Hugo von Hofmannsthal and the Austrian Idea: Selected Essays and Addresses, 1906-1927

By David S. Luft

The Austrian writer Hugo von Hofmannsthal (1874-1929) was one of the great modernists in the German language, but his importance as a major intellectual of the early twentieth century has not received adequate attention in the English-speaking world. One distinguished literary scholar of his generation called Hofmannsthal a "spiritual-moral authority" of a kind German culture had only rarely produced. This volume provides translations of essays that deal with the Austrian idea and with the distinctive position of German-speaking Austrians between German nationalism and peoples to the East, whether in the Habsburg Monarchy or beyond it, as well as essays that locate Hofmannsthal's thinking about Austria in relation to the broader situation of German and European culture.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Purdue University Press
• Release date: May 15, 2011
• ISBN: 9781612491943

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Hugo von Hofmannsthal

and the Austrian Idea

Central European Studies

Charles W. Ingrao, senior editor

Gary B. Cohen, editor

Franz Szabo, editor

Hugo von Hofmannsthal

and the Austrian Idea

Selected Essays and Addresses, 1906–1927

Translated and Edited by David S. Luft

Purdue University Press

West Lafayette, Indiana

Copyright 2011 by Purdue University. All rights reserved.

Printed in the United States of America.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hofmannsthal, Hugo von, 1874-1929.

[Selections. English. 2011]

Hugo von Hofmannsthal and the Austrian idea : selected essays and addresses,

1906-1927 / translated and edited by David S. Luft.

    p. cm. -- (Central European studies)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-55753-590-0

1. Hofmannsthal, Hugo von, 1874-1929--Translations into English. 2. Hofmannsthal, Hugo von, 1874-1929--Political and social views--Sources. I. Luft, David S. II. Title.

PT2617.O47A2 2011

838’.912--dc22

2010044563

Publication of this book has been made possible

through the generous support of the Horning Foundation.

Willard Haas und Edgar Beckham gewidmet

Contents

Foreword

Preface

Introduction

1. The Poet and Our Time (1906)

2. Boycott of Foreign Languages? (1914)

3. The Affirmation of Austria (1914)

4. Our Foreign Words (1914)

5. We Austrians and Germany (1915)

6. Grillparzer’s Political Legacy (1915)

7. Austria in the Mirror of Its Literature (1916)

8. The Idea of Europe (1916)

9. The Austrian Idea (1917)

10. The Prussian and the Austrian (1917)

11. Adam Müller’s Twelve Lectures on Eloquence (1920)

12. Three Small Observations (1921)

13. K. E. Neumann’s Translation of the Holy Writings of the Buddhists (1921)

14. View of the Spiritual Condition of Europe (1922)

15. New German Contributions (1921)

16. Czech and Slovak Folk Songs (1922)

17. Address on Grillparzer (1922)

18. Stifter’s Indian Summer (1924)

19. The Written Word as the Spiritual Space of the Nation (1927)

20. The Value and Dignity of the German Language (1927)

Bibliography

Index

Foreword

It is a great pleasure for the editors of Central European Studies to be able to publish this volume in the series. It includes the most significant and interesting of the great Austrian writer Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s essays on Austria, the relationship of Austria to Germany and of Austria and Germany to the rest of Europe. Only a few of these pieces have ever been published in English before.

David S. Luft, a highly accomplished scholar of modern Austrian and Central European intellectual and cultural history, has selected, translated, and annotated the essays. He has also provided a thoughtful and lucid introduction to their significance and their place in the larger body of Hofmannsthal’s work. The translations present the essays in idiomatic modern English, which still captures much of the beautiful literary style of the German original.

We think of Hofmannsthal as a masterful author of poetry, stories, plays, and opera libretti; but he was also a dedicated essayist who wrote on a considerable range of topics. It is lamentable that only a small portion of those essays has been translated into English up to now. Those included in this volume remind us that Hofmannsthal retained a strong engagement in the cultural and social issues of the world in which he lived, even if much about the political life of his day frustrated him. His engagement in contemporary affairs grew particularly strong during World War I, when he served as something of a cultural ambassador for Austria and gave public lectures in many places. The essays presented here, however, focus on the Austrian idea, and what Hofmannsthal saw as the intellectual, cultural, and spiritual role of Austria in European history and its mediating role between Germany, particularly modern Germany and its nationalism, and the European peoples to the east. In these essays we find many of Hofmannsthal’s same concerns about language, culture, and aesthetics, which are familiar from his literary works, refracted through the prism of his searching reflections on Austria’s role in Europe, both past and present. Both those readers interested in Hofmannsthal’s literary works and those with broader interests in early twentieth-century European cultural history will find much to ponder and savor in these wonderful essays.

