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A Cozy Little World: Reflections on Context in Austrian Intellectual History

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 April 2009

Michael Gubser
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Extract

Whilecontextualization is basic to all historical analysis, modern Austrian intellectual history exhibits a particular preference for strong contextual accounts of cultural development. Since the 1970s, the literature on fin-de-siècle Vienna as a birthplace of modernism—associated with scholars such as Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin, William Johnston, William McGrath, and above all Carl Schorske—has endorsed the view, famously expressed by the poet Friedrich Hebbel, that Austria was the “little world where the big world holds its tryouts.” Vienna's cultural efflorescence, it is argued, was exemplary not only for its magnitude and innovation, but also for the close affiliations of its participants. “No one who has studied the high culture of Vienna in the period of liberal ascendancy,” Carl Schorske remarked programmatically, “can fail to be impressed by the sturdy integration of its components.”

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Articles
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Austrian History Yearbook , Volume 40 , April 2009 , pp. 202 - 214
Copyright
Copyright © Center for Austrian Studies, University of Minnesota 2009

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References

1 Cited in Steinberg, Michael, The Meaning of the Salzburg Festival (Ithaca, 1990), 120Google Scholar. In a more apocalyptic vein, Karl Kraus quipped in Die Fackel that Austria-Hungary was the “experimental station for end of the world.” Cited in Timms, Edward, Karl Kraus, Apocalyptic Satirist: Culture and Catastrophe in Habsburg Vienna (New Haven, 1986), 10Google Scholar.

2 Edward Timms offers a suggestive visual image of this integration in the form of a diagram of a handful of Viennese intellectual circles whose memberships overlapped. Timms, Karl Kraus, 9.

3 Schorske, Carl, Thinking with History: Explorations in the Passage to Modernism (Princeton, 1998), 125Google Scholar.

4 Schorske, , Fin-de-siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (New York, 1981)Google Scholar. Schorske has extended his analyses to a wider comparative history of other turn-of-the-century cities. See Bender, Thomas and Schorske, Carl, eds., Budapest and New York: Studies in Metropolitan Transformation: 1870–1930 (New York, 1994)Google Scholar. Other authors have followed Schorske's paradigmatic lead by contributing cultural histories of Prague and Budapest. See, for example, Lukacs, John, Budapest 1900: A Historical Portrait of a City and its Culture (New York, 1988)Google Scholar; Anderson, Mark, ed., Reading Kafka: Prague, Politics, and the Fin De Siècle (New York, 1989)Google Scholar; Hanák, Péter, The Garden and the Workshop: Essays on the Cultural History of Vienna and Budapest (Princeton, 1998)Google Scholar.

5 Schorske's book has also become the monument for a particular method of linking politics and culture in intellectual history and, as such, stands as a historiographical classic. For an overview of Schorske's influence on Austrian history and a review of the fin-de-siècle Vienna literature, see Beller, Steven, ed., Rethinking Vienna 1900 (New York, 2001)Google Scholar, especially the introduction by Beller and the essays that bookend the volume: Allan Janik, “Vienna 1900 Revisited: Paradigms and Problems,” and Mary Gluck, “Afterthoughts about Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: The Problem of Aesthetic Culture in Central Europe.” This volume grew out of a 1995 conference entitled “Beyond Vienna 1900: Rethinking Culture in Central Europe.” For an account from a decade earlier that warns against “aestheticized” and “commodified” images of an overly coherent Viennese culture, see Steinberg, Michael, “‘Fin-de-siécle Vienna’ Ten Years Later: ‘Viel Traum, Wenig Wirklichkeit’,” Austrian History Yearbook 22 (1991): 151–62CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Steinberg defends Schorske against complaints that he overpackaged Viennese culture. On Schorske's wider influence beyond the borders of Austrian history, see the essays collected in Roth, Michael S., ed., Rediscovering History: Culture, Politics, and the Psyche (Stanford, 1994)Google Scholar, a volume compiled in Schorske's honor.

