Letters to My Grandchildren

This set of letters, written daily last year to his grandchildren by Reinhold Knoll, emeritus professor of sociology in Vienna, began as an attempt to maintain his relationships with them during the enforced separation of the pandemic of 2021. But as the themes accumulated they evolved into something of an obituary of European culture, politics, and society, as well as an admonition and a gesture of thanks to the United States, itself unbloodied by the religious wars, having taken a revolutionary path different from that of Paris, and above all having saved Europe from the World Wars of the twentieth century. There are one hundred eleven letters, in homage to the "pragmatic idealism" of Beethoven: like the corpus of his piano sonatas, some are light and humorous while others plumb the depths, but each reaches its own unique unity by bringing the past into the present or deriving the present from the past, often enhanced by the irony, humor, and independence of the Viennese perspective, with recondite and penetrating observations on enlightenment and revolution, painting and architecture and music, the history of social thought, the devolution of the museum, the status of the church, the migration crisis, fashions in pedagogy, and the insidious reversal by which technology is reducing its human users into tools for its own aimless profit. It is the work of a balanced consciousness in troubled times.