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Vienna 1900 Revisited: Paradigms and Problems

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 February 2009

Allan Janik
Affiliation:
Research Fellow at Brenner Archives, Innsbruck University.

Extract

The pleasure and honor attached to delivering the Kann Lecture is only outweighed by the responsibility of pursuing the high ideal of scholarship set by Professor Kann. Thus, to deliver the Kann Lecture is an especially daunting task if the challenge is to do justice to the multifarious developments in the field of Austrian cultural history since the appearance of his penetrating Study in Austrian Intellectual History. It will become clear in the course of my lecture that my praise of Kann is more than a pro forma courtesy. However, I should indicate at once that my concern is with his contribution—alas neglected—to the discussion of method in Austrian cultural studies.

Type
Robert A. Kann Memorial Lecture (1995)
Copyright
Copyright © Center for Austrian Studies, University of Minnesota 1997

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References

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

2 Here we might paraphrase Kant and suggest that criticism of sources is blind in the absence of models of explanation that allow us to identify just what is worth researching in the first place, whereas models that are applied without mastery of sources are empty. The systematic study of sources, that is, documentation, yields a discourse for dealing with a particular set of “facts.” However, to consider such research history is to confuse history with chronicle. It is in fact but the philological prolegomenon to history. Models, on the other hand, offer perspectives on those facts that can be seen as relevant to other groups of facts, that is, they are devices for unifying the various levels of discourse that have emerged from the study of sources. However, we often forget that we need models to do any research at all, that is, relatively simple “Vorbilder” of what the results of our study of sources should be like. Nevertheless, the insight that perspectives provide will lack convincing power if they are not developed from a close study of sources into a rich hermeneutic narrative yielding “thick” descriptions of significant facts.

3 Two problems crop up immediately as soon as one mentions “fin-de-siècle Vienna”: what do we mean by “turn-of-the-century,” and what is the relation between Vienna and Austria? “Fin de siècle” can refer to any period from the two to three years before and after 1900 to the whole period from 1867 to 1938. My own preference is for the period roughly from 1890 to 1914 (or 1918). Similarly, “Vienna” can refer to the city, or “Austria,” or eastern Austria. Normally these designations are not problematic. When they become so, the crucial questions are “As opposed to what?” And “For what purpose?”

4 On the notions of “paradigm,” “normal science,” and “revolutionary science,” the locus classicus is Kuhn, Thomas S., The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd ed. (Chicago, 1970)Google Scholar. For critical estimates of Kuhn, see the essays in the volume Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge, ed. Lakatos, Imre and Musgrave, Alan (Cambridge, Eng., 1970)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; cf. Brody, Martin and Janik, Allan, “Paradigms, Politics and Persuasion: Sociological Aspects of Musical Controversy,” in Janik, Style, Politics and the Future of Philosophy (Dordrecht, the Netherlands, 1989), 225–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a fuller account of my views on the problem of method in cultural history, see Janik, , How Not to Interpret a Culture: Essays on the Problem of Method in the Geisteswissenschaften (University of Bergen Philosophy Department Stencil Series, no. 73; Bergen, Norway, 1986).Google ScholarPubMed

5 Anderson, Harriet, Utopian Feminism: Women's Movements in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna (New Haven, Conn., 1992)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Fischer, Lisa, Lina Loos oder wenn die Muse sich selbst küβt (Vienna, 1994)Google Scholar; Oxaal, Ivar, The Jews of Pre-1914 Vienna: Two Working Papers (Hull, Eng., 1981)Google Scholar; Beller, Steven, Vienna and the Jews, 1867–1938: A Cultural History (Cambridge, Eng., 1989)Google Scholar; Rozenblit, Marsha, The Jews of Vienna, 1867–1914: Assimilation and Identity (Albany, N.Y., 1983)Google Scholar; Glettler, Monika, Die Wiener Tschechen um 1900 (Munich, 1972).Google Scholar

