In this collection of essays, Schorske evokes the changing mood of Viennese artists and intellectuals at the turn of last century. He details the rapid transformation of cultural, political, educational, and artistic trends in Habsburg Austria. In his first essay, “Politics and the Psyche: Schnitzler and Hofmannsthal,” Schorske begins, “the bourgeois turned his appropriated aesthetic culture inward to the cultivation of the self, of his personal uniqueness.” The middle class Viennese, as they gained in wealth and status, began turning away from engagement in politics and worldly affairs to mimic the aristocracy’s aesthetic tastes for refinement, particularly in opera and literature. The arts became an escape from reality. It was a substitute for the life of action. “Art became transformed from an ornament to an essence, from an expression of value to a source of value.” For the writer Arthur Schnitzler, the tension of life was between morality and instinct. He was ambivalently stuck in the middle, unable to choose a side. For many of his era, Schnitzler exemplified the apprehension between a life within society and its ethical responsibilities or retreating into the interior of the Self and personal feelings. “The social aristocrat can no longer control the reality; the aesthetic aristocrat cannot understand it.” For Hugo von Hofmannsthal the struggle was also how art and beauty could relate to the exterior world. “How shall art transcend the passive rendering of beauty to achieve a fruitful relationship to the life of the world?” Art awakened man’s instincts, but what more? Schorske states that Hofmannsthal’s “contribution was to show that beauty, which his culture had seen merely as an escape from the everyday world, pointed to another world—the ill-defined realm of the irrational…. With all its danger, the instinctual element in man, “the natural in us,” provided the power whereby one could escape from the prison of aestheticism, from the paralysis of narcissistic sensibility.” As for instinct’s relationship with civic society, “Where law ignores instinct, instinct rebels and subverts order. Politics is here psychologized, psychology politicized.”
Schorske’s second essay is on the construction of the Ringstrasse and the changing of Austrian architectural and urban planning tastes, in general. He contrasts Camillo Sitte, a defender of the old school artisans, with Otto Wagner, a modernist architect. Schorske begins, “Sitte’s deeply held assumption [was] that “artistic” and “modern” were somehow antithetical terms. The “modern” to him meant the technical and rational aspects of city building, the primacy of what he repeatedly referred to as “traffic, hygeiene, etc.”” Sitte forcefully expounded, “Modern systems! Yes! To conceive everything systematically, and never to deviate a hair’s breadth from the formula once it’s established, until all genius is tortured to death, all joyful sense of life suffocated, that is the mark of our time.” Otto Wagner disagreed about the purpose of art, stating, “The function of art is to consecrate all that emerges, in the fulfillment of [practical] aims…. Art has the task of adapting the face of the city to contemporary humanity.” Schorske relates the three principles Wagner developed for his new urban construction, “the primacy of function (Zweck) as determinant of form;…. the candid use of modern materials in terms of their inherent properties;…. a general commitment to the a-historical, quasi-symbolic language of modernity.” However, Schorske relates the single theme that did unite these two contradictory men, “Although both theorists rebelled in their divergent ways against the Ringstrasse’s uneasy synthesis of historic beauty and modern utility, both retained fidelity to one of the cardinal values of liberal bourgeois city builders: monumentality.”
Schorske’s next essay deals with three populist politicians, who each appealed to very different bases. All three men emerged in reaction to the dominant liberal values expressed by the Austrian elites. “The liberals succeeded, in releasing the political energies of the masses, but against themselves rather than against their ancient foes. Every shot aimed at the enemy above produced a hostile salvo from below…. The new anti-liberal mass movements—Czech nationalism, Pan-Germanism, Christian Socialism, Social Democracy, and Zionism—rose from below to challenge the trusteeship of the educated middle class, to paralyze its political system, and to undermine its confidence in the rational structure of history…. Against the dry, rational politics of liberalism, the powerful leaders of these movements developed what became known as “the sharper key,” a mode of political behavior at once more abrasive, more creative, and more satisfying to the life of feeling than the deliberative style of the liberals.” Georg von Schonerer was the son of an elevated noble, whose father had partnered with the Rothschilds to develop railways across Austria. His father had bought a country manor and sent his son to an agricultural college to learn to tend to his estates as a country gentleman. Georg eventually entered politics, espousing Pan-Germanic unity, and rebelling against everything his father had stood for. “Schonerer was the strongest and most thoroughly consistent anti-Semite that Austria ever produced. He was equally and correspondingly the bitterest enemy of every principle of integration by which the multi-national empire could be held together: the enemy of liberalism, of socialism, of Catholicism, and of imperial authority. As a total nationalist, he could not rest content with the imperial state.” Karl Lueger took up Schonerer’s anti-Semitic cause in a more pragmatic vein. His Christian Socialism was imperial, but anti-capitalist and anti-nationalist. “Catholicism offered Lueger an ideology that could integrate the disparate anti-liberal elements which had been moving in contradictory directions as his career developed: democracy, social reform, anti-Semitism, and Habsburg loyalty.” As for both men, Schorske contends, “Each in his way utilized aristocratic style, gesture, or pretension to mobilize a mass of followers still hungry for a leadership that based its authority on something older and deeper than the power of rational argument and empirical evidence.” Finally, Theodor Herzl moved from a position of Jewish assimilation to mass emigration as the political realities around him shifted. As for the Zionist dream, Herzl pontificated, “Dream is not so different from deed as many believe. All activity of men begins as dream and later becomes dream once more.” Schorske relates that for Herzl, “The task of politics was to present a dream in such a form as to touch the sub-rational wellsprings of human desire and will…. Herzl rejected a positivistic conception of historical progress in favor of sheer psychic energy as the motive force of history.” Herzl declared, “No one thought of looking for the promised land where it is, and yet it lies so nearby. There it is: inside ourselves!… The promised land is wherever we carry it!… With a flag one can lead men wherever one wants, even into the promised land!”
