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  • Hugo von Hofmannsthal and the Austrian Idea: Selected Essays and Addresses, 1906–1927 ed. by David S. Luft
  • Robert Dassanowsky
David S. Luft, trans. and ed., Hugo von Hofmannsthal and the Austrian Idea: Selected Essays and Addresses, 1906–1927. West Lafayette: Purdue UP, 2011. 201 pp.

What explains the relative lack of Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s resonance in the canon of early-twentieth-century Western cultural philosophy beyond [End Page 132] his position in Germanophone arts and letters—and even, arguably, there? Without doubt it derives from the same reasons that in the Anglo-American mind Paris oddly eclipses rather than resonates with Vienna as the home of modernism in the arts; that Ravel’s La Valse, a tone-poem tribute to composers ranging from Johann Strauss to Mahler and beyond, originally titled “Vienna,” has become associated solely with the demonization of Austria-Hungary; that existentialism in prose is now said to have started with Sartre and Camus rather than with Schnitzler and Rilke. To the victors go the philosophical spoils as well, apparently. Hofmannsthal’s Kulturstaat concepts, his European essentialism, his archaic modernity that sought to reconnect an atomized Mitteleuropa facing post-bourgeois totalitarianism to values swept away by a pseudo-revolutionary mania produced some of the most perceptive writing to come out of the collapse of the Old Order. Sadly, even in the twenty-first century, Hofmannsthal’s oeuvre beyond the libretto for Rosenkavalier or the ritual of Jedermann seems distantly esoteric, or more reprehensibly, a well-kept secret among even postcolonial cultural scholars.

The sociopolitical conditions Hugo von Hofmannsthal believed necessary for Austrian-German culture and for a healthy European future in the wake of the catastrophic war led the author to stress the need for counter-experience. An example of one of his tools for this purpose was cinema. This new medium furnished Hofmannsthal with the possibility of reanimating the lost imaginary, providing a platform showcasing Vienna’s multicultural impulses, and transcending a verbal crisis that ballet and opera had only partially remedied. For Hofmannsthal, film imagery could (re)create a sense of socio-cultural continuity with the cultural entity of Mitteleuropa and even the possibility of a greater pan-European idealism on the subconscious level. Rhetoric had failed the author in this quest, and despite his love of the “schöne Sprache” he believed that it had been somewhat responsible for the confusion of social and political identity in the prewar era. But what film theory text in any language (including German) today notes that the author’s “A Substitute for Dreams” (1921) contains what is ostensibly the earliest psychological understanding of scopophilic desire and the question of cinematic reality? In a contemporary European Union criticized by restless populations for having lost the sense of Europeanism to the deceptions of nationalist-tinged bureaucratic self-perpetuation, why is the wartime “Idea of Europe” (1916) not pressed into the hands of every new Euro-parliamentarian? And for all of Austria’s trauma in its postimperial reconstitution in defining, redefining, [End Page 133] abandoning, and quietly readapting concepts from the multicultural state that made it what it will forever be, has any political theoretician looked to the many essays on Austria and its relationship with Germany (and on Germany in a European context) in attempting negotiation with these identities on so many crucial levels? While Hofmannsthal’s dramas may have endeavored to reconstruct a sensitive “beauty” the early twentieth century no longer recognized or desired, his incisive prose and Euro-philosophy has mostly lost out to the xenophobia the writer himself criticized in “Boycott of Foreign Languages?” (1914). The essay might be of immediate interest to American academics and policy makers. On the other hand, Hofmannsthal’s incisive reflections in “The Written Word as the Spiritual Space of the Nation” (1927) might well have been written as a tonic for postmodern, virtualized, and fragmented globalism.

While David S. Luft’s richly contextualized and evocative translations in Hugo von Hofmannsthal and the Austrian Idea: Selected Essays and Addresses, 1906–1927 cannot singlehandedly resolve a century of neglect surrounding the philosophy of Hofmannsthal, it can offer a fresh resource to those outside the German language in the study...

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