Austrian Auf Wiedersehen : POSTCARDS FROM THE END OF THE WORLD<i> by Larry Wolff (Atheneum: $18.95; 288 pp.) </i>

F in-de-siecle Vienna was a remarkable meeting place of ultra-conservatism and genuine radicalism. By 1899, at the very beginning of la belle epoque , that brief golden age that lasted until August, 1914, architects like Wagner, Loos, Plecnik and Olbrich had already given Vienna buildings of rich glass, sinuous iron and flowing stonework characteristically art nouveau , while the decorative arts of Klimt, Loffler, Friedrich and others were astonishing people with their innovative beauty.

In painting, the Vienna Secession, formed in direct opposition to a powerful academic art establishment, alarmed the bourgeoisie as much as Schoenberg and his followers would attract the violent anger of concert-goers a few years later. Johann Strauss, the Waltz King, had just died, to be succeeded by the ‘silver era’ composers Oscar Strauss, Franz Lehar and Robert Stolz, while Mahler, last and perhaps greatest of the Romantics, had been appointed the Vienna Opera’s director by Emperor Franz Joseph, himself a myth as enduring to Middle Europe as Queen Victoria to the English-speaking world.

Here in 1899, the Werkstatte art guild foreshadowed the Bauhaus; soon Trotsky would find asylum to edit Pravda; Theodor Herzl, influential correspondent of the enormously powerful Neue Freie Presse, proposed the idea of Zionism in the pamphlet, “The Jewish State”; anti-Semitic German Nationalist politics were rapidly developing in a city where almost 10% of the population was Jewish in origin, and it would not be long before Hitler arrived and failed to get into art school. Meanwhile, as Larry Wolff frequently tells us in “Postcards,” Freud “anxiously awaited” publication of “The Interpretation of Dreams.”

“This Austria is a little world in which the large one is tried out,” wrote playwright Christian Hebbel nearly 50 years earlier--an idea even more applicable to Freud’s Vienna. In spite of terrible working-class poverty, Vienna attracted artists, intellectuals and politicians from the whole Austro-Hungarian Empire as well as other Slavic and Balkan countries; radical politics were tolerated here perhaps because Franz Joseph’s rule seemed monumentally stable, what Stefan Zweig called “the golden age of security.”

Italians, Bohemians, Hungarians, Poles, Serbs, Russians and Germans were drawn to a city, the third largest in Europe, to which they attributed the mythical qualities people would later invest in 1920s Paris or 1960s London and Los Angeles. Most great cities function from time to time in this way, and geographically as well as spiritually, Vienna was ideally located to attract a variety of talent. With all the wealth and confidence of a 19th-Century seat of empire, Vienna was as tolerant of nonconformity as London, which had sheltered the likes of Marx and Bakunin. On another level, however, the capital was deeply suspicious of change, and it can be argued that many of its famous citizens, including Freud, were producing sophisticated formulas by which it was possible for people to retain habits and attitudes embraced since the Middle Ages.

Some people now believe that both Freud and Hitler responded to the shock of the new as reactionaries rather than as radicals; Freud with a logic and vocabulary that merely put a gloss on old Judeo-Christian notions of human behavior (with their marked anti-female overtones) and Hitler providing the German people with political rhetoric encouraging all their atavistic yearning for a simpler, more primitive society in which 20th-Century morality, along with 20th-Century complexity, could be brutally rejected. As the world entered the Machine Age’s first decades, witnessing more social upheaval in a few years than in all the preceding centuries, only a few--the Futurists, for instance--welcomed this. In the light of the massive social and psychic changes taking place, Freud’s ideas can easily be seen as the banal speculations of a cocaine addict, unquestioningly rooted in an ancient and masculine romantic tradition and borrowing heavily from earlier writers like Arthur Schnitzler, who proposed the concept of the unconscious nearly 10 years before “The Interpretation of Dreams.”

This Vienna, in 1899, is the background of Larry Wolff’s book, “Postcards From the End of the World,” which takes its title from a series of ironic cards published to coincide with the apocalypse many believed must come with the end of the century. The cards were mentioned in the Neue Freie Presse, from which Wolff derives much of his text, having discovered in its files several cases of child murder, two of which involved horrible child abuse and which were reported at length. The first case, written in highly sensational and sentimental terms by Felix Dormann (librettist, seven years later, of Oscar Strauss’ popular “Waltz Dream”) describes Hedwig Keplinger, who shot herself and her little daughter when her expectations of marriage were dashed. Typical of the time, Dormann’s prose reflects both the urge to fictionalize the stark truth of the woman’s despair and the strong mood of anti-urbanism, which became an important ingredient in Nazism and in American politics of the interwar years. A second case is that of Anna Hummel, tortured to death by her parents, while a third about the Kutschera children, also written up by Dormann, who were systematically tortured by their parents.

Wolff writes about Freud’s studies of the adult-child relationship in the context of these cases to understand Freud’s own social notions; to discuss the “modern” conception of the abused child; to show how then, as now, the majority of reports are still slanted to give the impression that physical and sexual violence against women and children (especially girls) is somehow a rare aberration performed not by “ordinary” middle-class men but by sub-human brutes. We are gradually accepting that such abuse is prevalent in our society, where power and the means of interpretation/communication remains largely in male hands, an elite for whom Freud so successfully provided a rationale, where the genuinely radical analyses of writers like Andrea Dworkin, whose “Intercourse” last year caused at least as much of a furor as Freud’s first books, remain largely ignored.

As now, child abuse was widely recognized in Freud’s Vienna in private, but scarcely admitted publicly; as now, child pornography was widely circulated in private--Felix Salten’s pornographic novel “Josefine Mutzenbacher or My 365 Loves,” for instance, describes with great relish his heroine’s childhood sexual encounters (Salten is best-known as the author of “Bambi”). Wolff most successfully discusses this familiar mixture of sadism and disguising sentimentality, showing how, in this area at least, turn-of-the-century Vienna is clearly a model of our own world. If his book has a flaw it must be that, because it largely accepts established academic and psycho-analytical wisdom, it therefore fails to provide very much fresh light on how to understand and control the enduring cruelties and injustices it catalogues.