Progressive Historians and the Historical Imagination in Austria: Heinrich Friedjung and Richard Charmatz

Abstract

“ Alles flieβt ”—All things flow! Thus did the German-Austrian historian Richard Charmatz invoke Heraclitus to convey the sense of flux which characterized Austrian intellectual life before World War I. The sense of chronic, pervasive instability in late nineteenth-century Austrian society was the result of problems released by the solvents of liberal ideology, military defeat (in 1859 and 1866) and industrialization. In Danubian Europe, the discontents of modernity were experienced most acutely by the Germans, socially and culturally the most advanced of the nationalities of the Habsburg Monarchy. After 1848, the traditionally secure position of educated Germandom was threatened by the emergence of rival nationalisms, the growth of popular social protest, and the disintegration of a preindustrial value system. A culture accustomed to denying the Lebensfahigkeit of its neighbors was suddenly challenged by the need to demonstrate its own worth and capacity to survive. The Austro-German community reacted in a variety of ways; the result was a complex and extraordinarily rich cultural matrix which conditioned, on the one hand, the origins of psychoanalysis, logical positivism, musical atonality, and the philosophy of Wittgenstein, and nourished, on the other, the ideologies of Austro-Marxism, Christian Socialism, Zionism, and National Socialism. At the turn of the century, the capital of the backward “China of Europe” witnessed the birth of many of the major forces of contemporary history; cultural fecundity was the reflex of fear of decline and possible extinction.