Between Berlin and Vienna: Approaches to Austro-German Intellectual History

Abstract

Austrian authors of the early twentieth century were notoriously uncertain about their identity. The predominant mood of introspection in Viennese literary circles inspired a wealth of writing which deconstructed the stability of the self, while the ethnic confusion of the Habsburg Empire prompted many intellectuals to look towards Berlin for more self-assertive models of identity. The principal interest of Friedrich Rothe’s recent biography of Karl Kraus (1874–1936) lies in the fact that he approaches his subject from a German angle, emphasizing the fascination which the culture of Berlin exerted over the Viennese satirist. Setting chronology aside, Rothe begins by foregrounding the alliance Kraus formed with Brecht and his circle in the late 1920s at the time of the Threepenny Opera. He plausibly links Brecht’s use of spoken song with the presence of music in Kraus’s recitals of literary and satirical texts, ninety of which took place in Berlin between 1918 and 1932. He goes on to suggest that it was Brecht’s enthusiasm for new technologies that prompted Kraus to overcome his scepticism about the medium of radio and become an enthusiastic broadcaster. Politically, too, Rothe discerns a convergence, arguing that Kraus’s disillusionment with the Social Democratic leadership led him in 1929 to align himself with the communists. This reading of Kraus as a modernist with strong left-wing sympathies is supported by further chapters recalling his forays into the cultural politics of european history quarterly 