Hugo von Hofmannsthal and the Cavalry

Abstract

In the summer of 1895 Hofmannsthal described to Schnitzler the pleasures of life on manoeuvres and, knowing Schnitzler's aversion to the military, concluded his letter with the admonition: Begreifen Sie, das ich zufrieden bin! (Briefe 175). Like Schnitzler, later commentators are reluctant to accept that Hofmannsthal could have derived any satisfaction from military service and might have viewed it favourably as a very positive stage in his development as a man and a writer. This resistance is readily understandable in the light of Hofmannsthal's frantic and unbecoming efforts in July 1914 to be transferred from a garrison in Istria to a comfortable post in Vienna (Lunzer 25-30). He commenced his service in 1894/95 as an Einjahrig-Freiwilliger in the 6th Dragoons and took part in exercises in 1896, 1897, 1898 and 1900 as a reserve officer in the 8th Galician Uhlans and in 1904 and 1905 in the Landwehr-4th Uhlans. These military experiences have been seen until now as an ordeal that, to his credit, he did not seek to avoid (Alewyn 79) and that, with an open mind, he survived without damage to his character (Hederer 31). More frequently, though, his periods of service have been viewed as downright distressing and negative, especially in discussions of Reitergeschichte (1899), his most famous portrayal of the military world. The view is fostered that discipline and mechanical routine were an unmitigated torment to a sensitive and refined poet and made him into an uncompromising foe of the military mind. The most worthwhile result in human terms that critics can salvage from his military service is the growth in maturity and knowledge of life that came above all from involuntary contact with the ugliness of it (Fiedler 151; Robertson 319; Volke 55). Ironically, this beneficial result is, of course, indirectly a sad comment on Hofmannsthal's unwillingness to confront social problems in the raw. An informed awareness of a world of material and spi ritual deprivation could have been gained by a stroll from his own affluent 3rd District across the tracks of the Sudbahnhof into neighbouring working-class Favoriten. Instead, summer cavalry exercises in the squalor of remote Galicia, some twenty hours