4 - The Habsburg Empire

Summary

The historiography of central European modernism has been characterized by a set of oppositions that have sometimes appeared to be paradoxical. These contradictions relate to the context of the late Habsburg Empire and (after its dissolution following the First World War) its successor states, which include Austria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and the formerly Habsburg regions absorbed by Poland, Italy, Romania, and the new state of Yugoslavia. On the one hand, scholars have identified Habsburg Europe as the laboratory of many creations and movements that have been considered seminal to modernism in its myriad forms: in literature, in the visual arts, in architecture and design, in music, and in other intellectual spheres from the philosophy of language to psychoanalysis. Modernist literary giants from the Empire include Rainer Maria Rilke, Franz Kafka, Robert Musil, Paul Celan, and many others. These contributions, moreover, have been seen not simply as prime exemplars of modernism but as innovations of a radical type, producing lasting legacies for the twentieth century and beyond. In fact, some critics have claimed the term “modernism” itself, as applied to literature in particular, as an innovation of the Viennese critic Hermann Bahr, although that genesis is a matter of debate.