WHEN TRAKL WAS BORN into the German-speaking heartland of the Habsburg Empire in 1887, the world he became a part of was—in a sense that would deeply color his later poetry—already old. The reigning monarch Franz Joseph I had occupied the Austrian throne for almost four decades, while the state's dynastic roots could be traced back as much as nine centuries. By the time of the poet's death in 1914 at the age of just twenty-seven, the empire had become embroiled in a war that would result in its dissolution four years later, and the creation of a host of new states on its former territory. Its ultimate disintegration was swift by the standard of its own nearly millennial history, but the fall of the empire reflected the much longer-standing failure of successive Habsburg governments to resolve the “nationality question,” that is, to propagate a supranational consciousness strong enough to outweigh the nationalist aspirations and rivalries that had been growing among the empire's many ethnic and linguistic communities for much of the previous century. In a way that would be memorialized by Joseph Roth in his 1934 masterpiece of Habsburg nostalgia Der Radetzskymarsch, the zeitgeist of the empire’s final decades was tinged with an awareness, occasionally erupting into presentiments of impending disaster, of the age and weakness of the established political and cultural order. In a letter of June 1913, Trakl himself chose the epithets “gottlos” and “verflucht” to characterize the still-young twentieth century (HkA, 1/519). Although the poetry itself is never overtly political, this decadent undercurrent is one aspect of what Jakobson calls the “situation” that chimes unmistakably with the main theme of Trakl's work: its almost obsessive preoccupation with parallel processes of decay in the natural and human worlds.

If frailty and vulnerability are the features that stand out in a wideangled view of the late Habsburg Empire, a closer perspective reveals its major urban centers to have been sites of great intellectual energy and fertility. The capital Vienna in particular, at the time one of the largest cities in the world, became a hub for thinkers, writers, artists, and musicians from across the Empire, giving rise to the cultural flowering known as the Wiener Moderne.