The Naked Truth: Viennese Modernism and the Body

By Alys X. George

Uncovers the interplay of the physical and the aesthetic that shaped Viennese modernism and offers a new interpretation of this moment in the history of the West.

Viennese modernism is often described in terms of a fin-de-siècle fascination with the psyche. But this stereotype of the movement as essentially cerebral overlooks a rich cultural history of the body. The Naked Truth, an interdisciplinary tour de force, addresses this lacuna, fundamentally recasting the visual, literary, and performative cultures of Viennese modernism through an innovative focus on the corporeal.
 
Alys X. George explores the modernist focus on the flesh by turning our attention to the second Vienna medical school, which revolutionized the field of anatomy in the 1800s. As she traces the results of this materialist influence across a broad range of cultural forms—exhibitions, literature, portraiture, dance, film, and more—George brings into dialogue a diverse group of historical protagonists, from canonical figures such as Egon Schiele, Arthur Schnitzler, Joseph Roth, and Hugo von Hofmannsthal to long-overlooked ones, including author and doctor Marie Pappenheim, journalist Else Feldmann, and dancers Grete Wiesenthal, Gertrud Bodenwieser, and Hilde Holger. She deftly blends analyses of popular and “high” culture, laying to rest the notion that Viennese modernism was an exclusively male movement. The Naked Truth uncovers the complex interplay of the physical and the aesthetic that shaped modernism and offers a striking new interpretation of this fascinating moment in the history of the West.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: May 15, 2020
• ISBN: 9780226695006

Book preview

The Naked Truth

The Naked Truth

Viennese Modernism and the Body

Alys X. George

The University of Chicago Press

CHICAGO & LONDON

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2020 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2020

Printed in the United States of America

29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20    1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-66998-4 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-69500-6 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226695006.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: George, Alys X., author.

Title: The naked truth : Viennese modernism and the body / Alys X. George.

Description: Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019049797 | ISBN 9780226669984 (cloth) | ISBN 9780226695006 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Human body—Austria—Vienna—History—19th century. | Human body—Austria—Vienna—History—20th century. | Human figure in art. | Human body in literature. | Human body in popular culture. | Modernism (Art)—Austria—Vienna—History—19th century. | Modernism (Art)—Austria—Vienna—History—20th century.

Classification: LCC HM636 .G47 2020 | DDC 128/.6—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019049797

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

. . . There are moments when the body is as numinous

as words, days that are the good flesh continuing.

—Robert Hass, Meditation at Lagunitas

Contents

List of Illustrations

Note on Translations

Introduction

1. The Body on Display: Staging the Other, Shaping the Self

Science and Spectacle: Exotic Bodies on Display

Fictional Encounters? Peter Altenberg’s Ashantee (1897)

Somatic Utopias: Viennese Hygiene Exhibitions

Literary Life Reform: Peter Altenberg’s Pròdrŏmŏs (1906)

Nature and Culture on Stage

2. The Body in Pieces: Viennese Literature’s Anatomies

Becoming the Blade: Vivisection as the Primal Scene

In the Dissecting Room: Arthur Schnitzler and Marie Pappenheim

Viennese Symptoms, Human Fragments: Joseph Roth’s Journalism

The Politics and Poetics of Viennese Corpses: Carry Hauser and Joseph Roth

Corpse as Capital: Ödön von Horváth’s Faith, Hope, and Charity (1932)

3. The Patient’s Body: Working-Class Women in the Clinic

Finding a Voice: The Poetics of Pregnancy (Marie Pappenheim and Ilka Maria Ungar)

