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Austrian Intellectual History before the Liberal Era: Grillparzer, Stifter, and Bolzano

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 April 2010

David S. Luft
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Extract

In 1960, Robert A. Kann pointed out in A Study in Austrian Intellectual History: From Late Baroque to Romanticism that “[h]istorians of the future will still have to meet the challenging task of writing the comprehensive German-Austrian intellectual history.” The value of the project Kann called for is generally acknowledged, but there is no clear agreement in the field about what a survey of German-Austrian intellectual history should look like. In 2007, I argued in an article for The Austrian History Yearbook that the scope of Austrian intellectual history still needs to be circumscribed and characterized adequately—geographically, linguistically, and comparatively. Rather than concentrating on Vienna or extending the field to the whole of the Habsburg monarchy, including Hungary and Galicia, I proposed that we concentrate our approach to this question on the historic core of the Austrian state: the Austrian and Bohemian Crownlands, a unity from at least 1749 to 1918. This was the region where state-building, centralization, and reform were most coherently pursued in the century after 1749, when the German language was dominant in education and public life. I contrasted this view to the disembodied approach to the German intellectual life of the entire Habsburg monarchy, which relies on conventions that were developed for dynastic and diplomatic history, conventions that also work quite well for economic history or even for cultural history, neither of which is so directly dependent on language. The region I have in mind is the southeastern part of the German Confederation that was included in the Frankfurt Parliament in 1848 but excluded from Bismarck's Germany in 1866. The very existence of this region, let alone its long and rich history since the Middle Ages, often gets lost in political narratives of German nationalism and the Habsburg monarchy (Figure 1).

Type
Twenty-Fifth Annual Robert A. Kann Memorial Lecture
Information
Austrian History Yearbook , Volume 41 , April 2010 , pp. 1 - 10
Copyright
Copyright © Center for Austrian Studies, University of Minnesota 2010

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References

1 Kann, Robert A., A Study in Austrian Intellectual History: From Late Baroque to Romanticism (New York, 1960), 341Google Scholar.

2 Luft, David S., “Austrian Intellectual History and Bohemia,” The Austrian History Yearbook 38 (2007):108–21CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Map here of Central Europe, 1871.

3 See Zeman, Herbert, ed., Vorwort, Literaturgeschichte Österreichs, Akademische Druck- u. Verlagsanstalt (Graz, 1996)Google Scholar. Zeman explains that the volume's authors will follow the long-standing convention of allowing “Austria” and “Austrian” to have a variety of meanings over the centuries, beginning with the little Austria of the Babenbergs and the Habsburgs, moving to the crowns of 1526, and finally to little Austria since 1918. This means that “Austria” does not refer to something continuous and specific from a linguistic or social perspective. This whole frame of reference makes it difficult to locate a German-Austrian intellectual history in a historical world.

4 See also Kann, Robert A., History of the Habsburg Empire 1526–1918 (Berkeley, 1974), 578Google Scholar. Kann writes: “Regarding intellectual history in the early nineteenth century … [and the following period after 1867] … a comprehensive, full impartial presentation of the subject is still needed.”

5 See Meinecke, Friedrich, The Age of German Liberation, 1795–1815, trans. Paret, Peter and Fischer, Helmuth (Berkeley, 1977)Google Scholar. This period after 1795 draws attention to the generation of the 1790s—to romanticism and to idealism after Kant. Austrians sometimes overlook or understate the influence of Kant in Austria.

6 Gottfried Wilhelm Freiherr von Leibniz, Discourse on Metaphysics (1710), trans. George Montgomery and rev. Chandler, Albert R. in The Rationalists, ed. (Garden City, NY, 1960), 412Google Scholar. The Austrian tradition in philosophy emphasized from the outset the objective reality of God's world. See Bauer, Roger, La réalité royaume de Dieu: Études sur l'originalté du théâre viennois dans la première moitié du XIXe siècle (Munich, 1965)Google Scholar; Bauer, Roger, Idealismus und seine Gegner in Österreich, Carl Winter Universitätsverlag (Heidelberg, 1966)Google Scholar.

