This is a collection of biographical sketches on Austro-Hungarian subjects, who came of age near the end of the Habsburg Empire, the Dual Monarchy. Five of the six essays are about writers, while Perloff’s coda is on Ludwig von Wittgenstein, who wrote much about language games and the meaning of words. Perloff makes the case that these (largely Jewish) artists were a part of a distinct Austro-Modernist milieu, unique from their German Modernist contemporaries.
The Habsburg Empire, at its peak, encompassed fifty million inhabitants of disparate ethnicities, covering over 240,000 square miles. By the end of the First World War, in 1918, the Republic of Austria was reduced to six million citizens, in a territory of only 32,000 square miles. Again, aside from Wittgenstein, the artists Perloff sketches all were born outside of modern day Austria, yet they all considered themselves loyal citizens of the Empire, to varying degrees. In 1918, another Austrian Jew, Sigmund Freud, would declare, “Austria-Hungary is no more. I do not want to live anywhere else. For me emigration is out of the question. I shall live on with the torso and imagine that it is the whole.” Eric Hobsbawm later commented on this inter-war period, “The decline and fall of the Emperor Franz Josef’s, being both long expected and observed by sophisticated minds, has left us by far the most powerful literary or narrative chronicle. Austrian minds had time to reflect on the death and disintegration of their empire…. Perhaps the perceived and accepted multi-linguality, multi-confessionality and multiculturality of the monarchy helped them to a more complex sense of historical perspective. Its subjects lived simultaneously in different social universes and different historical epochs.”
Perloff writes specifically about the Austro-Modernist style that “its absorption of other language registers into the authors’ native German, its troubling anti-Semitism [even among ethnic Jews], its conviction, most memorably expressed by Wittgenstein, that argumentation called not for linear discourse but a series of aphorisms, its transvaluation of normative values, its fondness for paradox and contradiction as modes of understanding, and especially the hard edge of its savage and grotesquely comic irony” are its lasting legacies. She continues, “Given the particular situation of the Habsburg Empire and its dissolution, given the eastern (and largely Jewish) origin of its writers, it developed in another direction [from its German contemporaries], its hallmark being a profound skepticism about the power of government—any government or, for that matter, economic system—to reform human life. In Austro-Modernist fiction and poetry, irony—an irony less linked to satire (which posits the possibility of reform) than to a sense of the absurd—is thus the dominant mode.”
Perloff’s first essay is on Karl Kraus’s sprawling play, “The Last Days of Mankind.” Every line in the play is a verbatim citation of primary sources that Kraus had stitched together- newspapers, speeches, letters, political meeting minutes, interviews, and manifestos. Kraus wrote in the play’s preface, “The most improbable deeds reported here actually took place…. The most implausible conversations in this play were spoken verbatim; the shrillest inventions are quotations.” The cumulative effect of this montage is an indictment of war (and its inherent cruelty) in general, of the First World War, in particular, and of all the men who instigated, participated in, and prolonged it. The play is a critique of the whole social fabric that allowed the viciousness of war to seep into all aspects of life and degraded and dehumanized not only the politicians and soldiers, but all of Habsburg society. War is cruel tragedy realized in blood. Kraus had particular disdain for the journalists who egged on the public, whipped up nationalistic fervor, and spouted the lies of the powerful- all in the name of social cohesion and patriotism. Language is a powerful tool. “Language, for Kraus, thus has a strong ethical component…. For him, words are still viewed as carriers of specific cultural/political import.” In another essay, Kraus wrote, “to confront the riddles of [language’s] rules, the scenes of its dangers, is a mania more admirable than the madness that thinks it can control language.” Kraus himself was a master of language. He famously quipped, “In Berlin, things are serious but not hopeless. In Vienna, they are hopeless but not serious.”
The book’s second essay is on Joseph Roth’s novel, “The Radetzky March.” The novel centers around the military tune, written in 1848 to celebrate Field Marshall Joseph Radetzky’s victory over the Italian armies at Piedmont, in what turned out to be the Empire’s last great military triumph. Joseph Roth would refer to the March as “the Marseillaise of reaction.” The novel follows three generations of the Trotta family in an arch of triumph and decline that mirrors the Empire at large. It sheds light on a world of prescribed status and class, which is disintegrating as the Empire tears itself apart from within. Perloff writes, “the novel tracks the dissolution of a particular complex of values—values in many ways absurd and regressive, but benign in comparison to the political climate of post-World War I Europe.” Roth, himself, would declare of his sympathies, “I’m a European, a man of the Mediterranean…. A Roman and a Catholic, a Humanist and a Renaissance man.” He was actually born a Jew in Galicia, modern day Ukraine. Looking back (and perhaps forward) in 1933, he wrote in a letter, “I have never overestimated the tragic destiny of the Jews, least of all now, when it is a tragedy to be a decent human being.” For Roth, decency went hand in hand with a kind of moral relativism, or, at least, skepticism. He was reluctant to generalize on truth, beauty, or goodness. “Explanation is the enemy.” In the novel, Roth puts these words into the mouth of a Polish Count, “Vienna already stinks of the sweat of the Democrats; I can’t stand being on the Ringstrasse anymore. The workers wave red flags and don’t care to work. The mayor of Vienna is a pious janitor. The padres are already going with the people; their sermons are in Czech…. This era wants to create independent nation-states! People no longer believe in God. The new religion is nationalism. Nations no longer go to church. They go to national associations. Monarchy, our monarchy, is founded on piety, on the faith that God chose the Hapsburgs to rule over so and so many Christian nations.”
