The Geography of Genius: A Search for the World's Most Creative Places From Ancient Athens to Silicon Valley (43 page)

Everything about the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts reeks of solidity and permanence. It feels as if it could withstand a nuclear strike. It takes all my strength to pull open a heavy wooden door, the same door that a young artist tried, and failed, to breach in 1904. He applied twice and was rejected twice. The young artist grew increasingly despondent and bitter and, soon, angry as well. Eventually, he abandoned art and entered politics. As I step through the door, I can’t help but wonder how history might have been different had the academy seen fit to accept this young artist named Adolf Hitler.

Here I find Martin Guttmann, in black T-shirt and jeans, looking considerably younger than his fifty-odd years. Guttmann, an Israeli-born physicist, is ostensibly teaching a photography class. He considers it philosophy, though. All art is philosophy, he tells me. No wonder he feels at home in Vienna, I think. This city, historically at least, tolerated hybrid thinkers like Martin Guttmann.

We walk the short distance to the Café Sperl, just as the artist Gustav Klimt did many times, and find a table outside. Martin lights up immediately. Everyone around us is puffing away, too. This is the tame Viennese’s last rebellious act.
We no longer lead the world culturally or intellectually or in any other way, but we smoke like a global power!

I tell Martin about my quest, about what I’ve learned so far in Vienna, and what I haven’t yet. One question foremost on my mind is population. Unlike Athens or Florence or Edinburgh, Vienna was an enormous city, with more than 2 million people crowded onto its streets by 1900. What role did this play in its flourishing?

“Have you heard of phase transition?”

“No.”

“Okay, let’s say you have a bunch of molecules, and without even heating them, you put them in a smaller space or you put them in a bigger space. By doing that, you can turn the molecules from gas to liquid
or liquid to solid, and these things have completely different observable properties. If you pressure water, just by putting it in a smaller volume, it becomes ice.”

“Just by changing the space?”

“Yes. That is what is called phase transition. By changing the external environment you can create new properties that are completely different, a different regime. And you see it happening again and again.”

The Vienna of 1900 was experiencing a sort of phase transition, except instead of more and more molecules squeezed into a small space, it was people. It’s the urban-density theory again, but with a twist. What matters, says Martin, is not only the degree of density but the
rate
at which it occurs.

“From the 1880s to before the First World War, Vienna quadrupled or quintupled in population. Now try to imagine what it means to be in a city that quadruples in three decades, from say the 1980s until today. It means that you go out on the street and all of a sudden you become engulfed. It is cumulative. But you can feel it yourself. If you live on the same street and the population quadruples or quintuples, all of a sudden you begin to see the regime of chaos. And if the question is, ‘How does a place like Vienna help geniuses?’ I would say in the 1890s people were more open to revolutionary thinking because from their own experience they saw that things were changing qualitatively.”

I like Martin and his mind and could sit here all day, sipping beer, inhaling secondhand smoke and thirdhand ideas. As we range over topics from physics to sex, I get a taste of what it must have been like to live in the Vienna of 1900. A spring afternoon. A cold beer. No agenda, and no silos. People from wildly divergent fields actually speaking to one another, and in language unburdened by jargon. “You pick up a book from a physicist in the 1890s, and it is written in a way that people can understand. They had to defend their theories to a wide audience,” Martin tells me. How different from today, I think, when an academic is considered successful when no one can understand a word he says.

Martin has developed his own “taxonomy of genius,” as he calls it. He sees only two kinds of geniuses: unifiers and revolutionaries.
Revolutionaries, the more recognizable kind of genius, turn conventional wisdom on its head. Unifiers “take a lot of distinct, unconnected ideas and put them all together in a way that is completely unopposable. Completely defensible.” Unifiers connect the dots. Revolutionaries create new dots.