—Gary B. Cohen

Series Editor   

Preface

I became interested in Hugo von Hofmannsthal in recent years, after working for much of my scholarly life on another twentieth-century writer, Robert Musil. In an unusually creative generation of Austrian novelists, poets, and essayists, Hofmannsthal and Musil were perhaps the most distinguished essayists, but in certain respects my work on Musil had distanced me from Hofmannsthal, in part because Musil was more at home with modern science and technology. And, for the most part, I saw Hofmannsthal, as others did, primarily as a poet and playwright. Indeed, when I was working on Musil, Hofmannsthal’s essays were still not widely known and appreciated. More recently, Hofmannsthal’s appeal to me was that more than any other person he contributed to our understanding of the distinctive ethos of Austrian culture. As I worked on a book about Austrian intellectual history, The Austrian Tradition in German Culture, it became clear to me that countless widely held views of Austrian culture and intellectual life had derived from Hofmannsthal, often with little explicit reference or clarification. In some regards, we may say that Hofmannsthal invented the Austrian tradition, in much the same way that national traditions were invented around the world in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But another dimension of Hofmannsthal’s work is important to me. He was one of the great German writers of the twentieth century, and he located himself very much in the tradition of German literature, despite his advocacy of what was distinctive in the contribution of Austrians to the broad experience of German-speaking people. He was also concerned with characterizing what was distinctively Austrian, and we might say that Austria was the form of his conservatism. Hofmannsthal was more centrally concerned than Musil with rescuing what was of value in the tradition—and conservative in this sense. But at the same time he was very similar to Musil in his commitment to Europe and in his deep sense of irony—qualities that were decisively shaped for both writers by the First World War. Hofmannsthal’s own attempt to come to terms with the challenges of life in the modern world has a significance that goes beyond the fate of the Habsburg Monarchy and belongs to modern European literature and culture more broadly.

I began this translation edition while I was still at the University of California, San Diego, and I want to thank UCSD’s Committee on Research for their support for my work. Since I came to Oregon State University in the fall of 2008, I have benefited from the generous support of the Horning Endowment in the Humanities. Several of my friends in German and Comparative Literature encouraged me to undertake this project at the outset: Burton Pike, Katherine Arens, Regina Kecht, Michael Heim, and Cynthia Walk. In the early stages of my translating, three friends were especially helpful with their comments on the opening essay: Kristin Rebien, Joe Busby, and Don Wallace. Three native speakers of German worked for me as research assistants at different stages in the project: Anne Schenderlein, Thomas Koenig, and Dieter Manderscheid (himself a professional translator) offered helpful perspectives on particularly opaque passages in Hofmannsthal’s German. Kara Ritzheimer and Kristin Rebien both provided thoughtful, provocative readings of my introduction, alerting me to the perspectives of scholars in nearby fields. I also want to thank my editor, Gary Cohen, and the two readers for Purdue University Press: Frank Trommler and an anonymous reader. I especially want to thank Mason Tattersall, whose decision to leave the University of British Columbia to complete his doctorate with me in Corvallis contributed so much to my own experience at Oregon State University and to my work on Hofmannsthal. It has been a pleasure to have him as my research assistant while I was working on this project, and I have appreciated his thoughtful insights and wise editing. I have benefited from all of this counsel, but here, more than in any work, the mistakes are entirely mine. I dedicate this book to the two teachers who guided me so wisely in the early stages of learning German.

—David S. Luft

August 2010 

Corvallis       

INTRODUCTION

The Austrian writer Hugo von Hofmannsthal (1874–1929) was one of the great modernists in the German language, but his importance as a major intellectual of the early twentieth century has not received adequate attention in the English-speaking world. Hofmannsthal’s admirers are familiar with his poetry, plays, and libretti or, perhaps, with his prose fiction, but most of his essays are still untranslated and unknown to readers of English. Yet as J. D. McClatchy has recently pointed out, Hofmannsthal’s essays occupy nearly a third of his collected works, and they are in many ways the truest portrait of his mind.¹ One essay, the letter of Lord Chandos (1902), has been translated many times and is widely recognized as a crucial text for modern literature and theories of language; what is much less well known is that Hofmannsthal’s essays fill several volumes.² Even German and Austrian scholars have shown only slight interest in Hofmannsthal as an essayist. His essays had received comparatively little attention when he died in 1929, and not until more than a generation later did Germanists return to them in a serious way.³

