TALK | THUNDER AT TWILIGHT OR THE AGE OF INSIGHT: ERIC KANDEL AND FREDERIC MORTON IN CONVERSATION. VIENNA FROM THE FIN DE SIÈCLE TO THE PRESENT
The Austrian Cultural Forum presents an evening of intellectual debate between Nobel-Prize-winning neuroscientist Dr. Eric Kandel and acclaimed author Frederic Morton.
Against the contextual background of the current Vienna Complex exhibit, this talk will be another prominent and timely contribution to ACFNY’s activities in this 1914-2014 commemoration year.
The Age of Insight by Kandel takes us to Vienna 1900, where leaders in science, medicine, and art began a revolution that changed forever how we think about the human mind—our conscious and unconscious thoughts and emotions—and how mind and brain relate to art.
The recently published 2014 anniversary edition of Thunder at Twilight contains a new afterword in which Morton draws some fascinating parallels between the society he studies in his book and America today, highlighting our tendency to live constantly on the precipice as Vienna did a hundred years ago.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Eric Kandel was born in 1929 in Vienna, Austria, in a middle-class Jewish family. He has uncovered some of the basic molecular mechanisms underlying learning and memory in animals ranging from snails to flies to mice and even in humans. For his work, the Austrian-born Kandel was awarded the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. The traumatic events of Kandel’s childhood likely influenced his later interest in the biological mechanisms of memory. He was only eight when Nazi Germany annexed his homeland. In 1939, on the eve of World War II, his family fled Austria for the United States. As a college student at Harvard, Kandel majored in history and literature, but he was drawn to psychoanalysis after befriending a native Austrian student whose parents were prominent psychoanalysts in Sigmund Freud’s circle. Kandel went to medical school at NYU with the goal of studying psychiatry and becoming a psychoanalyst himself. But thinking that he should know more about how the brain works, he took a neurophysiology course that shifted his interest toward research into the biology of memory. Kandel still lives in New York.
Frederic Morton, born 1924, is a Jewish Austrian writer who emigrated to the United States in 1940. Born Fritz Mandelbaum in Vienna, Morton was raised as the son of a blacksmith who had specialized in forging imperial medals. In 1939 the family fled to Britain, and the following year they migrated to New York. Morton says that back in 1940 his father decided, with a heavy heart, to change their family name to Morton to be able to join the then anti-Semitic labor union. Frederic Morton first worked as a baker but from 1949 studied literature. In 1951 he visited Austria again for the first time after the war, and in 1962 he returned, this time to Salzburg. From 1959 Morton worked for several American periodicals, mainly as a columnist (The New York Times, Esquire, and Playboy).
VENUE
ACFNY