Carl Schorske, Pulitzer Prize-winning scholar, dead at 100

Carl E. Schorske, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and popular classroom lecturer whose "Fin-De-Siecle Vienna" is widely regarded as a classic work of intellectual scholarship, has died.
Schorske, who was 100, died Sunday at the Meadow Lakes senior facility in East Windsor, New Jersey, according to Martin Mbugua, a spokesman for Princeton University where the historian was a professor emeritus.
"Fin-de-Siecle Vienna," published in 1980, is a broad and detailed survey of Austrian politics and culture at the end of the 19th century, a setting that profoundly influenced the 20th century.
Schorske emphasized that all were responding to a breakdown in the liberal consensus of previous decades and unleashing desires to recapture the past, make sense of the present and race into the future. The era was a time of provocative sensuality, dreamy escapism and rising demagoguery, with Austrian George Ritter von Schonerer perfecting a fiery right-wing populism that would deeply impress a young Austrian, Adolf Hitler.

"As Schonerer was an angry man, so his ideological montage appealed to angry people: artisans cheated out of their past with no comfort in the pieties of the present and no hope in the prospect of the future; students with the spirit of romantic rebellion unsatisfied by the flat homilies of the liberal-ethical tradition," Schorske wrote.
"These were the first of the rootless, the spiritual predecessors of decaying Europe's special jetsam whom rightist leaders would later organize.