One obstacle to understanding Hofmannsthal’s intellectual significance has been his peculiar status as an Austrian intellectual and the degree to which Austria came to be central to his mature thought. As a major figure in German literature who was deeply concerned with the German nation and German culture, Hofmannsthal has often been associated with Germany, while his interest in an empire that no longer existed after 1918 has been difficult to appreciate. In 1906 the English writer Edward Gordon Craig called Hofmannsthal the most intelligent man in Germany, a reminder both of what he meant to the English-speaking world before 1914 and of how difficult it was even for contemporaries to locate him accurately in the Habsburg Monarchy rather than Prussia’s German Empire.⁴ Once the Great War began, Austrian perspectives on European politics and culture had less appeal for Anglo-American intellectuals, who were concerned with defeating Austria and creating a future world of nation-states without the Habsburg Monarchy. Indeed, the English-speaking world lost interest in Hofmannsthal and sympathy for Austrians just at the point when writing about Austrian and European culture became Hofmannsthal’s principal preoccupation. The First World War was the great common European experience of the early twentieth century, but it is also perhaps what divides English-speaking people most from the history and culture of Germany and Austria.⁵

Thinking about the historical meaning of Austria was a new departure for Hofmannsthal in 1914, but it was very much continuous with his reflections on European culture before the war. Even after the war, his thinking about Austria outlived the Habsburg Monarchy and flowed into his understanding of the European idea and the history of German culture since the eighteenth century. What is often overlooked in discussions of the Austrian idea is that for Hofmannsthal it is an idea and not a description of the Austrian state or Austrian national identity. For Hofmannsthal, the Austrian idea was a vision of Austria’s intellectual, spiritual, cultural, and potentially political significance. Perhaps his clearest definition appears in his essay on the Austrian idea in 1917, at a time when he was coming to understand that the monarchy was unlikely to survive the war: This primary and fateful gift for compromise with the East—let us say it precisely: toward compromise between the old European, Latin-German and the new European, Slavic world—this only task and raison d’être of Austria.⁶ For Hofmannsthal, the Austrian idea is the idea of mediation, especially mediation between the Germans and the West Slavs or between Western European civilization and the cultures to the east.

Hofmannsthal wrote a great variety of intellectually and emotionally rich essays between 1906 and 1927. The essays in this volume are representative of this body of work, but many others are not included here, even some of his essays on Austria, such as those on Prince Eugene and Maria Theresia.⁷ In this collection I have emphasized essays that deal with the Austrian idea and with the distinctive position of German-speaking Austrians between German nationalism and peoples to the East, whether in the Habsburg Monarchy or beyond it, but I have also included essays that locate his thinking about Austria in relation to the broader situation of German and European culture. The first essay in this volume, The Poet and Our Time (1906), expresses Hofmannsthal’s view of his own place in European culture before the First World War and is a broad statement of his understanding of the writer’s role in modern culture, which did not change in any fundamental way even after the war. The remaining essays appeared during or after the war, when Hofmannsthal was in his forties or early fifties. Although he became more involved in the social and political life of Austria and Germany than he had been before 1914, his real concerns and contributions had to do with language, literature, and culture. From the beginning of the war, Hofmannsthal’s conception of his own nation moved between Austria and Germany, and it was nearly always closely tied to language and to the great monuments of literature, whether Austrian or broadly German.⁸

Hofmannsthal belonged to an extraordinarily creative generation of writers, artists, and musicians who lived and worked in German-speaking Central Europe. Born between 1870 and 1890, these intellectuals were closely associated with modernism in the arts. They reached maturity in the decade before the First World War, but they were also young enough to serve as officers and medical orderlies during a war that changed almost everything about European life. I refer to them as the generation of 1905 to emphasize the year of the Russian Revolution and the First Moroccan Crisis, when the likelihood of European war and revolution became immediate.⁹ Albert Einstein’s paper on special relativity represents another powerful dimension of 1905 as a point of reference for Central European intellectuals, especially for Austrians who admired Ernst Mach (1838–1916). For intellectuals in the generation of 1905, the First World War was a decisive turning point, but this was especially true for Hofmannsthal. As Ernst Robert Curtius later put it, [t]he youth of 1905 wanted to be aesthetic; the youth of 1925 want to be political.¹⁰ This observation also corresponded to Hofmannsthal’s own development over the course of these twenty years, even though his significance remained primarily literary and cultural. Hofmannsthal believed, as he put it in the 1920s, that his generation of intellectuals had found themselves in one of the most serious spiritual crises to shake Europe since the sixteenth century, if not since the thirteenth. He continued in the same passage: And the thought is not far off that ‘Europe,’ the word taken as a spiritual concept, has ceased to exist.¹¹ The sense of cultural crisis was already palpable to many intellectuals before the war, and it became apparent to almost everyone once the war began. For Hofmannsthal, as for Robert Musil (1880–1942), this sense of cultural crisis was central to the creative work of the generation that reached maturity before the war:

This crisis affected all of the traditional European ideologies from Christianity to Marxism, but at its center was the liberal culture of reason, individualism, and progress—and the educated bourgeois elite which had advocated these values since the late eighteenth century. Not only was liberalism confronted by the political challenges of the mass parties, but something more diffuse with respect to the motivating power of culture seems to have been lost around the same time. The lack of a firm intellectual structure to inform the feelings and actions of the individual expressed itself during the early twentieth century in a period of cultural irrationalism and intense ideological conflict.¹²

This was the context for Hofmannsthal’s creative work, including his essays about Austria and modern culture.

Hofmannsthal was born in Vienna in 1874 to an ennobled banking family that belonged to what was known in Austria as second society, the highly cultivated world of the lower nobility, and he was perhaps the most cultivated person this nineteenth-century culture produced.¹³ Despite his high social status, Hofmannsthal did not come from great wealth. His family’s elite social position had been established by his great-grandfather, a Jewish banker who had settled in Vienna in the late eighteenth century.¹⁴ Hofmannsthal’s grandfather married an Italian and converted to Catholicism, and Jewish culture and tradition seem to have had little or no impact on Hofmannsthal as a child. As Hermann Broch (1886–1951) emphasized in his brilliant essay, Hofmannsthal and His Time, Hofmannsthal’s childhood was profoundly shaped by his father’s love for theater and the high culture of Vienna.¹⁵ And Michael Hamburger points out that Hofmannsthal was an only child who seems never to have felt the need to rebel against his parents.¹⁶ Even as a teenager, Hofmannsthal was already a figure of mythic proportions because of his precocity as a poet. He joined the circle of writers around Hermann Bahr (1863–1934) known as Jung Wien (Young Vienna), most of whom were considerably older than he, and he quickly achieved European stature. At the same time, Hofmannsthal’s uneasiness with fin-de-siècle aestheticism was already apparent at least as early as his friendship with the German poet Stefan George (1866–1933) in the early 1890s and their work together on the literary journal Blätter für die Kunst. This intense friendship brought home to Hofmannsthal the sharp differences of style and values between the two men.

Hofmannsthal completed his year of voluntary military service at the age of twenty in 1894 in the way that was customary for upper-middle-class intellectuals in Austria; and although he did not fight at the front during the First World War, he worked for a year in the war ministry and came to feel a strong connection with the generation of intellectuals who energized the monarchy’s army after 1914. He completed his doctorate in Romance philology at the University of Vienna in 1899 and seriously considered an academic career, but he decided instead to be a writer. He married Gertrud Schlesinger in 1901, and they had three children; she had been Jewish but converted to Catholicism when they married. The couple lived in Rodaun, near Vienna, but Hofmannsthal also spent considerable time in other countries, whether as a traveler or as a lecturer—mainly in Europe but also in North Africa in 1925. His cosmopolitanism, which included his close connection as a young man to both English and French culture, was quite striking even in a generation that felt itself to be European and moved easily across national boundaries.¹⁷ This internationalism of the prewar years is an important point of reference for Hofmannsthal’s understanding of German cosmopolitanism, which continued to inform his thinking about Austria and his understanding of Europe in the 1920s. He died suddenly of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1929—two days after his son Franz committed suicide. Hofmannsthal was widely celebrated as one of the great poets of his time, and one distinguished literary scholar of his generation called him a spiritual-moral authority of a kind that German culture had only rarely produced.¹⁸

