Introduction: Literary Imaginings and Cultural Constructions of the Habsburg Empire

Abstract

Austrian Studies 28 (2020), 1–18© Modern Humanities Research Association 2020 Introduction: Literary Imaginings and Cultural Constructions of the Habsburg Empire DEBORAH HOLMES AND CLEMENS PECK University of Salzburg I In March 1898, Mark Twain published an article in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine under the title ‘Stirring Times in Austria’. His daughter, Clara, was taking music lessons in Vienna and the family had spent over a year there; Twain was even granted an audience with the emperor.1 Before renting a house in the Vienna Woods, the Twains spent autumn 1897 in the luxurious Viennese Hotel Metropole on Franz-Josephs-Kai.2 The American writer was therefore able to witness first-hand how national conflicts within the Habsburg empire expressed themselves in the imperial capital, tensions that reached new heights during the Badeni crisis of 1897. However, ‘Stirring Times’ is not structured using climax or hyperbole, as one might expect, but rather through the figure of paradox. As distressing and irreconcilable as the differences within the empire may seem, Twain notes, Habsburg political theology nevertheless gives an unshakeable impression of tranquillity, as though it were situated outside history: Things have happened here recently which would set any country but Austria on fire from end to end and upset the government to a certainty; but no one feels confident that such results will follow here. Here, apparently, one must wait and see what will happen.3 Twain thus pre-empts the topos of Fortwursteln [muddling through] that was later to become a central category in Claudio Magris’s influential work on the ‘Habsburg myth’;4 approaching this phenomenon in the vein of cultural anthropology, he takes on the pose of wonderment that characterizes his 1 Anonymous, ‘Kleine Chronik’, Neue Freie Presse, 26 May 1899, p. 5. 2 Mark Twain, Notebook, prepared for Publication with Comments by Albert Bigelow Paine (New York and London: Harper, 1935), p. 339. The hotel was later to become the Gestapo headquarters and the setting of Dr B.’s solitary confinement in Stefan Zweig’s Schachnovelle [Chess Novella, 1942]. 3 Mark Twain, ‘Stirring Times in Austria’, Harper’s New Monthly Magazine for March, 96 (1898), 530–40 (p. 530). 4 Claudio Magris, Der habsburgische Mythos in der modernen österreichischen Literatur (Vienna: Zsolnay, 2000 [1966]), p. 29. Deborah Holmes and Clemens Peck 2 satirical (travel) writing. Austrian public life seems to be entirely made up of unexpected — if not impossible — combinations: it is an ‘unintelligible arrangement of things’, ‘a confusion of unrelated and irreconcilable elements’, ‘a condition of incurable disunion’.5 With the help of Forrest Morgan’s report on Austria in the Travelers Record, an often-used reference work of the time for staff and customers of the USA’s biggest travel insurance companies, Twain attempts to bring some order to bear on these phenomena. He frames them using a series of metaphors that characterize an overall Habsburg scheme, all the while strengthening the figure of paradox: The Austro-Hungarian Monarchy is the patchwork quilt, the Midway Plaisance, the national chain-gang of Europe; a state that is not a nation but a collection of nations, some with national memories and aspirations and others without, some occupying distinct provinces almost purely their own, and others mixed with alien races, but each with a different language, and each mostly holding the others foreigners as much as if the link of a common government did not exist. [. . .] [E]ach has remained for ages as unchanged in isolation, however mingled together in locality, as globules of oil in water. There is nothing else in the modern world that is nearly like it, though there have been plenty in past ages [. . .] it violates all our feeling as to what a country should be in order to have a right to exist [. . .]. 6 The centrepiece of Twain’s article are the tumultuous scenes that took place in the Reichstag [imperial parliament] in late autumn 1897, depicted as highprofile but nevertheless representative illustrations of this general Habsburg scheme. The ‘unrelated and irreconcilable elements’ collide forcibly, producing moments of high drama but also comedy, reminiscent at times of improvised Hanswurst performances from the Baroque. Since March 1897, Minister President Kasimir von Badeni had...