Hugo Von Hofmannsthal Research Articles

On the Chaos in Chandos: Hofmannsthal on Modernity’s Threshold

On the Chaos in Chandos:Hofmannsthal on Modernity’s Threshold Patrick Greaney (bio) In 1902, Hugo von Hofmannsthal published “A Letter,” in which a certain Lord Chandos writes to Francis Bacon to “excuse himself” for his “complete abandonment of literary activity.”1 It’s difficult to think of another short literary work in German that has received as much attention as this “founding text of literary high modernism.”2 Often, “A Letter” is introduced by literary critics as a straightforward account of falling into a “profound state of speechlessness,” and many commentators repeat Chandos’s presentation of this state, as if this work of literature were nothing more than a description of a character’s breakdown.3 Recent scholarship has avoided the once popular reading of “A Letter” as a “document” of Hofmannsthal’s biographical travails, [End Page 563] but many critics still interpret Chandos’s statements as if they recorded a real crisis.4 They seem to imagine their task as a Chandos diagnosis. “This character, Lord Chandos, has been taken at his word, which has directed attention away from literary knowledge of the text,” Rudolf Helmstetter writes, and readers, he continues, have “remained on the level of the character and his narcissistic self-deceptions and repeated his misjudgments with more or less empathy and emphasis.”5 What would it mean to pay attention to the literary aspect of “A Letter”? What would literary knowledge look like here? To read “A Letter” as a literary work first requires taking Chandos at his word, retracing his presentation of his crisis, but this can only be a preface to another kind of reading, one that no longer respects the integrity of anyone’s word. Chandos writes that he has “completely lost the ability to think or speak coherently [zusammenhängend] about anything at all” (121, 465). He can still do these things, just not coherently; there’s no speechlessness here. His problems begin with an experience of “abstract words…disintegrat[ing] in my mouth like rotten mushrooms;” he feels an “inexplicable uneasiness even pronouncing the words ‘spirit,’ ‘soul,’ or ‘body’” (121, 465). Words are no longer vehicles, but impediments. They are too corporeal to pronounce with confidence even the word “body.” This crisis comes about as he works on a collection, to be titled Nosce te ipsum, of apophthegmata or aphorisms, which would have included quotations from Chandos’s contemporaries as well as from ancient sources, including the “description” (“Beschreibung”) of architectural works (119, 463).6 This plan is made possible, according to Chandos, by his “drunken” vision of “all of existence as one grand unity” (120, 463–64). He feels this when he drinks fresh milk and when he takes in “sweet and foamy nourishment” from books. He insists on his mastery in these situations: some “tousled rustic” brings the milk to Chandos’s hunting lodge, and the books belong to him and are read in his study (120, 464). In his [End Page 564] experience of unity, “I had the intuition that everything was a symbol and every creature a key to another, and I felt I was surely the one who could take hold of each in turn and open as many of the others as would open [eine nach der andern bei der Krone zu packen und mit ihr so viele der andern aufzusperren, als sie aufsperren könnte]” (120, 464). This is how he summarizes his intentions: I wanted to open up [aufschließen] the fables and mythic tales which the ancients have handed down to us and in which painters and sculptors never cease to find mindless pleasure and show how they are the hieroglyphics of a secret, inexhaustible wisdom. (119, 463) Chandos insists here on “opening up” things and himself and gaining access to insides and interiorities. But as he proceeds with his “encyclopedic” project, these putative hieroglyphs take on their own life and become “dizzying whirlpools which spin around and around and lead into the void,” which is also a kind of inside (122, 466). He presents this change as a catastrophe, but his post-crisis situation is not all that different from his original state.7 In this new relation to the...

The Politics of Arabella: Post-Wagnerian Opera and the German-Jewish Quest for Lyrical Individualism, 1928-1933

The joint artistic project of composer Richard Strauss (1864-1949) and librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal (1874-1929), which flourished during the turbulent years 1909-1929, resulted in six operas – all won critical resonance and some even gained wide popularity. First staged in Dresden on 26 January 1911, Der Rosenkavalier became an immediate hit and opened more than fifty times that year to packed houses – in Dresden as well as in a string of other European cities. Demand for the opera was so great that the Prussian State Railways laid on a special service of Rosenkavalier trains to usher the enthusiastic crowds from Berlin to Dresden and its opera house.1 However, as opposed to the vitality of their early joint venture, Strauss and Hofmannsthal’s last joint creation, Arabella, is stamped with the mark of a melancholy anticlimax. On 15 July 1929, before he could finish work on the libretto, Hofmannsthal died while preparing funeral rites for his son, Franz, who had committed suicide two days earlier. The libretto was edited by Strauss throughout 1932, and the opera was finally staged in Dresden on 1 July 1933, with only minor corrections – a tribute to the librettist’s artistic legacy.