Egon Schiele in the Clinic

In the Women’s Clinic: Architecture, Gaze, Film

Speaking for Suffering Mothers: Else Feldmann and Carry Hauser

The Politics and Public Visibility of Workers’ Bodies

4. The Body in Motion: Staging Silent Expression

Body Language and Crisis of Language

Hugo von Hofmannsthal and the Power of Pantomime

Self and Other: Exploring Identity through Free Dance

Making Modern Dance Viennese

Celluloid Gestures and the Cinematic Body

The Worker’s Body: Modern Dance, Machine Culture, and Social Democracy

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

Illustrations

1    Hermann Bahr with Gustav Klimt’s Nuda Veritas, circa 1905

2    Daily Bodily Hygiene,

3    Contrasts of Two Human Bodies,

4    The Ashanti Chief with His Royal Court, 1897

5    Egon Schiele, physiognomic drawings, 1917

6    Anthropometric photographs, 1886

7    First edition cover of Peter Altenberg’s Ashantee, 1897

8    Commemorative postcard, General Hygienic Exhibition, 1906

9    Peter Altenberg on the Lido, 1913

10    Air and Sunbathing on the Schafberg, 1925

11    Postcard from the Vienna Hygiene Exhibition, 1925

12    Photograph of Erna Morena, inscribed by Peter Altenberg, 1918

13    Franz Zelezny, statuette of Peter Altenberg, 1909

14    Max Thun-Hohenstein, gymnastic demonstration, 1926

15    Franz Matsch, Anatomy, circa 1900

16    Carry Hauser, War Victim, 1922

17    Josef Eberle, poster for the Imperial Employment Agency for War Invalids, 1917

18    Dancing war invalid, 1915

19    Leg prostheses mounted on classical sculptures, 1915

20    Carry Hauser, plate from The Book of the City, 1921

21    Viennese corpse tram, after 1945

22    Gustav Klimt, Medicine, 1901

23    Gustav Klimt, Hope I, 1903

24    Egon Schiele, Pregnant Woman, 1910

25    Egon Schiele, Pregnant Woman, 1910

26    Egon Schiele, Pregnant Woman, 1910

27    Egon Schiele, Portrait of Dr. Erwin von Graff, 1910

28    Lecture hall of the Vienna Women’s Clinic, circa 1911

29    Film still from Marital Hygiene, 1922

30    Carry Hauser, illustration for Else Feldmann’s The Body of the Mother, 1923

31    Leaflet for Woman and Child exhibition, 1928

32    Advertisement for layette package, 1932

33    Bruno Frei, cover for Vienna’s Misery, 1921

34    Mother and children, Bruno Frei, Vienna’s Misery, 1921

35    Ruth St. Denis in Radha, 1906

36    Grete Wiesenthal in Donauwalzer, circa 1907

37    Erwin Lang, woodcut of Grete Wiesenthal in The Wind, 1910

38    Rhythmic gymnastic exercises, New Hellerau School, 1920s

39    Advertisement for Hilde Holger’s New School for Movement Art, 1920s

40    Gymnastic exercises, Schwarzwald School, 1915

41    Gertrud Bodenwieser, Demon Machine, 1939

42    Hilde Holger, Mechanical Ballet, 1926

Note on Translations

Wherever possible, I have used published translations of the works cited. These are noted in the text, as are any alterations I have made to them. However, since many of the sources drawn from are lesser known and not yet translated into English, I have, in large part, provided my own translations. Where not otherwise indicated, the translations are mine.

Introduction

They are an odd pair, the man and the woman depicted in the photograph. His stout figure, draped neck to toe in a heavy cassock, is curiously abstract. A luxuriant beard seamlessly extends the long, dark column of his body nearly to his piercing eyes, which widen, askance, to a bright punctuation mark in the grayscale interior landscape. She trains her vivid gaze no less directly on the viewer, yet her frontal nudity—unabashed, concrete, shimmering off the canvas—is the antipode to his physical concealment. Look at us, the twosome seems to challenge. She throws down the gauntlet, though, by matter-of-factly holding up a mirror all the while. Look at yourselves, she dares us. What do you see?

One half of this esoteric couple, the writer-director Hermann Bahr (1863–1934), was the godfather of the Young Vienna literary circle. As a torch-bearing critic, he sought, with uncommon persistence and verbiage, to define what exactly constituted modernism, and Viennese modernism specifically. His counterpart, the formidable redhead in the painting to which this book’s title alludes, is Gustav Klimt’s (1862–1918) allegorical Nuda Veritas (1899). Bahr acquired the alluring Truth from Klimt in autumn 1900 for four thousand crowns, roughly twenty-five thousand euros. What seems in contemporary terms like a steal, a deal brokered between an artist and one of his staunchest supporters, is rendered moot by the knowledge that the sum was one-third of what Bahr paid for the construction of the entire villa that housed the painting—and himself—in Ober St. Veit, a neighborhood of Vienna’s Hietzing district.¹ Designed by Joseph Maria Olbrich (1867–1908), right down to the specially fashioned wood paneling surrounding the canvas, the villa was a Gesamtkunstwerk of Viennese modernism, and The Naked Truth its iconographic centerpiece.

Fig. 1. Hermann Bahr in the study of his villa in Ober St. Veit with Gustav Klimt’s Nuda Veritas. Photograph by Aura Hertwig, ca. 1905. Image courtesy of KHM-Museumsverband, Austrian Theater Museum, Vienna.

