Marjorie Perloff - Edge of Irony: Modernism in the Shadow of the Habsburg Empire

For a young child, even a Jewish child, brought up as I was in the shaky little Republic of Austria between the two world wars, nothing was more glamorous than the tales of the Habsburg emperors, from Rudolf I (121891), to the bold Emperor Maximilian (14591519), immortalized in Drers great portrait, who secured the Netherlands, Hungary, Bohemia, and Spain for the Habsburgs, and especially to Empress Maria Theresa (171780), that powerful sovereign who presided over her vast empire, orchestrating both the War of the Austrian Succession and the Seven Years War (both against Prussia), while bearing her husband Francis I sixteen children, one of whom was Marie Antoinette. Stories about Maria Theresa were the stuff of legend and fairytale. The child Mozart, for example, having performed for the empress, evidently jumped on her lap and kissed her; she rewarded him with a little suit decorated with gold braid. A devout Catholic, Maria Theresa was staunchly anti-Protestant and even more virulently anti-Semitic, but as Austrian children, we knew only the tuneful songs and happy anecdotes about the great empress.

The year 1867 marked the official establishment of the Austro-Hungarian Empire or Dual Monarchy; it was also the year that the long-lived Emperor Franz Josef (18301916) decreed emancipation for the Jews. The empire, a collage of the most various ethnicities and cultures, was always fragile, but somehow it held together, producing what were generally considered the golden years that preceded the Great Wargolden years at least for the upper classes and a rising bourgeoisie, if hardly for the masses. In June 1914, on a tour in the restless Serbian province of Sarajevo, the unpopular Austrian crown prince Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie were assassinated by a Serb terrorist named Gavrilo Princip. Within little over a month, Austria-Hungary and Germany were at war with Serbia and Russia to the east, England, France, and Italy to the west. In November 1918, with the final victory of the Western powers, now including the United States as well, the Habsburg Empire quite simply collapsed. It seemed to happen overnight: millions of the empires citizensthose that had survived the Great Warsuddenly found themselves assigned to newly created nation-states.

I have always been interested in this terrible and poignant turn in European history, partly because it represents my own ancestry, partly because the last days of the empire had bred such brilliant composers as Gustav Mahler (from a large poor family in Bohemia), such novelists as Joseph Roth (from Galicia), and such poets as Paul Celan (Bukovina). Sigmund Freud and Ludwig Wittgenstein were children of the empire, as was Franz Kafka. And although the Weimar Republic always gets pride of place when German Modernism is discussed, the post-empire Austrian world looks increasingly important for an understanding of our own artistic and cultural values a century later.

In the Anglophone world, however, Austro-Modernism remains almost wholly unknown. True, Freud is a household name, known especially in its adjectival form (Freudian). True, Mahlers symphonies are regularly performed by the major orchestras, and the paintings of Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele are owned and exhibited by leading museums. But the writers? Outside of German departments (a now shrinkingindeed often disappearingentity in the United States), I find that as major a literary figure as Karl Kraus is virtually unknown. When I mention Roth to friends and colleagues, they assume I mean Philip Roth or perhaps Henry (