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antirational modernism. True, he notes the alienation from politics
of the intellectual in Vienna, a non-Weimar-like phenomenon.
Despite his recognition of an ahistorical self-consciousness in the
modernism in literature, psychology, art, and music evident in
Schnitzler, Freud, Schoenberg, and Klimt, he falls back on the idea
that the alluring and lasting significance of Viennese culture is its
novelty, its break with the past, its generational revolt. Since he
dates his own interest in Vienna from the height of radical politics in
the sixties, and mistakenly , for example, identifies the Mahler
revival with the Berkeley student movement (it occurred on a major
scale significantly later), he underestimates the significance of both
the Vienna of 1900 and the power of the analogy with America
today. The retreat from politics and society, the philistine character
of middle-class life in Vienna eighty years ago, and the hesitant, if
not the nostalgic, dimension in what he celebrates as the modernism
of that period, are all understated.
If
one steps away from the notion
advocated by Schorske and other American scholars about Vienna ,
from its apparent role in the start of a new age in culture and
politics, one can recognize telling dimensions of fin-de-siecle Vienna
which illuminate our newfound attraction for that period, our shift
away from Weimar, and our own current condition .
Rather than view fin-de-siecle Vienna as a seedbed of a lasting
revolution in esthetic attitudes or as the birthplace of a new politics
beyond liberalism and nineteenth-century socialism, two move–
ments which do not seem overly to fuel our interest in Vienna circa
1900, one ought to assess the Vienna analogy by those sustained
attributes in both our culture and that of the past. Rather, consider
the rejection of politics altogether; a synthetic , eclectic , new but yet
decorative, even monumental, esthetic, overtly tied to past models;
a pervading sense of a collective futility and the rush to self–
knowledge, private spheres, mere style, and uncamouftaged
personal gratifications.
Comparisons between Austria-Hungary and Vienna before
1914 and contemporary America are not new. Franz Werfel, in the
mid-thirties, saw both nations as carriers of higher values of
civilization and humanity, capable of suppressing the narrow,
irrational, and passionate drives of race and nation. The true
Austrian was to be a "new human being," a "teacher of men," who
"should be as a light" to those still prisoners of ordinary political
values. The melting pot of America struck Werfel as analogous to
the Hapsburg Empire . Werfel's Austrian supranational vision
