Book of Youth

In many aesthetic categories, Hermann Bahr served as a school of style formation, of which Schönberg was glad to be a pupil. Bahr was deemed a midwife or “catalyst” of Viennese modernism. Apart from his fundamental writings analyzing the modern era, Bahr authored numerous contributions and lectures on new works by Jung-Wien writers close to Schönberg. Schönberg found in Bahr the ideal typus of a modern critic, one who rejected moral standards and normative claims to validity and who did not reduce the worth of works of art to compliance with specified formal aspects. Both Bahr and Schönberg repeatedly dealt in their writings with the area of conflict between artworks and art adjudgment.