Hofmannsthal as Sociologist: „Die Briefe des Zurückgekehrten“

Abstract

The great age of modern literature – the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries — is also the classic age of sociology: of Émile Durkheim, Max Weber, and Georg Simmel. ¹ Literature and sociology set themselves similar tasks. In an age of accelerated social change, they were both trying to understand the new state of society that is now called modernity. Realist literature became a contribution to sociology. Proust said that in Á la recherche du temps perdu he had tried to present a sociology of Combray and the Faubourg Saint-Germain (Lepenies 89). Thomas Mann claimed that in Buddenbrooks he had independently anticipated Max Weber, Werner Sombart, and others in showing that the capitalist businessman was a creation of the Protestant ethic (Mann 145). Rudolf Borchardt complained in his “Rede über Hofmannsthal” (1902) that modern literature was close to sociology: Die Literatur, die vor hundert Jahren fur alles ähnlich gerichtete Bedürfnis die bezaubernde Form der Utopie, und nur die eine hatte, ist heute, wenn sie in diese unsere Stadt hineingreift, im innersten Wesen nicht weniger Ethnographie, als wenn sie Kandahar und East End festzuhalten strebt. (Borchardt 67)

An earlier version of this essay appeared as „‘Hofmannsthal sociologue: Die Briefe des Zurückgekehrten“, Austriaca 37 (1993): 275–86.