David S. Luft

Austria as a Region of German Culture: 1900–1938

This Essay Attempts to contribute to our understanding of the intellectual and cultural history of Central Europe by making explicit a variety of themes that haunt discourse about Austrian culture and by making some suggestions about periodizing the relationship between Austria and German culture. I originally developed these thoughts on Austria as a region of German culture for a conference in 1983 at the Center for Austrian Studies on regions and regionalism in Austria. Although the political institutions of Central Europe have undergone a revolution since then, the question of Austrias relationship to German culture still holds its importance for the historian-and for contemporary Austrians as well. The German culture I have in mind here is not the kleindeutsch national culture of Bismarcks Reich, but rather the realm that was once constituted by the German-speaking lands of the Holy Roman Empire. This geographical space in Central Europe suggests a more ideal realm of the spirit, for which language is our best point of reference and which corresponds to no merely temporal state.

Schopenhauer, Austria, and the Generation of 1905

Despite the substantial scholarly interest in Austrian intellectual history during the past decade, what we have learned about Austrian intellectual life remains isolated from our received models of Central European German culture. Scholars who study Austrian philosophy and literature are inclined to emphasize the “diachronic constants” of an intellectual tradition that is unfamiliar to most students of German philosophy, literature, and history. Histories of German philosophy in the nineteenth century frequently ignore key Austrian figures altogether; major literary figures, such as Grillparzer or Stifter, are often regarded as peripheral in discussions of German literature; and political historians continue to imagine German history in terms of Prussia and the achievements of Bismarck. Thus, our knowledge of the German culture of the Habsburg Monarchy or of Vienna at the turn of the century still has not been brought into relation to a model of German culture that is dominated by Northern, Protestant, and idealist traditions. The relations within this wider realm of German culture are far too complex to submit to easy summary, and any honest attempt at empiricism confronts a staggering mass of potential evidence, even in the case of the more limited question of the influence of North German culture in nineteenth-century Austria.