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Austrian Intellectual History and Bohemia

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 January 2010

David S. Luft
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Extract

This is an essay about the cultural, political, and geographical location of Austrian intellectual history and the special place of Bohemia and Moravia in that history. A great deal has been written about the multinational and supranational quality of Austrian culture and intellectual life. In practice, however, the Austria referred to in such arguments is usually the Habsburg monarchy of the two generations before World War I. Austrian intellectual history has generally been either strongly centered in Vienna or oriented to a very broad concept of Austria that includes the monarchy as a whole in the late nineteenth century. What is lost between the metropolis and the vast monarchy of many peoples is the centuries-long relationship between Austrian and Bohemia that was the basis for Austrian intellectual life in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. I argue here that we should think of Bohemia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as part of Austrian intellectual history in a way that other regions and historic lands in the Habsburg monarchy were not.

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Articles
Information
Austrian History Yearbook , Volume 38 , January 2007 , pp. 108 - 121
Copyright
Copyright © Center for Austrian Studies, University of Minnesota 2007

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References

1 Bohemia and Moravia are often referred to together as Bohemia, and I will follow that convention here for case of reference. The Kingdom of Bohemia included Bohemia proper, Moravia, and Silesia—most of which was lost to Prussia in the 1740s. Bohemia and Moravia were the principal lands of the Crown of St. Wenceslaus and constituted roughly the area of today's Czech Republic. See Agnew, Hugh LeCaine. The Czechs and the Lands of the Bohemia Crown (Stanford, 2004).Google Scholar

2 The question of what constitutes Austria for the purposes of intellectual history is rarely explicitly addressed. Many intellectual histories have concentrated simply on Vienna, in which was the question of the geographical limits of Austrian intellectual history need not arise. See, for example, Schorske, Carl E., Fin-de-siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (New York, 1980)Google Scholar; and Luft, David S., Eros and Inwardness in Vienna: Weininger, Musil, Doderer (Chicago, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a comparative approach to Vienna and Budapest, see Hanak, Péter, The Garden and the Workshop: Essays on the Cultural History of Vienna and Budapest (Princeton, 1998).Google Scholar

3 Hobsbawm, Eric, “Has History Made Progress?” in Hobsbawm, . On History (New York, 1997), 69.Google Scholar

4 Ulrich Greiner points to the delightful anomaly that half of German literature in the twentieth century came from Austria. See Greiner, Ulrich. Der Tod des Machsommers (Munich, 1979), 11Google Scholar. See also Franz Blei's playful remark about Robert Musil and Hermann Broch: “Strange, that it should be two Viennese writers who have written the fundamentally different novels, from which we will date a new epoch of the German novel.” Blei, , “Herman Broch und seine Romantrilogie ‘Die Schlafwandler’”, in Zwischen Orpheus und Don Juan, ed. Schönwiese, Ernst (Graz, 1965), 88.Google Scholar

5 See Arens, Katherine, “For Want of a Word…: The Case for Germanophone,” Unterrichtspraxis/Teaching German 32, no. 2 (1999): 130–42.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6 Dahrendorf, Ralf, Society and Democracy in Germany (New York, 1969), 267.Google Scholar

7 Seymour M. Lipset defines intellectuals as “those who create, distribute, and apply culture, that is, the symbolic world of man, including art, science, and religion.” See Lipset, , Political Man: The Social of Politics (Garden City, 1960), 311.Google Scholar

8 Indeed, for Austria, cultural historians have been especially concerned with the history of music, architecture, and the visual arts.

