Carl E Schorske obituary

Carl E Schorske, who has died aged 100, was one of America’s leading historians. He pioneered a new kind of intellectual and cultural history that paid as much attention to emotions as it did to ideas. More than anyone else, he put Vienna before the first world war on the map as a “laboratory of modernity”, where Sigmund Freud, Gustav Mahler, Arnold Schoenberg, Gustav Klimt and, in a more sinister way, the antisemitic politicians Karl Lueger and Georg Ritter von Schönerer (a huge influence on another of the city’s inhabitants, the young Adolf Hitler), reacted to the decay of political liberalism and the growing crisis of the Habsburg monarchy in different but connected ways. As the current mayor of Vienna, Michael Häupl, said: “He taught us our own history.”

Schorske was born in the Bronx, New York. His father, Theodore, ran a savings bank for immigrants; together with his wife, Gertrude (nee Goldschmidt), he was active in the settlement movement in New York, which helped newcomers find a home and build a new life for themselves. When Carl’s younger sister, Florence, announced her intention to go into nursing, Carl took her side against their father, who despite his left-leaning tendencies did not believe women should have careers; Theodore eventually relented, and Florence became a leading figure in the field of nursing.

The family spoke German at home, but changed to English on the outbreak of the first world war. As pacifists, they were particularly affected by the hostility they sometimes encountered after the US entered the war. In 1929 and again in 1932 the family visited Germany, where they were shocked by the rise of antisemitism on the eve of Hitler’s seizure of power: later on, they took an active part in helping German Jews to emigrate.

Schorske went to school in Scarsdale, New York, and received his BA from Columbia University in 1936, going on to take a PhD at Harvard. Shortly before the attack Pearl Harbor, he joined the research and analysis branch of the Office of Strategic Services (precursor to the CIA), where he became chief of political intelligence for western Europe.

Here he first encountered psychoanalysis, which was being used by some analysts, particularly Walter Langer, the brother of the historian William Langer, who had taught Schorske, as a tool for trying to understand the Nazi leaders. Schorske concluded that conventional historical scholarship neglected the instinctive and the emotional aspects of the subjects it addressed, and formed the idea of writing a PhD on the psychological origins of nazism, but decided he did not have the right approach, so opted to study the development of the German Social Democratic party instead.

In 1946, Schorske began his teaching career at Wesleyan University, in Connecticut, where he stayed until 1960. While there, he published his first book, German Social Democracy 1905-1917: the Development of the Great Schism (1955). This was a deeply researched, elegantly written study of the world’s largest political party in the years before the first world war, published long before labour history became fashionable.

It was firmly rooted in the present: its aim, said Schorske, was to explain the roots of the schism between East and West Germany, between the western Social Democrats, who were “democratic but not socialist”, and the eastern Communists, who were “socialist but not democratic”. It was remarkable for the attention it paid not only to questions of ideology but also to structural and organisational issues and to the impact of external influences, above all the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917, which frame the period covered by the book. Laced with acute judgments on figures such as Karl Kautsky and Rosa Luxemburg, it is still very much worth reading today.

In 1960 Schorske moved to a professorship at the University of California at Berkeley, where he acted as assistant to the chancellor on faculty development. This drew him into the free speech movement organised by student protesters in 1964-65, which was closely linked to the civil rights movement. The university authorities had banned the campaign, taking the line that political activities were not allowed on campus, but a series of mass demonstrations, which Schorske supported, forced it to back down. When the conservative Ronald Reagan (later US president) was elected governor of California in 1966, he told the board of regents to dismiss the university’s president for being too soft on the left and restrictions were tightened once more.

Schorske had had enough, and in 1969 he moved to Princeton, where he became professor of history, “to save, if possible, my scholarly work”, as he later wrote. It was the book he wrote here, Fin-de-siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (1980), that really established his reputation. It brought together a set of lengthy essays published over the previous two decades. In these erudite and highly readable pieces, he both charted the gradual abjuration of history by modernist artists, writers and thinkers, and showed how, paradoxically, they could be best understood historically, in the context of the decay of liberal values in pre-1914 Vienna.

Schorske was not only an elegant writer, he was also a gifted teacher whose students recorded the unforgettable impact he made on their lives. Teaching, he once said, was not about becoming your students’ buddy: it was, rather, about communicating your own enthusiasm for the subject to them.

He put on optional evening classes for his students on Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde and taught seminars on the history of architecture and the arts. He was passionately engaged with cultural and intellectual history; unusually, the students applauded when he concluded the final lecture in his first series at Princeton. He was one of 10 “great teachers” to appear on the cover of a 1966 issue of Time magazine. Schorske’s teaching involved a profound immersion in European culture. In his classes many of his students encountered for the first time Mahler and Schoenberg, Marx and Rousseau, Klimt and Freud.

He played in an amateur string quartet until late in life, and entertained audiences in his New Jersey retirement home by singing lieder, a pastime he had previously given up when he decided that his fine baritone voice was past its best.

In 2007, however, at the age of 92, at the ceremony to award him the Victor Adler prize of the Austrian government, he described how he had been disciplined at his New York kindergarten in 1919 for singing a German wartime song taught him by his parents, Morgenrot, in which a German soldier prophesies his coming death on the battlefield. Not content with recounting the incident, he then proceeded to sing the song to the hushed audience. “My voice is there,” he said, “as my intellect disappears.”

He won many awards and honours, starting with a Pulitzer prize in 1981 for general non-fiction for Fin-de-siècle Vienna, and ending with the honorary citizenship of Vienna, granted in 2012.

In 1942 he married Elizabeth Rorke, whom he met at the OSS: she later became an activist in the opposition to the Vietnam war and in the migrant workers’ rights movement led by Cesar Chavez. She died in 2014. He is survived by a daughter, Anne, three sons, Carl Theodore, John and Richard, three grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.