The Afterlife of Austria-Hungary: The Image of the Habsburg Monarchy in Interwar Europe by Adam Kożuchowski (review)

Reviewed by: The Afterlife of Austria-Hungary: The Image of the Habsburg Monarchy in Interwar Europe by Adam Kożuchowski Tiffany Wilson (bio) Adam Kożuchowski, The Afterlife of Austria-Hungary: The Image of the Habsburg Monarchy in Interwar Europe(Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013).232pp., ills. Bibliography. Index. ISBN: 978-0-8229-6265-6. The Afterlife of Austria-Hungary and the postimperial role of the “Austrian Idea” Adam Kożuchowski’s recent book The Afterlife of Austria-Hungary examines the interwar discourses that provided a postmortem examination of the Habsburg Empire. Through the lenses of historians, political theorists, and novelists, Kożuchowski shows the simultaneous deconstruction of Habsburg sympathy and construction of Austrian identity. The Afterlife of Austria-Hungary presents a thorough study of discourses as constructed by interwar Austro-German men of letters. While he is not in direct dialogue with previous Habsburg historians, his examinations of the “Austrian idea” provide a significant contribution to the field, encouraging historians to consider how the Austrian idea applies to the postimperial Habsburg space. Kożuchowski’s text aims not to comment on the state of present-day Habsburg historiography, but to illuminate [End Page 437] common themes among interwar thinkers (1918–1939). In his introduction, Kożuchowski argues that the critical years between World Wars I and II permanently shaped discourses on the Habsburg Empire. Kożuchowski focuses his study on three types of writers: professional historians in chapter 1, political theorists in chapter 2, and literary craftsmen in chapter 3. His fourth chapter stands alone as an exposition of interwar depictions of Emperor Franz Joseph. While Kożuchowski identifies and uses these categorizations, he admits that the differences in form matter less than the various national and political affiliations of the authors. Perhaps the only critique against the author’s analysis is the occasional overdependence upon tropes of national identity, at the expense of thought-provoking discourses on modernity, class, and gender. The creation of Austrian identity was an important theme to the men of letters Kożuchowski considers. Some theorists argued the small, postwar Austria was the same as it had ever been. The period of Austrian imperial rule had merely ended, leaving just the core of the empire, as it had been 400 years previously (P. 69). Inspired by this, as well as a distrust of nationalism as the source of the monarchy’s woes, theorists, led by the poet and playwright Hugo von Hofmannsthal, proposed the creation of an “Austrian idea.” The Austrian idea was a set of characteristics, defining Austrianness, and standing in for Austrian nationalism. As explained by Kożuchowski, the Austrian idea included exclusionary elements, seeking only to appeal to “true” Austrians, including the peasantry, nobility, and the “patriotic middle class” (P. 99). The Austrian idea excluded nationalists of all ilks, as many post-Habsburg intellectuals blamed successful national movements (including the Czechs and Hungarians) for the breakup of the monarchy. Kożuchowski finds that many intellectuals, from both ends of the political spectrum, understood the Austrian idea as essential for delineating Austria from its German cousin, Prussia. For some Catholic thinkers, fiercely loyal to the fallen monarchy and suspicious of Protestant Prussia, the blame lay at the feet of Prussian and Hungarian politicians who manipulated the Austrians into warring against Serbia and caused the escalation of hostilities, expanding the scale of warfare to become the Great War (P. 57). Writing in exile from his Nazi-occupied homeland, the Austrian Communist Albert Fuchs held similar levels of suspiciousness toward German nationals. Fuchs found balance between the internationalism of the Communist movement, and his homeland pride. For him the blame [End Page 438] rested not with Prussians abroad, but with the German nationalists within the Habsburg monarchy. German nationalists prevented the growth of true Austrian identity during the period when it might have saved the monarchy, and forced an artificial alliance with the German Empire (P. 61). Interwar intellectuals also varied in their attitudes toward turn-of-the-century Austrian thought. The optimism of “la belle époque,” the golden era, contrasted with the cynicism and anxiety of the “fin de siècle,” or turn of the century. More optimistic authors presented the...