Hofmannsthal’s reputation as a literary figure has been dominated by his early poetry and his connection to aestheticism and symbolism, and it is primarily as a literary figure that he is known in the English-speaking world. For a long time, critics and scholars emphasized his precocity as a lyric poet and his association in the 1890s with Bahr and George.¹⁹ More recently there has been greater interest in Hofmannsthal’s contributions to theater, including his collaborations with Richard Strauss (1864–1949) and Max Reinhardt (1873–1943).²⁰ Scholars have emphasized the letter of Lord Chandos as a decisive turning point in Hofmannsthal’s work, which separated the aestheticism of his early lyric poetry from his later commitment to active, practical life and connections to the social world. This fictional letter points to the limits of language in grasping objective reality. In it Lord Chandos explains to his friend Lord Bacon that he experiences himself as standing outside and apart from things and that his identity does not seem stable and continuous. The language crisis described by Lord Chandos is close to the philosophical views of Fritz Mauthner (1849–1923) and Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951), and this skepticism about language was still apparent in Hofmannsthal’s postwar comedies, for example in Der Schwierge (The Difficult Man, 1921). The sense of the inadequacy of language in the Chandos letter is, of course, more devastating for a poet whose medium is words than it would be for a painter or a musician, but the letter also points to the recognition that language becomes meaningful only in a social context.²¹ If the Chandos letter represents a crisis of language, the view of language Hofmannsthal developed in the essays in this volume takes seriously the social context of language. Hamburger argues that throughout his life Hofmannsthal was committed to bridging the gulf between private vision and social involvement, the language of ecstasy and the language of practical life.²² Hamburger describes this in terms of his difficult transition from the Romantic-symbolist premises to a new classicism, or from individualism to a new impersonality.²³ This new classicism shaped his view of Austria and of German culture and language more broadly.

Hofmannsthal’s ideas and metaphors were important sources of inspiration for both Broch and Carl Schorske, whose commentaries on Austrian culture, especially on liberal Vienna, are familiar in the English-speaking world. Along with Arthur Schnitzler (1862–1931), Hofmannsthal became a central figure for Schorske’s interpretation of the crisis of liberal culture in Fin-de-siècle Vienna (1980).²⁴ Michael Steinberg has explored more extensively Hofmannsthal’s relationship to the Salzburg Festival and cosmopolitan nationalism, an understanding of German culture that reaches back to the eighteenth century, before the emergence of a German nation-state.²⁵ Although there is now a broad scholarly awareness of the whole of Hofmannsthal’s creative work, historians still do not fully appreciate the extent of his influence on thinking about Austria or the degree to which his view goes beyond the relatively conventional ideas often attributed to him. It is difficult to understand either Austrian intellectual history or the Austrian vision of it without reading Hofmannsthal—especially the essays from the last two decades of his life. It is not merely that Hofmannsthal’s views should weigh heavily in discussions of the Austrian idea or Austrian culture, but also that they have already left their imprint on the discussion in countless ways.

The decisive context for Hofmannsthal’s understanding of Austria and the Austrian idea is the development of modern German culture since the middle of the eighteenth century. Hofmannsthal repeatedly referred to the late eighteenth century as a period of linguistic and cultural creativity, in which he included both the German classicism of Goethe and Schiller and the following generation of romantics around 1800. The emergence out of the German Enlightenment of idealism and neohumanism, from Kant and Herder to Novalis and the Schlegels, parallels in many respects the development of classical liberalism in Western Europe, but this ideology of emancipation took on a distinctive flavor in German literature, philosophy, and music. Hofmannsthal regarded this as a period of the liberation of the modern self from traditional bonds, and much of what he wrote in his mature essays deals with the fate of this cultural legacy during the course of the nineteenth century. This century of German culture has often been seen in terms of the development of political nationalism, culminating in Bismarck’s Empire in 1871, but Hofmannsthal saw it differently. He emphasized the creativity of a German cosmopolitan culture that informed (and was informed by) all the lands of the Holy Roman Empire in the late eighteenth century, including those that did not become part of the Second Empire, that is to say Austria and Bohemia. Despite his generation’s powerful sense of cultural crisis before the war, Hofmannsthal looked toward the emergence of a new period of spiritual and cultural creativity in the early twentieth century. He believed that in Central Europe the answers of classical liberalism were no longer adequate and that creative people were looking for new forms of solidarity and connection.

The degree to which the First World War transformed human history, especially in Europe, has largely been lost to Americans because of the impact of the Second World War. Moreover, it is uncomfortable for many Americans, and for English speakers generally, to hear Hofmannsthal advocate the side of the Central Powers in a war in which English-speaking countries were united against the Germans. Of course, for the most part, Hofmannsthal’s patriotism during what he regarded as a defensive war would seem quite natural from an American or British or French intellectual, and it is sobering to compare Hofmannsthal’s view of foreign languages (his wartime advocacy of French and English, for example) to the way many Americans felt about the German language during the First World War. In France and England as well, parliamentary institutions were compromised to a large extent after 1914, and in all European countries the officer corps were enriched by an infusion of young minds. It is often emphasized that this meant the loss of a generation of leaders in combat, but it also meant new energy and intelligence in the Austrian army during the early stages of the war, and Hofmannsthal’s political involvement