One type of genius isn’t better than the other, says Martin, just different. We may value revolutionaries more today—our age worships at the feet of creative destruction—but unifiers, such as Bach and Kant and Newton, can change the world every bit as much as revolutionaries, and sometimes more. Bach, for instance, took a lot of disparate musical traditions and integrated them in a way no one had done before.

The milieu matters much more for revolutionaries than for unifiers. “You can be a unifier anywhere,” Martin says. “But if you are a revolutionary, you need a special environment.”

“What sort of environment?”

“An environment that dramatizes a predicament.”

“So they can revolt against something?”

“No, so they can feel the break is in the air.”

“What do you mean?”

“In the Vienna of 1900, everybody felt a break was in the air. And the break was everywhere. You see a break in music, and a break in physics. So people said, ‘What about my field? Maybe there is a break there, too?’ ”

I sip my beer and recall those “schema violations,” as well as Dean Simonton’s research. He reviewed the historical records and found that whenever new, and often competing, schools of philosophy emerged, other
completely unrelated
fields also thrived. The break was in the air.

The Vienna of 1900 had “so many breaks in the air that you felt like the entire world was breaking up,” says Martin. That’s why the contemporary journalist and raconteur Karl Kraus described turn-of-the-century Vienna as “a laboratory for world endings.” People knew they were living in a dying empire, that an explosion was coming; it was only a question of when. This sense of impending collapse was, oddly, liberating. The old rules no longer applied, so why not think about problems differently? That is, says Martin, exactly what Freud did.

“He started hearing more and more stories from women who were coming to him saying they were abused, and he said it couldn’t be true that they were all abused. And then he started saying, ‘Well, they have this kind of fantasy life,’ and that is really where psychology starts. At some point he had to say, ‘They couldn’t all be true.’ In other words, it is a break from the most simple explanation. And that is something that one needs a certain mentality for. When would you ever go in this direction?”

“It takes guts, doesn’t it?”

“It takes guts, but you also have to be open to this kind of tsunami idea that is completely opposed to common sense. And how do you get there? When you see it happening elsewhere.”

Toward the end of my time in Vienna, I find myself standing in front of the Loos House, the groundbreaking work of architect Adolf Loos. It sits directly across a small square from the Hofburg Palace, the former seat of power and, at the turn of the century, home to the ruler Franz Joseph. Perhaps fifty yards separates the two. Fifty yards and about five centuries, for one represents the old world and the other the new. The palace is ornate in the extreme, fronted with classic domes and statues of Greek gods. It looks like something out of a children’s fairy tale gone horribly awry.

The Loos House, on the other hand, is austere and minimalist. “The house with no eyebrows,” people called it, because it had no blinds. Loos’s choice of location was no accident, for his work was a reaction to the frilliness of the Hapsburgs. In his essay “Ornament and Crime,” Loos lays out his architectural philosophy: “The evolution of culture marches with the elimination of ornament from useful objects.” Excessive ornamentation, he believed, causes objects to go out of style and become obsolete. Ornamentation was wasteful and “degenerate,” and no society that indulged in it could rightfully call itself modern. If, as Brady had told me back in Athens, genius always makes the world a little bit simpler, then, Loos argued, ornamentation does the opposite. He said, “You can measure the culture of a country by the extent to which its lavatory walls are scribbled.” I read that and sigh; this does not bode well for us.

The intellectual dynamism of a Freud or a Wittgenstein constituted a reaction to this ornamentation; an attempt to hack through all that frilliness and arrive at the truth. Vienna was a teacher, but one of object lessons as much as anything else. Places of genius challenge us. They are difficult. They do not earn their place in history with ethnic restaurants or street festivals, but by provoking us, making
demands
of us. Crazy, unrealistic, beautiful demands.

Emperor Franz Joseph was progressive in some ways, but not when it came to architecture. He despised the Loos House. He considered it an abomination, an affront to a centuries-old tradition of frilliness. No surprise there. What is surprising, though, is what he did about it—or, rather, what he
didn’t
do. He did not have Loos noosed or even arrested. Surely he could have. He was emperor after all, and if history has taught us anything, it is that emperors can do as they damn well please. No, Franz Joseph took more of a housekeeping approach. He ordered the palace blinds drawn so he wouldn’t have to see the Loos House. It was a practical, and tolerant, reaction. Perfectly Viennese.