Becoming Austrians: Jews and Culture between the World Wars by Lisa Silverman (review)

Reviewed by: Becoming Austrians: Jews and Culture between the World Wars by Lisa Silverman Dagmar C. G. Lorenz Lisa Silverman, Becoming Austrians: Jews and Culture between the World Wars. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2012. 334 pp. Lisa Silverman’s transdisciplinary study on Jews and Jewish spaces in interwar Austria examines legal, philosophical, geographic, and literary issues. Conceptually it bridges the gap between different approaches, including Sander Gilman’s psychoanalytical approach and Marsha Rozenblit and Harriet Pass-Freidenreich’s sociological methodology as well as literary historical, culture, and discourse critical studies. Particularly enlightening is Silverman’s discussion of Austrian high cultural theater and associated festivals and Jewish stages such as the cabaret and Yiddish theater of the period. In short, Becoming Austrians is an innovative exploration of pre-Shoah Jewish Austrian identity that stands on the shoulders of the rich tradition of research devoted to Vienna as an urban and intellectual center. This is also obvious from the structure [End Page 143] of the book: The main text comprises 180 pages and the remaining 154-page apparatus consists of bibliography, index, and endnotes. The result is a transparent and user-friendly as well as erudite publication. Instead of striving for unattainable completeness, Silverman constructs her narrative around focal areas and events that provide an entrée to the multilayered cultural imaginary and social reality of interwar Austrian Jewishness. Yet one important aspect of identity to enlighten the process of “becoming Austrians” seems missing: the issue of Jewish speech and its range and registers. This topic has recently been explored by Neil Jacobs and would have added a significant dimension to Silverman’s book. Included in the panorama of Silverman’s study are individual case studies and snapshots of social phenomena, for instance the almost imperceptible Jewishness of Catholic descendants of formerly Jewish families as distinguished from the obvious difference of newcomers. Silverman does set these groups apart while at the same time revealing their discreet commonality. The appeal of the unassimilated for non-Jews is apparent in her discussion of the Yiddish theater, as is the attraction of Catholic culture for Jews in the segments on the Salzburg Festival. Silverman argues convincingly that in becoming Austrians, the members of different Jewish-identified groups did more than simply contribute to the Austrian fabric: the fabric of Austria would not have been the same without them. The title of Silverman’s book emphasizes the processes of cultural transformation undertaken by new immigrants to the former capital of the Habsburg Empire. At the same time it announces a focus on the individual person and particular developments rather than promising a streamlined assessment of the overall historical spectrum. Silverman discusses many of the key figures known from the research of Carl Schorske, Peter Gay, Frederick Grunfeld, Allan Janick, Steven Beller, and Ritchie Robertson, and she engages with the recent scholarship of Hillary Herzog, William Donahue, and Robert Dassanowsky. In addition to the protagonists of earlier publications on the topics of emancipation and assimilation featuring Arthur Schnitzler, Ludwig von Wittgenstein, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Hugo Bettauer, Stefan and Arnold Zweig, and Elias and Veza Canetti, Silverman also examines less prominent authors whose glamour, like that of Vicki Baum, faded over time, or who because of their gender, their chosen genre, or their linguistic affiliation were marginalized within the Viennese cultural spectrum. Some of the exiles continued their career elsewhere but were forgotten in Austria. Silverman [End Page 144] is also alert to the representation of gender, highlighting, for example, the absence of Jewish female figures in Bettauer’s Die Stadt ohne Juden. Her awareness of cultural nuances is apparent in her remarks about the Yiddish theater, which was popular with Jewish and non-Jewish audiences but held its performances in dilapidated venues. Silverman contrasts this tradition with the glamorous, Catholic-coded Salzburg Festival, which was initiated by Jewish-identified personalities such as Max Reinhardt and Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Based on these examples, Silverman sketches a specifically Jewish geography of Vienna that extends into the provinces, where festivals of deliberately non-urban character were held. Thus Silverman uncovers apparent paradoxes of Austrian Jewishness, including the propensity of Austrian Jews for Austrian German and the Baroque-based Catholic culture that...

Micenas na Viena fin-de-siècle: Nietzsche, Freud, Hofmannsthal e o eterno retorno do mito

Este artigo tem por objetivo investigar a correlação de pensamento entre três importantes nomes da segunda metade do século XIX - Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud e Hugo von Hofmannsthal - que se debruçaram sobre as crises da identidade masculina frente ao retorno do matriarcado. Tendo a Viena fin-de-siècle como cenário, o feminino é apresentado aqui por intermédio de Electra, que no texto homônimo de Hofmannsthal representa não só o fortalecimento como a própria destruição da mulher.

