy between “inmates of American detention during the War on Terror”—a category encompassing hundreds of the guilty and not guilty—and “Dreyfus”—one innocent man—can lend itself to a certain misleading equivalence that Begley, in his zeal to make his argument, does not always avoid.

These minor reservations aside, Begley has written a brave and important book. Beneath its lawyerly precision, the book vibrates with what one feels must be a personal passion. Begley fled a Europe destroyed by hate and fear, a world in which the dread of enemies without and within led an ancient and civilized nation to imprison, torture, and kill without restraint, and to wage a war without limits while husbanding an intact sense of its own righteousness and victimization through it all. He found in America a virtuous haven for himself and others of his kind which permitted him to join the ranks of its wealthy elite in a single lifetime—only to observe, in old age, the lawless depredations of the Bush Administration in the wake of 9/11. “As each generation confronts the outrages committed in its name,” he writes, permitting his lawyerly voice to lift toward eloquence, “analogies to past outrages become clear, illuminating. And so does the need for a response to the question that has been posed time and again without losing its urgency: Will there be in that generation men and women ready to defend human rights, and the dignity of every human life against abuse wrapped in claims of expediency and reasons of state?”

The Dreyfusards answered the call in their own time. The answering voices confronting malign forces in the time of Begley’s childhood were not sufficient to the task posed to them.

Of our own time, Begley writes:

“Journalists dedicated to exposing the abuses of the Bush Administration, members of the federal judiciary unflinchingly upholding the rule of law, military lawyers who have put their careers at risk by taking a stand against torture and kangaroo trials, and civilian lawyers and law professors of all ages who have devoted thousands of hours without pay as legal defenders of Guantanamo detainees have given the answer for the United States. They have redeemed the honor of the nation.”

It was the instrument of a revolution in bourgeois manners and mores. What other country would dress its privileged children in the garb of its sharecroppers and coal miners, or school them, three minutes at a time, in the sexual mores of the ghetto, selling them commercial fantasies of freedom and authenticity that would seduce the young everywhere? The industry spawned by the music has long since grown (like the old Elvis) cynical, corpulent, corporate, and corrupted; and (like the aging Michael Jackson) inhumanly strange, sequestered in appalling opulence, frozen in childhood, and besieged by creditors. But as with all things that go wrong on a grand scale, rock and roll was once, like the young Elvis, extraordinary—a vision of a miscegenated American future as compelling as the linked arms of Freedom Fighters that were then rising up across the South.

It was the early 1950’s and America was changing. Who would serve as the vanguard of this change? You would need people eager to embrace the new, able to serve as intermediaries linking black and white, high and low, sensitive enough to hear joy where others heard only squalor, clever enough to hear opportunity where others only heard noise, alive to the mordant humor of the ghetto, heedless of existing prejudices and conventions, enterprising enough to invent an industry where none had existed before. You needed Phil and Leonard Chess in Chicago; Syd Nathan at King Records in Cincinnati; Lester, Jules, Saul, and Joe Bihari at Modern Records in Los Angeles; Leo and Eddie Mesner at Aladdin Records just down the road; and Alan Freed on first the Cleveland, then the New York City airwaves. You needed Jerry Wexler and Herb Abramson at Atlantic Records in New York; a teenaged Michael Bloomfield playing in the first integrated electric blues band in Chicago in 1963; and the former Robert Zimmerman in the cafes of Greenwich Village. You needed people who could operate at the bloody crossroads where commerce, art, and social change were converging. All of which is to say that you needed Jews.

Here is how Lester Sill, national sales manager for the independent blues label Modern Records explained it to a teenaged Jerry Leiber, (“Kid, I think you’re going to like this music,” Sill told Leiber before handing him a recording of John Lee Hooker’s “Boogie Chillun,”) then a part-time clerk at Norty’s, a little record shop in Los Angeles that sold Frankie Laine records and cantorial music from Russia and Poland:

“‘The big labels,’ explained Lester, ‘like RCA, Columbia and Decca are ignoring the really great popular Negro artists because they just don’t understand or care about the music. They don’t think it’s worthwhile, artistically or commercially. Well, I don’t have to tell you how wrong they are.’”

The voice reminiscing above belongs to Jerome Leiber, who would go on to become one half of the songwriting team that wrote and produced some of the most important and best rock and roll singles ever, including “Kansas City,” “Stand By Me,” “Poison Ivy,” “Yakety-Yak,” “This Magic Moment,” “Spanish Harlem,” “Searchin’,” “Jailhouse Rock,” and “Hound Dog.” Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller began writing songs in 1951, at the age of 18, for a label producing what were then known as “race records” for Ray Charles, Charles Brown, Jimmy Witherspoon, the Robins, the Drifters, Big Joe Turner, and Ruth Brown. By 1958, at the age of 25, Leiber and Stoller had been dubbed “the Gilbert and Sullivan of rock and roll,” and “the Grandfathers of Rock and Roll.” They would go on to write and produce the major hits of the Drifters and the Coasters, establish themselves as the first independent record producers in the industry, and nurture the talent of one Phil Spector.

Hound Dog, the Leiber and Stoller Autobiography, just released by Simon and Schuster, is a slight volume of edited interviews that recapitulates much of what was already known about the songwriting duo, and some delightful new anecdotes of uncertain veracity. The first third of the book captures the excitement of those early days when the music was still unknown to white audiences and the big record companies had no regard for it. For anyone remotely susceptible to the heartbreaking innocence of that period, the sly, keen, slightly-outdated hip patois recorded in that book is an unmitigated delight.

