Even a cursory glance at the artistic projects and aesthetic conceptions that take shape in the German-speaking parts of Central Europe between 1890 and 1930 and that have since come to be viewed as indispensable to an understanding of German Modernism will yield an enormous variety of projects. From the early expressionist projects of the Brücke and the Viennese Sezession to the brutally satiric and anti-aestheticist indictments of a bankrupt bourgeois culture in Georg Grosz, Otto Dix, or Max Beckmann in the visual arts; from the second Viennese School of Schoenberg, Berg, Webern to the unique amalgamation of seemingly disparate and often brilliantly adaptive styles in late-or avowedly post-Romantic composers such as Mahler, Berg, Zemlinski, Korngold, or Kurt Weill; and from the post-Humanism of such dissimilar figures as the post-Nietzschean pessimist Oswald Spengler and the only slightly more upbeat projects of Max Weber and Georg Simmel to the epigrammatic concision of Karl Kraus and Ludwig Wittgenstein, German Modernism, characterized by a propensity for manifesto-style self-authorization, claims programmatic status for itself even is it comprises enormously diverse and distinctive figures.