6 Vergo, Peter, Art in Vienna, 1898–1918 (London, 1975)Google Scholar; Comini, Alessandra, Egon Schiele's Portraits (Berkeley, 1974)Google Scholar; idem, Gustav Klimt (New York, 1975); Clare, George, Last Waltz in Vienna (London, 1983)Google Scholar; De La Grange, Henry-Louis, Mahler, 3 vols. (Paris, 19791984)Google Scholar; Morton, Frederic, A Nervous Splendor (New York, 1980).Google Scholar

7 For a typical example, see the report of the research project Ambivalenz des Fin de Siècle. Wien-Zagreb, ed. Barbarić, Damir and Benedikt, Michael, research report, Ministry of Science, Research, and Art (Vienna, 1995).Google Scholar

8 Broch, Hermann, Hofmannsthal and His Time, trans. Steinberg, Michael (Chicago, 1984)Google Scholar; Johnston, William, The Austrian Mind: An Intellectual and Social History, 1848–1938 (Berkeley, 1972)Google Scholar; Barea, Ilsa, Vienna: Legend and Reality (New York, 1966)Google Scholar; Kann, , A Study in Austrian Intellectual History.Google Scholar

9 Schorske, Carl E., Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (New York, 1980)Google Scholar. Since most of the French literature on Vienna descends from Schorske, it can be considered as part of the “Schorskean paradigm”; see Pollack, Michael, Vienne 1900: Une identité blessé (Paris, 1986), 10Google Scholar; cf. Le Rider, Jacques, Modernité viennoise et crises de l'identité (Paris, 1989)Google Scholar (the recent symposium on women at the turn of the century, “Wien um 1900. ‘Such-Bewegungen,’” indicates that much of current feminist thinking about Vienna 1900 proceeds from Le Rider). McGrath, William, Dionysian Art and Populist Politics in Austria (New Haven, Conn., 1974)Google Scholar; Steinberg, Michael, The Meaning of the Salzburg Festival: Austria as Theater and Ideology, 1890–1938 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1990).Google Scholar

10 Boyer, John W., Political Radicalism in Late Imperial Vienna: Origins of the Christian Social Movement, 1848–1897 (Chicago, 1981)Google Scholar (the second volume of Boyer's study, Culture and Political Crisis: Christian Socialism in Power, 1897–1918 [Chicago, 1994]Google Scholar was not available to me at the time of writing this essay); Beller, , Vienna and the JewsGoogle Scholar; cf. Janik, , “Neuerscheinungen über die Kultur der Jahrhundertwende,” Mitteilungen aus dem Brenner Archiv, 1990, 101–2.Google Scholar

11 For a full account of the conundrums surrounding the nature of a Kuhnian paradigm, see Masterman, Margaret's “The Nature of a Paradigm,” in Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge, ed. Lakatos and Musgrave.Google Scholar

12 May, Arthur, Vienna in the Age of Franz Josef (Norman, Okla., 1966).Google Scholar

13 “Τολμητ⋯ον ⋯пιτ⋯θεσθαι τ пατρικ λ⋯γΨ,” Sophist, 242.Google Scholar

14 Janik, Allan and Toulmin, Stephen, Wittgenstein's Vienna (New York, 1973).Google Scholar

15 Personal communication from Stephen Toulmin. Neither he nor I take this story as more than an amusing anecdote. For an account of what he and I saw ourselves as doing in writing that book, see Janik, , “In Place of an Introduction: Writing Wittgenstein's Vienna,” in Essays on Wittgenstein and Weininger (Amsterdam, 1985), 525Google Scholar. I have never been happy with the title of our book. The words “ethics” or “ethics of silence” should have appeared, but they made the title too unwieldy. It was only around 1988 that I realized that the book should have been called “Cordelia's Silence,” alluding to the inappropriateness of demanding that a supreme moral value (in her case, love) be put into words.

