Literatur und Kultur im Österreich der Zwanziger Jahre (review)

Literary traditions can become captives to their own accomplishments. Such is arguably the case with Austrian modernism, which for most people immediately evokes images of gleaming geometric façades by Loos, contorted yet languid figures by Klimt or Schiele, or Freud's dream of Irma: Vienna, ca. 1900. When thinking of the 1920s, however, a para-Hegelian mental tick sends thoughts north, as if the spirit of German-language modernism had migrated after the war to the Weimar Republic. The present volume aims to confute this habit through detailed explorations of a range of phenomena in Austrian literature and culture in the 1920s.

One of the main ghosts being exorcized here is of course Claudio Magris's influential thesis of a "Habsburg myth": the claim that after the fall of the Empire, the major Austrian authors responded to their sense of loss, disorientation, and chaos by turning their gaze back to a Habsburg world conceived as an age of security and assurance; even skeptical or ironic authors such as Musil (according to Magris) contributed to the construction of this myth. Magris's book appeared close to a half a century ago, so it is not surprising to find scholars wishing to revise his powerfully synthesizing yet inevitably limiting account of Austrian modernism. But such revisionism is nothing new: Wendelin Schmidt-Dengler, for example, made major contributions to the process well over a decade ago. The present volume does not explicitly reflect on its own position within this revisionist discourse, which is a drawback. The essays were originally presented as individual contributions at a 2004 conference titled "Epochenprofil der 20er Jahre in Österreich" at the Universität Klagenfurt, and as such they do not follow a coordinated theoretical approach or line of argument. That, to be sure, is perfectly fine, but one does wish that the editor had opened the volume with more in the way of a general assessment of the new directions and questions for research emerging or exemplified here. Despite this lack of self-reflection on the volume's overall contribution to the deconstruction of the myth of the Habsburg myth, many of the individual essays are indeed interesting and discuss original material.

The first essay, by Karl Müller, takes up the point (first raised in the editor's introduction) that in Austria "die literarische Landschaft nach 1918 ist eben nicht auf Habsburgmythisierendes zu verkürzen, sondern vielgestaltig und widersprüchlich" (26). The essay goes on to examine one of the presumably most distinctive shapes of this paradoxical Austrian modernism: the "conservative revolution" associated most closely with the name of Hugo von Hofmannsthal and the foundation of the Salzburger Festspiel. In a volume that aims to show how Austrian writers confronted and drew inspiration from the chaotic new realities of post-Habsburg society, this is perhaps not the best place to begin. Müller himself describes this as an example of the "gegenmoderne, restaurative Konzepte" (27) prominent in Austria after the war, and the essay puts forward no argument as to why one should not regard this as evidence supporting rather than dismantling Magris's thesis. Müller does give a useful and concise account, but much of this material is by no means unfamiliar and the essay ends by characterizing Austrian modernism through predictable dichotomies of order v. chaos, synthesis v. division, healing v. destruction, and so on (46).

Next follows Primus-Heinz Kucher's examination of the letters, diaries, feuilletons, and similar "small texts" of very large figures such as Hermann Bahr, Karl Kraus, Hofmannsthal, Arthur Schnitzler, and Eugen Hoeflich. Kucher's thesis is that these texts reveal a much deeper and more systematic engagement with new social realities than do the more representative "Großformen," such as novels (48). Persuasive evidence is indeed presented, although again one could play devil's advocate: what is arguably most intriguing here is not that these figures were unable to live in hermetically sealed bubbles but that there does seem to be a...