“Like Lester, many of the label owners were Jewish. ‘Look at the way the big iron and steel companies threw the scraps to the Jews,’ said Lester. ‘That’s how Jews started in the scrap metal business. Same thing in music. The majors see a great artist like Jimmy Witherspoon as scrap. They don’t want to deal with what they consider junk. Well, some of these small labels were actually junk dealers before they got into the music game. Through experience, they learned what some see as junk might actually be precious jewels.’”

Jerry Leiber first heard black music in homes where he delivered “five-gallon cans of kerosene and ten-pound bags of soft coal,” as an errand boy for his mother, who owned the only grocery store willing to extend credit to blacks in the neighborhood. His father had been a “door to door milkman who died penniless,” when Leiber was five. Leiber’s first language was Yiddish; his earliest attempt to play boogie-woogie on piano ended when his Uncle Dave, “without warning, violently slammed down the wooden keyboard cover,” in the midst of a lesson.

Mike Stoller’s aunt was a child prodigy who graduated from the Vienna Conservatory at 12, but his introduction to boogie-woogie came under the gentle direction of the stride pianist James P. Johnson. Stoller grew up listening to Richard Strauss, Shostakovitch, and Sibelius, but “it was black music,” he explains, “that excited my deepest passion. I heard the lyricism in Richard Strauss, I felt the elegance of Bach, but boogie-woogie really reached my eight-year old soul.” Where music had been, for his mother’s German Jewish family, the hallmark of social superiority, young Stoller’s interest in music “was purely visceral.” Is there a clearer illustration of the Old World’s cultural hierarchies succumbing to the blandishments of the New World’s freedom to reinvent oneself in any guise?

Stoller would write the music, noodling along on the keyboard while Leiber tossed out phrases off the top of his head. Many of their hits were written in fifteen minutes or fewer. The story of their ascent within their field is rapid and untroubled. “Our interest was in black music and black music only,” Stoller declares. His own musical vocabulary spanned the blues, R&B, avant-garde jazz and classical music of his day, but he deployed all of it in search of the most immediate impact, and without any consciousness that the music they were making was other than ephemeral. “If you had asked me and Mike back then,” Leiber says about the great Robins song “Smokey Joe’s Cafe,” we would have said that we loved the recording, that it might even be a hit, but we assumed that in a few months the song—and, for that matter, all our songs—would be, like a pile of old comic books, discarded and forgotten.” Stoller observes that when he was writing hit songs “stratification of popular music was absolute. At the top were giants like George Gershwin and Irving Berlin. At the bottom were guys like us.” Leiber quotes Random House’s co-founder politely inquiring: “Why did you write something called ‘Hound Dog’?” The “highbrow view of the day” was that “rock and roll was trash.” The view had something to recommend it, according to the sexual mores of the day. Leiber wrote the lyrics with a vocabulary, as Stoller puts it that was “black, Jewish, theatrical, comical,” telling stories, as Leiber tells it, about “heartache and pain, but also unrestrained joy and unrestrained sex.”

“She wasn’t built for power
She wasn’t built for speed
But she was built for comfort
And that’s what I need.”

In 1953, Leiber and Stoller wrote a song for Big Mama Thornton called “Hound Dog,” which became a hit on the R&B charts. At one point during the session Leiber encourages Thornton to “attack” a certain part of the song. Thornton interrupts him. “‘Come here boy,’ she said, motioning me to stand even closer to her. ‘I’ll tell you what you can attack. Attack this…’ she added, pointing to her crotch.” The opening lyric, as Thornton had sang it, went like this:

You ain’t nothing but a hound dog
Quit snooping ‘round my door
You can wag your tail,
But I ain’t gonna feed you no more”

In 1956, Elvis Presley appeared on the Ed Sullivan show singing

You aint’ nothing but a hound dog
Crying all the time
You ain’t never caught a rabbit
And you ain’t no friend of mine”

“The song is not about a dog,” Leiber observes. “It’s about a man, a freeloading gigolo. Elvis’s version makes no sense to me,” going on to opine that “there’s no comparison between the Presley version and the Big Mama original. Elvis played with the song. Big Mama nailed it.” Nonetheless, Presley’s choice of the song made Leiber and Stoller, as Leiber puts it “awfully goddamn lucky,” to be placed at the forefront of “the bigger commercial revolution in American music: teenage rock and roll.”

The book then settles into the rhythm of professional success, punctuated by conflict, as the duo negotiates the treacherous waters of the music business. They go on to write Peggy Lee’s signature mid-life crisis hit “Is That All There Is?” in which the aging singer faces mortality with resignation that is at once cheerful, rueful, and mordant. The book ends with the obligatory flourish of showbiz gratitude for blessings bestowed by fate, but ends on a note struck all those decades ago by the nihilistic chanteuse. Leiber and Stoller began life as “horny teenagers” obsessed with the sound, rhythm, and preoccupations of the lustful music emerging from the black underground. They managed to make being a horny teenager into a profitable vocation, and became rich, honored, and successful men, carving out a permanent place in American cultural history for the ephemeral songs they wrote in 15 minutes or fewer. Facing mortality and clinging to life amid failing health, Leiber admits that he thinks back “to the days of cognac and tobacco with deep nostalgia.” Aging and mortality—the insistent facts for which rock and roll has no reply. And he tells his interlocutor that:

“If my next medical report is ‘Leiber, you’ve run out of options. You’ve got a month at most to put your affairs in order,’ then this is my plan: I’m going to buy a fifth of Maker’s Mark bourbon, a carton of Camels, and as many Billie Holiday records as I can carry. I’m going to break out the booze and have a ball.”

