Vanished Empire: Vienna, Budapest, Prague : The Three Capital Cities of the Habsburg Empire As Seen Today
Brook's invigorating tour of pivotal cities of the Hapsburg Empire, which collapsed during WW I, illuminates three very different national identities. He found the Viennese "myopically inward-looking," their cultured city still a seedbed of the neuroses that Freud investigated nearly a century before; Austrians, in his view, are unwilling to face their Nazi past. In Budapest, writing in 1987-1988 before the recent changes in the Hungarian government, he encountered a restless, irrepressible people frustrated by a system they openly despised. Prague's impassive residents seemed disillusioned with Gorbachev, yet relatively well-off and inured to the self-perpetuating, corrupt Czech government. Brook ( Honkytonk Gelato ) visited restaurants, therapeutic springs, markets, palaces; he offers an opinionated guide to operas, museums, architecture. He also has a wonderful eye for those details that reveal the quirks, fissures and strengths of each nation's psyche.Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.