The photograph, shot by Aura Hertwig around 1905, stages the canvas’s supertitle in Bahr’s defiant posture: If you cannot please everyone through your deed and your artwork, please just a few. Pleasing many is terrible.² The sharp polemic was as much a rebuke to the critics of the Vienna Secession as it was a programmatic statement of purpose for the city’s artistic avant-garde at large. My eye is drawn, however, to Truth’s mirror, rendered as a milky moonstone in the painting. I am reminded of Michel Foucault: It is the mirror that teach[es] us . . . that we have a body.³ Körper haben and Leib sein—to have a body (from the Latin corpus) and to be a body (from the Middle High German lip, both body and life)—these central distinctions of philosophical anthropology are implicated in Hertwig’s image of Bahr and Truth, dauntless, her mirror aloft.⁴ In the defining image of Viennese modernism, Nuda Veritas, the body is front and center, at once an invitation and a provocation. Why, then, has the body been neglected in the cultural history of Vienna?

A full decade before positioning his writing desk in the sight line of—and facing—the two-meter-tall, naked Truth, Bahr had already identified the body as a key locus of modernist cultural production. His early programmatic texts document a restless quest to define a specifically Austrian form of modernism that could rival those of Paris and Berlin. The Modern (Die Moderne), a groundbreaking essay from 1890, details the characteristics of a new direction in Viennese art and literature. Truth, life, and, consequently, the purpose of modern art were to be found, according to Bahr, in the threefold exploration of emotions, thoughts, and the body.⁵ Two of the three paradigms Bahr pinpointed, the interior worlds of human emotions and thoughts, proved prognostic.

Like Nuda Veritas, Sigmund Freud’s (1856–1939) The Interpretation of Dreams (Die Traumdeutung) was completed in late 1899, although it was postdated to 1900 to coincide symbolically with the dawn of a new century. Freud’s theories provided unparalleled insights into the life of the human mind, as well as impulses that influenced the cultural production of his age and far beyond. Moreover, they have offered an irresistible frame of reference for subsequent historiography on Viennese modernism. Carl Schorske’s groundbreaking scholarship of the 1960s and 1970s, a series of essays united in the Pulitzer Prize–winning Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (1979), identified homo psychologicus (psychological man) as the emblematic manifestation of Viennese culture.⁶ Two elegant, powerful theses defined Schorske’s understanding of modernist cultural production in Vienna. It was premised, first, in Freud’s wake, on a fascination with the psyche, the unconscious, and subjectivity; it was distinguished, second, by a withdrawal into the life of the mind resulting from the failure of Austrian liberal politics, which Schorske characterized as an ahistorical retreat into the garden of aestheticism.⁷ Since then, the psyche has been the enduring paradigm and an inward turn the central gesture of Viennese modernism.⁸

But what of Bahr’s third wellspring of truth, life, and art: the body? As he formulates a blueprint for modern cultural production in 1890, Bahr appeals directly to his Viennese contemporaries: We want to observe the bodies, individual and in aggregate, in which humankind lives; want to study the laws they obey, the destinies they experience; the births from whence and the deaths toward which they march; want to document it as it is.⁹ Bahr’s peers took up the directive in spades at the fin de siècle. Using their pens and stages, drafting tables and brushes, and, soon after, their new Kodaks and movie cameras, they observed, studied, and documented bodies—their own and those of others. From its very origins, Viennese modernism was as attuned to homo physiologicus, the physiological human being, with all its attendant naked truths, as it was to psychological man. This search in the arts was nourished by a refashioning of knowledge about the human body in medicine, the sciences, and philosophy in the second half of the nineteenth century. A full generation before Vienna became the hothouse for Freudian psychoanalysis, it was the world leader in anatomy and pathology under the second Vienna medical school. The prominence of these disciplines, the social networks that existed between doctors and artists in Vienna, and the popularization of medical knowledge around 1900 help to explain why the cultural production of Viennese modernism—literature, the visual arts, and the performing arts—engaged so unflaggingly with the body—as material, trope, and metaphor.

This book, an interdisciplinary cultural history of the long Viennese fin de siècle (1870–1938), recovers the forgotten history of the human body in Viennese modernism. It restores homo physiologicus to his—and her—rightful place alongside homo psychologicus in the story of Vienna’s cultural production from the late imperial period through the interwar years. By centering on the body culture that occupied the addressees of Bahr’s artistic mandate, it seeks to understand how Viennese society’s attitudes toward the body shaped its cultural production. It puts, in other words, culture back into the historical study of body culture, while also positioning body culture as a crucial yet long overlooked facet of Viennese modernism. It therefore significantly deepens our knowledge about Viennese modernism, adding vital nuance and complexity to a historical era which itself has evolved into a culture industry of powerful proportions.¹⁰ Moreover, it allows us to view familiar players from the Viennese cultural scene in new light, while also reinscribing forgotten cultural figures—many of them long disregarded on the basis of gender, class, or ethnicity—to their rightful places in the narrative of Viennese modernism.

