Le arti a confronto. Cabaret e letteratura nella Vienna dell’ultimo Ottocento

This work considers an aspect, almost unexplored, of the great culture of the Austrian fin-de-siècle (better Viennese): that flowering of a theatrical genre, the cabaret, which was able to conciliate several artistic expressions (from dramaturgy to mime, from music to dance) in the sign of an often sharp satire of the everyday life seen as a ‘minor history’ in which, however, the values of the ‘greatest History’ were questioned. That way, now engulfed with the wreckage of the Habsburg world, maintains still now a surprisingly vitality especially when compared to the ‘way of the main characters’ of the most important country representative of the ‘Modern’: the names of Schnitzler, Hofmannstahl, Kafka, Broch, Musil circulate as worrying but also familiar presences in that way of doing theatre which was led, with persistence on the edge of an ‘announced’ disaster.