9 See, for example, Zeman, Herbert, ed., Literaturgeschichte Österreichs (Graz, 1996)Google Scholar; Benedikt, Michael et al. , eds., Verdrängter Humanismus—verzögerte Aufklärung: Philosophie in Österreich, 4 vols. (Vienna, 1992)Google Scholar; Acham, Karl, ed., Geschichte der österreichischen Humanwissenschaften, 6 vols. (Vienna, 1999–).Google Scholar

10 von Andrian-Werburg, Victor Freiherr, Oesterreich und dessen Zukunft (Hamburg, 1843), 6–7Google Scholar. See Kann, Robert A.. The Multinational Empire: Nationalism and Reform in the Habsburg Monarchy 1848–1918, 2 vols. (New York, 1950), 1:chapter 1.Google Scholar

11 For an example of an explicitly German-Austrian literary history of the Dual Monarchy, see Willibald, Johann, Zeidler, Jakob, and Castle, Eduard, eds., Deutsch-Österreichische Literaturgeschichte: Ein Handbuch zur Geschichte der deutschen Dichtung in Österreich-Ungarn, 4 vols. (Vienna, 1937).Google Scholar

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13 Kann, The Multinational Empire, 1:28.

14 Kann, , A History of the Habsburg Empire, 1526–1918 (Berkeley, 1980).Google Scholar

15 See Luft, David S., “Cultural Memory and Intellectual History: Locating Austrian Literature,” in Austrian Literature: Gender, History, and Memory, ed. Regina Kecht, Studies in Twenty-First Century Literature 1 (Summer 2007): 25–45.Google Scholar

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17 This word was often used in discussions of Austrian literature in the early twentieth century.

18 This region was the historical core of German-speaking culture and social life in the Habsburg monarchy. Here I emphasize region and language, although a fuller account would, of course, need to say more about class, gender, and religious difference in Austrian intellectual history.

19 See Dickson, P. G. M., Finance and Government under Maria Theresia 1740–1780, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1987), 1:20–22Google Scholar. In the eighteenth century, “the Austrian lands and those of the Bohemian Crown were spoken of as ‘the Hereditary Lands's (die Erbländer), or, again confusingly, ‘the German Hereditary lands.’” Dickson refers to these lands together as ”the central lands of the Monarchy.”

20 Slovenia is less problematic for the question of locating Austria, since it was part of Austria from the Middle Ages to the end of World War I, and the Slovene language continued to play a significant role in the intellectual and political life of the Austrian republics. Although Slovenia was unambiguously part of Austria and the original hereditary lands, it was less important than Bohemia for nineteenth-century Austrian intellectual life.

21 Allmayer-Beck, Johann Christoph, Der Konservatismus in Österreich (Munich, 1959), 13.Google Scholar

22 See Cohen, Gary B., The Politics of Ethnic Survival: Germans in Prague, 1861–1914 (Princeton, 1981)Google Scholar; and Judson, Pieter, Exclusive Revolutionaries: Liberal Politics, Social Experience, and National Identity in the Austrian Empire (Ann Arbor, 1996)Google Scholar. My concern in the present discussion is not whether German speakers in Prague and Bohemia had developed a conscious ethnic identity in the early nineteenth century. They were rather, as Cohen argues, “Bohemians and Austrians not Germans”. It was only beginning in 1848 that “the German-speaking middle and upper strata transformed themselves from Bohemians to Germans.” Ibid., 26.

23 Galicia is a more problematic periphery, but it was geographically, institutionally, and historically more separate from the German Crownlands than Bohemia was—and much closer to the context to Polish culture than to German or Austrian culture. See, for example, Cohen, Gary B., Education and Middle Class Society in Imperial Austria: 1948–1918 (West Lafayette, 1996), 8Google Scholar. Cohen's argument about education distinguishes Hungary and Galicia in terms of the social and economic basis for intellectual life in the late nineteenth century: “In analyzing the social functions of advanced education and the recruitment of the educated elites during the second half of the nineteenth century, there are good reasons to treat the Austrian half of the Habsburg Monarchy separately from Hungary and, within Austria, to focus primarily on the Alpine and Bohemian lands.”

24 See Johnston, William M., The Austrian Mind: An Intellectual and Social History (Berkeley, 1972), 269Google Scholar. Johnston emphasized the “astonishing” number of intellectuals from Bohemia and Moravia who settled in Vienna, including Viktor Adler, Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, Sigmund Freud, Edmund Hussers, Hans Kelsen, Karl Kraus, Adolf Loos, Gustav Mahler, Josef Popper-Lynkeus, Joseph Schumpeter, Bertha von Suttner, and Robert Zimmermann. Ibid..