Body culture, in its broadest sense, is the intersection of scientific knowledge about the body with aesthetic, popular, and social representations of it. The history of the body is a field, that is, where thought and life intersect. The notion of body culture is distinct from, but encompasses, the related concept of physical culture. As Karl Toepfer has noted in his significant study Empire of Ecstasy, the body’s determinacy, its ostensible finitude as physical matter, belies the scope of what might immediately come to mind under the rubric of body culture. In point of fact, a wide array of endeavors is subsumed under the term. It includes, but is by no means limited to, the performing arts, literature, the fine arts, sports, athletics, medicine, sex, sexology, fashion, advertising, labor, ergonomics, architecture, leisure activities, music, physiognomic study, and military discipline.¹¹ Toepfer argues that modernist culture physicalize[s] modernity within the body and perceives the body itself as a manifestation of modernist desire.¹² Body culture thus bespeaks a way of interrogating traditional boundaries between mind and body, subject and object, self and the world,¹³ categorical distinctions that were increasingly being called into question in the decades around 1900.

While Hermann Bahr laid the body as a programmatic cornerstone in the search for the modern and for truth, this central aspect of Viennese modernism has never been considered systematically from a scholarly vantage point. Yet Viennese modernists both partook in and contributed to the wider European rediscovery of the human body that historian George Mosse identified as a distinctive feature of European society at the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century.¹⁴ In a recent attempt to synthesize the key intellectual program points of Viennese modernism, Hubert Christian Ehalt identified a new consciousness about the body as one of the era’s central features.¹⁵ Years ago, though, the art historian Werner Hofmann and the writer Hilde Spiel had already remarked on the centrality of the body in Viennese modernist cultural production.¹⁶ Both criticize the antitheses through which Viennese modernism has so often been read: dream and reality—as the Historical Museum of the City of Vienna’s pathbreaking 1985 exhibition Dream and Reality: Vienna 1870–1930 (Traum und Wirklichkeit: Wien 1870–1930) positioned it—or ornament and austerity—the two poles of the Jugendstil decorative impulse and its rejection by Adolf Loos, Karl Kraus, and others. If we step outside of these conceptual antinomies, as Hofmann suggests, it is possible to note a golden thread throughout the cultural production of Viennese modernism, one absolutely central to the exploration of the visual arts, philosophy, psychology, literature, and social theory: the impulse, as Hofmann phrases it, to recognize the flesh, to apprehend the human being in its creatureliness.¹⁷

This unique attentiveness to the materiality of the human body in Viennese culture stems, I argue, from the centrality of the materialist conception of disease under the second Vienna medical school. Called to life in the 1830s and 1840s, it reigned paramount in the second half of the nineteenth century.¹⁸ While Freud would later make his life’s work the exploration of people’s psychic creatureliness, his training was fully under the spell of Viennese materialism. Writing in the 1920s, Freud himself cautioned against a mythic creation narrative of psychoanalysis. While it may be said to have been born with the twentieth century, he wrote, it did not drop from the skies ready-made. How it developed must take into account the contextual circumstances that informed it and with which it was in dialogue, as well as its specific prehistory.¹⁹ It was his medical training in anatomy and physiology at the University of Vienna, more than any philosophical or artistic antecedent, that shaped Freud’s worldview.²⁰ His strongest early influence was the scientific materialism that was Viennese medicine’s unique hallmark, one that grew out of a reactionary stance to the early nineteenth-century speculative idealism of Naturphilosophie.²¹ That scientific materialism was, as David Luft has argued, the defining factor that characterized the Viennese tradition²²—and the body its central object. Long before Freud became a groundbreaking psychoanalyst, he was a radical materialist.²³ Before the psyche became the watchword of a generation, in other words, the guiding principle was the body.