“If that’s all there is.”

Paul and Ludwig Wittgenstein

It had not occurred to the Wittgensteins, erstwhile possessors of one of the largest fortunes in Europe, that anyone would try to persecute them, least of all for an identity they had long ago disclaimed. The latter third of Waugh’s book is taken up with an account of the bureaucratic and legal maneuvers by which the Wittgensteins sought to evade the fate of European Jewry by means of all the considerable resources at their disposal. Their legal hope, such as it was, rested on the claim that one of their grandparents had, in fact, been the bastard child of a gentile nobleman. In the end, they secured their freedom only by releasing the bulk of their fortune to the Nazi state. The story underscores the macabre fact that even the wealthiest, best-connected, and most patriotic Austrians—those who, like the Wittgensteins, had literally sacrificed both life and limb in the service of Austria—were not exempted from the cruel exactions of the Third Reich. It also underscores the equally macabre fact that, in the end, such people were usually able to buy their way out of persecution, at the cost of millions of pounds of gold.

The Nazi episode effected the final split between the surviving Wittgenstein siblings and scattered what remained of their vast fortune. It was a fortune that had taken a single lifetime to build. Waugh devotes a chapter to the rise of its progenitor, Karl Wittgenstein, who went from rebellious American barman to multimillionaire Austrian steel magnate” in 33 years. During that time Karl had risen from salaried engineer at an ironworks to the owner or principal shareholder in the Austro-Hungarian empire’s largest iron, steel, mining, munitions, and financial companies. In 1898, he retired at the age of 51 and turned to a life of cultivated leisure. He was the most successful of a family of 11 that included judges, soldiers, doctors, scientists, patrons of the arts and government administrators—all of them prominent.” He had fathered nine children of his own, some of whom were notable for their gifts, some of whom were notable for their beauty, and he amassed magnificent and valuable collections of furniture, art, porcelain, and autograph musical manuscripts.”

His happiness was at its height. But the Wittgenstein industrial fortune took a single lifetime to dissipate. Waugh devotes much of the book to the madness, waste, expropriation, and misfortune that afflicted Karl’s heirs. In 1902, his eldest son, Hans, disappeared in America, an apparent suicide. In 1904, his next eldest son, Rudy, emptied a vial of potassium cyanide into a glass and drank it. Karl forbade his family to mention the names of either of his lost sons, driven not by a lack of feeling on his part, but by a surfeit of it.” Waugh goes on to observe that “the effect of his censorship created an atmosphere of unbearable tension in the home, causing a split between the Wittgenstein children and their parents that time would never heal.”

None of his remaining three sons was equipped or inclined to take over the empire which he bequeathed at his death in 1913: Kurt was lightweight, Paul and Ludwig both worryingly neurotic and fundamentally uninterested in business. By the time of his dying, none of them was married.” They were made for other vocations. Kurt, the eldest survivor, followed his father into industry, leaving for America to expand the company’s interests there. He would eventually kill himself on the battlefield after spending much of the war struggling to evade an American prohibition preventing him from fighting in the war he so fervently wished to join. Paul launched on his promising career as a pianist. Ludwig left for Cambridge, where, by 1912, without having a single significant piece of written philosophical work and while still only in his mid-twenties, he was being hailed by many of the brightest minds of Cambridge University as a genius.”

Hermine, Helene, Margarete, (back) Paul and Ludwig (front)

Ludwig would go on to become, as Waugh puts it, an icon of the 20th century.” The visual metaphor is a deliberate one. Waugh is uninterested in Ludwig’s thought. Every story he tells reinforces the impression, unmistakably Waugh’s own, that the cult of Ludwig Wittgenstein is the product of eminent men like Bertrand Russell and George Moore who had fallen under the spell of Ludwig’s striking looks, manner and extraordinarily persuasive personality,” and gone to find in his incomprehensible” writings an intellectual richness that may or may not have existed. This derisory attitude was shared by Ludwig’s family. Shaking their heads, they found it amusing that the world was taken in by the clown of their family, that that useless person had suddenly become famous and an intellectual giant in England.” Ludwig renounced his share in the family fortune and went to work as a primary school teacher, eventually getting himself fired for brutalizing his students. He had first considered suicide at 11, and the thought never strayed very far from his consciousness.

At the center of the narrative Waugh casts Paul Wittgenstein, who lost his arm in the Great War and went on to become perhaps the greatest, certainly the most famous, one-handed pianist in history—far more famous than Ludwig in his own lifetime. Inspired by the example of the blind composer and family friend Josef Labor (a composer forgotten by posterity, but regarded by his Wittgenstein family patrons as among the greatest ever), Paul devised an extraordinary one-hand technique that permitted him to recreate the fullness generated by a two-handed pianist. Waugh gives lengthy and amusing accounts of Paul’s dealings with the composers whom he commissioned to write music for his one hand, including Richard Strauss, Maurice Ravel, and Sergei Prokoviev. (Performers must not be slaves!” Paul told Ravel during a dispute over a concerto he had commissioned; Performers are slaves!” Ravel shot back.) Waugh quotes many admiring accounts of Paul’s concerts by some of the leading music critics of his age, but the reader cannot help suspecting that Prokofiev had it right when he observed, It may be that his misfortune had turned out to be a stroke of good luck, for with only his left hand he is unique but maybe with both hands he would not have stood out from a crowd of mediocre pianists.”