Talking Like a Book: Exception and the State of Nature in Benjamin and Molière

Walter Benjamin confides to his friend Hugo von Hofmannsthal that “I sometimes think about writing a book on French tragedy as a counterpart to my Trauerspiel book,” noting that his “plan for the latter had originally been to elucidate both the German Trauerspiel and the French tragic drama in terms of their contrastive nature.” However, to do so “something must be added” that the book he wrote failed to supply. The aim of this essay is twofold: to reconstruct what Benjamin might have said about French classical tragedy and to identify the mysterious addition. Why does the effort to “elucidate” the two forms “in terms of their contrastive nature” demand a supplement? What would the supplement have been, and how might it illumine Benjamin's own project as well as tragedy and Trauerspiel? My hypothesis is that Benjamin remains silent on these points because he was temperamentally and philosophically unable to think them through. Benjamin's focus on tragedy is itself an indicator of this psychic resistance. Benjamin clearly assumed that, whatever deeper features of German tragic drama a contrast with the French version might bring to light, Trauerspiel constitutes a sovereign law unto itself, whose wider metaphysical as well as historical authority needs no argument. As a result, his interpretation of the nature of French tragedy inevitably would have confirmed his core theses about the German baroque, a fact that in turn draws attention to what Benjamin truly needed to add to both accounts: the perspective of comedy.I propose, then, to counter Benjamin's argument by exploring the ways in which comedy challenges the underlying metaphysics to which tragedy appeals. To this end, I argue that the greatest tragedy of the French classical age is its greatest comedy, Molière's Dom Juan, ou le festin de pierre. Reading Molière's play alongside French and German tragedy reveals not only how deeply both versions of the “mourning play” are implicated in the political ideology of royal absolutism but also the availability of a quite different model of social and political association grounded in the historical ontology of modernity against which absolutism sets its face. In addition to opening new sightlines on seventeenth-century tragedy and comedy alike, the result raises questions about the metaphysics underlying both Benjamin's thought and the tradition of critical theory from Burckhardt, Nietzsche, and Weber down to Benjamin's rivals and epigones, Adorno, Schmitt, and Agamben.

Der unzuverlässige Erzähler im Bergwerk: Zu zwei Aspekten der Faschismusanalyse in Hermann Brochs Verzauberung

This paper deals with the motif of the mine in Hermann Broch’s novel Die Verzauberung (first version), aiming to analyze the specific intertextual references that inform Broch’s idiosyncratic contribution to the “Bergwerk” topos. The most evident influences in Die Verzauberung are the adaptations of the Falun legend by E. T. A. Hoffmann and Hugo von Hofmannsthal. In tracing the relationship between these texts and Broch’s novel, we observe a phenomenon one could term “selective intertextuality.” I attempt to explain this intertextuality with reference to the primacy Broch accords to a stringent analysis of fascism, which could be said to be the over-arching project of Die Verzauberung , of which the mine motif forms an important part.

Hugo von Hofmannsthal and the Austrian Idea: Selected Essays and Addresses, 1906–1927 ed. by David S. Luft (review)

Hugo von Hofmannsthal and the Austrian Idea: Selected Essays and Addresses, 1906–1927 ed. by David S. Luft (review)

Melancholy and allegory inDie Frau ohne Schatten

AbstractDie Frau ohne Schatten(The Woman without a Shadow, 1917) was conceived as Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal's ‘chief joint work’, and its central message has been read as an allegory of artistic collaboration and social engagement. This article calls upon Walter Benjamin's theory of allegory to enrich such an interpretation and unravel the opera's positive conclusion as an inadequate cure for the artistic melancholy of thefin de siècle. While Strauss successfully engaged with allegory to portray two of the opera's characters – the infertile Emperor and Empress – he was unable, for his own philosophical reasons expressed in the contemporaneousEine Alpensinfonie(1915), to ratify Hofmannsthal's hope, rooted in his ‘Chandos Crisis’, of creating an aesthetic totality, of reconstituting the symbol that Benjamin, in his later writings, pits against allegory.

The Breaking of the Voice

Part I of this article explores instances in Mahler's symphonies where the composer allows the continuity of the musical voice to break and to fall temporarily into silence. It analyses these in terms of seven different categories or compositional strategies – violent strikes, abysmal silence, draining away/falling apart, drowning out, hyperintensity, fragmentation, and strained voices. Part II considers the wider context for this breaking of the voice in literary and philosophical self-critiques of language contemporary with Mahler's work, specifically Austro–German forms of Sprachkritik as in the work of Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Fritz Mauthner, but also extending the parallel in less obvious directions to include Samuel Beckett. Taken together, the two parts of the article thus provide both evidence and historical context for a radical suggestion about Mahler's music, that at the heart of the symphonic is a constant threat of the aphonic – a complete loss of voice. While such moments are rare in Mahler, they might be read as extreme manifestations of the self-consciousness of language to which all his music is subject.

Hugo von Hofmannsthal and the Austrian idea: selected essays and addresses, 1906-1927

The Austrian writer Hugo von Hofmannsthal (1874-1929) was one of the great modernists in the German language, but his importance as a major intellectual of the early twentieth century has not received adequate attention in the English-speaking world. One distinguished literary scholar of his generation called Hofmannsthal a spiritual-moral authority of a kind German culture had only rarely produced. This volume provides translations of essays that deal with the Austrian idea and with the distinctive position of German-speaking Austrians between German nationalism and peoples to the East, whether in the Habsburg Monarchy or beyond it, as well as essays that locate Hofmannsthal's thinking about Austria in relation to the broader situation of German and European culture.

