The genesis of the half-published Viennese autobiography of Karl Menger (1923–1938): new light on the Vienna Circle and the Mathematical Colloquium

For better understanding the connections between the Viennese circles in which Menger was involved, it is necessary to make some remarks on the Viennese context where they developed. Since the end of the 19th century up to the interwar period, Vienna was a very lively city from a cultural point of view, the birthplace of modernism (Janik & Toulmin, 1973). In the age of the late Habsburg monarchy as well as in the post-First War ‘Red Vienna’, the intellectual, scientific and artistic life of the Austrian capital was so fervent that those years are recalled by historians as theViennese Enlightenment, thegay apocalypseand thegolden autumn: ‘two generations were enough to cover the whole period. The economist Carl Menger (1841–1920) shaped the beginning, and his son, the mathematician Karl Menger (1902–1985), witnessed the end’ (Golland & Sigmund, 2000, p. 34). After the First World War, from an economic point of view, a high inflation overwhelmed the country; while from a political point of view, ‘the new Austria was fragmented and labyrinthine’ (Leonard, 1998, p. 6): the Christian socialists were the conservative part of the society, but one third of citizens supported the new social-democratic party, which had the majority in Vienna.