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99 ◆ The AusTriAn ideA ◆ This essay1 from 1917 is Hofmannsthal’s classic statement of the Austrian idea. It appeared in November as Europeans were entering into the postwar era and after Lenin’s revolution. “The Austrian Idea” is closely related to “The Idea of Europe,” which had appeared earlier in the year, just after the First Russian Revolution of 1917. Hofmannsthal emphasizes Austria’s connection both to the Holy Roman Empire and to the Roman Empire, but he also underscores Austria ’s anticipation in the nineteenth century of the larger European issues that confronted the postwar era. The essay is important as a clarification of the relationship between Austria and cosmopolitan German culture, as well as the relationship between Cisleithanian Austria and the Habsburg Monarchy as a whole. The world has seen an energy radiate from here in the past four years that has made itself felt in renewed waves. A continually renewed effort can never go forth from an inert mass, and people have gradually been forced to regard this conglomerate, this “bundle of nations,” supposedly standing under some sort of tyrannical supreme authority, as the revelation of a spiritual power and a historical necessity. Behind the naive and sustained devotion of such different groups, there had to have been something of the greatest scope, which would be no more comprehensible through the concepts of organization and power than with the opposite concepts of inertia or force of habit. The assurances of astonishment and respect that I encountered on this subject in Switzerland, Poland, Scandinavia, and elsewhere, were very instructive. People spoke of an admirable regeneration, but it is perhaps more accurate to speak of an historical power complex that has won back its natural center of gravity. People have taken pains to reconcile this with the usual prejudices, or rather to let these recede; but people should perhaps have thought more about the spiritual [das Geistige] from the outset, as they are now beginning to do at the end of the war. We recall that the laws of existence crisscross in complicated ways and that historical phenomena do not thereby grow less noble but may indeed participate in a higher order of things because as products of such crossings they are harder to see than other phenomena and cannot be judged at first glance. And we could have found thatAustrian optimism, rising up from the depths and appar- 100 ◆ Hugo von Hofmannsthal and the Austrian Idea ently to be neither uprooted nor exhausted, was based on two factors, which, like everything that lies close at hand, are easy to overlook: how long the empire has existed and its geographical situation. These factors had, in fact, stepped into the background by comparison with the prominent and militant ideologies that ruled all the minds and busied all the pens. Both the venerable age of this monarchy and its dominant position in the southeast on the banks of the great stream that unites Europe with the Orient must always have been valued very highly: both have been rehabilitated, as it were, by this war, which tested all values and validated them in their true dimensions. The geographical situation seems in itself inalterable and yet is subject to ever new interpretations, while age is thought about very little or only with the occasional undervaluing of half-understanding, so that we ought not to have forgotten those lines of Machiavelli, which are clear and indestructible like every part of his political thought: “In matters of the state, the form of government is of very little significance, although half-educated people think otherwise: the great goal of statecraft should be duration, which outweighs everything else.” On both of these, geography and age, rests in this Empire the restored feeling of one’s own significance, as well as the courage to understand ourselves and to comprehend the polarities that exist within our borders as life-enhancing constellations, and our usual domestic tensions and crises as anticipations of what is most fundamental in the European conflict. All of this was already perceptible among us when the rest of Europe, locked in the dullness of exclusively material interests and in a precarious condition of balance, did not yet have the courage to look its greatest political, and that means spiritual and intellectual, challenges in the eye. It is not a matter of indifference whether we were born yesterday or began as a march of the Holy Roman Empire eleven hundred years ago or as a Roman border...

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