6 These challenges have taken a variety of forms. Historians such as John Boyer and Pieter Judson have questioned Schorske's characterization of liberalism. Steven Beller, Robert Wistrich, and Ivar Oxaal have pointed out his marginalization of Jewish contributions to, even the overall Jewish character of, Vienna's cultural innovation. Still others, such as Michael Pollack, Jacques Le Rider, David Luft, and Michael Gubser, have disputed the Schorske's protomodernist and ahistorical characterization of Viennese culture. Boyer, John W., Political Radicalism in Late Imperial Vienna (Chicago, 1981)Google Scholar; Judson, Pieter, Exclusive Revolutionaries: Liberal Politics, Social Experience, and National Identity in the Austrian Empire, 1848–1914 (Ann Arbor, 1996)Google Scholar; Beller, Steven, Vienna and the Jews, 1867–1938: A Cultural History (Cambridge, 1989)Google Scholar; Oxaal, Ivar, Pollak, Michael, and Botz, Gerhard, eds., Jews, Antisemitism, and Culture in Vienna (London, 1987)Google Scholar; Wistrich, Robert S., The Jews of Vienna in the Age of Franz Joseph (Oxford, 1989)Google Scholar; Pollak, Michael, Vienne 1900: Une identité blessée (Paris, 1984)Google Scholar; Le Rider, Jacques, Modernité viennoise et crises de l'identité (Paris, 1990)Google Scholar; Luft, David, Eros and Inwardness in Vienna: Weininger, Musil, Doderer (Chicago, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gubser, Michael, Time's Visible Surface: Alois Riegl and the Discourse on History and Temporality in fin-de-siécle Vienna (Detroit, 2006)Google Scholar.

7 Here, and in other histories of Austrian cultural and intellectual life, there is a tendency to blur several contexts—imperial, national, and urban—by interchanging the terms “Austria” (especially Cisleithanian Austria) and “Vienna.” This move contributes to the untidiness of the paradigm. In a recent essay, David Luft makes a similar argument about the damaging effects for intellectual history of the geographic and linguistic ambiguity of the term “Austria.” See Luft, , “Austrian Intellectual History and Bohemia,” Austrian History Yearbook 38 (2007): 108–21CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 The argument that historians of Austrian high culture have muddied the distinction between thesis and paradigm comes from Allan Janik, “Vienna 1900 Revisited: Paradigms and Problems.” Janik's summary is helpful in reminding us that the effect of Schorske's work diverged from the author's stated intent. Janik also acknowledged that his own classic, Wittgenstein's Vienna, co-written with Stephen Toulmin, advanced a paradigmatic thesis about a Viennese high culture focused on the troubled relation between language and ethics, a culture of “critical modernism.” Hence, although Wittgenstein's Vienna acknowledged the influence of non-Austrian thinkers, it still strove for an integrated characterization of metropolitan culture. Wittgenstein came to stand for qualities that exemplified Viennese thought and culture.

9 This quest for Austrian-ness, it should be noted, extends well back into the nineteenth century, but Schorske helped to renew the concern for cultural distinctiveness by offering a model of cultural coherence built around the unique features of Austria's capital. His account has contributed to the nostalgic revival of interest in Francis Joseph's Vienna.

10 See, for example, Johnston, William, The Austrian Mind (Berkeley, 1972)Google Scholar; Janik, Allan and Toulmin, Stephen, Wittgenstein's Vienna (New York, 1973)Google Scholar; Luft, David, Robert Musil and the Crisis of European Culture 1880–1942 (Berkeley, 1980)Google Scholar; Nyíri, J. C., Austrian Philosophy: Studies and Texts (Munich, 1981)Google Scholar; Smith, Barry, Austrian Philosophy: The Legacy of Franz Brentano (Chicago, 1994)Google Scholar.

11 La Capra, Dominick, “Is Everyone a Mentalité Case? Transference and the ‘Culture’ Concept,” History and Theory 23, no. 3 (October 1984): 296–311CrossRefGoogle Scholar; “Reading Exemplars: Wittgenstein's Vienna and Wittgenstein's Tractatus,” in Rethinking Intellectual History: Texts, Contexts, Language (Ithaca, 1983), 84–117. Against Schorske's critics, Roth, Michael (“Performing History: Modern Contextualism in Carl Schorske's Fin-de-Siècle Vienna,” American Historical Review 99, no. 3 [1994]: 729–45)CrossRefGoogle Scholar notes the performativity of his mentor's account.