16 This has nothing to do with generations as they are conceived in political or military history, for intellectuals can be the same age and represent different constellations of values whereby one reacts upon the other, as did Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Karl Kraus, who were both born in 1874.

17 The first and third appeared originally in the American Historical Review 68 (07 1961): 930–46Google Scholar and American Historical Review 72 (07 1967): 1283–320Google Scholar, respectively, whereas the second was first printed in the Journal of Modern History 39 (12 1967): 343–86.Google Scholar

18 Schorske, , Fin-de-Siècle Vienna, xiixxiiGoogle Scholar; cf. Roth, Michael, “Performing History: Modernist Contextualism in Carl Schorske's Fin-de-Siècle Vienna,” American Historical Review 94 (06 1994): 729–45.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

19 On the important distinction between the intentions of the artist and the intentions immanent in the work of art, see Nordenstam, Tore, “Intention in Art,” in Wittgenstein, Aesthetics and Transcendental Philosophy, ed. Johannessen, Kjell S. and Nordenstam, Tore (Vienna, 1981), 127–35.Google Scholar

20 Bloom, Allan, The Closing of the American Mind (London, 1988).Google Scholar

21 Bahr, Hermann, “Die Überwindung des Naturalismus,” reprinted in Die Wiener Moderne. Literatur, Kunst und Musik zwischen 1890 und 1910, ed. Wunberg, Gotthart (Stuttgart, 1980), 202.Google Scholar

22 The last point is Steinberg, Michael's extension of Schorske's thesis in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna.Google Scholar

23 “Vienna was a hard school for me, but it taught me the most profound lessons of my life” (Hitler, cited in Bullock, Alan, Hitler: A Study in Tyranny [New York, 1961], 13).Google Scholar

24 Boyer's work is a good example of work that is conceived and presented as “normal” or “monographic” history in the sense used here but is in fact “revolutionary,” that is, “interpretive.” This is possible in history, where, unlike the situation in natural sciences, the models that inform research are often largely unarticulated and are never formal.

25 Boyer, , Political Radicalism, 26, 37.Google Scholar

26 Ibid, 411–21.

28 May, Arthur, The Habsburg Monarchy, 1867–1914 (New York, 1968), 147.Google Scholar

29 Johnston, , The Austrian Mind, 58.Google Scholar

30 Boyer, , Political Radicalism, 210 et passim.Google Scholar

31 Ibid., 414. It is important to emphasize that Buyer's picture of Lueger in no sense absolves Lueger from responsibility for the spread of rabid anti-Semitism in Vienna, for, as Boyer emphasizes, Lueger certainly tolerated real fanatics in his entourage. However, Boyer's position does falsify Schorske's picture of Lueger as merely a charismatic figure whose political practices were somehow less realistic than those of his predecessors. The question of responsibility thus turns out to be more complicated than a thesis like Schorske's would suggest. But then responsibility in these matters is a highly complex matter, as Jaspers, Karl insisted in his classic The Question of German Guilt, trans. Ashton, E. B. (New York, 1947), 3146.Google Scholar

32 The concept of Gesamtkunstwerk is a murky one, inasmuch as Richard Wagner developed a notion for the cooperation between artists under that rubric that does not in fact apply to his work. The term later came to be applied to his music dramas with respect to the way in which they captivate and overpower the audience with a view to moving the audience to see the world differently. In effect, the Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk aims at something akin to a religious conversion (see Revers, Peter, “‘Erlösung dem Erlöse—Wer Erlöst uns von dieser Erlösung’. Zur Rezeption des Erlösungsgedankens bei Wagner und Nietzsche,” in Der Fall Wagner, ed. Steiert, Thomas [Laaber, Ger., 1991], 137–46Google Scholar). For an example of the importance of this concept, see Shedel, James, Art and Society: The New Art Movement in Vienna, 1897–1914 (Palo Alto, Calif., 1981), 2930 et passim.Google Scholar

