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Austria as a Region of German Culture: 1900–1938

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 February 2009

David S. Luft
David S. Luft
Affiliation:
Associate Professor of History at the University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093.
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Extract

This Essay Attempts to contribute to our understanding of the intellectual and cultural history of Central Europe by making explicit a variety of themes that haunt discourse about Austrian culture and by making some suggestions about periodizing the relationship between Austria and German culture. I originally developed these thoughts on Austria as a region of German culture for a conference in 1983 at the Center for Austrian Studies on regions and regionalism in Austria. Although the political institutions of Central Europe have undergone a revolution since then, the question of Austria's relationship to German culture still holds its importance for the historian-and for contemporary Austrians as well. The German culture I have in mind here is not the kleindeutsch national culture of Bismarck's Reich, but rather the realm that was once constituted by the German-speaking lands of the Holy Roman Empire. This geographical space in Central Europe suggests a more ideal realm of the spirit, for which language is our best point of reference and which corresponds to no merely temporal state.

Type
New Conceptual Directions
Information
Austrian History Yearbook , Volume 23 , January 1992 , pp. 135 - 148
Copyright
Copyright © Center for Austrian Studies, University of Minnesota 1992

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References

1 Luft, David S., Robert Musil and the Crisis of European Culture: 1880–1942 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980)Google Scholar. Three important recent books on Germany in the nineteenth century have treated Austria as a constitutive element of German history before 1866: Nipperdey, Thomas, Deutsche Geschichte 1800–1866. Bürgerwelt und starker Staat (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1983)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lutz, Heinrich, Zwischen Habsburg und Preussen. Deutschland 1815–1866 (Berlin: Siedler Verlag, 1985)Google Scholar; and Sheehan, James J., German History, 1770–1866 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989)Google Scholar. This emplotment of German history stands in sharp contrast to the Prussian teleology that founded the modern historical profession and still plays a huge role in our understanding of German history.

2 Dahrendorf, Ralf, Society and Democracy in Germany (New York: Norton, 1967), 3Google Scholar.

3 Greiner, Ulrich, “Das Phantom der Nation,” Die Zeit (03 23, 1990): 13Google Scholar.

4 Fellner, Fritz, “The Problem of the Austrian Nation after 1945,” journal of Modern History 60 (06 1988): 269CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 Two of the most influential statements of the distinctiveness of Austrian literary and cultural traditions are Heer, Friedrich, Land im Strom der Zeit. Österreich gestern, heute, und morgen (Vienna: Herold, 1958)Google Scholar, and Strelka, Joseph, Brücke zu vielen Ufern. Wesen und Eigenart der österreichischen Literatur (Vienna: Europa Verlag, 1968)Google Scholar. See also Heer's, more recent statement of this view: Der Kampf um die österreichische Identität (Vienna: Hermann Böhlaus, 1981)Google Scholar. Other important accounts of Austrian intellectual traditions are Mühlher, Robert, Österreichische Dichter seit Crillparzer (Vienna: Braumüller, 1973)Google Scholar; Basil, Otto, Eisenreich, Herbert, and Ivask, Ivar, Das grosse Erbe (Graz: Stiasny-Verlag, 1962)Google Scholar; Adel, Kurt, Geist und Wirklichkeil. Vom Werden der österreichischen Dichtung (Vienna: Österreichische Verlag, 1967)Google Scholar; and Fuchs, Albert, Ceistige Strömungen in Österreich, 1867–1918 (Vienna: Globus-Verlag, 1949)Google Scholar.

6 Schorske, Carl E., Fin-de-siède Vienna (New York: Knopf, 1980)Google Scholar.

7 On the significance of this period of Austrian thought for modernism and postmodernism, see Rider, Jacques Le, Modemitė viennoise et crises de I'identité (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1991)Google Scholar.

8 Most of the recent literature on Austrian identity is concerned with a view of Austria since 1945 or since the founding of the Second Republic in 1955. These books are for the most part concerned with questions of state building and national consciousness, a different set of concerns from the ones I am addressing here. See Kreissler, Felix, Der Österreicher und seine Nation. Ein Lemprozess mit Hindemissen (Vienna: Hermann Böhlaus, 1984)Google Scholar, and Bruckmüller, Ernst, Nation Österreich. Sozialhistorische Aspekte ihrer Entwicklung (Vienna: Hermann Böhlaus, 1984)Google Scholar.

9 For a recent discussion of baroque ideology and its invention in the modern period, see Steinberg, Michael P., The Meaning of the Salzburg Festival: Austria as Theater and Ideology, 1890–1938 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990)Google Scholar, especially chapter 1, “The Ideology of the Baroque, 1860–1938.” Steinberg emphasizes the polarity in Austrian intellectual history between critical modernism and conservative baroque ideology. The latter view, which was given shape and prestige by Hugo von Hofmannsthal during the interwar years, has sometimes encouraged historians to mistake baroque ideology for historical reality.

