Good Living Street
An Australian art critic probes the past of his family – Austrian Jews who enjoyed one of Vienna's grandest eras, only to lose it all in the face of World War II.
Good Living Street:
Portrait of a Patron Family, Vienna 1900
By Tim Bonyhady
Pantheon
400 pp.
Australian art critic and environmental lawyer Tim Bonyhady has written a book of multilayered history refracted through the prism of his family, an economic and cultural powerhouse in Vienna at the turn of the 20th century. While it is not always easy to keep all the family names straight, the central themes of Good Living Street are vivid and open-ended.
They include the blend of culture and commerce in Vienna before World War I, the vexing complexities of assimilation, the growth of anti-Semitism, the ambiguity of identity in a diaspora, and what it means to feel at home. The last matters particularly to Bonyhady, a Jew from an Austrian family that more often than not practiced Catholicism, largely due to reasons of faith but partially also in defense.
This book is Bonyhady’s attempt to grasp his complicated heritage and so come to terms with his own identity. In a sense, it’s history as reclamation, which is common. But it's also something rarer: history as forgiveness.
The work bubbles with the intellectual ferment of a brief era – basically, the first decade of the 20th century – in which such giants-to-be as Gustav Mahler, Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele and, soon, Arnold Schoenberg, ushered modernism into music and art. Also key: architects and designers such as Josef Hofmann and Koloman Moser, drivers of the Wiener Werkstaette, Vienna’s most famous workshop. (Klimt founded the Secession in rebellion against the more traditional Kuenstlerhaus.)