33 Such recognition was the only move that would have undermined political anti-Semitism, that is, the concept of Jews as “parasites” in German culture (Dethloff, Klaus, Theodor Herzl oder Der Moses des Fin de Siècle [Vienna, 1986], 36 et passim).Google Scholar

34 Kann, , A Study in Austrian Intellectual History, xiii.Google Scholar

35 Here it is worth quoting Kann at length: “The genuine Liberal in German Austria does not occupy a firm middle ground between the party ideologies of political Catholicism, integral nationalism, and Socialism. He is at times—more often than not erroneously—to some extent associated with one of them, but generally attacked by all of them…. The liberal position is even more seriously jeopardized by its later failure to cope with social, national, and historical traditional problems. Above all, it has never had a social group support equal in strength to that of any of the other groups mentioned” (ibid., 255).

36 On civil society, see the contributions of Shils, Edward and Taylor, Charles in Europa und die Civil Society, ed. Michalski, Krzysztof (Stuttgart, 1991), 1351, 5284.Google Scholar

37 On Vico, see Berlin, Isaiah, Vico and Herder (London, 1976), 64 et passim.Google Scholar

38 Barea, , Vienna: Legend and Reality, 45ff.Google Scholar

39 Boyer, , Political Radicalism, 117.Google Scholar

40 Thus Hitler's fanatical fatalism—which was the other side of the coin of his fanatical belief in his own will—can be taken to be continuous with Viennese sentimental fatalism even if it is not identical with it. On Hitler's fatalism, see Stern, J. P., Hitler: The Führer and the People (Berkeley, 1975), 61, 222, et passimGoogle Scholar; cf. Haffner, Sebastian, Anmerkungen zu Hitler (Munich, 1983), 153 et passim.Google Scholar

41 Evans, R. J. W., The Making of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1550–1700 (Oxford, 1979).Google Scholar

42 Ibid., 447.

43 On “Modernisierung via Fremdenverkehr,” see Hanisch, Ernst and Fleischer, Ulrike, Im Schatten berühmter Zeiten. Salzburg in den Jahren Georg Trakls (1887–1914) (Salzburg, 1986), 5154Google Scholar. The little-discussed notion of modernizing through tourism is of the utmost importance for understanding the Alpine regions of Austria from the turn of the century, as well as the rest of Austria, including Vienna, which became “provincialized” in this respect as capital of rump Austria. Modernization via tourism helps to explain Austrian reluctance to come to grips with the shadier aspects of the Austrian past, such as anti-Semitism, in the great international exhibitions, which are principally conceived as tourist attractions.

44 Dahrendorf, Ralf, Society and Democracy in Germany (New York, 1967), 129–55.Google Scholar

45 Here we must distinguish at the philosophical level between modernism understood as the view that there are true-for-all-time criteria of rationality that can be comprehensively represented in a single theory (the “verificationism” of the Vienna Circle, Lenin's “dialectical materialism,” and Habermas's “theory of communicative action” would be three examples); antimodernism (the wholesale rejection of everything that has to do with industrialized society in favor of some romantic ideal of lost communitarian values); postmodernism (“anything goes”: the simple negation of the modernist monolithic account of rationality); and critical modernism (the pluralistic, because practice-immanent, search for the criteria that make it possible to carry on particular activities based upon the analysis of specific cases, that is, for criteria that do not prejudge the normative issues by imposing a universally valid scheme, rather than giving up in despair at ever arriving at any criteria for evaluating anything). Popper's “falsificationism” is a step in the direction of critical modernism that finds its full expression in Wittgenstein's differentiating efforts to base reflection upon the nuances of particular cases. Martin Seel has made an eloquent case for a “second modernism”—free of the abuses of the first, corresponding to what I understand under “critical modernism”—in his “Plädoyer für eine zweite Moderne,” in Die Aktualität der “Dialektik der Aufklärung”. Zwischen Moderne und Postmoderne, ed. Kunneman, Harry et al. (Frankfurt, 1989), 3660Google Scholar. In the critical modernist view, Enlightenment is more a matter of establishing the limits of reason than it is of improving society through the application of scientific knowledge. Here Diderot's dialogue Rameau's Nephew is perhaps the crucial text. In aesthetics, the critical modernist approach is heralded in Nietzsche's critique of Wagner (see n. 31 ). Nearly everything of interest in the postmodernist conception of culture is anticipated in one way or another by Egon Friedell, who has been all but completely neglected in discussions of Vienna 1900 both in Austria and in France. In his Kulturgeschichte der Neuzeit (Munich, 1927)Google Scholar, we find clear anticipation, for example, of the rejection of any hard and fast distinction between truth and falsity, Derrida's “pharmakon,” the rejection of the notion of the “author” (in the defense of plagiarism), an emphasis upon the importance of the fragmentary and the will to incompleteness, a love of paradox, the notion of the social construction of disease (Foucault) and “illness as metaphor” (Sontag), and a conception of a “laughing” philosophizing.