There is something determinedly contrarian, even a bit perverse, about Waugh’s decision to write a biography diminishing the 20th century’s best-known philosopher at the expense of the one-handed pianist in his family.

There is something determinedly contrarian, even a bit perverse, about Waugh’s decision to write a biography diminishing the 20th century’s best known philosopher at the expense of the one-handed pianist in his family. The project feels, at times, like a deliberate thumb in the eye of, as Waugh puts it, a cult . . . whose membership includes many who have never opened his books or tried to understand a single line of his thought,” which is also the group from which Waugh’s readers will almost certainly be drawn. But even readers hostile to Waugh’s dismissal of Ludwig Wittgenstein will find something to admire in The House of Wittgenstein. Waugh has a gift for the historical set piece that makes his writing a continual pleasure—a cinematic rather than a novelistic pleasure, lingering on surfaces, eschewing depth. He writes with delight of the sumptuous interiors of the Wittgenstein palace, but also of the squalor of Russian POW camps during the Great War. And the story itself, coolly recited with poise and authority, has the advantage of arriving front-loaded with the pathos and dread of the 20th century.

In the end, the Wittgensteins succeeded in their bid to sunder their fate from that of the Jewish people, whom they had never regarded as their brethren, and with millions of dollars remaining. The ordeal left them permanently estranged. Paul Wittgenstein lived the rest of his life in Great Neck, Long Island, having made an honest woman of his mistress, whom he smuggled out of Germany and into the United States. He never returned to Vienna. One by one, cancer took each of the remaining siblings. The fabulous Wittgenstein palace, monument to one of Europe’s grandest fortunes, and incubator to one of its most gifted families, was razed for redevelopment.

One hundred years ago, Arthur Schnitzler published his most ambitious novel, The Road into the Open. He declared it his most personal work; it would be his least understood. It was like his other work in that it portrayed an affair between an aristocrat and a woman of the lower middle class—a subject he claimed as his own in the cynical, melancholy comedies that had made him one of the most popular playwrights of the Austrian fin de siècle. It was unlike his other work in that it depicted Viennese Jews struggling to breathe in an atmosphere poisoned by anti-Semitism.

The readers of Schnitzler’s day were not ready for this. They found The Road into the Open perplexing, and mostly ignored it, passing on that neglect to posterity. Many decades would pass before scholars of another era would restore the book to its central place in Schnitzler’s oeuvre. A new translation by Roger Byers was issued in 1992 by the University of California Press. It tried to improve upon the only previous English translation, from 1923, by recreating in English the music of the German original. It introduced a new generation of readers to a unique work deserving of a still wider readership—the only enduring novel written in any language before 1945 which highlights urban Jewish intellectuals of the pre-1914 period,” the cultural historian William Johnston wrote in his introduction to the 1991 Northwestern University Press edition, and the only prose fiction in which Schnitzler portrayed an entire social world.

By 1908, in Parliament and on the streets, the terminal descent into class warfare and race hatred that would tear the Austro-Hungarian Empire apart had already begun. The city was governed by an avowed anti-Semite; its gutter press was filled with attacks on the Jews; German and Slavic nationalists exchanged bloodthirsty invective in Parliament. A 19-year-old Adolf Hitler arrived in Vienna that year and found there, fully formed, the rhetorical arsenal that he would brandish in a later time and a different place.

Then again, the Christian Socialist mayor Karl Lueger—charming, elegant, much beloved in the city—pursued no discriminatory policies against Jews, dined with them openly, collaborated with them in the governance of the city, and harmed no one on the basis of their race or nationality. And Vienna was home to the largest Jewish middle class in the world. Nowhere else had Jews progressed so rapidly, prospered so well, or assimilated so quickly. Schnitzler was a characteristic product of this milieu. Born into the Jewish quarter of the city, the Leopoldstadt, in 1862 (when it was still a quite elegant neighborhood,” he observed in his memoirs) to a prominent laryngologist who counted many of the city’s theatrical stars among his clients, he was raised in privilege, followed his father into medicine, and trained in the same psychiatric clinic as Sigmund Freud. He allied himself with the aesthetic revolutionaries who named themselves Young Vienna, chased women (he was one of the great erotomaniacs of his age, meticulously recording each of his orgasms in a diary), and strode into a successful literary career.

And yet this unbroken record of pleasure and success was shadowed by fear. Prosperous and fully enfranchised, the Jews of Vienna bore a crushing psychic burden that distorted their relations to themselves and others. Speaking broadly,” the Gentile anti-hero of The Road into the Open, Baron Georg Wergethin, observes early on of the Jewish friends that surrounded him, he found their tone to each other now too familiar, now too formal, now too facetious, now too unsentimental; not one of them seemed really free and unembarrassed with the others, scarcely indeed with himself.” In the novel, Schnitzler the former doctor lays out a clinical anatomy of the psychic scars imposed on the Jews by their liminal position as privileged outsiders in Austrian society. His characters can neither fully embrace nor wholly reject their equivocal role in an unjust and disintegrating society. They twist themselves into a fantastic array of personal and political contortions in an effort to break out of the impasse, and into the open.