When Freud began his medical studies in 1873, Vienna was the Mecca of medicine, as Rudolf Virchow famously termed it. Working as the second Vienna medical school, together with Josef Škoda (1805–81) and Josef Hyrtl (1810–94), the legendary Carl von Rokitansky (1804–78) had fundamentally retooled diagnostic medicine around the discipline of pathological anatomy.²⁴ They replaced a largely observational and descriptive medicine with the localization of clinical symptoms traced to pathological changes in organs and specific parts of the body. Such knowledge was best won not at the bedside but on the autopsy table. From autopsies, doctors could conduct detailed analyses and, ultimately, diagnoses of the pathological changes that had resulted in illnesses. Late in his life, Rokitansky once claimed to have performed over eighty thousand dissections, and he elevated the corpse—the material facticity of the human body—to the central source of medical knowledge in Vienna in the second half of the nineteenth century. The Viennese privileging of postmortem examination led to the city’s status as the worldwide center of pathological anatomy, and doctors from across the globe flocked to its lecture halls and dissecting rooms. It also, however, was the central feature of what William Johnston calls Vienna’s characteristic therapeutic nihilism, which he used as a conceptual lens through which to interpret Austrian intellectual history.²⁵ For decades, Viennese medicine stood under the sign of understanding illness rather than treating it. It is this propensity for examination and diagnosis, often absent a therapeutic impulse, that we find reflected time and again in the cultural production of the long fin de siècle.

If we follow Freud’s directive and chart the genealogy of psychoanalysis to his own training in the anatomical sciences, with the body as their material basis, we must analogously interrogate the origins of Viennese modernism, since its own creation myth has been linked inextricably to a psychological turn. The prehistory of that psychological turn is, as this study claims, a corporeal turn. The fascination with the body in Viennese culture not only predated the allure of psychoanalysis as an interpretive lens but ran parallel to it into the interwar years. The alternative genealogy I propose for Viennese culture in the long fin de siècle allows us to draw an arc that springs from the centrality of the body in Viennese medicine of the middle- to late-imperial period and extends to the communal socialist politics of the First Republic, whose health and hygiene initiatives foregrounded the body with a centrality perhaps unmatched worldwide. The materialist theory of disease that prevailed under the second Vienna medical school in the second half of the nineteenth century had raised the body to a central position in Viennese thought and culture long before the psyche achieved predominance. Anatomy’s and pathology’s concern with the corporeal colored Viennese culture for decades to come, not least in Freud and Josef Breuer’s early work on hysteria, which emphasized the legibility of the body as a text. As scientific and medical knowledge filtered outward from universities and clinics, the idea of controlling the body through dietetics, hygiene, fitness, and—taken to the extreme—through social-Darwinist eugenics, racial hygiene, and criminology permeated public discourse. Popular illustrated newspapers such as Der Kuckuck regularly devoted entire pages, for example, to everyday hygiene matters and health concerns. Philipp Sarasin speaks of a culture of bodily knowledge that transformed the ancients’ philosophical dictum Know thyself! into a bourgeois educational directive from 1850 onward.²⁶ That mandate became the catchphrase of Viennese hygiene and public education initiatives, as well as of pedagogical reforms for the working classes, particularly in the interwar First Austrian Republic.

The fascination with the human body in Viennese culture stems not only from the centrality of the materialist conception of disease under the second Vienna medical school, as I argue, but also, as Werner Hofmann notes, from the Austrian Catholic tradition, with its dogma of the word become flesh.²⁷ David Luft, moreover, identifies one of the distinctive features of the Viennese intellectual and cultural world as an accent on the powerful role of feelings and the body in human experience. Accompanied by a pessimistic existential bent, one Luft reads through Otto Weininger, Robert Musil, and Heimito von Doderer, the centrality of the body in Viennese culture resulted from the confluence of scientific materialism—especially as manifest in medicine—and philosophical irrationalism in the second half of the nineteenth century.²⁸ Luft has a wider perspective in mind on the latter point, but in our context, Nietzsche’s wise man in Zarathustra springs to mind: Body am I through and through, he says, and nothing besides; and soul is just a word for something on the body. The body is a great reason, a multiplicity with one sense, a war and a peace, one herd and one shepherd.²⁹ It is, in other words, everything.

Fig. 2. Daily Bodily Hygiene (Die tägliche Körperpflege). Der Kuckuck, November 17, 1929, 10. ANNO/Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna.

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Underlying this book’s focus on the specifically Viennese interest in the body in the decades surrounding the turn of the century is the body’s centrality within the wider contextual landscape of modernity. The task Bahr laid out for his contemporaries in fin-de-siècle Vienna—to investigate the body and its determinants, to analyze its destinies, births, and deaths—amounts to nothing less than an early appeal for the corporeal turn that has lately received sustained scholarly attention.³⁰ The rubrics body studies and body history have become common cross-disciplinary parlance since the 1980s, following on the heels of Foucault’s foundational studies about the sexuality, illness, and disciplining of bodies and the rediscovery of Norbert Elias’s monumental The Civilizing Process (1939).³¹ The reams of critical literature produced in recent decades attest to a persistent interest in the body, as well as in its cultural, social, philosophical, and historical construction.³² The din around the body has been so resonant in academic circles over the past four decades that the medievalist Caroline Bynum was prompted early on to ask (one senses not without a trace of exasperation), Why all the fuss about the body?³³ Interest in the body as an object of inquiry has proliferated in fields as far ranging as ethnography and anthropology; art history and literary studies; feminist, gender, and sexuality studies; sociology and urban studies; and philosophy and historical studies of all stripes—from political, social, and cultural history to the histories of science and medicine.

