Vienna's 'Holy Spring' and beyond: Ver Sacrum (1898-1903), Almanach der Wiener Werkstätte (1911), Hohe Warte (1904-9), Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration (1897-1932)

Silverthorne’s chapter provides a critical analysis of ‘Ver Sacrum’, the periodical published in English by the members of the Vienna Secession; it situates the periodical in fin-de-siècle Vienna’s unique social and cultural circumstances. Based on archival research carried out within an AHRC-funded project on Vienna Café Culture, it identifies the designer Alfred Roller, a little known figure of the Vienna Secession, as an important contributor to the appearance of ‘Ver Sacrum’ as a ‘total work of art’. It also analyses the Werkstätte Almanach which was only published once, bringing it to the attention of an English-speaking readership for the first time. The volumes in which the chapter appears are the first comprehensive survey of the, often short-lived, periodicals (literary, art, applied arts, design, architecture, music) which proliferated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, which carried a wealth of important material reflecting avant-garde and modernist ideas in the arts.