In his satirical poem “Goethe und Hofmannsthal” Karl Kraus (1874–1936) suggested, somewhat misleadingly, that the gap of one century between both poets had been of no stylistic consequences. Thus, Kraus concluded, the reader could not tell one poet from the other. Given their impeccable (read: sterile) poetic form Goethe and Hofmannsthal, Kraus predicted, would in future become even more interchangeable.

It seems, however, that much, perhaps everything, has changed since 1900 — in Vienna and elsewhere. Would anyone nowadays feel tempted to follow Kraus's example and write a poem on Hofmannsthal and Ernst Jandl (1925–2000)? What is left for instance of Hofmannsthal's language in today's poetry? Or are we to ask how much Austrian consciousness was and is present or left, if not lost, in Viennese poetic modernism and postmodernism?

The question of what the year 1900 actually stands for has been the subject of countless intellectual explorations and debates. Some insist on associating this penultimate turn of a century with Vienna and nothing but Vienna, while others wish to de-localize, as it were, this unique blending of Symbolism, Naturalism, the atmosphere of the fin de siècle and early Expressionism. And there are others who would single out one particular non-literary phenomenon that conditioned this period such as the crisis of political Liberalism in Austria around 1900 which resulted in an overall sense of crisis and acute sensitivities amongst (predominantly bourgeois) intellectuals as regards their own position in society.