Schnitzler’s Gentile baron is a privileged outsider in a world of privileged outsiders. Georg attends to the sorrows and involutions, the gossip and political disputes, of the Jewish writers and artists that frequent the salon of Salomon Ehrenburg, a munitions manufacturer. There are no observant Jews in this social milieu; the Galician immigrants who had crowded into the Leopoldstadt in the decades after emancipation (transforming the elegant neighborhood of Schnitzler’s youth) do not appear here. In a series of set pieces in the Ehrenburg salon and in Italian resorts, Schnitzler deploys a contrapuntal method to survey the full range of responses to anti-Semitism as his Jewish characters are

tossed to and fro as they were between defiance and exhaustion, between the fear of appearing importunate and their bitter resentment at the demand they must yield to an insolent majority, between the inner consciousness of being at home in the country where they lived and worked, and their indignation at finding themselves insulted in that very place.

Salomon Ehrenburg’s son Oskar represents capitulation: he aspires to be absorbed into the Catholic aristocracy; only the threat of disinheritance prevents him from converting. The beautiful Therese Golowski has become a leader of the Social Democratic movement, though her passion for social justice conflicts with her taste for beauty and luxury. (She will either end up on the scaffold, or as a Princess,” another character predicts.) When we first learn of her, she has been imprisoned for defaming a member of the royal family at a coal miner’s strike; later, she appears at an Italian resort on the arm of a famous aristocratic horseman. Her younger brother Leo is serving as a military officer in the east. Though possessed of all the courtly virtues, he has become a fervent Zionist, and embraces the cause of the Galician masses yearning for a return to their spiritual homeland. He embodies the spirit of Jewish self-assertion. He will go on to challenge an anti-Semitic persecutor to a duel, and shoot him dead.

Georg draws closest to the novel’s most complex and most tortured Jewish character, the playwright Heinrich Bermann. His satirical plays, like Schnitzler’s, have been attacked by the conservative and clerical press. He admits to Georg to being adversely affected by the attacks, and, speaking on behalf of the Jews, tells him: It doesn’t take much to awaken the self-contempt which is constantly lurking in us; and once that happens there is hardly a fool or scoundrel with whom we are not ready to take sides against ourselves.” Bermann manages his tortured Jewish self-consciousness through brutal candor. He is free with criticism of himself and others, and he does not exempt his co-religionists. Characteristically, his statement of Jewish pride takes the form of an avowal of hatred:

There are Jews who I really hate, hate as Jews. They are those who behave in front of others, and sometimes among themselves, as if they weren’t Jews at all. Who try to appease their enemies and despisers in a cheap, cringing manner and think they can ransom themselves like this from the eternal curse, which weighs on them, or from that which they only feel as a curse.

Bermann has watched anti-Semitism destroy his father, once a successful lawyer, who was driven out of the German Liberal Party and financially ruined when his clients desert him. Bermann is keenly aware that even the best-intentioned Gentiles, such as Georg, are not immune to it. But he rejects the Zionist enthusiasms of Leo Golowski with equal fervor. In a lengthy colloquy with Leo, Bermann avers that to depart Austria for a desert under the rule of the Ottoman sultan would be a capitulation to the worst of the Jews’ enemies. He insists on his right to live in Austria. He would accept Zionism as a moral principle and as a welfare scheme if it would honestly make itself known as such; but the idea of the establishment of a Jewish state on religious and national grounds appeared to him an insane revolt against the spirit of all historical development.”

Running parallel to Georg’s social life among the Jews is a sad and chastened account of his affair with Anna Rosner, a music teacher from a lower-middle-class German family. The young Schnitzler had inveighed against the hypocrisy of the old Victorian sexual morality, though not without acknowledging the dangers of unleashing the instincts. In The Road into the Open, Schnitzler pits fathers and sons, Gentile and Jew, in a series of exemplary generational conflicts that seldom redound to the credit of the sons.

Georg impregnates Anna, and takes her on a journey to hide the fact. He does not know whether he will marry her. Much of the novel is consumed by lengthy accounts of vacillation and drift. He is haunted by the memory of past affairs. If the world were coming to an end tomorrow,” he muses, not long after learning of the pregnancy, It would be Cissy I’d choose to spend the night with me,” speaking of a minor personage on his social scene.

This hesitation is shocking to the elderly Doctor Stauber, a friend of Georg’s deceased father, who tries to shame him into marrying Anna: Just think for a moment how your blessed Herr father, who didn’t even know Annerl, would have felt about the matter. He was surely one of the brightest men, and the most free of prejudice, that one can think of. And despite that, don’t think for a moment that it would be completely without shock even to him.” Stauber’s tone is at once condemnatory, beseeching, and self-effacing. He knows that sexual mores have changed, that his shock is a product of another world in which certain concepts stood authoritatively firm, when everyone knew quite well: one must honor one’s parents, or else one was a lout…or: a true love comes once in one’s life…or: it is an honor to die for the Fatherland…” He knows that it is impossible to invoke such concepts without self-irony, that they have lost their morally coercive power over a younger generation that has freed itself from the influence of the fathers.

A possibility of this new freedom was that the surfeit of possibility itself could paralyze the will, and evacuate the heart. This incapacity recurs elsewhere in the novel. Time and again, the young fail to rise to the standards of decency set by their parents. Stauber rallies to Anna’s side in her time of need. Anna’s parents bear the burdens of their misfortune humbly. Her lazy, resentful brother Josef embarks on a career with an anti-Semitic newspaper owned by the demagogic Alderman Jalaudek. Bermann confesses that receiving the news of his father’s death troubled him less than his concern over new developments in his latest affair with an actress.

