Long is the path of untold history in cities that stand at the crossroads of deceased empires. In the year before the Great War, where the orient ended and the west began, one city stood at the heart of a turbulent continent, a city whose indifference to social permanence served as a refuge for the idealistic: Austria's golden capital on the Danube, Vienna. A breeding ground for radicalism bathed this unusual city in contrasting mosaics of gold and future visions of bloodshed. As the site where psychoanalysis first exposed the repressions of modern man, dreams unearthed from the minds of lascivious madams foretold of the blooming century's plight. The revolutionary upstarts stood on the shoulders of giants to condemn those who'd designed the modern metropolis, blaming not each nation's lack of interest in regulating industry but certain races and social groups instead. The daring innovations of Klimt, Freud, Schoenberg, and all the others who shaped the intellectual landscape of the time, were overshadowed by the eerie confluence of several parasites giving birth to the rise of totalitarianism in eastern Europe. War would soon be an answer to their prayers, and a disaster for the others who sought to reconcile industry's stranglehold with an era of peace and artistic liberation. As the artists had reacted to the invasion of class struggle, industry, and mechanical realism that had sedated the senses through the course of the 19th century, many of the future totalitarians had condemned them, along with the Jews, as being the culprits generating it. Several of these purveyors banned freedom of expression after they rose to power, ironically setting the same city they'd sought solace in against itself. It can't be a coincidence that Tito, Trotsky, Stalin, and Hitler all gravitated to Vienna the very year before World War I started. Despite there being no evidence that they met each other, they were collectively destined to ravage the Earth, and it all began in a city that was as geographically central to the spread of despotism that those seeking power in eastern Europe could get.
Klimt's seminal work Philosophy was produced in the same year that Freud's Interpretation of Dreams came out: 1900. In the illustration the face of knowledge, represented by a woman with intimidating eyes, watches the viewer from the bottom. Above her coil the nude bodies of several humans who appear to be suffering as a result of their earthly passions. Two things are striking about this column of bodies: one being that they are twisted in a spiral like the DNA molecule (Klimt couldn't have known about the shape of DNA in 1900, as it hadn't been discovered yet), and the other is that the naked bodies reflect Adam and Eve being expelled from the Garden of Eden for eating from the Tree of Knowledge. The question arises: if knowledge herself is watching this happen from her veiled position, might she be representing Satan in the illustration? The column of bodies is spiraling up into the cosmos, where the face of God appears to be dreaming in a celestial background. This would seemingly signify God's judgment; that as the dreamer, He has unconsciously condemned man for laying claim to His knowledge, something that Satan was successful in spoiling. Fancy then that Freud's revolutionary work on dreams came out at the same time. Klimt had foreshadowed the following century's dependence on rational insights into things that can't be rationalized. Psychoanalysis can be a useful tool, but it isn't always clear why the dreamer is dreaming what they are. Perhaps the illustration means that God has only dreamt us into existence, and that this is the only available knowledge we have. Perhaps the nightmare of the century is that God is asleep and Satan is truly the omniscient one, enticing his disciples into attaining ever-greater methods of self-destruction. Perhaps Klimt even saw a glimpse of the unconscious legacy of his own city; that while on the surface Vienna would glisten with fabulous works of art, deep in the bowels of its irrational subconscious the repressed workings of power-hungry madmen like Stalin and Hitler would seep to the surface, culminating in all the abominable behaviors that would come to pass after two World Wars and the invention of the atomic bomb.
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