The Cambridge Companion to German Romanticism (review)

Reviewed by: The Cambridge Companion to German Romanticism Dennis F. Mahoney Nicholas Saul, ed., The Cambridge Companion to German Romanticism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. xx + 335 pp., 2 illustrations. German romanticism, with its penchant for crossing boundaries and its ever-shifting groupings of artists and intellectuals, is a phenomenon that calls for interdisciplinary, collaborative scholarship. Nicholas Saul, who has done pathbreaking work as scholar and editor on what he has called the “Aesthetic Humanism” of the period from 1790 to 1830, has here assembled a distinguished team of scholars from British, Irish, German, and American universities to take a fresh look at German romanticism. After Azade Seyhan’s introduction to the historical, philosophical, and literary origins and essential features of early romanticism, Ricarda Schmidt traces differing notions of human fulfillment in love and art from early to late romanticism, while also taking note of the triadic concept of historical development that distinguishes the romantic writers from their predecessors and successors. Then follow concise, informative chapters on the narrative, lyric, and dramatic productions of German romanticism, written respectively by Anthony Phelan, Charlie Louth, and Roger Paulin, which are complemented by John McCarthy’s ensuing reflections on the forms and objectives of romantic criticism as a “a fourth generic category” (114). Both in these chapters and throughout the volume as a whole, it is encouraging to encounter more than just the “usual suspects” of literary histories of German romanticism. McCarthy discusses, for example not only the Schlegels and Hardenberg/Novalis, but also Görres and Adam Müller, while Louth includes treatments of Hölderlin and Günderode in his interpretations of the romantic lyric. Kleist’s works are treated in the chapters on romantic prose and drama; likewise, Zacharias Werner’s works appear not only in this latter chapter, but also in Saul’s essay “Love, Death and Liebestod in German Romanticism.” Here Saul makes a convincing case for re-examining in its capacity “as a central focus of Romantic thought” (166) a theme that opponents of romanticism long regarded as evidence of its life-denying nature, but which in recent decades has been less in the forefront of critical attention. First, though, in his capacity as editor he provides three further wide-ranging and insightful contributions from Jane Brown (“Romanticism and Classicism”), Gesa Dane (“Women Writers and Romanticism”), and Carl Niekerk (“The Romantics and Other Cultures”). The next five chapters form a subunit in their discussions of romantic philosophy and religion (Andrew Bowie), romantic politics and society (Ethel Matala de Mazza), romantic science and psychology (Jürgen Barkhoff), German romantic painters (Richard Littlejohns), and romanticism and music (Bowie’s second contribution to the volume). Littlejohns deserves particular praise for providing an overview of romantic artists and their achievements in the areas of landscape, political, and religious art that also gives a vivid sense of individual paintings and drawings—so much so that it seems as though there were more illustrations provided than the two black-and-white reproductions of Caspar David Friedrich’s Das Kreuz im Gebirge (1808) and Runge’s Morgen (1803). The volume concludes with Margarete Kohlenbach’s survey “Transformations of German Romanticism 1830–2000,” which ranges from Heine and Nietzsche through French symbolism and neo-romanticism (with a special focus on Hugo von Hofmannsthal) to the Frankfurt School and contemporary writers like Botho Strauß and Peter Handke. [End Page 327] With the exception of Saul (less) and Kohlenbach (slightly more), each author has written essays between fifteen and twenty printed pages in length. All the contributions are scholarly and accessibly written, with observations of value both to specialists and to individuals seeking a good preliminary guide to the topic at hand. Some chapters have more extensive notes than others, but all conclude with select bibliographies of relevant scholarship for those readers interested in further investigations. In addition, Saul provides a concise but well chosen guide to further reading (291–304) for the volume as a whole, subdivided into sections on editions, works in English translation, and secondary literature relating to general topics, authors, genres, and themes. Similarly user-friendly is the extensive index (305–35), which includes entries not only for authors and their works, but...

« Beautiful Idiots and Brilliant Lunatics » Social Comedy, Nostalgia and a World of Fantasy (Wilde and Hofmannsthal)

The article focuses on the social comedies where a reception is being held, these passages offering a key to understanding not only the lasting popularity of the productions, but also the symbolic value and general ambivalence of Wilde’s theatrical picture of the Victorian upper class. The acts present an extremely brilliant, though exaggerated mirror world and act thus as critical comments upon the fabric of British society, a glowing Schein on the brink of disappearing forever. Wilde’s stagecraft lies in his combination of the codes of sociability and the codes of comedy, revealing the theatrical nature of Victorian high society, even the universal shaming of these “beautiful idiots and brilliant lunatics”. The author compares Wilde’s comedies with another piece de salon and conversation piece, functioning as revelateur, Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s Der Schwierige (1921), also a lasting success while set in an era radically out of touch with the present. The article offers thus a comparative perspective on the model of sociability exhibited by the reception scenes, a model no longer valid if it even has ever existed as such, and stresses its fundamental and underlying element of melancholy. What the public is made to witness is perhaps only a graceful though extremely attractive ballet of ghosts and masks, long lost, but still striking a most powerful chord—one of the reasons for the plays’ enduring success : they appeal to modern audiences’ fantasy and work, paradoxically, as founding myths of the Ideal Victorian or Austro-Hungarian aristocratic society.