25 Michael Benedikt, for example, identifies Austria with the House of Austria for the purposes of the history of philosophy. Benedikt, Michael, ed. Wilhelm Baum, Reinhold Knoll, co-editors, Verdrängter Humanismus—Verzögerte Aufklärung, Österreichische Philosophie zur Zeit der Revolution und Restauration (1750–1820) (Vienna, 1992), 2:10.Google Scholar

26 Magris, Claudio, Der habsburgische Mythos in der österreichischen Literatur (Salzburg, 1966)Google Scholar. Magris's point was not that the Habsburgs had realized the ideal that interwar writers had in mind.

27 Woolf, Virginia, A Room of One's Own (New York, 1929; San Diego, 1989), 41Google Scholar. The citation is to the 1989 edition.

28 The distinction between core and periphery is most applicable to the context of imperial administration. But even this administration was not uniform throughout the empire, except perhaps briefly in the 1850s.

29 See Rozenblit, Marsha, Reconstructing National Identity: The Jews of Habsburg Austria during World War I (Oxford, 2001)Google Scholar; and Aschheim, Steven, Brothers and Strangers: The East European Jews in German Jewish Consciousness, 1800–1923 (Madison, 1982).Google Scholar

30 Urbanitsch, Peter, “Pluralist Myth and Nationalist Realities: The Dynastic Myth of the Habsburg Monarchy—A Futile Exercise in the Creation of Identity?” Austrian History Yearbook 35 (2004): 101–41.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

31 Georg Lukács, for example, belongs primarily to Hungarian rather than an Austrian context. For the period of the Dual Monarchy, Hungarian thought may actually have had more affinities with Germany than with Austria, and there is perhaps a study to be done on the Hungarian tradition in German culture. On the distinctiveness of intellectual life in Budapest, see Gluck, Mary, Georg Lukács and His Generation 1900–1918 (Cambridge, MA, 1985), which concentrates mainly on sources in Hungarian.Google Scholar

32 Spector, Scott, Prague Territories: National Conflict and Cultural Innovation in Franz Kafka's Fin de Siècle (Berkeley, 2000), 37.Google Scholar

33 Stifter, Adalbert, Witiko: Roman, afterward by Fritz Krökel (Munich, 2001)Google Scholar. This edition of Stifter's historical epic about the twelfth century follows the first edition of 1865–67 with notes by Karl Pörnbacher.

34 King, Jeremy, Budweisers into Czechs and Germans: A Local History of Bohemian Politics, 1848–1948 (Princeton, 2002)Google Scholar. The term Habsburg was sometimes used in the nineteenth century to describe what was not merely Czech national or German national, but it referred to Bohemia in a difference sense than it referred to Hungary. Budweisers actually called their politics Austrian.

35 Palacký, FranzGeschichte von Böhmen: grösstentheils nach Urkunden und Handschriften, 5 vols. (Prague, 1844–67)Google Scholar. See also Dobrowsky, Joseph, Geschichte der böhmischen Sprache und älteren Literatur (Prague, 1818)Google Scholar. Dobrowsky referred to the early history of the Czech language as “deutschen und slawonischen (eigentlich böhmischen).” Ibid., 13. The modern Czech language and the modern conception of Czech nationalism grew to a large extent out of the modern German culture of the Enlightenment. My argument sets out from the cosmopolitan German culture that developed in the Enlightenment, which was not tied to a single nation-state. For my purposes, a writer—even a Czech nationalist—belongs to German culture if s/he writes in German. See Sayer, Derek, The Coasts of Bohemia: A Czech History (Princeton, 1998), 56–62Google Scholar. Sayer emphasizes the attempts of Bolzano (1781–1848) to overcome linguistic difference in Bohemia and how unclear even patriots were in the early nineteenth century about what constituted the nation. On the complex evolution of the relationship between Germans and Czechs in Bohemia and Moravia, see Křen, Jan, Die Konfliktgemeinschaft Tschechen und Deutsche 1780–1918, trans. Heumos, Peter (Munich, 1996).Google Scholar

