TTK: dè topic.

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A Nervous Splendor is a study of a single year - 1888-1889 - in the fairy tale city of Vienna. During this year Johann Strauss Jr. wrote his Emperor Waltz; Sigmund Freud, having quit his lucrative job as assistant physician to a Nerve Specialist for the Very Rich, used the term "subconscious" for the first time in print; there was a renaissance of Viennese music, art, literature, and architecture; and Vienna became the Suicide Capital of the world. It was the year Crown Prince Rudolph, handsome and popular heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, shot his 17 year-old mistress Mary Vetsera and then himself at his hunting lodge Mayerling. It was also the year Clara Hitler gave birth to Adolph. For many Austrians, it was the year the Western Dream died.

In its loving attention to detail - the Austrian-American Morton is clearly in love with Vienna and its past - this is a very romantic book and reads like a romance novel, which makes its horrifying climax all the more tragic. The book is also one of the most painless ways to understand both the Fall of the Hapsburgs and the causes of World War I. And Morton gives one of the most balanced accounts of the Mayerling tragedy and the events leading up to it. There are no villains here (with the possible exception of the obnoxious boor Kaiser Wilhelm) and no way-out conspiracy theory is endorsed to explain why a gifted young prince like Rudolf - the hope of European liberals - should have taken his own life and why a popular and ambitious teenager like Mary Vetsera would have agreed to a suicide pact with him. Dismissing the various "murder plot" theories as well as the "tragic romance" theories (Rudolph did, after all, spend the night before his suicide in another mistress’ bed!), Morton gives his own, far more plausible explanation for both the famous double suicide and the scores of other seemingly inexplicable suicides during the course of that remarkable year.

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What do Stalin, Trotsky, Hitler, Tito, Freud, the Emperor Franz Joseph and the Archduke Franz Ferdinand have in common? They were all in Vienna during the carnival of 1913, living within a square mile of each other. Here, in this laboratory of cultural, social and political experiment, some of the key figures of the twentieth century met and collided: Stalin on a mission for the revolution, Trotsky publishing the first edition of Pravda - and establishing a feud with Lenin in nearby Hapsburg; Hitler, still just a failed artist, spouting tirades at fellow drifters in the flophouse; Tito, a car mechanic, taking dancing and fencing lessons; and Freud, completing an essay he would use in his duel with Jung. He called it Totem and Taboo, and it dealt with the myth - ancient and prophetic - of the slaying of a prince by the crowd. As, just twenty months later, the bullet that killed the Archduke would set of the war that killed 10 million more.

Morton brilliantly explores the coincidence and seedbed of disaster, in a perspective that includes a mercurial Churchill, the posturings of Kaiser Wilhelm and the waverings of Tsar Nicholas. But above all, he evokes Vienna with the eye of a master novelist - the elegant, opulent, divided, incomparable sunset metropolis: the volcano of the 20th century Zeitgeist.