My first vacation reading recommendation for Labanistas is Thunder at Twilight:
Vienna 1913-14 by Frederic Morton. In this book, Morton portrays the royalty,
politicians, artists, intellectuals, and, above all, the atmosphere of Vienna just before
the outbreak of the First World War. It’s a fascinating cast of characters that
includes Emperor Franz Josef, Freud, Trotsky, and even Hitler.
The story culminates with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand by a young Serbian terrorist and the frantic machinations of the Emperor and his advisers to punish Serbia without setting in motion the network of European alliances. Their machinations failed, and Europe went to war with a great hurrah. Four years later, no one was cheering.
As the author notes, the people in Vienna and the events of the time “galvanized a zeitgeist whose consequences live today in the international news, on the street corner.”
So, in honor of the ending of World War I a century ago, peruse this readable and
gripping history. Find out what was happening in Vienna while Rudolf Laban, son of
an Austro-Hungarian Army general, was dancing in the Swiss mountains.