So, too, was the reaction to the poster I’m staring at now, smack in the middle of the Ringstrasse. It’s a painting of a woman. She is looking to one side, avoiding my gaze. She is well toned, muscular even. She is wearing a pair of bright orange boots, and the mildly annoyed expression of a runway model. Nothing else. A triangle of black hair is clearly visible between her legs. You can’t help but look. The artist, Gustav Klimt, surely intended it that way. The painting is arresting even today. I can only imagine what kind of reaction it elicited a century ago. In his career, Klimt ran into obstacles—a work commissioned by the University of Vienna was deemed too controversial—but by and large he was free to pursue his art unmolested. Likewise, Freud published his scandalous treatises on human sexuality without fear of censorship.

As I stroll along the Danube Canal, walk Vienna’s streets, ride its silky-smooth streetcars, a word pops into mind: nice. Vienna today is nice. A pleasant curio shop of past glories, like your grandfather’s attic, only with better coffee. The Vienna of 1900, though, wasn’t nice. It was a city of dirty politics and brothels and a palpable sense of impending
disaster. Tension is a necessary ingredient for a place of genius. Tension in the larger world of politics, and tension in the smaller worlds of writers’ conclaves and board meetings. Tension, not necessity, is the mother of invention.

It starts to rain, at first a pleasant drizzle, then a not-so-pleasant downpour. I seek shelter at the Café Sperl, this time alone. I ensconce in a corner booth, with its plush, soft-green velour padding, faded, and practically oozing
Gemütlichkeit
, a particular kind of coziness. This is another side of the Viennese coffeehouse, one not of conversation but of contemplation. From my perch, I defocus my attention and watch the world go by. It does not go by quickly. Time passes differently in a Viennese coffeehouse. Less presto, more adagio.

Darkness has settled. I order cheese, and some herring, and wonder, if I sit in a Viennese coffeehouse long enough and drink enough turbocharged espresso, might I, too, become a genius? Might I develop a theory of the unconscious or a radically new school of art, or atonal music? Or might I just get the jitters? Tough to say. But the world now seems, as Loos imagined it, vast and intimate at the same time. The more I ponder that formula, the more I realize it may hold the key to the genius that was Vienna. To create, we need both elements: vastness to open our minds to the Other, intimacy to consolidate our insights.

A woman sits at the piano and begins to play. This being Vienna, she plays well. As I nibble on my herring and take in the music, not so much listening as imbibing, it dawns on me that Vienna’s double dip of genius was an illusion. It was, in fact, one continuous golden age, with an interlude, a gap, that allowed the orchestra to catch its breath before playing again, this time with even more passion and virtuosity.

Most golden ages fizzle. Vienna’s ended with a bang. Literally. On June 28, 1914, in Sarajevo, a young Serbian assassin named Gavrilo Princip shot and killed Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir presumptive to the Austrian throne, sparking World War I. Vienna’s reign as a cultural and scientific juggernaut came crashing to an end. After the war, other European capitals enjoyed their moments in the sun, Paris and Berlin in the
1920s, for instance, but the mantle of genius soon sailed West, across the Atlantic and to the New World. These American places of genius were different: less eclectic, more specialized. Think of New Orleans and jazz; Detroit and cars; Hollywood and film; New York and modern art.

The ultimate example of this new monochrome golden age took root not in a big city, but in the rolling farmland and suburban sprawl of Northern California. In 1971, a young journalist writing in a trade journal called
Electronic News
gave the place a name: Silicon Valley. It stuck; a catchy moniker for what is perhaps the least likely yet most far-reaching genius cluster. As I board the plane that will take me there, I wonder, is it the last great place?