7 See Johnston, William M., The Austrian Mind: An Intellectual and Social History 1848–1938 (Berkeley, 1972)Google Scholar, part 4 on Bohemian Reform Catholicism and the impact of Leibniz on Bohemian philosophy, 279 and passim. Johnston calls Leibniz “the progenitor of Austrian philosophy” (274). On the role of science in Austria during the Baroque period, see Hellyer, Marcus, Catholic Physics: Jesuit Natural Philosophy in Early Modern Germany (Notre Dame, 2005)Google Scholar. For a thoughtful discussion of the Enlightenment in the Habsburg monarchy as a whole, see Evans, R. J. W., “The Origins of the Enlightenment in the Habsburg Lands” and “Culture and Authority in Central Europe, 1683–1806,” in Austria, Hungary, and the Habsburgs: Central Europe c. 1683–1867 (Oxford, 2006), 36–74Google Scholar.

8 Kürnberger, Ferdinand, Literarischen Herzensachen: Reflexionen und Kritiken (Vienna, 1877), 284Google Scholar.

9 Grillparzer, Franz, Sämtliche Werke: Ausgewählte Brief, Gespräche, Berichte, 4 vols. (Munich, 1960–1965), 1:504Google Scholar. See also Franz Grillparzer, Sämtliche Werke, 3:284: “To hell with theories.”

10 “At the same time, it [Stifter's Indian Summer] constitutes, along with Grillparzer's most important creations—among them his still unknown diaries, which are full of substance like a mine—the strongest gift of Austria to Germany.” See von Hofmannsthal, Hugo, Reden und Aufsätze II, Gesammelte Werke, ed. Schoeller, Bernd and Hirsch, Rudolf (Frankfurt, 1979), 220Google Scholar.

11 In 1990, Günther Nenning presented Grillparzer somewhat provocatively as “the undiscovered hero of postmodernism.” See Roe, Ian F., Franz Grillparzer: A Century of Criticism (Columbia, SC, 1995), 126Google Scholar.

12 Roe, Franz Grillparzer, 5 and passim.

13 On Austrian literature, see Franz Grillparzer, Sämtliche Werke, 3:809–11.

14 Nietzsche, Friedrich, Untimely Meditations, ed. Breazeale, Daniel, trans. Hollingdale, R. J. (Cambridge, UK, 1997), 20CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Nietzsche admired Stifter as well.

15 Grillparzer, Sämtliche Werke, 1:500.

16 See Lorenz, Dagmar C. G., Grillparzer: Dichter des sozialen Konflikts (Vienna, 1986)Google Scholar and Politzer, Heinz, Grillparzer oder Das abgründige Biedermeier (Vienna, 1972)Google Scholar.

17 Roe, Franz Grillparzer, 18. Wiese's comment was from 1948.

18 Cowen, Roy C., “The History of a Neglected Masterpiece: Der arme Spielmann,” in Grillparzer's Der arme Spielmann: New Directions in Criticism, ed. Bernd, Clifford Albrecht (Columbia, SC, 1988), 9Google Scholar.

19 In his “Grillparzer's Political Legacy,” Hofmannsthal brought out an important picture of the Austrian literary tradition as embodied in Grillparzer. “The Slavic Bohemians and Moravians stood as close to his innermost temperament, to the life of his life, to his imagination, as did the Styrians or the Tyroleans. . . . Schiller's dramas still take place in all the dominant countries, Grillparzer's all really take place in Austria. The Greek dramas have their setting in nowhere; in them is his homeland in timelessly idealized costumes. Of Grillparzer's other plays, four are set in Bohemia and the hereditary lands, one in Spain, which in a certain sense belongs to Austrian history, one in Hungary.” Hofmannsthal, “Grillparzers politisches Vermächtnis,” in Reden und Aufsätze II, 409–10.

20 Palacký, Franz, Geschichte von Böhmen: grösstentheils nach Urkunden und Handschriften, 5 vols. (Prague, 1844–1867)Google Scholar.

