Edge of Irony: Modernism in the Shadow of the Habsburg Empire. Marjorie Perloff. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016. Pp. xi+204.

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Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewEdge of Irony: Modernism in the Shadow of the Habsburg Empire. Marjorie Perloff. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016. Pp. xi+204.Anna C. SouchukAnna C. SouchukDePaul University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreIn his memoir The World of Yesterday, the Vienna-born writer and intellectual Stefan Zweig describes his youth in the period before the First World War as “the Golden Age of Security. Everything in our almost thousand-year-old Austrian monarchy seemed based on permanency, and the State itself was the chief guarantor of this stability.”1 Years later, reflecting on this bygone world from the perspective of his Brazilian exile, Zweig acknowledged that his generation was “optimistically delusional”; the age of security was “naught but a castle of dreams.”2 Zweig’s idealized “Golden Age of Security” and its subsequent dismantling is the same period in which Marjorie Perloff places Edge of Irony, her study of Austro-modernism and its representative writers in the first half of the twentieth century. Though Perloff recognizes the centrality of Vienna to the Austro-Hungarian empire, she focuses instead on writers from the “far-flung frontiers of the dismembered empire” (2). Like Zweig, she considers the dual crises of culture and identity that emerged from the dissolution of Austria-Hungary, suggesting that Austro-modernist literature is distinct from German modernism as a result: “No other national culture,” she argues, “experienced the trauma of sudden rupture as did the Austrians” (4).The writers that Perloff discusses in Edge of Irony—Karl Kraus, Joseph Roth, Robert Musil, Elias Canetti, Paul Celan, and Ludwig Wittgenstein—are quite literally “on the edge.”3 Not only are their origins in the margins of the empire (with the exception of Wittgenstein, all of them were born in some place other than Vienna), they all, save for Musil, emerge from the marginalized world of Jewish experience in Austria-Hungary. Their writing, too, is a “literature on the edge” (18), reflecting how each writer, chosen by Perloff to represent a particular genre,4 absorbed the anxieties of the moment and contemplated the “edge” of things in myriad ways: the crisis of language, the struggle of increasingly overt anti-Semitism, and the loss of Heimat and identity in the context of shifting borders and nationalities in the interwar period.Disparate though their representative genres may be, these writers are united by “the Austro-German language into which they were born” (11). Austrian German, with, as Perloff describes it, “its own much softer accent, its dialect variations, idioms, neologisms, and compounds” (130), was a common means of communication in an otherwise vast polyglot empire, an Ersatz place that provided a sense of belonging for cultural and religious outsiders, and, as something that could be misused and appropriated, the subject of analysis and critique. For multilingual Canetti, German, if not purely his mother tongue—he learned the language as an eight-year-old schoolboy—was his mother’s tongue, the language that would later become their shared language of love (111). But it was also a pervasive language that signaled distance and difference, a place in which Canetti considered himself only ever “a guest,” even as he continued to write in German during his English-language exile (121). German for Celan was both the “greyer” language of Nazi barbarism and also the only native language that would do for writing his own poetry, a “mother-tongue firmly anchored in the realm of the dead” and brought back to life after the Holocaust in his poems (128). Karl Kraus, who believed that language “has a strong ethical component” (39), denounced the misuse of language in his journal Die Fackel for over thirty years.5 In The Last Days of Mankind, his epic play that Perloff characterizes as both “hypertextual” and “a documentary drama” (26, 20), Kraus utilized direct quotation from myriad sources, compelling his reader to accept, however unbelievably, that “the most implausible conversations in this play were spoken verbatim; the shrillest inventions are quotations” (20). As Perloff writes, Kraus was convinced that, “as language goes … so goes the nation” (38): an eerily prescient forecast of the relationship governing language, truth, and media in the twenty-first century. Wittgenstein, meanwhile, who tried to unpack the puzzles of language, did not make the “slightest value judgment as to the ethical value of this or that word or phrase” (39). Perloff reminds the reader of his argument in the Tractatus: “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world” (27).Alongside questions of language for the writers in Perloff’s study was the matter of Jewish identity. This was a particularly complicated issue for the Jewish bourgeoisie in Austria-Hungary, whose members often regarded themselves first as assimilated, full contributors to the empire and its culture before anything else.6 In The Wandering Jews, Joseph Roth describes a particular kind of Jewish anti-Semitism that pitted the assimilated Jewish bourgeoisie against the orthodox or newly emigrated Ostjuden: “Jews, too, are capable