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1 ◆ IntroductIon ◆ The Austrian writer Hugo von Hofmannsthal (1874–1929) was one of the great modernists in the German language, but his importance as a major intellectual of the early twentieth century has not received adequate attention in the Englishspeaking world. Hofmannsthal’s admirers are familiar with his poetry, plays, and libretti or, perhaps, with his prose fiction, but most of his essays are still untranslated and unknown to readers of English. Yet as J. D. McClatchy has recently pointed out, Hofmannsthal’s essays “occupy nearly a third of his collected works,” and they “are in many ways the truest portrait of his mind.”1 One essay, the letter of Lord Chandos (1902), has been translated many times and is widely recognized as a crucial text for modern literature and theories of language; what is much less well known is that Hofmannsthal’s essays fill several volumes.2 Even German and Austrian scholars have shown only slight interest in Hofmannsthal as an essayist. His essays had received comparatively little attention when he died in 1929, and not until more than a generation later did Germanists return to them in a serious way.3 One obstacle to understanding Hofmannsthal’s intellectual significance has been his peculiar status as an Austrian intellectual and the degree to which Austria came to be central to his mature thought. As a major figure in German literature who was deeply concerned with the German nation and German culture, Hofmannsthal has often been associated with Germany, while his interest in an empire that no longer existed after 1918 has been difficult to appreciate. In 1906 the English writer Edward Gordon Craig called Hofmannsthal “the most intelligent man in Germany,” a reminder both of what he meant to the English-speaking world before 1914 and of how difficult it was even for contemporaries to locate him accurately in the Habsburg Monarchy rather than Prussia’s German Empire.4 Once the Great War began,Austrian perspectives on European politics and culture had less appeal for Anglo-American intellectuals, who were concerned with defeating Austria and creating a future world of nation-states without the Habsburg Monarchy. Indeed, the English-speaking world lost interest in Hofmannsthal and sympathy for Austrians just at the point when writing about Austrian and European culture became Hofmannsthal’s principal preoccupation. The First World War was the great common European experience of the early twentieth century, 2 ◆ Hugo von Hofmannsthal and the Austrian Idea but it is also perhaps what divides English-speaking people most from the history and culture of Germany and Austria.5 Thinking about the historical meaning of Austria was a new departure for Hofmannsthal in 1914, but it was very much continuous with his reflections on European culture before the war. Even after the war, his thinking about Austria outlived the Habsburg Monarchy and flowed into his understanding of the European idea and the history of German culture since the eighteenth century. What is often overlooked in discussions of the Austrian idea is that for Hofmannsthal it is an idea and not a description of the Austrian state or Austrian national identity. For Hofmannsthal, the Austrian idea was a vision of Austria’s intellectual, spiritual , cultural, and potentially political significance. Perhaps his clearest definition appears in his essay on the Austrian idea in 1917, at a time when he was coming to understand that the monarchy was unlikely to survive the war: “This primary and fateful gift for compromise with the East—let us say it precisely: toward compromise between the old European, Latin-German and the new European, Slavic world—this only task and raison d’être of Austria.”6 For Hofmannsthal, the Austrian idea is the idea of mediation, especially mediation between the Germans and the West Slavs or between Western European civilization and the cultures to the east. Hofmannsthal wrote a great variety of intellectually and emotionally rich essays between 1906 and 1927. The essays in this volume are representative of this body of work, but many others are not included here, even some of his essays on Austria, such as those on Prince Eugene and Maria Theresia.7 In this collection I have emphasized essays that deal with the Austrian idea and with the distinctive position of German-speaking Austrians between German nationalism and peoples to the East, whether in the Habsburg Monarchy or beyond it, but I have also included essays that locate his thinking about Austria in relation to the broader situation of German and...

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