Publicity, politics, and professoriate in fin-de-siècle Vienna: The misconduct of the embryologist Samuel Leopold Schenk

2020 ◽  
Vol 58 (4) ◽  
pp. 458-484
Author(s):  
Tatjana Buklijas
Keyword(s):  
Early Retirement ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
The Public ◽  
Political Landscape ◽  
Anti Semitism ◽  
Egg Maturation ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
Main Driver ◽  
The Moment ◽  
The University

This essay uses the case of the fin-de-siècle Vienna embryologist Samuel Leopold Schenk to analyze the factors at play in allegations of misconduct. In 1898, Schenk published a book titled Theorie Schenk. Einfluss auf das Geschlechtsverhältnis (Schenk’s theory. Influence on the sex ratio). The book argued that, by changing their diet, women trying to conceive could influence egg maturation and consequently select the sex of their offspring. This cross between a scientific monograph and a popular advice book received enormous publicity but also spurred first the Vienna Medical Association and then the Senate of the University of Vienna to accuse Schenk of poor science, self-advertisement, quack medical practice, and wrong publisher choice. Formal proceedings against Schenk ended in 1900 with the unusually harsh punishment of early retirement. Schenk died two years later. I examine the elements of the case, from the science of sex determination and selection, to the growth of print media and advertising within the changing demographic and political landscape of Vienna. I argue that the influence of the public, via the growing media, upon science was the main driver of the case against Schenk, but also that the case would have had a more limited impact were it not for the volatile political moment rife with anti-Semitism, nationalism, and xenophobia. I draw the attention to the importance of setting cases of misconduct in the broader political history and against the key social concerns of the moment.

9. After the Rougon-Macquart

2020 ◽  
pp. 104-122
Author(s):  
Brian Nelson
Keyword(s):  
Carbon Monoxide ◽  
Carbon Monoxide Poisoning ◽  
Science And Religion ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Victor Hugo ◽  
The Public ◽  
Personal Significance ◽  
Dreyfus Affair ◽  
Fin De Siècle

‘After the Rougon-Macquart’ considers the final novel of the Rougon-Macquart cycle, Doctor Pascal. This novel explores the themes of science and religion, renewal and rebirth. The latter theme was of personal significance to Zola, as he had recently fathered two children with his mistress, Jeanne Rozerot. Zola’s later fiction is discussed in the context of the climate of ideas in France in the fin de siècle. The writer’s involvement in the Dreyfus affair brought him glaringly into the public eye, and may indeed have led to his death: he died from carbon monoxide poisoning, suspected to be the result of foul play. His remains were interred in the Panthéon alongside Voltaire, Rousseau, and Victor Hugo.

Pierre de Coubertin: sport and ideology in the Third Republic, 1870–1914

2000 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 167-171
Author(s):  
H. L. Wesseling
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Public Schools ◽  
Olympic Games ◽  
Third Republic ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Organized Sport ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Third ◽  
Fin De Siècle

Organized sport was first developed in Germany in the form of the so-called Turnvereine, and in England at the public schools. It came to France later, at the end of the nineteenth century. Despite this, the modern Olympic Games was a French invention, the result of the ambitions and efforts of an aristocratic admirer of England, Baron Pierre de Coubertin. His ideas and attitudes were in many ways characteristic of fin-de-siècle France.

Vienna–London–Belfast: Schnitzler's Reigen on the Translation Roundabout

2009 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 88-98 ◽  
Author(s):  
Heidi Zojer
Keyword(s):  
Cross Section ◽  
Peace Process ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Film Version ◽  
Cultural Specificity ◽  
University College ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
Problems Of Translation ◽  
The University

Arthur Schnitzler's cycle of sexual permutations in fin de siècle Vienna has always been prone to problems of translation – not least of its title, properly in German Reigen, but often miscalled La Ronde, after Max Ophüls's film version of 1950. But its problems for translators also derive from the cultural specificity of its time and place, and in this article Heidi Zojer first examines how its numerous English translators have tried to overcome the difficulties the play presents, illustrating from a cross-section of versions examples of its resistance to easy translation, whether ‘faithful’ or colloquial. She concludes that freer adaptations such as David Hare's The Blue Room (1998) have in fact been truer to the spirit of Schnitzler's play – while perhaps truest of all has been Carlo Gébler's complete rewriting, in Ten Rounds (1999), which ‘translated’ the play to contemporary Belfast during the years of the peace process. Heidi Zojer was awarded her D. Phil. from the University of Innsbruck, Austria, in 1999. From 2000 to 2002 she was Lecturer at the University of Birmingham, and since then has been teaching at University College Dublin.

Mass Society, I

2019 ◽  
pp. 234-249
Author(s):  
David Sorkin
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Population Growth ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
The United States ◽  
Civil Defense ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Mass Society ◽  
Anti Semitism ◽  
Mass Migration ◽  
Fin De Siècle

This chapter addresses how Europe became a mass society in the fin de siècle (1870–1914). Explosive population growth gave rise to major metropolises whose residents were divided by rank and religion, gender and class. The new conditions of the fin de siècle, mass migration from eastern Europe, and the rise of the new organized political anti-Semitism propelled Jews across Europe and in the United States to establish social welfare and civil defense organizations. The former practiced solidarity on a grand scale; the latter intervened to protect equality. The organizations' promotion of emancipation was predicated on Jews being a confession or religious group: by functioning under the guise of “welfare” and “civil defense,” they deliberately eschewed political claims. From the 1890s, new forms of mass Jewish politics emerged that contested that basic assumption.

Constructing George Wyndham: Narratives of Aristocratic Masculinity in Fin-de-Siècle England

2000 ◽  
Vol 39 (4) ◽  
pp. 487-517 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nancy W. Ellenberger
Keyword(s):  
Heart Attack ◽  
Conservative Party ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
House Of Commons ◽  
Ruling Class ◽  
Career Interest ◽  
The Public ◽  
Working Through ◽  
Fin De Siècle

In June 1913, on a holiday trip to Paris, George Wyndham died suddenly of a heart attack—he was not quite fifty years old. Shocked by this unexpected loss, colleagues in the Conservative Party and the House of Commons, whose inner circles he had occupied for a quarter of a century, organized the usual tributes. Obituaries laid out Wyndham's pedigree as scion of one of England's more romantic landed families, charted his meteoric rise in the 1890s under Arthur Balfour's patronage, referred briefly and discreetly to his troubled tenure as Irish secretary from 1900–1905, and applauded his versatility as a sportsman and a man of letters. Despite his truncated career, interest in Wyndham did not wane after these first homages. Working through the interruption of war, his family saw that collections of letters and essays, with the 1925 set prefaced by J. W. Mackail's “life,” reached the public. These materials prompted pen portraits and biographies that appeared at regular intervals into the 1970s.A largely sympathetic group of authors, those who wrote about Wyndham faced the interesting challenge of presenting as inspiring and exemplary a life whose disappointments had threatened to outweigh its achievements. The solution they found was one that Wyndham would have accepted, for, indeed, he helped to shape it. In their hands, George Wyndham became a modern Siegfried, the charming, versatile, and disinterested son of an extraordinary ruling class—now, alas, eclipsed—who had guided Britain through two centuries of unprecedented grandeur and prosperity.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document