The corporeal turn has been framed by the notion—building on Foucault and articulated most trenchantly by feminist scholars such as Judith Butler, Susan Bordo, Elizabeth Grosz, and others—of the body as a historical, sociocultural, and political construct.³⁴ The body is, in other words, not merely a biological given but is discursively created and subject to the inscription of power and knowledge. Bordo, for example, views the body as a cultural text, open, like other forms of cultural creation, to reading and interpretation. Similar to cultural studies’ and new historicism’s view that artists and their aesthetic production are inseparable from their surroundings, Bordo views the body as equally mutable and subject to change according to its sociocultural context. Her important study Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body probes the sociohistorical underpinnings that have influenced perceptions of the (female) body. Arguing with both feminist theory and Foucault, Bordo maintains that attitudes toward the body have evolved over time, in accordance with the powerful influence of institutions, media, and other hegemonic forces. As a result, the body—and perceptions of it—are far from enduring; instead, they are impermanent, subject to reappraisal and modification, and compelled to adapt in accordance with their varying contexts.³⁵

This fact is significant not just for the framing of women’s bodies but also for the bodies of other marginalized populations, including those distinguished by class and ethnicity. While feminist scholars have highlighted how women’s bodies are sites where discursive power is exercised, the same holds true for Jewish bodies and the bodies of the working classes. Particularly in the context of medicine, which forms one of the focal points of this study, Sander L. Gilman has demonstrated how Jewish difference—and the purported difference of many others—has been historically constructed through medical discourses.³⁶ Gilman and Klaus Hödl have documented the dangerous seamlessness between the scholarly study of biology, anatomy, and other human sciences, on the one hand, and the biology of race as a constructed category, on the other, that characterized late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century scientific and medical discourses.³⁷

Especially salient in our context is Caroline Bynum’s pinpointing of two distinct sets of theoretical constructs frequently deployed in contemporary studies on the body. Either the body is referred to in terms of its limits, locatedness, boundaries, and constraints—whether in biological, physical, or social terms—she argues; or the body is referred to in the context of its limitlessness, desire, or potentiality, as a flexible construct or a malleable representation.³⁸ Both of these conceptions of the body were, however, already present at the turn of the century. Around 1900, the body was either conceived of as constraining/constrained and limiting/limited, something to be overcome, improved upon, or mastered; or it was viewed in terms of its potential, its seeming limitlessness, its versatility and flexibility. And, as we will see, sometimes the boundaries between the groupings collapsed.

While Bordo’s contextual perspective and Bynum’s conceptual outline inform my approach to the body in Viennese modernism, it is also important to keep in mind, as the art historian Lynda Nead reminds us, that cultural representations—literary, visual, and mental—always produce bodies. There is no recourse to a semiotically innocent and unmediated body, she contends.³⁹ For this reason, my approach to the body is not strictly historical but focuses primarily on a wide variety of representations and theories of the body from the time frame covered. It moreover investigates the social practices and material cultures—themselves historically contingent—that mark and frame historical bodies.⁴⁰ These materialities and practices, it is worth remembering, necessarily inform the ways in which we read and make sense of the bodies at hand. Published in Die Bühne in 1930, a striking photo spread by Willy Riethof (1905–94) invites viewers, for example, to consider the contrasts of two human bodies. An image of a bare-chested worker is juxtaposed with that of a dancer’s nude torso; both are surrounded by physiognomic photo studies of artists’ countenances. The caption does not merely alert us to the social and cultural practices that shaped the bodies we see depicted here but also notes that two worlds collide in the image assemblage. That the camera has gained human eyes, according to the commentary, also bears witness to debates about the mutual influence of bodies and media.

Fig. 3. Contrasts of Two Human Bodies (Kontraste zweier Menschenkörper), two-page spread. Die Bühne, February 1, 1930, 46–47. Photographs by Willy Riethof. ANNO/Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna.