Viennese Jewish Modernism: Freud, Hofmannsthal, Beer-Hofmann, and Schnitzler (review)

Reviewed by: Viennese Jewish Modernism: Freud, Hofmannsthal, Beer-Hofmann, and Schnitzler Alison Rose Abigail Gillman . Viennese Jewish Modernism: Freud, Hofmannsthal, Beer-Hofmann, and Schnitzler. University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009. Pp. x, 215. Paper $60.00. ISBN: 9780271034096. Abigail Gillman's study of Viennese Jewish modernism is a welcome edition to the literature on fin de siècle Viennese Jewry and European modernism. Setting out to define exactly what constitutes Viennese Jewish modernism, she focuses on the works of four somewhat disparate individuals: Sigmund Freud, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Richard Beer-Hofmann, and Arthur Schnitzler. Of the four, only Freud did not belong to the Jung Wien literary circle, only Hofmannsthal was not Jewish but of Jewish descent, and only Beer-Hofmann fully embraced Judaism as a religious and national identity. Much of the book is dedicated to finding and elucidating the underlying themes that connect their works. Gillman identifies as the primary affinities of the works examined a concern with memory, wrestling with Jewish identity and sources, and the shared practice of seeking new genres for the expression of cultural memory (8). The shared concern with how to express cultural memory is the second of Gillman's two basic theses alongside her claim that "Viennese Jewish modernism is a literary historical construct that attempts to make sense of modernist experiments that link Jewish Vienna to European modernism" (8). She refers to the Historical Exhibit at the Jewish Museum of Vienna (reopened in 1994 in the center of the city), which depicts Austrian Jewish history through a series of holograms and questions why the museum chose the most fleeting of media to represent the much ignored Austrian Jewish past. Holograms are an avant-garde form that juxtaposes images without making the connections and denies the priorities of history. She suggests that holograms exemplify what [End Page 102] is meant by "genre" throughout her book. Viennese Jewish modernists were like the makers of holograms in that they "deployed their aesthetic constructs to recombine history and memory in specific ways for specific purposes" (12). In her focus on the turn to tradition and memory in the works of Viennese Jewish modernists, Gillman challenges the interpretation of Viennese modernism as a rejection of the past as defined by Carl Schorske and others (Fin de Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture). While scholars such as Steven Beller, Marsha Rozenblit, Robert Wistrich, and Ivar Oxaal have documented the Jewish contribution to Viennese culture, she adds a new perspective by asking "what exactly was Jewish about the modernism these Jews created?" (20). The book is organized both chronologically and thematically. Part one, on genres of memory, begins with a chapter on Freud's works "Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of his Childhood" (1910), "Moses of Michaelangelo" (1914), and "Moses and Monotheism" (1938). By reading Freud through the lens of Viennese Jewish modernism, Gillman explores the centrality of memory in Freud's work. She demonstrates that he responded to dilemmas of Jewish life and memory through the creation of new genres of Jewish discourse (52). In chapter 2, Gillman focuses on Hofmannsthal's use of the pantomime genre, a form of popular theater that incorporates dance, music, and sung narrative, in Der Schüler (1901). Hofmannsthal suppressed the Jewish identity of his characters in the final published version of the pantomime. She also examines the role of the Jewish daughter, Taube, as conforming to the "daughter plot" in Western literature and concludes that Hofmannsthal's experiment with pantomime blurs Christian and Jewish sources (75). Part two, "Hybrid Plots, Virtual Jews" begins with a chapter on Beer-Hofmann's Der Tod Georgs (1900), which Beer-Hofmann wrote associatively, without the necessary connection between thoughts (78). The work explores the mental processes of Paul the narcissist, the principle character, who returned to Judaism as a result of the death of his friend Georg. In the end, a racial memory, the blood in his veins (95) returned Paul to Judaism. In chapter 4, Gillman examines Schnitzler's two Jewish tragicomedies, Der Weg ins Freie (1908) and Professor Bernhardi (1912). Both failed with his readers, crossed forms and genres, and provided no solutions to the Jewish question (104...

