Introduction: Being in Place

Abstract

Austrian Studies 27 (2019), 1–12© Modern Humanities Research Association 2019 Introduction: Being in Place ANDREW J. WEBBER University of Cambridge It seems appropriate to begin this introduction with reference to a scholar who made some of the most important contributions to our thinking about Arthur Schnitzler and his contemporaries over the last decades: the late Edward Timms,1 who is remembered, not least as founding co-editor of Austrian Studies, in a tribute by Ritchie Robertson in this volume. In the wake of new attention in the 1980s to the cultural vibrancy of Vienna around 1900, most notably Carl E. Schorske’s hugely influential Fin-de-Siècle Vienna. Politics and Culture (1980), Timms accounted for that vibrancy with an appeal to a model of socio-cultural geometry. Extrapolating from the Vienna Circle of empiricist philosophy, he proposed — first in different iterations in the two volumes of his monumental study, Karl Kraus, Apocalyptic Satirist — that the rich cultural life of Vienna in the period around 1900 and until the hegemony of National Socialism could be understood as the product of a set of intersecting circles of intellectual and cultural activity. Schnitzler is given a prominent position in the constellations of circles in both volumes, albeit set somewhat apart from the political coordinates that frame the ‘cultural field’ in the second.2 In an article devoted to the transposition of that model of ‘Cultural Parameters’ to the interwar years, Timms drew upon the version of the circles mapped out in the second Kraus volume, thickening the description of the micro-circuitry of Viennese cultural life, in view of dimensions such as politics, economics, public life and gender relations. And he concluded his argument by acknowledging a matter that is of particular relevance for the present volume. While the geometric circuitry that he proposes, even in its more thickened forms, is necessarily an abstraction from the complex realities of the personal interactions and parallelisms (as well as the displacements and missed encounters) of cultural life in Vienna around 1900 and in the subsequent decades, it always needs to be thought in a relation with particularities of place 1 Alongside attention to Schnitzler in a number of his publications, Edward Timms reviewed successive volumes of the author’s diaries for the Times Literary Supplement between 1982 and 1988. 2 Edward Timms, Karl Kraus, Apocalyptic Satirist. Culture and Catastrophe in Habsburg Vienna (New Haven and London, 1986), p. 8; Karl Kraus, Apocalyptic Satirist, II. The PostWar Crisis and the Rise of the Swastika (New Haven and London, 2005), p. 108. Andrew J. Webber 2 and space. And place and space, in turn, need to be thought in a variety of forms. ‘Mapping cultural life in terms of “circles”’, Timms writes, seems to imply that the most significant developments occurred in the semiprivate space of coffeehouses or seminar rooms. But account should also be taken of more public spaces like the Konzerthaus (concert house) — the stage on which the different factions competed for cultural hegemony.3 Accordingly, Timms’s final monograph on Austria, Dynamik der Kreise, Resonanz der Räume. Die schöpferischen Impulse der Wiener Moderne [Dyna­ mics of Circles, Resonance of Spaces. The Creative Impulses of Viennese Modernism, 2013] expressly sounds out the different spaces in which the Viennese circles congregated and revolved. Whether moving in the sorts of sociogrammatic circles that Edward Timms draws, or in more angular or tangential formations, the cultural protagonists of Vienna around and after 1900 were always engaged in complex negotiations of cultural and social space on domestic, semiprivate and public levels. And this is certainly the case for Arthur Schnitzler, as one of the most significant of those protagonists, a figure commonly seen as the pre-eminent representative of ‘fin-de-siècle Vienna’. Not for nothing does the collocation ‘Schnitzler’s Vienna’ feature repeatedly in the literature,4 with Hugo von Hofmannsthal predicting its currency as early as 1922.5 The present volume aims to place Schnitzler anew by considering both more abstract or symbolic senses of placement (on the model of the kinds of circles that Timms draws) and more concrete, sociocultural senses. In doing so, it explores the map of (Schnitzler’s...