The Vienna I Knew: Memories of a European Childhood

Wechsberg’s memoir of pre-World War II mittel-Europa recounts with charm and irony life in the dying Habsburg Empire, family stories of wealth gained and lost, the subtleties of coffeehouse culture and the dynamics of Viennese society where one “is at the same time an actor, his own audience, and his own critic.”

“[His] early childhood reads like an idyll […] so that while other writers may recall the last years of this ancien régime as constricting, Wechsberg remembers them as kindly and ea...