Mercury Dressing: Poems (review)

Reviewed by: Mercury Dressing: Poems X. J. Kennedy (bio) J. D. McClatchy , Mercury Dressing: Poems (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009), 96 pp. At first—only at first, mind you—I had a hard time getting into J. D. McClatchy's new collection. On the jacket flap, the copywriter's drum-beating almost discouraged me from opening the book. McClatchy's work, it claims, "has increasingly revealed a concern with the life of the soul." Suffering cats. In my experience, poets who discourse on the life of the soul usually put us to sleep faster than Sominex. The soul, unfortunately, is harder to visualize than those streaks of the tulip that Dr. Johnson said poets shouldn't number, but which generally make for more arresting and persuasive poetry. As Ezra Pound, wrong about so many things but rarely wrong about poetry, advised poets, "Go in fear of abstractions." Not that a poet can be blamed for the enthusiasms of his jacket copy. Still, for the title of a poetry book, Mercury Dressing seems rather blah and unengaging. Evidently this god of commerce, Jove's winged messenger, holds great import for the poet; exactly why, he doesn't make clear. The book opens with a title poem in which the god is donning "transparency," also his feathered helmet and a helmet-like codpiece. Somehow this apparition "Unsteadies the routines of the heart." Will the god bring the speaker harm or help? The question remains unanswered. The god disappears "As so much else has down the years" (an apparent stab at Capital-S Significance), though somehow he remains inside the speaker—"His nerve electrifies the air." Are we to expect, then, the poems that follow to be charged with electricity? Only sometimes do we hear the crackle of high voltage. But later, as if to reinforce the book's mercurial theme, there's an extremely fine, vivid translation of a tale from Ovid in which Mercury, on fire with passion for the maiden Herse, has to make his way past her meddling sister Aglauros, whom Envy has turned to stone. McClatchy ends the tale with Mercury charging into Herse's bedchamber, a logical conclusion though not in Ovid. "A god can do this," he adds, "can do whatever he wishes." If McClatchy envies the god that power, I can understand. But what are we supposed to make of Mercury's role in this book? "His message is his being there," the title poem declares. Say what? When after struggling with that title poem, not getting far, I gritted my teeth and kept reading, I found McClatchy in "Self-Portrait as Amundsen" championing an abstraction: [End Page 140] I have always known that I would be the oneNot just who found but wanted to find the abstractMeaningless point on which the planet turns. Splendid lines! Coming upon them, I did a double take, feeling like an oaf for having been so hasty to judge. Those lines reminded me that an abstraction can be immense, even in poetry. After all, there's Wordsworth's marvelous sonnet "Mutability" (of "the unimaginable touch of time"), and Richard Crashaw's hymn beginning, "Love, thou art absolute sole lord / Of life and death." If McClatchy wants to seek abstractions as wonderful as the poles of the earth, I thought, then to hell with Pound and more power to him. He includes, by the way, an impressive version of another poem about mutability, one by Hugo von Hofmannsthal. A deeper perusal of Mercury Dressing proved more and more rewarding. McClatchy is a master at limning particulars—"Outside, a flag of shadow is snapping angrily on the grass." The sea is a mass of "great gray plates / coupling and uncoupling." He can capture precise details in musical words: "Starflakes and splintery stalactites, / A crystalline chaos of sharp shreds." Those wonderfully chewy lines gave me much pleasure. I went around all day chanting them. In its high intelligence and tremendous formal skill, McClatchy's work is on a level with that of James Merrill, several volumes of whose poems, essays and memoirs, novels and plays he has edited. Evident in McClatchy's poems, too, is his long involvement in...

‘Between Moscow and New York’: Richard Strauss's Die ägyptische Helena in Cultural-Historical Context

This article offers a contextual reading of Hugo von Hofmannsthal's and Richard Strauss's 1927 opera Die ägyptische Helena. For Hofmannsthal and Strauss, the marital rift between Menelas and Helena caused by her infidelity operated as the symbolic manifestation of a similar schism in pan-Germanic politics, society and the arts – thus highlighting the concomitant necessity for unity through recognition and celebration of a common culture. By recasting the story of Menelas's and Helena's homeward journey from Troy in order to create an aesthetic answer to the problems of the present, Hofmannsthal and Strauss pointed to the distinct similarities between the Trojan War and the recent conflict that had completely changed the political, geographical and social landscape in Europe. As this article demonstrates, Die ägyptische Helena stands as an artwork both expressly aware and uniquely representative of its historical moment through a multi-faceted literary and musical referentiality inherently characteristic of its creators.

“Imperialism of the Spirit”: Fictions of Totality and the Self in Austrian Modernism*

In Austrian Studies, the debate continues as to whether postcolonial theory is applicable to the Hapsburg monarchy. This article seeks to contribute to this debate by analysing discursive structures common to the continental empires rooted in medieval structures and to modern colonial empires, as well as critically assessing some of their specificities. To this end, I analyse the Utopia of an “Imperialism of the Spirit” present in the essays of two central Viennese modernists, Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Robert Müller, demonstrating the discursive construction of a particular kind of imperialism and nationalism based on culture and the arts. I further show, focusing on Robert Müller’s and Robert Musil’s major novels, how imperialism functions as a fulcrum of the complex relation of modernist literature with the paradigm of modernity. At the same time, imperialism is also the object of critique and rewriting in the context of the resolution of the many crises of modernity, especially that of the Subject.