46 It should be pointed out that critical modernism is first and foremost an attitude to culture. None of the figures in question incorporated this attitude in all of their work—let alone their personal lives, as Lisa Fischer's Lina Loos clearly indicates with respect to Adolf Loos. Many of the designs of Adolf Loos, for example, are clearly products of classical modernist megalomania, such as his sketches for his Chicago skyscraper or his plans for the restructuring of Vienna. The point is that his most important achievements are precisely those that call the assumptions of classical modernism into question. I have profited from conversations with Hans Veigl concerning the ambiguities of Viennese “modernism.”

47 See Rodlauer's introduction to Weininger, Otto, Eros und Psyche. Studien und Briefe, ed. Rodlauer, Hannelore (Vienna, 1990), 1151Google Scholar; Hirsch, Waltraud, Eine unbescheidene Charakterologie. Geistige Differenz vom Judentum und Christentum als Lehre vom bestimmten Charakter bei Otto Weininger (D.Phil, diss., University of Tübingen, 1995)Google Scholar; Beller, , Vienna and the Jews, 221–36Google Scholar; and Janik, , “Weininger's Vienna: The Sex-Ridden Society,” in Vienna: The World of Yesterday, 1889–1914, ed. Bronner, Steven E. (New York, 1996).Google Scholar

48 On Schoenberg's critical modernism, see Janik, , “Schoenberg's Vienna: The Critical Modernism of a Viennese Composer” (in Dutch), Nexus 12 (1995): 4368Google Scholar. On Schiele, see Botstein, Leon, “Egon Schiele and Arnold Schoenberg: The Cultural Politics of Aesthetic Innovation in Vienna, 1890–1918,” in Egon Schiele: Art, Sexuality, and Viennese Modernism, ed. Werkner, Patrick (Palo Alto, Calif., 1994), 101–18Google Scholar. On Wittgenstein, see Janik, and Toulmin, , Wittgenstein's ViennaGoogle Scholar, and Janik, , “Nyíri on the Conservatism of Wittgenstein's Later Philosophy” and “Wittgenstein, Marx and Sociology,”Google Scholar in Janik, , Style, Politics and the Future of PhilosophyGoogle Scholar. On Trakl, see Janik, , “Georg Trakl und die Zerstörung des habsburgischen Mythos,” in Studia Trakliana, ed. Cercignani, Fausto (Milan, 1989), 5162Google Scholar; cf. Methlagl, Walter, “Der schlafende Sohn des Pans,” in Studia Trakliana, ed. Cercignani, 6380Google Scholar, and Methlagl, , “Nietzsche und Trakl,” in Frühling der Seele, ed. Stieg, Gerald and Colombai, Remy (Innsbruck, 1995), 83123Google Scholar. One of the few scholars to follow my usage is Christian-Paul Berger in his unpublished study “Georg Trakls Begegnung mit Ludwig Wittgenstein. Eine Kulturtheorie der österreichischen Moderne” (Innsbruck). Broch practically defined the aesthetic position that I refer to as critical modernism in an early essay, “Notizen zu einer systematischen Ästhetik,” which was rejected for publication in Der Brenner by von Ficker, Ludwig in 1913 (typescript, Brenner Archives)Google Scholar; cf. Methlagl, WalterDer Brenner’—Beispiel eines Durchbruchs zur Moderne!Mitteilungen aus dem Brenner Archiv 2 (1983): 1112Google Scholar. Adorno, Theodor W., “Meditationen zur Metaphysik,” Negative Dialektik (Frankfurt, 1990), 354400Google Scholar. On Chargaff, see Methlagl, Walter, “Von Wright, Chargaff och Heraclitus's Fire,” Dialoger (Stockholm) 26 (1992): 3238Google Scholar. On Mitterer, Walter Methlagl has drawn my attention to the fact that Mitterer's Stigma, for example, stands in a critical modernist relation to Baroque drama.

