Abstract
On one occasion Robert Musil describes ‘Kakanien’, his wonderful Active re-creation of decaying Austria-Hungary, as ‘ein besonders deutlicher Fall der modernen Welt’.2 ‘Kakanien’ is portrayed as a Vanity Fair of the mind, a social pandemonium of warring creeds, myths, ideologies in which the demands of intellectual honesty and scruple lead to a hypostatisation of ‘Eigenschaftslosigkeiť. The protagonist Ulrich, the Man without Qualities, seeks to live in the mode of the possible rather than succumb to the petrification of the mind and the constriction of the impulses so comically enshrined in the Tarallelaktion’. Yet the pandemonium on which Musil bases his ‘Kakanien’ was ‘ein besonders deutlicher Fall der modernen Welt’, precisely because the combination of ideological assertiveness and intellectual volatility made possible so many insights and questions that form the cornerstones of European modernism.
This paper, in its first incarnation, appeared in German in Literatur und Kritik, 161/2 (February–March 1982), pp. 52–61. For the present publication it has been translated into English and extensively reworked.
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Notes
Robert Musil, Tagebücher, Aphorismen, Essays (ed. Adolf Frisé), Reinbek bei Hamburg, 1955, p. 226.
Ernst Mach, Die Analyse der Empfindungen, Jena, 1903, p. 20.
Lothar Hönnighausen, ‘“Points of View” and its Background in Intellectual History’, Comparative Criticism, 2 (1980), pp. 151–66.
Carl Schorske, ‘The “Ringstraße”, its Critics, and the Birth of Urban Modernism’, in A Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture, London, 1980, pp. 24–115.
Claudio Magris, Der habsburgische Mythos in der os̈terreichischen Literatur, Salzburg, 1966.
Stefan Grossmann, Ich war begeistert, Berlin, 1931, p. 119.
Arthur Schnitzler, Die dramatischen Werke, I, Frankfurt am Main, 1962, p. 576.
Dorrit Cohn, ‘“Als Traum erzählt”: the Case for a Freudian Reading of Hofmannsthal’s Märchen der 672. Nachť, DVjS, 54 (1980), pp. 284–305.
Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Arthur Schnitzler, Briefwechsel (ed. Therese Nicki and Heinrich Schnitzler), Frankfurt am Main, 1964, p. 63.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Blue and Brown Books (1932–3), Oxford, 1964, p. 17.
See, for example, Richard Lawson, ‘A Reinterpretation of Schnitzler’s Leutnant Gustl’, JIASRA, 2 (1962), pp. 4–19, and
Rolf-Peter Janz, Klaus Laermann, Arthur Schnitz1er: Zur Diagnose des Wiener Bürgertums im Fin-de-Siècle, Stuttgart, 1977, pp. 118–30.
Arthur Schnitzler, Das erzählerische Werk, I, Frankfurt am Main, 1961, p. 366. Arthur Schnitzler, Die dramatischen Werke, I, pp. 42–3.
See Heinz Politzer, ‘Diagnose und Dichtung: Zum Werk Arthur Schnitzlers’ in Politzer, Das Schweigen der Sirenen, Stuttgart, 1968, p. 137.
See, for example, the following sociological studies to which I gladly acknowledge my indebtedness: Horst Althaus, Zwischen Monarchie und Republik, Munich, 1976;
Hartmut Scheible, Arthur Schnitzler (Rowohlts Bildmonographien), Reinbek bei Hamburg, 1976;
Hartmut Scheible, Arthur Schnitzler und die Aufklärung, Munich, 1977;
Janz and Laermann, Arthur Schnitzler, Stuttgart, 1977.
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© 1988 School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University of London
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Swales, M. (1988). Liberalism or Hedonism? Arthur Schnitzler’s Diagnosis of the Viennese Bourgeoisie. In: Péter, L., Pynsent, R.B. (eds) Intellectuals and the Future in the Habsburg Monarchy 1890–1914. Studies in Russia and East Europe. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-19169-7_2
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