The second half of the nineteenth century witnessed a sea change in how bodies were perceived, and—beyond the advances in medicine and the natural sciences I have already sketched—any number of factors led to its centrality in the culture of the fin de siècle. These included the physical culture craze; prevailing philosophical and epistemological debates, in particular those about the status of language; processes of industrial modernization; and a changed and rapidly changing media-technological landscape. It is no great leap to imagine that the sweeping epochal shifts occurring in these and other arenas at the turn of the century led many to feel—appropriating Marx and Engels’s famous formulation and the title of Marshall Berman’s important work—as if all that had seemed solid was melting into air.⁴¹ Hence, the persistence of the term crisis with regard to modernity and its effects. In Schorske’s reading of fin-de-siècle Vienna, that crisis was one of the liberal ego; in Jacques Le Rider’s interpretation, it was a generational identity crisis; for John Boyer, the crisis was one of party politics.⁴² Beyond specific local manifestations, though, the pages of past and contemporary reflections on modernity and modernism are strewn with mentions of crises of the senses and perception, of experience, language, and representation, of the self. Sara Danius has suggested that the artistic practices we classify under the rubric of modernism are, when viewed in this frame of reference, many different kinds of crisis management.⁴³ If modernity was characterized by a pervasive sense of crisis, and if modernism is a collection of various forms of crisis management, what, then, could serve as stable grounding, as a counterweight to all the upheaval of an era W. H. Auden famously called the age of anxiety?

In response to an epochal sense of unmooring, Auden’s sonnet sequence In Time of War (1939), written on the brink of World War II and in the year after the Austrian Anschluss—that is, at the close of the era this book considers—offers an answer: We have no destiny assigned us: / Nothing is certain but the body.⁴⁴ Ulrich, the protagonist of Robert Musil’s monumental, unfinished novel The Man without Qualities (Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften), similarly proclaims, in 1913, the dawn of an era of physical culture, for the only thing that gives ideas some sort of foothold is the body to which they belong.⁴⁵ As the categorical distinctions between self and the world, subject and object, Geist and Gesellschaft, were increasingly destabilized in the decades around 1900, the materiality of the body appeared to offer substance, stability, and certitude—particularly vis-à-vis the shadowy, immaterial depths of the psyche, which Freud had begun to plumb. In her landmark study The Body in Pain, Elaine Scarry argues that historical watersheds of philosophical and social crisis result in recourse to the body. When belief is undermined—that is, when central philosophical or religious tenets, key ideologies, and accepted cultural constructs are called into question—Scarry maintains that people appeal to the sheer material factualness of the human body in order to imbue their lifeworlds with the aura of ‘realness’ and ‘certainty.’⁴⁶ The fascination with the corporeal in Viennese modernism corroborates Scarry’s assertion. The body was looked to as a kind of somatic and semiotic utopia, which seemed to offer answers to pressing questions in an era of unsettling change. It shows that modernity was not merely a condition, a series of crises and efforts at crisis management, but that it was also performed and experienced. Modernity thus not only acts on bodies but is also acted out with bodies—and representations of them.⁴⁷ An array of desires was projected onto the body, as people sought to create presence, enhance immediacy, recover naturalness, and adequately express the authenticity of lived experience. Such questions were asked across a range of aesthetic genres—including literature, painting, pantomime, modern dance, and silent film.

Let us recall for a moment Hermann Bahr’s appeal to his Viennese contemporaries in 1890 to observe, investigate, and depict bodies. For Bahr, that utopian call to aesthetic action had taken a more reflective philosophical turn after the fin de siècle. Writing in his journal in 1906, Bahr pointed to the disconnect between the bodies his generation felt they should have—embodiments of a highly developed civilizational spirit—and the bodies they actually had. We are all suffering from the fact that our bod[ies] are not keeping pace with [our] will[s], he remarked. It is as if we had already achieved the spirit of a higher human form, but the body we are schlepping behind us from the earlier [form] cannot satisfy the [new spirit]. And perhaps we must suffer so much from this affliction that from it strength will one day spring forth, [the strength], commensurate with the strong new spirit, that will at last form the body anew. If those of the younger generation believe they can simply declare themselves to be Nietzschean Übermenschen, they are sorely mistaken, he opines. Bahr describes the process necessary to achieve correspondence between mind and body: First, a crisis. This becomes a powerful yearning. From it, the spirit forms an image. The growth of the body follows from that. We are currently engaged in devising the image of a new human being. And are feeling the labor pains. The quest for a new human being, the goal of a new body—both of which should be ideal manifestations of the era’s new spirit—are, Bahr argues in the same entry, the longing of the entire generation.⁴⁸

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What follows in The Naked Truth, then, are generational snapshots of a wide-ranging search to better understand the self and others, to create a sense of belonging, to access truth and meaning in the modern world—through the body. The subsequent chapters crisscross six decades, frame dozens of figures, and traverse aesthetic and scientific domains. Each chapter focuses on a recurrent corporeal topos that occurred across genres of cultural production: bodies on display; bodies in pieces; patients’ bodies; and bodies in motion. Taking a thematic approach allows us to regard from a variety of vantage points how and why the works of various writers and artists engage, often very differently, with the body.