49 Schnitzler, Arthur, Das weite Land, in Das dramatische Werk, 2 vols. (Frankfurt, 1962), 2: 217320Google Scholar. Musil's extended meditation on both “Genauigkeit” and “Seele”—on both natural science and what he called “the other condition,” intense feeling or the state of being enraptured—is a case in point; see Musil, Robert, “The German Personality as Symptom,” in Austrian Philosophy, ed. Nyíri, J. C. (Munich, 1981), 173200.Google Scholar

50 Anderson, , Utopian Feminism, 52.Google Scholar

51 Ebner's campaign against Traum vom Geist is a paradigm case for defining critical modernism. On Ebner, see Janik, , “Offenbach—konsten mellan monolog och dialog,” Cordelias tysnad (Stockholm), 1991, 4563Google Scholar, and “Ebner contra Wagner. Erkenntnistheorie, Ästhetik und Erlösung in Wien um 1900,” in Kreatives Milieu Wien um 1900, ed. Brix, Emil and Janik, Allan (Vienna, 1993), 224–41.Google Scholar

52 Georg Trakl, Letter to von Ficker, Ludwig, 06 26, 1913Google Scholar, Historisch-kritische Ausgabe, ed. Killy, Walther and Szklenar, Hans, 2 vols. (Salzburg, 1969), 2:519.Google Scholar

53 See Methlagl, , “Nietzsche und Trakl.”Google Scholar

54 Zohn, Harry, Karl Kraus (New York, 1972), 42Google Scholar; Merkel, Reinhard, Strafrecht und Satire im Werk von Karl Kraus (Baden-Baden, 1994).Google Scholar

55 See Habermas, Jürgen, Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit (Neuwied, 1962).Google Scholar

56 See Merkel, , Strafrecht und Satire, 154–55.Google Scholar

57 Beller, , Vienna and the Jews, 3370.Google Scholar

58 Ibid., 153.

59 For a trenchant comparative analysis of the impact of the Enlightenment upon Judaism and Catholicism, see Sorkin, David, “From Context to Comparison: The German Haskalah and Reform Catholicism,” Tel Aviver Jahrbuch für deutsche Geschichte 22 (1991): 2358.Google Scholar

60 The difference is that Habermas is not “idealistic,” in the colloquial sense, in the way that Viennese liberal Jews were. In a sense the ideal was more real than the world before them. The difference between them is the latter's belief in the ideology of “progress,” which was extinguished by World War I.

