Empire and Identity: Biographies of the Austrian State Problem in the Late Habsburg Empire

Part Two: Hugo von Hofmannsthal (Leopold von Andrian): The Problem of the Austrian Culture

105 PART TWO Hugo von Hofmannsthal (Leopold von Andrian) ◆ The Problem of the Austrian Culture ◆ The fire is rampant, red alert in Mauer, the Russians are plundering Mauer and Liesing. Although we were ill, Resi and I had to get out of bed, in a great hurry, get a little bread and jewellery, and some more things were packed into bags. The valuable things had already been taken away or hidden, and off we went into the street. Marie stayed on to lock the house. Papa carried his manuscripts in his hand, and all in all the scene must have looked rather comical, and I think the villagers of Rodaun were laughing at us. The whole thing was exaggerated; a couple of Russians had attempted to break into a railway wagon. That was it.1 On one of the first days of November 1918, Hugo von Hofmannsthal and his family, in panic, as it seems, left the house in Rodaun, outside of Vienna, in which they had lived since the early years of the 1900s. The perceived threat from escaped Russian prisoners of war during these confused last days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire was exaggerated, as Hugo’s daughter Christiane noted in her diary on the day after the hurried family evacuation. Hofmannsthal’s reaction seems more in tune with the expected arrival of a hostile army than with the petty plundering of a few escaped prisoners of war. A couple of days after this evacuation, the family was back in Rodaun , where Hofmannsthal was engaging intensely in the organization of a militia defense force for the small country communities on the southeastern outskirts of Vienna. Needing assistance in his endeavors, he writes about the incident a few days before to his friend Robert Ehrhart, a high-ranking civil servant and right-hand man to the imperial Austrian minister president in close-by Vienna. Now he feels more secure, Hofmannsthal states to Ehrhart, since he and his household have armed themselves with rifles. The house in Rodaun, and the whole village as such, seems to 106 ◆ PART TWO: HOFMANNSTHAL ANDRIAN assume the appearance of a fortress as Hofmannsthal expands on his plans to organize a militia self-defense force consisting of 4 to 6 lorries armed with machine guns to defend the countryside surrounding his home.2 The house in Rodaun was very important to Hofmannsthal. One could say that it constituted the locus of his identity. Here his artistic life and the lives of his family and friends had their centers of gravity. At the time he and his wife, Gertrud, as a newly married couple moved into the house in summer 1901, Hofmannsthal wrote rapturously to all his friends about this new center of his life.3 Here their three children Christiane, Franz, and Raimund would be born and grow up. And Hofmannsthal would always treat the visits of his artistic colleagues and foreign friends to the house as a sort of ritual, or perhaps rite of initiation, into his personal and creative lives.4 About a year before finding the house during a trip to France in the spring of 1900, Hofmannsthal had ruminated about his “continued longing for a house.” He pondered the stabilizing effects on the personality, on one’s identity, of owning a house, and he expressed his wish “to enclose a written note with a few of Gerty’s pearls in the foundation stone of our little house.”5 Hofmannsthal had suffered a prolonged personal crisis, to a great extent a crisis of identity, during the years preceding his marriage in 1901. He had unsuccessfully tried to find a passable route The Fuchs Schlössl, Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s house in Rodaun: Street view; Freies Deutsches Hochstift, Frankfurter Goethe-Museum The Problem of the Austrian Culture ◆ 107 into adult life and to establish himself socially and economically in the Viennese Grossbürgerliche society. Shortly after moving into the house in Rodaun with his wife, Hofmannsthal indicated to his father that he had now found the basic stability he needed in order to move on in life. Among the fundamental factors that made him feel this way, he enumerated to his father, were his parents, his wife Gerty, his many good friends, and “my dear house.”6 Placed in the middle of that Lower Austrian landscape Hofmannsthal repeatedly praised in his letters at the time,7 the house also...