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xi Preface I became interested in Hugo von Hofmannsthal in recent years, after working for much of my scholarly life on another twentieth-century writer, Robert Musil. In an unusually creative generation of Austrian novelists, poets, and essayists, Hofmannsthal and Musil were perhaps the most distinguished essayists, but in certain respects my work on Musil had distanced me from Hofmannsthal, in part because Musil was more at home with modern science and technology. And, for the most part, I saw Hofmannsthal, as others did, primarily as a poet and playwright . Indeed, when I was working on Musil, Hofmannsthal’s essays were still not widely known and appreciated. More recently, Hofmannsthal’s appeal to me was that more than any other person he contributed to our understanding of the distinctive ethos of Austrian culture. As I worked on a book about Austrian intellectual history, The Austrian Tradition in German Culture, it became clear to me that countless widely held views of Austrian culture and intellectual life had derived from Hofmannsthal, often with little explicit reference or clarification. In some regards, we may say that Hofmannsthal invented the Austrian tradition, in much the same way that national traditions were invented around the world in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But another dimension of Hofmannsthal ’s work is important to me. He was one of the great German writers of the twentieth century, and he located himself very much in the tradition of German literature, despite his advocacy of what was distinctive in the contribution of Austrians to the broad experience of German-speaking people. He was also concerned with characterizing what was distinctively Austrian, and we might say that “Austria” was the form of his conservatism. Hofmannsthal was more centrally concerned than Musil with rescuing what was of value in the tradition—and conservative in this sense. But at the same time he was very similar to Musil in his commitment to Europe and in his deep sense of irony—qualities that were decisively shaped for both writers by the First World War. Hofmannsthal’s own attempt to come to terms with the challenges of life in the modern world has a significance that goes beyond the fate of the Habsburg Monarchy and belongs to modern European literature and culture more broadly. I began this translation edition while I was still at the University of California , San Diego, and I want to thank UCSD’s Committee on Research for their support for my work. Since I came to Oregon State University in the fall of 2008, I have benefited from the generous support of the Horning Endowment in the xii Humanities. Several of my friends in German and Comparative Literature encouraged me to undertake this project at the outset: Burton Pike, KatherineArens, Regina Kecht, Michael Heim, and Cynthia Walk. In the early stages of my translating , three friends were especially helpful with their comments on the opening essay: Kristin Rebien, Joe Busby, and Don Wallace. Three native speakers of German worked for me as research assistants at different stages in the project: Anne Schenderlein, Thomas Koenig, and Dieter Manderscheid (himself a professional translator) offered helpful perspectives on particularly opaque passages in Hofmannsthal’s German. Kara Ritzheimer and Kristin Rebien both provided thoughtful, provocative readings of my introduction, alerting me to the perspectives of scholars in nearby fields. I also want to thank my editor, Gary Cohen, and the two readers for Purdue University Press: Frank Trommler and an anonymous reader. I especially want to thank Mason Tattersall, whose decision to leave the University of British Columbia to complete his doctorate with me in Corvallis contributed so much to my own experience at Oregon State University and to my work on Hofmannsthal. It has been a pleasure to have him as my research assistant while I was working on this project, and I have appreciated his thoughtful insights and wise editing. I have benefited from all of this counsel, but here, more than in any work, the mistakes are entirely mine. I dedicate this book to the two teachers who guided me so wisely in the early stages of learning German. —David S. Luft August 2010 Corvallis ...

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