Schnitzler’s dialectical method has a way of destroying all contrasting arguments; neither assimilation nor resistance, flight nor defiance, the worker’s utopia nor the embrace of German culture will deliver these characters into the open. The malign stasis of Viennese political life never resolves. The characters continue to drift, avowing causes and living lives for which they are each, in different ways, temperamentally unfit. Georg’s domestic drama finally concludes in sterility and death. His child is stillborn in a rented house on the outskirts of Vienna. He will not marry Anna. He gazes on his dead child and is overtaken by sorrow, as he gazes at a future that will not be born:

There lay this sweet, tiny body, which was ready for existence, and which now could not move. There shone large, blue eyes, as if longing to drink in the light of the sky, blind as death before they had ever seen a single ray. There opened, as if thirsty, a tiny, round mouth, which would never be permitted to drink from the breast of a mother. There stared this pale child’s face, with fully formed human features, that would never receive and experience the kiss of mother or father. How he loved this child! How he loved it, now that it was too late.

Wesley Yang has written about books and culture for the Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Observer, and n+1.

In Otto Weininger’s Sex and Character—published four months before his suicide, at twenty-three, in 1903—a brilliant mind comes unmoored. Based on a grotesque premise, the book reasoned shoddily to monstrous conclusions. It distinguished itself as notably anti-Semitic in fin-de-siècle Vienna, a setting in which the distinction wasn’t easy to earn; and it is perhaps the most misogynistic book written in any language in the history of the world. It embraced the Wagnerian opposition of the heroic Aryan to the materialistic Jew; enthusiastically cited Houston Stewart Chamberlain, the theorist of racial degeneration read so avidly by Hitler; and ended by endorsing the voluntary self-extinction of the human race.

A book like this survives, to the extent that it does (a new English translation—the first since 1906—by Ladislaus Lob was issued by Indiana University Press in 2005, with a preface declaring it “The Book That Won’t Go Away”), principally as a reminder of the perverted thinking that was midwife to an age of atrocity. Fin-de-siècle Vienna, the place where, as the historian Norman Stone puts it, “most of the twentieth-century intellectual world was invented,” gave us psychoanalysis, analytic philosophy, atonal music, and architectural modernism, among other attainments, but it also bequeathed a darker legacy. While it was nurturing Ludwig Wittgenstein, scion of a family of wealthy and accomplished secular Jews, in one part of the city, a vastly less fortunate and gifted young man, squirreled away in a men’s rooming house—Adolf Hitler—was failing in his bid to earn admission to the academy of art, and schooling himself in the doctrines of race war and Aryan superiority flourishing in the intellectual undergrowth of that city (and, alas, not only there, and not only in that city).

But Weininger’s strange book, the only one he published in his short life, survives not just as a primary source in the history of political and psychosexual pathology, but also in the history of thought and art. It straddled the young Hitler’s Vienna and the Vienna of Wittgenstein, Freud, Oskar Kokoschka, Adolf Loos, Gustav Mahler, and Clemens Krauss in an utterly eccentric way that casts an oblique light on both of the city’s legacies.

For one thing, Wittgenstein himself credited Weininger as one of the ten thinkers who decisively influenced him—exactly how remains a matter of scholarly speculation and dispute. (In a letter to G.E. Moore, Wittgenstein remarked that “he was fantastic, but he was great and fantastic,” going on to assert that “roughly speaking, if you just add a ‘~’ to the whole book it says an important truth.”) Wittgenstein was far from alone in his admiration. Many of the canonical figures of the heroic period of early Modernism—Karl Kraus, August Strindberg, Hermann Broch, James Joyce, and Franz Kafka—read and discussed him and, in ways both apparent and obscure (few of them uncritically embraced his assertions about women or Jews), were influenced by him. There was something remarkable about the book that some of the best minds of his generation were content to call genius. His writing, Elias Canetti recorded in his diary of Vienna in the 1920s, “cropped up in every discussion.” Ford Madox Ford described the “immense international vogue” the book experienced after Weininger’s death thusly: “One began to hear singular mutterings amongst men. Even in the United States where men never talk about women, certain whispers might be heard. The idea was that a new gospel had appeared.”

The new gospel purported to resolve for the first time—and for all time—the “Woman Question,” by means of an investigation into the deep structure of femininity and masculinity—it was an inquiry into not women but Woman. It is a sprawling, unstable admixture of scientific and pseudoscientific theorizing, cultural polemic, and philosophical argument that imposes a paranoid coherence on its breathtakingly disparate elements. Even while heaping rhetorical abuse upon women and Jews, Weininger argues explicitly against any infringement of their rights. To understand the weird fascination the book exerted on its readers, one must appreciate it for all that it was: an impassioned defense of the autonomous self against the forces that would turn it into a thing to be manipulated, an impossibly idealistic assertion of neo-Kantian ethics, a glimpse into one tortured young man’s psychosexual panic, and a sounding board for an inflamed epoch’s sexual and racial obsessions. Though Weininger’s view of women is practically incomprehensible to those of us raised in the postfeminist present, it merely advanced with fanatical rigidity a view that permeated his age, expressed in the violent misogyny appearing in the paintings of Alfred Kubin, Egon Schiele, and Oscar Kokoschka, among others, which is vividly summoned up by the title of Kokoschka’s avant-garde play Murder, Hope of Woman.

