19 October 2012
Inauguration of the Ludwig Boltzmann Lecture Series

The Austrian ambassador in London, Dr. Emil Brix, opened the Ludwig Boltzmann Lecture Series at the University of Cambridge with a talk titled Revisiting Fin-de-Siècle Vienna. The lectures in this series will take place annually as part of the Research Colloquium of the Department of German & Dutch and will include discussion of the latest work of the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for the History and Theory of Biography. Dr Brix’s lecture on new directions in the study of Vienna around 1900 was received with great interest by a large audience of department members and students. After the talk the question of whether the culture of the Fin-de-Siècle is still relevant today was subject to heated debate. The general conclusion was that an engagement with questions of cultural and religious identity, which permeate literary discourse at the turn of the century, is still highly relevant given the current political crises in Europe.