12 Beller's work on the prevalence of Jews in Vienna's cultural efflorescence and Pieter Judson's work on liberalism in the Habsburg Empire offer a much less homogeneous image of Austrian culture than that suggested in the Schorskean paradigm. Steven Beller, Vienna and the Jews; Pieter Judson, Exclusive Revolutionaries. In “Geschichte als Wissenschaft. Der Beitrag Österreichs zu Theorie, Methodik und Themen der Geschichte der Neuzeit,” Fritz Fellner has shown that the Austrian historical profession benefited from thinkers and ideas from outside the monarchy. See Fellner, , Geschichtsschreibung und nationale Identität: Probleme und Leistungen der österreichischen Geschichtswissenschaft (Vienna, 2002), 36–91Google Scholar. Social historians have also demonstrated the porous nature of Vienna's city limits and cultural allegiances. See, for example, Ch. Ehalt, Hubert, Heiß, Gernot, and Stekl, Hannes, eds., Glücklich Ist, Wer Vergißt: Das andere Wien um 1900 (Vienna, 1986)Google Scholar.

13 Beller, ed., Rethinking Vienna 1900. In his 2001 Wittgenstein's Vienna Revisited, Janik credited the city's polyglot character with stimulating cultural innovation. He noted that scholars have only begun to investigate the elaborate links between Vienna and the rest of the empire, not to mention the importance of foreign immigration and international connections on the development of ideas. See Janik, , Wittgenstein's Vienna Revisited (New Brunswick, 2001), 5–6Google Scholar.

14 Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna, xxii.

15 I thank Samuel Moyn for pointing out this irony to me.

16 Gubser, Time's Visible Surface, 216–17.

17 Riegl's classic works include Stilfragen: Grundlegungen zu einer Geschichte der Ornamentik (1893), Spätrömische Kunstindustrie (1901), and Das holländische Gruppenporträt (1902). On Riegl, see Olin, Margaret, Forms of Representation in Alois Riegl's Theory of Art (University Park, PA, 1992)Google Scholar.

18 On Brentano, see Smith, Barry, Austrian Philosophy: The Legacy of Franz Brentano (Chicago, 1994)Google Scholar. For a related discussion of aesthetic formalism in Austria, see Wiesing, Lambert, Die Sichtbarkeit des Bildes: Geschichte und Perspektiven der formalen Ästhetik (Reinbek bei Hamburg, 1997)Google Scholar.

19 Benjamin, Walter, The Arcades Project, trans. Eiland, Howard and McLaughlin, Kevin (Cambridge, MA, 1999), 463Google Scholar. See also Buck-Morss, Susan, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA, 1989)Google Scholar.

20 Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, Emmanuel Levinas, and Jacques Derrida are only a few of the philosophers inspired by Husserlian phenomenology. Donald Wallace, in a paper delivered at the 2007 American Historical Association Conference in Atlanta, pointed out Husserl's impact on Hermann Broch. The French poet Francis Ponge also admired phenomenology. For Husserl's impact on research and assessment methodologies, see Holstein, James A and Gubrium, Jaber F., “Interpretative Practice and Social Action,” in Denzin, Norman K. and Lincoln, Yvonna S., eds., The Sage Handbook of Qualitative Research, 3rd ed. (Thousand Oaks, CA, 2005), 483–505Google Scholar.

21 My book, Time's Visible Surface, points out Brentano's influence on Alois Riegl. Barry Smith's Austrian Philosophy discusses Brentano's impact on analytic philosophy and on the economist Carl Menger.

22 On Husserl's significance for historical hermeneutics, see Hoy, David Couzens, The Critical Circle: Literature, History, and Philosophical Hermeneutics (Berkeley, 1978)Google Scholar.

23 For helpful introductions to Husserl's thought, see Spiegelberg, Herbert, The Phenomenological Movement (The Hague, 1976)Google Scholar; Edie, James M., Edmund Husserl's Phenomenology: A Critical Commentary (Bloomington, 1987)Google Scholar; Kockelmans, Joseph J., Edmund Husserl's Phenomenology (West Lafayette, IN, 1994)Google Scholar; Ricoeur, Paul, Husserl: An Analysis of his Phenomenology (Evanston, 1967)Google Scholar; Ströker, Elisabeth, Husserl's Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. Hardy, Lee (Stanford, 1993)Google Scholar.

24 Husserl, , Logical Investigations, trans. Findlay, J. N. (New York, 1970), 225Google Scholar.

25 Ströker, 21–22n.

26 In Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, Brentano, famously argued that “[e]very mental phenomenon is characterized by what the Scholastics of the Middle Ages called the intentional (or mental) inexistence of an object, and what we might call, though not wholly unambiguously, reference to a content, direction, or toward an object (which is not to be understood here as meaning a thing), or immanent objectivity. Every mental phenomenon includes something as object within itself, although they do not all do so in the same way.” (Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, trans. Rancurello, Antos, Terrell, D. B., and McAlister, Linda [London, 1973], 88)Google Scholar.

