From Robert Musil to Austrian Intellectual History

My essay is a refl ection on how my work developed and how my discovery of Robert Musil was decisive for my thinking. I concentrate primarily on Robert Musil and the Crisis of European Culture: 1880–1942 (1980) and Eros and Inwardness in Vienna: Weininger, Musil, Doderer (2003). I also discuss two translation projects: Musil's essays, with Burton Pike (1990), and Hugo von Hofmannsthal's essays on the Austrian idea (2011). Much of my work appeared as essays, which I hope to publish as a collection under the title Decentering Central Europe. Perhaps the most important of these essays, "Schopenhauer, Austria, and the Generation of 1905" (1983), set the direction for my research and writing after Musil, while my "Bohemia and Austrian Intellectual History" (2007) pointed toward Hugo von Hofmannsthal and the Austria Idea and The Austrian Dimension in German Intellectual History: From the Enlightenment to Anschluss.