36 In Witiko Stifter achieved what he had aimed at: “Der Roman hat eine wissenschaftliche Seite, die von vornherein in keines Menschen Seele liegt, sondern die er sich erwerben muss, das Geschichtliche. Dies muss so true angeeignet werden, dass Dichter and Leser in der Luft jener vergnagen Zeiten atmen und die Gegenwart für sie nicht ist, dies allein gibt Wahrheit. Aber zu dem is nicht das historische Wissen allein gunug.” This passage is cited by Krökel in the afterward to his Witiko edition, 885.

37 Heer was a European intellectual historian who studied German history with Heinrich Ritter von Srbik and Otto Brunner. Part of Heer's appeal is that he bagan to develop an alternative master narrative of the history of Central Europe. See Der Kampf um die österreichische Identität (Vienna, 1981)Google Scholar. For a more detailed discussion of this theme, see Heer, Friedrich, Die dritte Kraft: Der europäische Humanismus zwischen den Fronten des konfessionellen Zeitalters (Frankfurt am Main, 1959).Google Scholar

38 Our best estimates today suggest that Prague had passed Vienna in number of Czech speakers by 1900, but the large number of Viennese families from Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia makes this very difficult to specify with precision. “Between 1856 and 1910 about a quarter of all the inhabitants of Vienna came immediately from the lands of the Bohemian crown [Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia] a further quarter shared these origins indirectly through their parents, and even greater percentage through their ancestors” See Glettler, Monika, Die Wiener Tschechen um 1900: Strukturanalyse einer nationalen Minderheit in der Großstad (Vienna, 1972), 32–33.Google Scholar

39 Heer, Friedrich, Land im Strom der Zeit: Österreich gestern, heute, morgen (Vienna, 1958), 61–63Google Scholar, passim. Lenau is the lone Hungarian in this list, although Lenau chose to spend his adult life in Swabia—and not in Austria or Hungary.

40 In Basil, Otto, Eisenreich, Herbert, and Ivask, Ivar, Das grosse Erbe: Aufsätze zur Österreichischen Literatur (Graz, 1962), 5–59.Google Scholar

41 Herbert Eisenreich, “Das schöpferische Misstrauen oder ist österreichs Literatur eine österreichische Literatur?” in Basil et al., Das grosse Erbe, 94–126.

42 See, for example, Smith, Barry, Austrian Philosophy: The Legacy of Franz Brentano (Chicago, 1996)Google Scholar; Haller, Rudolf, Studien zur österreichischen Philosophie: Variationen über ein Thema (Amsterdam, 1979)Google Scholar; Haller, , Questions on Wittgenstein (London, 1988)Google Scholar; Nyíri, J., Am Rande Europas: Studien zur österreichisch-ungarischen Philosophiegeschichte (Vienna, 1988)Google Scholar; and Grassl, Wolfgang and Smith, Barry, eds., Austrian Economics: Historical and Philosophical Background (London, 1986).Google Scholar

43 Smith, Austrian Philosophy, 3.

44 See, for example Hárs, Endre, Müller-Funk, Wolfgang, and Orosz, Magdolna, eds., Verflechtungsfiguren: Intertextualitäl und Intermedialität in der Kultur Österreich-Ungarns (Frankfurt am Main, 2003).Google Scholar

45 By the end of the monarchy, the state turned out to be both surprisingly local and difficult to locate. See Healy, Maureen, Vienna and the Fall of the Habsburg Empire: Total War and Everyday Life in World War I (Cambridge, 2004)Google Scholar. Healy is right to emphasize Prague's separateness from Vienna as a cultural and intellectual center during World War I, but the situation was more complex earlier.