In hisStudy inAustrianIntellectualHistory, Robert Kann unobtrusively posed a pivotal question that continues to engage practitioners of intellectual history. Whose culture, he asked, are we talking about when we generalize about the literary, artistic, and musical products of an age? His unhesitating answer, “the culture of the select few,” reflected the dominant view of intellectual historians in 1960, the year when the book was first published. Since then, our sense of what constitutes historical relevance has expanded, and the automatic equation of culture with social and intellectual elites has eroded but has by no means disappeared.

Haydn's two great oratorios, The Creation and The Seasons (Die Schöpfung and Die Jahreszeiten) stand as monuments—on either side of the year 1800—to the Enlightenment and to the Austrian Enlightenment in particular. This is not to claim that they have no connection with what would often be considered more “progressive”—broadly speaking, romantic—tendencies. However, like Haydn himself, they are works that, if a choice must be made, one would place firmly in the eighteenth century, “long” or otherwise. The age of musical classicism was far from dead by 1800, likewise the “Age of Enlightenment.” It is quite true that one witnesses in both the emergence of distinct national, even “nationalist,” tendencies. Yet these intimately connected “ages” remain essentially cosmopolitan, especially in the sphere of intellectual history and “high” culture. Haydn's oratorios not only draw on Austrian tradition; equally important, they are also shaped by broader influence, especially the earlier English Enlightenment, in which the texts of both works have their origins. The following essay considers the theology of The Creation with reference to this background and, to a certain extent, also attempts the reverse, namely, to consider the Austrian Enlightenment in the light of a work more central to its concerns than might have been expected.

In the age of modern nationalisms, the first attempt that Poles made to construct a national landscape came in the last third of the nineteenth century. The stateless Poles, subjects of three different imperial powers, somehow managed to transform a remote mountain borderland along the internal Austro-Hungarian frontier into a recognizable and important national icon. While many attempts have been made to transform the natural environment into a national environment since then, this accomplishment helped to make the Carpathian Mountains, and in particular a section of them known as the Tatra Mountains, one of the most recognizable parts of “Poland,” however it is defined.

Ifhigh culture, asTheodorAdornoonce proposed, promises a reality that does not exist, why, at the fin de siècle, did it hold such great attraction for Central Europe's populist politicians who were most attuned to the realities of everyday life? The answer, at least for imperial Austria, is that those politicians believed high culture to possess an integrative social function, which forced them to reconcile notions of “high” culture with “mass” culture. This was particularly true in Vienna, where the city's public performance venues for art, music, stage theater, and visual art stood as monuments to the values that the liberal middle classes had enshrined in the 1867 Constitution. A literate knowledge of this cultural system—its canon of symphonic music; the literature of tragedy, drama, and farce; and classical and contemporary genres of painting—was essential for civic participation in an era of liberal political and cultural hegemony. This article examines one cultural association that attempted to exploit the interaction between German high culture and two spheres, which are commonly thought to stand at odds with elite, high culture: popular culture and mass politics. Rather than a simple, cultural divide, this relationship created a contested “terrain of political and social conflict” in the decades preceding World War I. This terrain was of enormous consequence for Viennese of every social class.

Veni, CreatorSpiritus! From the triumphant chorus of Gustav Mahler's Eighth Symphony to the muse-choir adorning Gustav Klimt's Beethoven Frieze, the Vienna Moderns celebrated the inspirational powers of the feminine. Muses, or the spiritual forces guiding acts of artistic and literary creation, have long been associated with the creative output of the Vienna Moderns, the groups and individuals responsible for the development of modernism in the arts and literature in Vienna from 1890 to 1910. These inspiring women—commonly personified as femmes fatales, femmes fragiles, and femmes savantes—played a crucial role in bringing the art, architecture, and writing of Viennese Modernism to fruition.

For almost a century now, Tomáš Masaryk has been one of the most famous Czechs in world history. He was nominated at least twice for a Nobel Prize and lionized by noteworthies across the globe. However, that esteem paled when compared to the adoration expressed for him at home. During and after his lifetime, Masaryk was presented as the embodiment of moral rectitude, cosmopolitan erudition, and democratic egalitarianism. By the end of the 1930s, Masaryk's association with the state he had helped found was impressively total. But it was not accidental. Many different groups and factors collaborated to position Masaryk as the only man capable of superseding Czechoslovakia's ethnic and political divisions, a devoted democrat to lead Europe's self-styled ideal new democracy.

From the late eighteenth century until the present, suicide has become a fundamental issue for professional Europeans' understanding of themselves and especially of the supposed health of their societies. From the second half of the eighteenth century onward, medical doctors, moral statisticians, sociologists, psychologists, and other professionally trained and university-educated experts produced increasing numbers of studies on suicide. Prior to 1750, suicide had been a popular theme for commentary from moralists, philosophers, and, above all, theologians and clerics. Of course, these groups of commentators have continued to write on the topic through the modern period, but the emergence of doctors, sociologists, and psychologists, among others, in the debates surrounding suicide has been a hallmark of the modern era. Claiming to offer complete or partial answers to the issue and causes of suicide, these professional groups increasingly asserted their own pivotal roles in analyzing the problems of European societies. Suicide was supposedly a modern problem that required expert commentary and intervention.

Political developments between 1933 and 1934 placed Austrian cinema under more governmental control than at any time since World War I. In 1934 the new chancellor, Engelbert Dollfuss, attempted to counter a looming civil war and the growing power of the Austrian National Socialists by disbanding the embattled parliament and instituting a nonparty clerico-authoritarian corporate state, often referred to as Austrofascist. Although Dollfuss's Fatherland Front was intended to be a national unity movement above party politics, it was, in fact, led by the conservative, Catholic-oriented Christian Social Party. Subsequent laws, which outlawed all political parties, may have temporarily silenced the National Socialists, but they also alienated a substantial portion of Austria's electorate that had supported the Social Democrats.