61 On the problems surrounding the notion of “self-hatred,” see Janik, , “Viennese Culture and the Jewish Self-Hatred Hypothesis: A Critique,” in Jews, Anti-Semitism and Culture in Vienna, ed. Oxaal, Ivar, Pollack, Michael, and Botz, Gerhard (London, 1987), 7588.Google Scholar

62 See Stieg, Gerald, “Ferdinand Ebners Kulturkritik. Am Beispiel der Salzburger Festspiele,” in Gegen den Traum vom Geist, ed. König, Christoph et al. (Salzburg, 1985), 243Google Scholar; and Berger, Christian-Paul, “Kritischer Katholizismus versus kritische Theorie. Der Brennerkreis und die ältere Frankfurter Schule,” Mitteilungen aus dem Brenner Archiv 10 (1991): 7292Google Scholar. I am grateful to Gerald Stieg for information about Canetti; see Stieg, , “Ebners Kulturkritik,” 241Google Scholar. On Kraus and Der Brenner, see Stieg, 's seminal study, Der Brenner und Die Fackel (Salzburg, 1977)Google Scholar. For an overview of the history of Der Brenner, the only periodical to survive both world wars, see Methlagl, Walter and Janik, Allan, “Der Brenner,” in Major Figures of Austrian Literature: The Interwar Years, 1918–1936, ed. Daviau, Donald G. (Riverside, Calif., 1995), 83106.Google Scholar

63 See Pauley, Bruce, “Political Anti-Semitism in Interwar Vienna,” in Jews, Anti-Semitism and Culture, ed. Oxaal, Pollack, and Botz, 152–73Google Scholar, and Pauley, , From Prejudice to Persecution: A History of Austrian Anti-Semitism (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1992).Google Scholar

64 Personal communication from Inge Lehne regarding Kann, Robert A., Kanzel und Katheder, trans. Lehne, Inge (Vienna, 1985).Google Scholar

65 In this connection it is worth quoting Hilde Spiel quoting Madame de Staël: “Few books were read in the great houses to which she was invited and no writers were received. ‘It results from that separation of classes that the literary people lack grace and the fashionable people rarely receive instruction’” (Vienna's Golden Autumn [London, 1987], 38Google Scholar). There is little reason to think that this changed much.

66 Wistrich, Robert, The Jews of Vienna in the Age of Franz Josef (Oxford, 1989), 9091.Google Scholar

67 Weininger, Otto, Geschlecht und Charakter (Vienna, 1903).Google Scholar

68 This claim should be compared with the provocative thesis of Berlin, Isaiah in his “Political Ideas in the Twentieth Century,” in Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford, 1969), 140Google Scholar, arguably the most trenchant study in twentieth-century Western political ideas yet to appear.

69 On this “problema Austriacum,” see Evans, , The Making of the Habsburg Monarchy, 335Google Scholar. On Croce, see Collingwood, R. G., The Idea of History (New York, 1956), 202.Google Scholar

70 Burke, Peter, Venice and Amsterdam (Cambridge, 1994).Google Scholar

71 Jules Michlet cited by Burke, Peter, The French Historical Revolution (Cambridge, 1990), 8.Google Scholar

72 Gerhard Östreich has laid the foundations of such a study in the essays collected in Geist und Gestalt des frühmodernen Staats (Berlin, 1969)Google Scholar and Strukturprobleme der Neuzeit, ed. Östreich, G. (Berlin, 1980)Google Scholar. I have benefited from conversations with Raoul Kneucker and Waltraud Heindl on this subject.

73 Lesky, Erna, The Vienna Medical School of the Nineteenth Century, trans. Levij, J. (Baltimore, Md., 1976).Google Scholar

74 Hofstadter, Richard, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (New York, 1967)Google Scholar. Like Dahrendorf's study of society and democracy in Germany, Hofstadter's well-documented book claims to be an exercise in civil courage more than an academic study. If they are accurate in describing their work, the importance of both of these books ought to tell us something about standard “academic” priorities. One important reminder to American students of Austrian culture implicit in Hofstadter's work is the closeness of American and Austrian forms of political fundamentalism. Schorske himself has pointed out how the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was a model to Schönerer (Schorske, , Fin-de-Siècle Vienna, 129Google Scholar), whereas Pauley has indicated that the quotas on Jewish students that Viennese anti-Semites demanded in the 1930s were already in effect at American elite institutions like Harvard (Pauley, , From Prejudice to Persecution, 94, 128).Google Scholar