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127 ◆ View of the Spiritual Condition of europe ◆ This short essay1 offers valuable insights into Hofmannsthal’s view of the impact of the war and the state of European culture in the 1920s. He is thinking of Europe here as a unity, from Oxford to Moscow, even though this Europe was in crisis. He emphasizes Dostoevsky and Goethe and their spiritual significance for this moment. He treats this broad conception of Europe much as he does Asia in his essay on Neumann, but Russia and Dostoevsky also stand for a deeper connection to Asia. The damage from the war to every country and to every individual was so great, the material consequences are so severe and so interconnected and constitute such an effort and a burden for the imaginative and emotional life of the individual as well, that a feeling about it does not really come to expression, at least not one that is clear and resounding, but only, if you will, to a numbed expression that nonetheless fills all thinking individuals: that we find ourselves in one of the most serious spiritual crises to shake Europe since the sixteenth century, if not since the thirteenth. And the thought is not far off that “Europe,” the word taken as a spiritual concept, has ceased to exist. It is remarkable, but it is among the mysterious, seemingly planned coincidences that rule in all such universal crises, that Europe in this moment does not have a single intellectual representative who could really be regarded as a dominant European figure. A few, to be sure, are European figures in the sense of fame but not in the sense of a spiritual power and authority that emanates from them, of the kind, for example, that applied only two decades ago to Ibsen and Tolstoy. A man like Anatole France,2 whom the Stockholm Academy just crowned with the Nobel Prize, is certainly for the moment an intellectual phenomenon of the first rank. But in relation to the greatest representatives of his own national tradition, there is something epigone-like about this figure; a spiritual fascination emanates from him, but it is not a spiritual power before which Europe would bow and centuries would seem like brief spans of time. 128 ◆ Hugo von Hofmannsthal and the Austrian Idea Bernard Shaw as well is without doubt a broadly European phenomenon and, perhaps, the most representative figure of the moment. In relation to the overpowering force of technological developments and in the face of the mass of irony that was released by all these terrible, powerful events and their connections to so much misery and absurdity in all minds who had not been completely numbed, his witty, ironic intellectual language, which brings together the most heterogeneous elements in lightning-like leaps, often seems to be the only jargon in which intelligent people can come to some kind of understanding of such a bewildering world situation. In fact, this jargon is spoken and understood in all countries; not only has it become commonplace in the German intellectual world, but it has also penetrated into the Romantic and Slavic worlds as well; it possesses something that is liberating for the moment, and it is to be expected that Shaw’s way of thinking and speaking will attract a tremendous following among journalists and will assume the legacy of Heinrich Heine’s way of writing for decades. But this witty mentality is able to set the deeper layers of the human soul, which yearns for new—the word must be said—religious ties, only in a mild, restless vibration, but not in a genuine tremor, which precedes a powerful transformation, and so the Irishman remains a phenomenon more than a leader. If our age has a dominant spiritual figure, then it is Dostoevsky. His power over the souls of young people is incalculable; it is a genuine fascination; what is feverishly heightened in his novels is the appropriate nourishment for young people—the same thing that Schiller was for them a hundred years ago and even fifty yeas ago—he breaks through social depiction into the absolute, into the religious . Young people of all countries feel that they recognize in his characters their own inwardness—he and no other is heir apparent to the throne of spiritual imperator—and who could challenge him in this—if not someone who died almost a hundred years ago, whose emergence as a spiritual power of the first order, not merely as an artist...

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