Sex and Character begins with an argument about method, assailing the experimental psychology of the day—which had famously declared, in the words of its leading exponent, Ernst Mach, that the “self was beyond salvage.” The autonomous and unified subject of liberal political philosophy had come under assault; following the philosophical skepticism of David Hume, the experimental psychologists saw the mind as a mere bundle of sensations. They eschewed introspection as a valid form of investigation, and restricted research to what could be measured in a laboratory. Psychology, then, as Weininger puts it, “completely fails to reach those problems normally described as eminently psychological, the analysis of murder, of friendship, of loneliness, etc.” In place of this impoverished account of the self, Weininger argued, we needed a new “characterology,” which would inquire into the stable and unique source of individuality, into that “something that reveals itself in every thought and every feeling.”

Weininger rooted his concept of the self in Kant’s transcendental, suprasensible “intelligible” subject, whose existence could never be demonstrated empirically, but only deduced. This self makes our perception of empirical reality possible. For how could we conceive of time if we were merely caught up in the flux of sensation from isolated moment to isolated moment? Some part of us must partake of eternity in order for us to know eternity, and it was, Weininger said, this suprasensory self that was responsible for all of the highest expressions of the human spirit. “The desire for value expresses itself in the general striving to emancipate things from time,” he wrote. The genius is the person who remembers everything because he is capable of endowing every moment of his life with meaning.

It is this intelligible self in each of us that gives humanity its special moral significance. Kant’s “categorical imperative” enjoins us to treat all others as ends in themselves rather than means to other ends. The categorical imperative defined for Weininger the curious vision of utopia articulated in his book: a world in which people engage in mutually respectful relationships that inspire individual genius and spiritual perfection. It also defined the negative utopia that Weininger saw emerging all around him:

Although in a later chapter Weininger concedes that women are not “animals or plants,” but in fact “human beings,” they qualify for this distinction only in the most rudimentary, basely biological way.

a modern world in which people were becoming mere cogs in a gigantic machine, using each other for their own basely material ends, and negating the very existence of a higher world. Our materialistic, mechanistic science was but one of the many faces this creeping degeneration wore. Our glorification of sex was another.

Throughout Weininger’s account of the intelligible self and of genius, he continues to denigrate women in a way that feels compulsive and almost beside the point, noting that if men are capable of conscious thought, women are capable only of calculating immediate material advantage, and that if men are capable of spiritual aspiration, women are capable of mimicking—expertly—whatever men present to them as the proper values to emulate. Thus far, we remain within the context of the misogyny of the age—the misogyny of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, and a thousand after-dinner boors.

It is when Weininger turns fully to the subject of Woman that the book begins its long slide into extremism. He proclaims Woman to be nullity itself: incapable of reason, creativity, or spiritual aspiration; sexually insatiable (“under the spell of the phallus”); psychologically incoherent, desiring nothing more than her own subordination to man—“a hollow vessel covered for a while in makeup and whitewash.” Although in a later chapter Weininger concedes that women are not “animals or plants,” but in fact “human beings,” they qualify for this distinction only in the most rudimentary, basely biological way. In a passage devoted to acknowledging the “meanness and inanity” that may appear in individual men, he nonetheless concludes that “the most superior woman is still infinitely inferior to the most inferior men.”

Weininger’s misogyny is eccentric. His extremism leads him, at times, to sound rather like a radical feminist. He will have nothing to do with the sentimental veneration that imprisons women while pretending they are more virtuous than men. He wants to debunk what he sees as the great lie written into the traditional narratives structuring relationships between men and women. Love itself is a form of imprisonment. And “all eroticism, even the most sublime, remains a threefold immorality: selfish intolerance for the real empirical women, who is merely used as a means to an end . . . and who is therefore denied an independent life of her own.”

Weininger closes his long inquiry into the “Nature of Woman and Her Purpose in the Universe” by laying the responsibility for the moral condition of women on men: “Man must redeem himself from sexuality in order to redeem Woman.” Weininger acknowledges that this will mean the extinction of the human race. It is a small price to pay for the emancipation of woman, and the perfection of humanity.

Tacked onto this exhaustive inquiry, the weird fascination of which is impossible to convey in any quotation or series of quotations, Weininger wrote a single chapter that would help to define the category in which he is, along with “crazed misogynist,” best remembered—that of the self-hating Jew. For Weininger was the son of a solidly middle-class Jewish goldsmith much admired for his knowledge of his craft. Secular in orientation, anti-Semitic in his opinions, Leopold Weininger nonetheless, according to his daughter, Rosa, “thought as a Jew and was angry when Otto wrote against Judaism.” Like other sons of the newly emergent Jewish middle class, Weininger went to a private high school, where he learned multiple languages and attended to self-cultivation with an intensity that is scarcely conceivable today. There, he came upon a dawning conviction that has afflicted hormonal adolescent men throughout history: that he was a genius. This subject would absorb much of his attention in Sex and Character, in which he defines “genius” as a capacity for universal empathy with other men and with the universe as a whole. The genius becomes the “microcosm” able to absorb and reflect everything he encounters.

Weininger was a tortured soul who “lived in complete isolation” with his books, according to his father, and held himself aloof from the pursuit of sex and drinking that characterized the social lives of his classmates at the University of Vienna. His letters refer to his inability to experience pleasure or love, and an overpowering sense of his own moral corruption. There is no evidence that he ever had sex with a woman, and no conclusive proof that he was either sexually abused as a child, as David Abrahamsen speculated in his 1946 book The Mind and Death of a Genius, or homosexual, as others have speculated. Chandak Sengoopta’s excellent 2000 monograph Otto Weininger: Sex, Science, and Self in Imperial Vienna includes a letter from Weininger to his closest friend in which he reports success in administering male hormones for the purpose of converting a homosexual “patient” who was, in fact, “already preparing for his first coitus!” Sengoopta asserted that it was “strongly likely” that the “patient” was Weininger himself.