The Naked Truth makes the case for the centrality of the body in Viennese modernist cultural production in four narrative chapters, each revolving around a constellation of protagonists. Canonical figures in Viennese culture—Peter Altenberg, Adolf Loos, Arthur Schnitzler, Ödön von Horváth, Egon Schiele, Vicki Baum, and Hugo von Hofmannsthal—are brought into dialogue with other fascinating yet often overlooked figures, such as the author and doctor Marie Pappenheim, the poet Ilka Maria Ungar, the journalist Else Feldmann, the visual artist Carry Hauser, the film theorist Béla Balázs, and the dancers Grete Wiesenthal, Gertrud Bodenwieser, and Hilde Holger, for example. The individual chapters, each centering on a specific trope of the body, likewise allow different modes of cultural production—literature, popular exhibitions, painting, the performing arts (pantomime, dance), and silent film—to intersect. This thematic approach enables the diachronic consideration of genres and authors, while simultaneously highlighting the synchrony of the era’s interart relations, sociocultural networks, and crossover between aesthetic production and medico-scientific discourses.

Chapter 1 examines how human bodies were staged and represented in popular public exhibitions at the fin de siècle. Initially, the Viennese sought to define themselves vis-à-vis cultural others. The late imperial period’s large-scale human displays, so-called ethnographic exhibitions, were implicated in both science and spectacle. Austro-Hungarian anthropology and ethnography—disciplines that emerged directly from (pathological) anatomy as Vienna’s leading medical specialization—developed corporeal taxonomies on the basis of measurements taken from the peoples on display. As new display modes increasingly invited physical transgression, spectators were invited to become armchair scientists at the expense of exhibition participants. Later, after the turn of the century, it was the body of the self that was put on display in blockbuster hygiene exhibitions, which showcased the achievements of both Austria’s medical sciences and its imperial aspirations. Much like the life reform movements of the same period, the hygiene exhibitions pursued utopian goals of improving the body to create a healthy, classless Volksgemeinschaft (people’s community) of equals as a civilizational corrective to the perceived ills of modern society. In the interwar years, the discourses, displays, and visual codes shifted again, as new humans took center stage in Social Democratic biopolitics. This chapter connects medical science and social history as reflected in exhibition culture to Viennese cultural production in the work of a leading Viennese modernist author, Peter Altenberg. Altenberg’s literature was uniquely attuned to the human body, and his books Ashantee (1897) and Pròdrŏmŏs (1906) coincided with—and spotlighted in prose—the bodies on display in the exhibitions.

Chapter 2 uncovers a hidden geography of medical institutions in Viennese modernist literature by attending to the body in pieces. From the 1880s to the 1930s, Viennese literature repeatedly presented the dissecting room as the birthplace of knowledge, and, as under the second Vienna medical school, the corpse was the object on which the search for truth was carried out. Two doctor-writers, Marie Pappenheim and Arthur Schnitzler, employ the trope in this fashion. Schnitzler, long acclaimed as an anatomist of the soul—his writing regarded as the literary counterpart to Freud’s theories of the unconscious—shows that key works, including Dream Story (Traumnovelle, 1925–26), were indebted to his training as a bona fide anatomist. Following World War I, the corpse comes to serve a different, social function, as in Joseph Roth’s early journalistic work and Carry Hauser’s graphic art. The University of Vienna’s Anatomical Institute subsequently took on dubious social relevance in Ödön von Horváth’s drama Faith, Hope, and Charity (Glaube Liebe Hoffnung, 1932), which fictionalizes a Viennese trade in cadavers. The text reveals much about the desperation of the working poor, whose bodies were conceived of as commodities to be capitalized on in the hopes of alleviating their misery. The corpse as a central topos in Viennese modernist literature functions as a truth-teller, whether in epistemological or social terms.

Chapter 3 brings to light an interface between cultural production and institutional medicine in Vienna—one that intersects on the patient’s body, and more specifically on the pregnant bodies of working-class women. The chapter tracks how changing conceptions of motherhood were reflected in Viennese literature, visual art, and medicine in the first three decades of the twentieth century. It embeds these representations in a historical framework that renders visible operations of gender, class, and power (per Foucault) to show that in Vienna between 1900 and 1930, the working-class mother’s body became an increasingly contested site. Early in the twentieth century, forgotten poets such as Marie Pappenheim and Ilka Maria Ungar sought to give a literary voice to working-class mothers on