Perloff’s third essay is on Robert Musil’s unfinished epic novel, “The Man without Qualities.” The novel was largely a meditative quasi-essay on possibility and contingency. Musil wrote, “Whoever has [a sense of possibility] does not say, for instance: Here this or that has happened, will happen, must happen; but he invents: Here this or that might, could, or ought to happen. If he is told that something is the way it is, he will think: Well, it could probably just as well be otherwise.” Musil’s novel is also about a world turned upside down by new technology and dissolving social norms. In the novel, Musil pontificates on the mind of his main character, Ulrich, “All moral events seemed to him to be the function of other events on which they depended…. There [is] only one question worth thinking about, the question of the right way to live.” For Musil, ethics and aesthetics were one. Life, art, knowledge, and science could all be combined. Jean-Pierre Cometti commented on Musil, “Unlike the philosopher, the essayist doesn’t demonstrate and lacks the ambition to do so, his ‘arguments’ are closer to intuitions and suppositions; they don’t have the systematicity that philosophical argumentation demands.” In the novel, Musil puts into the head of his quasi-heroine, “Every time Diotima had almost opted in favor of some idea, she could not help noticing that its opposite was equally great and equally worthy of realization…. Ideals have curious properties, and one of them is that they turn into their opposites when one tries to live up to them.” Musil goes on to describe the contradictions and absurdity of the Habsburg Empire, “Liberal in its constitution, it was administered clerically. The government was clerical, but everyday life was liberal. All citizens were equal before the law, but not everyone was a citizen. There was a Parliament, which asserted its freedom so forcefully that it was usually kept shut; there was also an Emergency Powers Act that enabled the government to get along without Parliament, but then, when everyone had happily settled for absolutism, the Crown decreed that it was time to go back to parliamentary rule.” Musil wrote in his diary of his own disposition, “As an individual I am a revolutionary. That cannot be otherwise for the creative individual always is. But in politics I am evolutionist.”
The book’s fourth essay is on Elias Canetti’s autobiography, “The Tongue Set Free.” He was born in Rustchuck, on the Bulgarian-Romanian border, to a Sephardic Jewish family, in a community which spoke the Spanish dialect, Ladino. His parents, who met in a theater troupe in Vienna, spoke German to each other, which the young Canetti struggled to understand. The family moved to England in his youth and so Canetti’s first language became English, even after his father had died and the family returned to various outposts within the Habsburg Empire. Perloff posits, “multilingualism complicates—and often undermines—identity.” Claudio Magris expands, “A plurality of heterogeneous components and irreconcilable contradictions…. Habsburg identity is paradigmatic of the lost or fractured identity of the modern individual.” Canetti, himself, mused, “how much of a forgotten language stays with us I have no way of knowing.” The clash of language in his head would make Canetti wary of all group identification, be it political, religious, or national. He was a European. He wrote, “When all pretexts crumbled, I was left with the excuse of expectation. I wanted people, including myself, to become better.”
Perloff’s fifth essay is on the poetry of Paul Celan. Although Celan eventually moved to Paris and conversed mainly in French, he wrote verse exclusively in German. He explained, “Only in one’s mother tongue can one express one’s own truth, in a foreign language the poet lies…. I do not believe there is such a thing as bilingual poetry…. Poetry is by necessity a unique instance of language. Hence never—forgive the truism, but poetry, like truth, goes all too often to the dogs—hence never what is double.” Celan’s parents were arrested, deported, and killed by the Nazis during the Second World War while he lucked out, having argued with them and slept at his girlfriend’s on that fateful night. He later wrote, “Only one thing remained reachable, close and secure amid all losses: language. Yes, language. In spite of everything, it remained secure against loss…. It gave me no words for what was happening, but went through it. Went through and could resurface, ‘enriched’ by it all.”
Perloff’s final essay is on the philosophical and religious musings of Ludwig von Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein wrote, “Hegel seems to me to be always wanting to say that things which look different are really the same. Whereas my interest is in showing that things which look the same are really different…. I am not a religious man but I cannot help seeing every problem from a religious point of view.” Wittgenstein believed that all growth was personal. One could not change society, but one could change himself. He had a secular determination to become a different man, a better man, “to turn into a different person.” He held “an intense desire to take something difficult upon himself and to do something other than purely intellectual work.” Perhaps, for him, intellectual accomplishments came all too easily. Wittgenstein told his Anglican friend, Maurice Drury, “If you and I are to live religious lives it must not just be that we talk a lot about religion, but that in some way our lives are different.” His family was ethnically Jewish, but had converted and he had been baptized a Catholic. “The true religion of the Wittgensteins, in any case, now became culture.” Politics and nationalism were coarse, demeaning, and beneath him. “Everything depended on individual integrity, on personal choice.” Wittgenstein wrestled with a Christian faith he could not quite believe in, even if he could embrace it. He wrote in his journal, “Christianity, I believe, says among other things that sound doctrines are all useless. You have to change your life. (Or the direction of your life.) That all wisdom is cold: & that you can no more use it for setting your life to rights, than you can forge iron when it is cold. Faith is a passion.” Wittgenstein would state to Drury, “The symbolism of Christianity is wonderful beyond words, but when people try to make a philosophical system out of it I find it disgusting.” Closure of the mind was the enemy. The everyday present of actual lived life was the only thing worth examining. Language and experience placed strictures on all of us. Wittgenstein wrote, “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.”
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