In 1902, Weininger wrote a dissertation on sexual characteristics that his professors admired, but not without misgivings. Weininger’s assertions on women “could not be described as anything other than fantastical,” one of his advisors wrote. (The same professor would later call the latter half of Sex and Character “shocking and repulsive.”)

Weininger openly acknowledged that he was himself “of Jewish ancestry,” and then went on to argue that Jews, like women, are “soulless people” who lack intelligible selves.

The dissertation would eventually become Sex and Character, but not before failing to earn the endorsement of Sigmund Freud, who nonetheless described Weininger as a striking personality “with a touch of genius.”

Soon after completing his dissertation, Weininger converted to Protestantism—doing himself no worldly favors in that Roman Catholic capital, but instead announcing his commitment to the austere creed of Northern Germany, and the religion of his hero, Immanuel Kant. But in a footnote to his infamous chapter on Judaism, Weininger openly acknowledged that he was himself “of Jewish ancestry,” and then went on to argue that Jews, like women, are “soulless people” who lack intelligible selves. But he does this in a characteristically eccentric way that has nothing to do with the eliminationist anti-Semitism of the Nazis, and everything to do with his own anguished wrestling with his own identity.

“From now on,” Weininger wrote, “when I speak of the Jew I mean neither a specific individual nor a collective, but every human being as such, insofar as he participates in the Platonic idea of Judaism.” The Jew is “relatively amoral, never very good and never very bad,” and the “opposite pole of the aristocrat,” for whom “the strictest observation of the boundaries between human beings” is the guiding principle of conduct. Yet the Jew is also “the born communist and always wants community.” At the same time, the Jew is the spirit of irony and debunking, wishing to denude the world of mystery, and strip away the spirit from the material world. Never truly revolutionary, but always subversive, “he is an absolute ironist, like—and here I can only name a Jew—like Heinrich Heine.” Capable of adapting himself to all situations, he never really possesses an inner being.

Weininger goes on:

It is like a condition before being, an eternal wandering back and forth before the gate of reality. There is nothing with which the Jew can truly identify, no cause for which he can risk his life unreservedly. What the Jew lacks is not the zealot but the zeal, because anything undivided, anything whole, is alien to him. It is the simplicity of belief that he lacks and it is because he lacks this simplicity and stands for nothing positive that he seems to be more intelligent than the Aryan and is supple enough to wriggle out of any oppression. Inner ambiguity, I repeat, is absolutely Jewish, simplicity is absolutely un-Jewish.

Jewishness is thus, for Weininger, as it was for many others, a spiritual condition more or less identical with modernity itself. (And certainly not, as it was for the most virulent anti-Semites, either a malevolent or a uniquely powerful force ruling the world from the shadows.) It is also roughly analogous to the diagnosis of the Jewish condition advanced by the pioneering Zionists, who dreamed of a Jew restored to psychic health and vigorous manhood by a renewed relationship to the land. Weininger rejects Zionism as the solution to the Jewish question, but curiously he retains it as an unreachable ideal. “The Jews would have to overcome Judaism before they could be ripe for Zionism.” This cannot be done collectively, Weininger argues: “Every single Jew must seek to answer it for his own person.” But by posing the greatest obstacle, Judaism also occasions the highest possibilities. Thus, “Christ was the greatest human being because he overcame the greatest adversity,” as “the only Jew who has ever succeeded in defeating Judaism.”

This struggle against the Jew in each of us was, for Weininger, clearly a battle the culture at large was losing:

Our age is not only the most Jewish, but also the most effeminate of all ages . . . an age of the most credulous anarchism, an age without any appreciation of the state and law . . . an age of the shallowest of all imaginable interpretations of history (historical materialism), an age of capitalism and Marxism, an age for which history, life, science, everything, has become nothing but economics and technology; an age that has declared genius to be a form of madness, but which no longer has one great artist or one great philosopher; an age that is most devoid of originality, but which chase most frantically after originality; an age that has replaced the idea of virginity with the cult of the demivierge. This age also has the distinction of being the first to have not only affirmed and worshipped sexual intercourse, but to have practically made it a duty, not as a way of achieving oblivion, as the Romans and Greeks did in their bacchanals, but in order to find itself and to give its own dreariness a meaning.

One recognizes in this peevish rant the intransigence of youth. In differing forms Weininger’s concerns were the concerns of anti-modernists of every persuasion, including some of our most admired writers. But they come together in Weininger with a rigidity and literalism, an absence of humor or detachment that marks his work as that of a callow, sheltered, and disturbed personality. Weininger might conceivably have worked through his issues over time, had he taken Freud’s advice and spent another ten years gathering data for his wild assertions, perhaps abandoning them in the process. Weininger’s propositions tell us nothing useful or true; instead they enact for us a drama that is of continuing significance to a world in which bright young men—traumatized by sex, infatuated with piety, and obsessed with Jews—continue to try to live in opposition to the age by dreaming of apocalypse.

The fin-de-siècle anti-modernists feared a world from which all nobility and heroism would be banished, and in which the individual would be swallowed up by a technological mass society. Their fears were not without basis. The more reckless among them, who substituted crude symbols, like the Woman or the Jew, for concrete analysis of large social processes, made more than an intellectual error. They helped to make the earth, for a time, into hell. Weininger became the microcosm of his age, but not in the way he intended.