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111 ◆ Three Small ObServaTiOnS ◆ This modestly titled essay turns out to be very substantial: as an assessment of the impact of the war, as an analysis of the significance of film in modern urban life, and as a statement of Hofmannsthal’s view of writing. The reader may be inclined to read Hofmannsthal’s discussion of dreams here in relation to Freud, but more important for Hofmannsthal were Nietzsche and the broad literary tradition. His discussion of the role of vision in dreams echoes his account of the poet in 1906, and the essay concludes with a powerful account of what constitutes good writing . His reflections on irony, the unconscious, and good writing reveal a great deal about dimensions of modern life that made Europeans more available to the new political style of fascism. The Irony of Things It was long before the war that I found this remark in the Fragments2 of Novalis: “After an unsuccessful war, comedies must be written.” This note, in its peculiarly laconic form, was rather strange to me. I understand it better today. The essence of comedy is irony, and nothing is better suited to make clear to us the irony that rules over all the things of the earth than a war that ends unhappily. Tragedy gives its hero, the individual, an artificial dignity: it makes him into a demigod and raises him up above bourgeois circumstances. When tragedy moves even a half-step away from this unconscious but necessary tradition, it finds itself in the realm of comedy: even a play like Hamlet comes close to this—but Hamlet himself is still a king and a hero, even if he is a hero whose substance is being melted away by the irony of things and by self-irony like the rays of the sun on a snowman. And a bourgeois tragedy is simply an absurdity, since the bourgeois world is the world of the socially conditioned, and tragedy unfolds in the socially unconditioned. But real comedy places its individuals in a thousandfold interwoven relationship with the world; it sets everything in relation to everything else, and thereby everything in relation to irony. It was just like this with the war, which came over all of us, and which even today we still have not moved beyond; indeed, we may still not have moved beyond it after twenty years. War sets everything in relation to everything, the apparently great in relation to the apparently 112 ◆ Hugo von Hofmannsthal and the Austrian Idea small, the apparently conditioned in relation to something new above it, by which it is conditioned once again, the heroic in relation to the mechanical, the pathetic in relation to the financial, and so forth without end. At first, when the war began, the hero was ironized by the trench-digger, the one who wanted to stay on his feet and attack by the one who had a shovel and dug in; at the same time the individual was ironized by the mass to the point of the annihilation of his sense of self, and not just the individual but the organized mass as well, the battalion, the regiment, the corps, by the even greater and more formless mass. But then yet again the whole fighting mass, this fear-instilling and pathetic giant, by something it felt ruled by, thrust forward, and for which it is difficult to find a name: let us call it the spirit of the nations. But the moment came when even this, the great masses symbolized as a unity, was ironized by the momentary omnipotence of single individuals who somehow had their hands on the levers of power with which this unwieldy whole could be ruled for the moment. In the same moment, however, these too were submerged in the crisscrossing currents of the strongest, most undermining irony: the irony of the contrast between the great, ideal worldviews that they had in their mouths and the jumble of intractable realities with which they had to struggle, the irony of the tool against the hand that imagines it guides the tool, the irony of the details that are grounded a thousandfold in reality against the premature and consciously untrue syntheses. But at the same time the moment came when, in the midst of this gigantic whole, the concept of the nation was ironized by the concept of social class. The moment of coal and the coalminer arrived: this whole structure of the apparently spiritual [Geistigen], behind which...

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