10 As V, Charles once remarked: “One speaks Spanish with the gods; French with the ladies; Flemish with human beings; Italian with the birds; English with the horses; and German with the dogs.” Bab, Julius and Handl, Willy, Wien und Berlin. Vergleichende Kulturgeschichte der beiden deutschen Hauptstädte (Berlin: Oesterheld, 1918), 62Google Scholar.

11 See Blackall, Eric A., The Emergence of German as a Literary Language 1770–1775, 2nd ed., (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1978)Google Scholar.

12 See Evans, R. J. W., The Making of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1550–1700 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979)Google Scholar.

13 See Valjavec, Fritz, Der Josephinismus. Zur geistigen Entwicklung Österreichs im achtzehnten und neunzehnten jahrhundert (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1945)Google Scholar.

14 Bauer, Roger has written two excellent books to clarify these issues in the realms of philosophy and theater: Der Idealismus und seine Gegner in Österreich (Heidelberg: Winter, 1966)Google Scholar and La Realité royaume de Dieu. Études sur I'originalité du théâtre viennois dans la première moitié du XIXe siècle (Munich: Max Hueber Verlag, 1965)Google Scholar. On the significance of the early nineteenth century for Austrian literature, see Weiss, Walter, “Thematisierung der ‘Ordnung’ in der österreichischen Literatur,” in Dauer im Wandel. Aspekte österreichischen Kulturentwicklung, ed. Strolz, Walter and Schatz, Oscar (Vienna: Herder, 1975), 19–44Google Scholar; Greiner, Ulrich, Der Tod des Nachsommers (Munich: Hanser, 1979)Google Scholar; and Magris, Claudio, Der Habsburgische Mythos in der österreichischen Literatur (Salzburg: Otto Müller Verlag, 1966)Google Scholar.

15 In The Age of German Liberation: 1795–1835, trans. Paret, Peter and Fischer, Helmuth (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977)Google Scholar, Friedrich Meinecke draws attention to the decade between the Peace of Basel and the defeat of Prussia by Napoleon (1795–1806) to show the military and diplomatic context for the origins of German idealism and romanticism.

16 See Eder, Karl, Der Liberalismus in Altösterreich. Geisteshaltung, Politik und Kultur (Vienna, 1955)Google Scholar, and Franz, Georg, Liberalismus. Die deutschliberale Bewegung in der Habsburgischen Monarchic (Munich: G. D. W. Callwey, 1955)Google Scholar.

17 See McGrath, William J., Dionysian Art and Populist Politics in Austria (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1974)Google Scholar.

18 Beller, Steven emphasizes the decisive role of Jews in the liberal culture of fin-de-siècle Vienna: Vienna and the Jews, 1867–1938: A Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989)Google Scholar. See also Wistrich, Robert S., The Jews of Vienna in the Age of Franz Joseph (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989)Google Scholar.

19 Here I use Hughes's, H. Stuart terminology from Consciousness and Society: The Reorientation of European Social Thought (New York: Knopf, 1958)Google Scholar. Hughes's description of the European generation of the 1890s coincides with Carl E. Schorske's account of this generation in Austria. See Schorske's, “Generational Tension and Cultural Change: Reflections on the Case of Vienna,” in Daedalus (Fall 1978, Generations): 111–22Google Scholar.

20 Schorske, Fin-de-siècle Vienna, xxvii.

21 See Steinberg's discussion of the relationship of the Salzburg Festival to “nationalist cosmopolitanism” in The Meaning of the Salzburg Festival, chapter 3.

22 Gay, Peter, Weimar Culture (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), 2–6Google Scholar. Also of interest in this context is Gay's, Freud, jews and Other Germans (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978)Google Scholar; see especially his comment (p. 12) on the differences within German culture, e.g., between Austria and Prussia or between Hamburg and Vienna: “To write the history of German culture, in short, is to write comparative history. And yet, what tied all these regions together was more important than what divided them.”

23 Schorske, “Generational Tension and Cultural Change,” 119–20.

24 Musil, Robert, Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1968), 34Google Scholar.

25 See Luft, David S., “Schopenhauer, Austria, and the Generation of 1905,” in Central European History 16 (03 1983): 53–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

26 Luft, Robert Musil, 18. For a fuller discussion of the generation of 1905 in Central Europe, see 13–22.

27 See Luft, “Schopenhauer, Austria, and the Generation of 1905.”

28 See Rabinbach, Anson, The Crisis of Austrian Socialism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983)Google Scholar, for a valuable discussion of Bauer. Max Adler is, of course, also important for this generation's consideration of Marx and Kant.

29 The Correspondence of Arthur Schnitzler and Raoul Auernheimer, ed. Daviau, Donald and Johns, Jorun B. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1972), Introduction, 8–9Google Scholar.

30 Gay, Weimar Culture, 7.

31 Luft, Robert Musil, 15–16.

32 Musil, Robert, “Als Papa Tennis lernte” (1931), Prosa und Stücke (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1978), 687Google Scholar.