21 Greiner, Ulrich, “Denken wie der Wald,” Die Zeit, 20 October 2005, 60Google Scholar.

22 See Dobrovsky, Joseph, Geschichte der böhmischen Sprache (Prague, 1791, 1792, and 1818)Google Scholar.

23 Stifter, Adalbert, Bunte Steine, Späte Erzählungen, ed. Stefel, Max (Augsburg, 1960), 6Google Scholar.

24 See Greiner, “Denken wie der Wald,” 61: “Denken wie der Wald—das ist Stifters zentraler Gedanke. Die Natur als unser Lehrmeister, als ästhetisches Vorbild, so wie er in seinem ‘Sanften Gesetz’ formuliert hat.” Greiner points out that thinking like the forest is not merely reassuring, but also contains a deeper problem: the force and brutality of nature. Greiner also points out that nature slows us down and inspires meditative power.

25 Nietzsche's model of an ideal history might have described Stifter. See “On the uses and disadvantages of history for life,” in Untimely Meditations, 91: “A historiography could be imagined which had in it not a drop of common empirical truth and yet could lay claim to the highest degree of objectivity. Indeed Grillparzer ventures to declare: ‘What is history but the way in which the spirit of man apprehends events impenetrable to him; unites things when God alone knows whether they belong together; substitutes something comprehensible for what is incomprehensible.’ ” This passage almost seems to invoke Stifter's Witiko.

26 “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 treu angeeignet warden, dass Dichter und Leser in der Luft jener vergangen Zeiten atmen und die Gegenwart für sie nicht ist, dies allein gibt Wahrheit. Aber zu dem is nicht das historische Wissen allein genug.” Quoted by Krökel, Fritz in the forward to Witiko (Munich, 1986), 885Google Scholar.

27 Swales, Martin and Swales, Erika, Adalbert Stifter: A Critical Study (Cambridge, UK, 1984), 29Google Scholar.

28 Winter, Eduard, Die sozial- und ethnoethik Bernard Bolzanos (Vienna, 1977), 10,15Google Scholar.

29 “Bernard Bolzano,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/bolzano (accessed 13 December 2009). There is very little on Bolzano in English, and this online article is an excellent introduction to his life and work.

30 One key to understanding the origins of the analytic and phenomenological traditions is Bolzano's establishment of a position independent of Kant, out of which arguably both of these traditions arose. See Bolzano, Bernard, Theory of Science, abridged, trans. and ed. George, Rolf (Berkeley, 1972)Google Scholar.

31 Haller, Rudolf, “Bolzano und die Österreichische Philosophie,” Bernard Bolzano und die Politik, ed. Rumpler, Helmut (Vienna, 2000), 355Google Scholar.

32 Bauer, Idealismus und seine Gegner in Österreich, 71–76.

33 See, for example, Haller, Rudolf, Studien zur österreichischen Philosophie: Variationen über ein Thema (Amsterdam, 1979)Google Scholar and Questions on Wittgenstein (London, 1988); Smith, Barry, Austrian Philosophy: The Legacy of Franz Brentano (Chicago, 1996)Google Scholar; Nyíri, J., Rande, AmEuropas: Studien zur österreich-ungarischen Philosophiegeschichte (Vienna, 1988)Google Scholar. Whereas historians of philosophy often emphasize types of philosophy and aim for sharp contrasts and definitions, I am mainly concerned with the historian's work of locating intellectual developments in time and space—of seeing this historical space. Sharply defined terms have, of course, heuristic and professional value; but when they are applied to regions and national traditions, they inevitably reduce complexity, often leaving out quite important ways of thinking.

34 See Dummett, Michael, Origins of Analytic Philosophy (Cambridge, MA, 1994)Google Scholar.

35 Seigel, Jerrold, The Idea of the Self: Thought and Experience in Western Europe since the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, UK, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

36 Regarding our privileging of Western Europe in both political and intellectual history, see Chakrabarty, Dipesh, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, 2000)Google Scholar.

37 Kann, Robert A., Multinational Empire: Nationalism and National Reform in the Habsburg Monarchy, 1848–1918, 2 vols., 2nd ed. (New York, 1964)Google Scholar.