Embodied Texts: Symbolist Playwright–Dancer Collaborations (review)

Reviewed by: Embodied Texts: Symbolist Playwright–Dancer Collaborations Christopher Martin Embodied Texts: Symbolist Playwright–Dancer Collaborations. By Mary Fleischer. Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft 113. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007; pp. xxi + 346. $104.00 paper. Where is the power of theatre located? Is it in the text? In the artful transference of ideas from the mind of the playwright, conveyed through the performer, into the mind of the audience? Is the power of performance located in the ritual act of performance itself? In the ephemeral connection between an audience and a performance? In the act of observing? Diverse theatre artists at the turn of the twentieth century grappled with these questions. Mary Fleischer’s Embodied Texts presents five detailed case studies that examine collaborations between writers and dancers who sought to harness the power of nonverbal communication to locate the power of the theatre outside of the spoken word. The case studies center around five relationships: Gabrielle D’Annunzio and Ida Rubenstein; Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Grete Wiesenthal; W. B. Yeats and Michio Ito; Yeats and Ninette de Valois; and Paul Claudel and Jean Börlin. Each study is structured similarly: Fleischer begins with an introduction to the writer, situating him in the context of the arts during the fin-de-siècle, then she meticulously traces connections between the writer and other artists of the day, building toward the writer–dancer collaboration. This is followed by a similar treatment of the dancer, after which the products of the collaborative labor are considered. Fleischer asserts [End Page 502] that the “complex and unique nature of these pieces . . . can be appreciated only through an exploration of their initial rehearsal and production periods, set within the context of their collaborators’ artistic goals” (xvii). This strategy generally serves Fleischer well as she draws the reader forward through the myriad connections between Symbolist artists in Europe after the turn of the twentieth century. Symbolism, a movement concerned with breaking down realist conventions through explorations of myth, dreams, and emotions, was a common ground for both writers and dancers seeking to expand the boundaries of their fields. The Symbolist fascination with the dancing body was perhaps best expressed by Wiesenthal: “[t]he last secret [of the dance] perhaps is that the human body, this poor, profane body, which is subject to all the phases of decrepitude in the course of a human life, . . . allows us to sense the coming of a brilliant transformation beyond the earthly” (133). This perception of a transcendent quality that could best be expressed in dance drove many of these collaborations. In 1910–11, Hofmannsthal and Wiesenthal worked in a form they called “new pantomime,” in which Hofmannsthal sought to “bridge subjective feeling and external form,” while Wiesenthal used dance as “the means to artistically express the interlocking of reality and play, of this side and beyond” (126). Similar sentiments can be found in the work of D’Annunzio and Rubenstein on Le Martyre de Saint Sebastien, Yeats and Ito’s At the Hawk’s Well, and Claudel and Börlin’s The Ballets Suedois. In her conclusion, Fleischer suggests that “these works disrupt realistic conventions governing the coordination of language and movement, and they often suspend linear time though combining dance and theatrical elements in modern, abstract ways” (306). Unfortunately, Fleischer’s introduction and conclusion comprise a mere twenty-three pages of the text, and the body occasionally reads as a redaction of previous scholarship or a mere chronicle of the activities of the artists. These case studies seem to cry out for further analysis or a theoretical frame. I found myself wondering, for example, how the interaction of the male writers, choreographers, composers, and designers with the female dancers worked within or subverted gender dynamics of the time; other issues similarly go unaddressed. Salted throughout Embodied Texts are anecdotal insights into the difficulties of the collaborative process. Such difficulties were perhaps an inevitable result of bringing together artists who understood expression so differently, and charting where the productions succeeded and (more often) failed is naturally a major consideration of the work. Fleischer provides numerous instances in which talented artists cannot quite get on the same page. Often, the...

The whole difference: selected writings of Hugo von Hofmannsthal

The whole difference: selected writings of Hugo von Hofmannsthal

A semiotic approach to the pathology of literary Décadence

The article attempts to explain literary Decadence, a literary phenomenon of the mid- to late-nineteent century, by applying analytical categories to it that are derived from Umwelt theory. Having outlined the theoretical approach, which centres upon the concept of Lebenswelt, it is applied it to Hugo von Hofmannsthal's Ein Brief. I shall show that what is presented in this text is the collapse of the Lebenswelt as well as an attempt to rebuild it through conscious efforts. My claim that this is precisely what lies at the root of Decadence as a literary phenomenon will be put to a test in the subsequent attempt to explain essential features of Decadent writing.