Laughter and Forgetting. Moritz Csáky: Ideologie der Operette und Wiener Moderne: Ein kulturhistorisches Essay zur österreichischen Identität

James Joyce once remarked that the soul of a culture is to be found in its music halls; by the same token, the gospels of Postmodernism preach that popular entertainment is as worthy of academic study as any other cultural phenomenon, a laudably democratic stance that neatly side-steps the thorny question of aesthetic value by subsuming it in sociology or history.