of anti-Semitism. One does not want to be reminded by some recent arrival from Lodz of one’s own grandfather from Posen or Katowice” (51)—this, indeed, was the same Jewish self-loathing of which Karl Kraus was often accused. The idea of “Jewishness” was thus malleable and shifting, a state of being famously defined by Karl Lueger, Vienna’s notoriously anti-Semitic mayor, who explained away his scores of Jewish friends with the declaration, “I decide who is a Jew.”7 Perloff characterizes many of the writers in Edge of Irony as “ambivalent” vis-à-vis their Jewishness. Roth was sympathetic toward the Ostjuden of his childhood (52), while the astronomically wealthy Wittgenstein became “self-conscious about his own Jewishness in a decidedly negative way” in response to Nazi politics (157). In The Man without Qualities, Robert Musil, the only non-Jewish writer in Perloff’s study, perhaps best describes the impossibility of Jewish belonging: “The whole so-called Jewish Question would disappear without a trace if the Jews would only make up their minds to speak Hebrew, go back to their old names, and wear Eastern dress” (97). Assimilated Jews could “overcome” their Jewishness by becoming even more stereotypically Jewish: an absurd and seemingly impossible proposition that summarizes the paradox of Jewish experience in and after the empire.Commenting on Roth’s The Radetzky March in 2005, the esteemed translator Michael Hofmann posits that Austria-Hungary was a “heroic project, and its end in a blizzard of competing nationalisms a continuing tragedy for Europe … the division of Europe, the Iron Curtain, the murder of six million Jews and both world wars, all seem to me to be directly traceable to the end of the dual monarchy” (quoted in Perloff, 67). Canetti, too, wrote in Crowds and Power that the seeds of National Socialism were sowed in the first days of the Great War (120). The end of the Austrian empire cast a long shadow upon the twentieth century and indeed, the twenty-first, making it, as Perloff writes, “increasingly important for an understanding of our own artistic and cultural values a century later” (xii). At a moment of increasing nationalism and populism around the globe, and in an era of “fake news” that calls the very idea of truth and reality into question, we are well served by studying these writers who chronicled the decline of their empire. As Kraus compels us in The Last Days of Mankind: “Far greater than the infamy of war is that of men who want to forget that it ever took place … it is to be feared that some future age, sprung from the loins of this desolate generation, will have no greater power of understanding, despite being at a greater distance.”8Notes1. Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday: An Autobiography (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1964), 1.2. Ibid., 5.3. One might also include Ingeborg Bachmann in this list of writers, as Perloff devotes some space in her Celan chapter to Bachmann, albeit only in the context of their love relationship. Perloff describes the 2008 publication of Bachman and Celan’s correspondence as a “tale with the aura of Hollywood film” (125). Indeed, in 2016, Ruth Beckermann released her film Die Geträumten, which focused on the correspondence between the two poets. The title of the film comes from a letter Bachmann wrote to Celan, quoted in Perloff’s text: “That is true for the dreamt ones [Die Geträumten]. But are we only the dreamt ones?” (147).4. The writers in Perloff’s study were chosen as representatives of particular genres: “drama (Kraus’s The Last Days of Mankind), the ‘realistic’ novel (The Radetzky March), the essay (as central to Musil’s The Man without Qualities), the memoir (Elias Canetti’s The Tongue Set Free), the lyric poem (Celan), and the philosphical notebook (Wittgenstein)” (xiii).5. Kraus criticized the popular press in particular, with the widely read Neue Freie Presse and its editor Moritz Benedikt as two of his principal targets.6. As Zweig observes, “Through their desire for assimilation, [Jews] had adapted themselves fully and were happy to serve the glory of Vienna … much, if not the most of all that Europe and America admire today as an expression of the new, rejuvenated Austrian culture, in literature, the theater, in the arts and crafts, was created by the Viennese Jews” (World of Yesterday, 23). Similarly, the Viennese Jewish writer Arthur Schnitzler conveyed the dilemma of assimilated Jews in several of his texts (most notably in his novel The Road into the Open), where he described the schizophrenic experience of simultaneous belonging and not belonging and the fear of being unmasked as a “foreigner” in one’s own cultural home.7. Roth describes this same phenomenon in The Wandering Jews: “When the war was over, they were repatriated, sometimes forcibly. A Social Democratic provincial governor had them thrown out. To Christian Socialists, they are Jews. To German nationalists, they are Semitic. To Social Democrats, they are unproductive elements” (quoted in Perloff, 52).8. Karl Kraus, The Last Days of Mankind, trans. Fred Bridgham and Edward Timms (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015), 2. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 115, Number 4May 2018 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/695967HistoryPublished online December 01, 2017 For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.