Schorske’s essay on Gustav Klimt focuses on the shifting meaning of aesthetics in Austrian society. Klimt headed the Secessionist School, Austrian modernists aligned with the art nouveau. The Secessionists felt “art should provide for modern man asylum from the pressure of modern life.” Klimt began using myths from pagan Greece to represent the instincts within man, which he felt had been repressed in modern society. He merged Schopenhauer’s theory of World as Will with pagan symbols to create allegories of man’s true internal nature. But Klimt still felt conflicted. “In the nineties, the very nature of reality became problematical for Klimt. He did not know whether to seek it in the physical or the metaphysical, in the flesh or the spirit. These traditional categories were losing their clarity and independence. The crisis of the liberal ego came to focus on the indeterminacy of the boundaries between them. In Klimt’s constantly shifting representations of space and substance—from the naturalistically solid through the impressionistically fluid to the abstract and geometrically static—we can see the groping for orientation in a world without secure coordinates.” Finally, Klimt felt the inadequacy of physical realism. “The break he had made with history as the source of meaning, and with physical realism as the proper mode of representation, remained permanent, for him as for the class whose expectations of history and nature had played them false. He had passed irrevocably from the realm of history, time, and struggle to that of aesthetic abstraction and social resignation. In his Secessionist voyage interieur…. with Greek myth serving often his iconographic pilot, Klimt had opened up new worlds of psychological experience.”
Schorske’s final two essays, “The Transformation of the Garden” and “Explosion in the Garden,” once again deal with how artists relate to and interact with society at large. Hugo von Hofmannsthal stated, “It is hard to grapple with an existing social order, but harder still to have to posit one that does not exist.” In the rapidly changing politics of fin-de-siecle Vienna, it was hard for the artist to either conform to or to rebel against the atmosphere of the times. Adalbert Stifter tried to integrate ethics into culture. He believed the revolution of 1848 had failed because men had not developed the moral maturity to handle their own freedom. He believed primary education was the means by which the masses could be taught both Bildung and morality. Schorske explains, “Bildung, a term increasingly denoting that acquired high culture which accorded a mark of social substance if not of social grace to its possessor, still meant to Stifter a richer complex of attributes composing the well-formed and integrated personality.” Stifter believed in the power of art as the highest moralizing force. Schorske continues, “Man’s aesthetic power unites him to the creativity of God; it lets him perceive even in movement and passion that measure and order which so enchant us. Art expresses the highest stage of Bildung, for it presents the world not only to the mind, but to the soul, as religion had done…. Art took on a burden once performed by religion: the canalizing of the passions and the refinement of feelings.” For Hofmannsthal, it was, particularly, the poet who could unite the disparate and contradictory impulses of his age. He stated, “It is he [the poet] who binds up in himself the elements of the times…. [The poet] is the passionate admirer of things of eternity and the things of the present…. Everything is simultaneously present in him.” Schorske explains, “The poet must accept the multiplicity of reality, and, through the magic medium of language, bring unity and cohesion to modern man.” The artist Oskar Kokoschka and the composer Arnold Schoenberg both rebelled from, instead of trying to conform to, the dictates of fin-de-siecle society and its norms of culture and, thus, were both expelled from the garden. Kokoschka believed, “A person is not a still life.” The face and body of man contains his spirit and is the voice of his psyche. There was a rawness, based on instinct, in all of Kokoschka’s portraiture. Kokoschka continued, “Isolation compels every man, all alone like a savage, to invent his idea of society. And the knowledge that every doctrine of society must remain a utopia will also drive him into solitude. This solitude swallows us in emptiness.” Schoenberg also rebelled against traditional form to try to relay the feelings buried deep inside man in his music. He proclaimed, “Inside, where the man of instinct begins, there, fortunately, all theory breaks down.” Schoenberg felt that his age had sought comfort at the expense of truth. Schorske explains, “As a determined bourgeois individualist, he fought for the rights of the psyche against society and its confining art forms…. The truth of the wilderness—atomized, chaotic, indifferent, yet open and bracing—became Schoenberg’s substitute for the utopian beauty of the garden.” Schorske continues, “The two anti-bourgeois bourgeois, Kokoschka and Schoenberg, found the forms to express the soul of men whose culture had prevented their irrational private experience from finding public expression.” Schoenberg sums up their personal view of aesthetics, “Art is the cry for help of those who experience in themselves the destiny of men.”
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