27 Husserl, Logical Investigations, 648.

28 Ibid., 688.

29 Ibid., 688.

30 Ibid., 667.

31 On this point, Husserl clarified an ambiguity in Brentano's concept of intentionality regarding the relation between a consciousness and its mentally in-existent object.

32 Husserl, Logical Investigations, 538.

33 Ibid., 712–15. Ströker, Husserl's Transcendental Phenomenology, 56–58.

34 This subject-object admixture resembles the art-historical theory of illusionism outlined by the Austrian art historian Franz Wickhoff in Roman Art. Methodological and theoretical resemblances in the work of Wickhoff, Alois Riegl, and their colleagues led me to describe them as protophenomenological in Time's Visible Surface.

35 The term “eidetic” comes from the Greek word eidos, meaning “form” or “idea.” Although Husserl's term recalls Platonic forms, he did not claim that eidetic images existed in any real or external sense. Instead, they designated the pure experience of perceived objects, prior to the mitigating preconceptions that shape our worldly experience.

36 Husserl's influence on Derrida is well known. See Derrida, Edmund Husserl's Origin of Geometry: An Introduction, trans. John P. Leavey, Jr. (Lincoln, NE, 1978). For a discussion, see Gasché, Rodolphe, The Tain of the Mirror: Derrida and the Philosophy of Reflection (Cambridge, MA, 1986)Google Scholar.

37 For a longer discussion of Husserl's theory of objects, see Ströker, Husserl's Transcendental Phenomenology, Section B, 45–114.

38 Husserl, Ideas, 116–17.

39 Born in Moravia, Husserl studied in Vienna between 1881 and 1886, where he fell under the sway of Brentano. His subsequent teaching career took him to Halle, Göttingen, and Freiburg.

40 In this regard, Husserl's later investigation of the life-world that provides the horizon of meaning for all objects is also methodologically germane. See The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy, trans. David Carr (Evanston, 1970). Gadamer, Hans-Georg provides a trenchant discussion of this concept in Philosophical Hermeneutics, trans. Linge, David E. (Berkeley, 1976)Google Scholar.

41 All of these philosophies, it should be noted, are linked genealogically to Husserlian phenomenology.

42 Alexander von Helfert's pamphlet “Über Nationalgeschichte und den gegenwärtigen Stand ihrer Pflege” (Prague, 1853) helped to define the mandate for this institute. On the Institut für österreichische Geschichtsforschung, see Lhotksy, Alphons, Geschichte des Instituts für österreichische Geschichtsforschung 1854–1954 (Graz, 1954)Google Scholar; Fellner, Geschichtsschreibung und nationale Identität; and Gubser, Time's Visible Surface, 77–88. In “Austrian Intellectual History and Bohemia” (110), Luft points out that there were also nineteenth-century writers who questioned the concept of “Austria.”

43 Steinberg, Michael, The Meaning of the Salzburg Festival: Austria as Theater and Ideology, 1890–1938 (Ithaca, 1990)Google Scholar.

44 See Edward Timms, Karl Kraus; David Luft, Robert Musil and the Crisis of European Culture; Broch, Hermann, Hugo von Hoffmannstahl and his Time: The European Imagination, 1860–1920, trans. Steinberg, Michael (Chicago, 1984)Google Scholar.

45 For an argument, contra Schorske, that Freud should not be understood through a primarily Austrian (or primarily Jewish) lens, see Gay, Peter, Freud, Jews, and Other Germans: Masters and Victims in Modernist Culture (New York, 1978)Google Scholar.

46 La Capra's work demonstrates these challenges abundantly. In that light, I use the term “documentary analysis” to highlight the priority of texts and artifacts, not to invoke the naive view of texts as unproblematic windows on the past, a view that La Capra has done so much to question.

47 On this topic, see Bacher, Ernst, ed., Kunstwerk oder Denkmal? Alois Riegls Schriften zur Denkmalpflege (Vienna, 1995)Google Scholar. For an account of Riegl's links to Vienna's museum world, see Reynolds's, Diana Graham excellent Alois Riegl and the Politics of Art History: Intellectual Traditions and Austrian Identity in Fin-de-siécle Vienna (Ph.D. diss., University of California, San Diego, 1997)Google Scholar.

48 Quoted in Sherover, Charles, The Human Experience of Time (New York, 1975), 141Google Scholar.