Carl E.

Schorske

Fin-de-Sicle Vienna

Cultural Community
In London, Paris, or Berlin the intellectuals in the various branches of high culture, whether academic or aesthetic, journalistic or literary, political or intellectual, scarcely knew each other. They lived in relatively segregated professional communities. In Vienna, by contrast, until about 1900, the cohesiveness of the whole elite was strong. The salon and the caf retained their vitality as institutions where intellectuals of different kinds shared ideas and values with each other and still mingled with a business and professional elite proud of its general education and artistic culture. -- page xxvii

The Rational Man of Liberalism

Traditional liberal culture had centered upon rational man, whose scientific domination of nature and whose moral control of himself were expected to create the good society. -- page 4

Austrian Liberalism
Socially, they [the liberals] believed that the aristocratic class, having been above throughout most of history, was either being liberalized or sinking into a harmless, ornamental hedonism. The principles and programs which made up the liberal creedc were designed to supersede systematically those of the feudals, as the aristocrats were pejoratively called. Constitutional monarchy would replace aristocratic absolutism,; parliamentary centralism, aristocratic federalism. Since would replace religion. [German c ulture would raise the subject peoples to enlightenment]. Finally, laissezfaire would break the arbitrary rule of privilege in the economic sphere and make merit, rather than privilege or charity, the basis of economic reward. -- page 117

Challenges to Liberalism
New social groups raised claims to political participation: the peasantry, the urban artisans and workers, and the Slavic peoples. In the 1880s these groups formed mass parties to challenge the liberal hegemony -- the anti-Semitic Christian Socials and Pan-Germans, Socialists, and Slavic nationalists. Their success was rapid -- page 5

Liberal Values
The moral and scientific culture of Viennas haute bourgeoisie was intellectually committed to the rule of the mind over the body and to latter-day Voltairism: to social progress through science, education, and hard work. -- page 6

Gefhlskultur
More significant is the evolution of the aesthetic culture of the educated bourgeoisie after the mid-century, for out of it grew the peculiar receptivity of a whole class to the life of art, and, concomitantly at the individual level, a sensitivity to psychic states. By the beginning of our century, the usual moralistic culture of the European bourgeoisie was in Austria both overlaid and undermined by an amoral Gefhlskultur. -- page 7

THE FEUILLETON
The feuilleton writer, an artist in vignettes, worked with those discreet details and episodes so appealing to the nineteenth centurys taste for the concrete. But he sought to endow his material with color drawn from his imagination. The subjective response of the reporter or critic to an experience, his feeling-tone, acquired clear primacy over the matter of his discourse. To render a state of feeling became the mode of formulating a judgement.. -age 9 Cf. Herb Caen, especially the Sunday pieces

Narcissism
The feuilletonist tended to transform objective analysis of the world into subjective cultivation of personal feelings. He conceived of the world as a random succession of stimulti to the sensibilities, not as a scene of action. The feuilletonist exemplified the cultural type to whom he addressed his columns: his characteristics were narcissism and introversion, passive receptivity toward outer reality, and, above all, sensitivity to psychic states. -- page 9 See Altenbergs Little Things, in The Vienna Coffeehouse Wits, pages 126-127

Conscience in the Temple of Narcissus

Art became transformed from an ornament to an essence, from an expression of value to a source of value. The disaster of liberalisms collapse further transmuted the aesthetic heritage into a culture of sensitive nerves, uneasy hedonism, and often outright anxiety. To add to the complexity, the Austrian liberal intelligentsia did not fully abandon the earlier strand in its tradition, the moralistic-scientific culture of law. The affirmation of art and the life of the senses thereby became, in Austrias finest types, admixed with and crippled by guilt. The political sources of anxiety found reinforcement in the individual psyche through the persistent presence of conscience in the temple of Narcissus. -- page 10

Von Hofmannsthal on Das Gleitende

The nature of our epoch is multiplicity and indeterminacy. It can only rest on das Gleitende [the moving, the slipping, the sliding]. Everything fell into parts, the parts again into more parts, and nothing allowed itself to be embraced by concepts any more. -- quoted in Schorske, page 19

Robert Musil on Being Austrian

The Austrian existed only in Hungary, and there as an object of dislike; at home he called himself a national of the kingdoms and lands of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy as represented in the Imperial Council, meaning that he was an Austrian plus a Hungarian minus that Hungarian; and he did this not with enthusiasm but only for the sake of a concept that was repugnant to him, because he could bear the Hungarian as little as they could bear him, which added still another complication to the whole combination. -- The Man Without Qualities,
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