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Karlskirche, Vienna
The Archaeology of Postmodernity, Part I: Viennese Mutations
E. R. E. Knutsson
December 6
The long-term destiny of the Western world
has been a movement from pre-modern ‘Providence’ via modern ‘Progress’ to postmodern ‘Nihilism’. Providentialism’s linear
future-oriented focus — emphasizing the role of reason to the detriment of
divine intervention — easily merged with the Enlightenment idea of Progress,
paving the way for the rise of modern science. The Enlightenment project —
designed to eliminate uncertainty and ambivalence — was gradually undermined by
postmodern inversion, implosion, relativism and nihilism.
The resulting “postmodern
condition” calls for an investigation into the archaeology of
post-modernity. Excavations of this kind are likely to encounter layers of 19th
and 20th-century answers to 21st-century questions. A privileged site to start
looking for answers is Vienna — “the capital of the 20th century.”
Metropolises such as Vienna, Berlin, Budapest, Prague, St. Petersburg and New
York – 19th and early 20th-century cityscapes with significant Jewish Diasporas
and epicenters of a widely felt civilizational crisis — were scenes or
“laboratories” for intense, sub-counter-cultural “experiments” and avant-garde
strategies designing prototypes of a future hybridized, postmodern world.
Viennese modernism represents, according to
Jacques Le
Rider, “the appearance of a post-modern moment in the
history of European culture.” The Jewish
satirist
Karl Kraus
damned Vienna
as a “research laboratory for world
destruction.”
The revolution of (proto-post-)modernism entailed an increasing
separation of representation from
“the real.”
In this context, the pseudo-assimilated Jew has been seen as “the prototype of
the post-modern self.” Major themes
of the Kulturkritik of the 1970s and
1980s,
Jacques Le Rider points out, were prefigured in the Viennese modernism
of 1900.
Vienna Court Opera, 1902
Vienna: “The Capital of the 20th Century”
At the turn of the 20th century
Vienna was one of Europe’s largest urban centers, with a population of more than
two million by 1910. By then, Vienna had been a major centre of political power
and cultural patronage for centuries. Vienna was a place of tensions and paradox:
Its mayor,
Karl Lueger, had
anti-Semitic inclinations. Vienna
sheltered both Theodor Herzl — the founder of Zionism — as well as Adolf Hitler,
the founder of National Socialism.
The city’s
numerous innovative cultural and intellectual movements and figures radically
changed Western culture and thought, according to
Steven Beller:
Leading a very long list are two intellectual giants: Sigmund Freud, the founder
of psychoanalysis, and
Ludwig Wittgenstein, one of the most influential philosophers of the modern
era. … Hans Kelsen
revolutionized the theory of law; the Austrian School of Economics had a large
influence on liberal economic thought; the Vienna Circle of philosophers
developed logical positivism, and
Karl Popper acted as that
movement’s leading critic;
Alfred Adler developed individual psychology, the first of many rebels from
Freudian orthodoxy who established their own movements; Austro-Marxism brought
innovative reinterpretations of socialist theory. Vienna also became a
powerhouse of literary innovation:
Arthur Schnitzler,
Hugo von Hofmannsthal,
Karl Kraus,
Hermann Broch, Robert
Musil, Stefan Zweig and
Franz Werfel, later
Elias Canetti, were but
the most prominent among a vast array of writers. It is the depth of
intellectuality and talent that is perhaps the most impressive part of Vienna
1900.
Viennese ‘critical modernism’ had its roots in French
decadence, the positivism of the
physicist
Ernst Mach and the
“Dionysian” influence of Richard Wagner and Friedrich Nietzsche.
Nietzsche had, in the words of
Joan Peyser, “repudiated nineteenth-century ideology and demanded the
reorganization of human society under the guidance of exceptional leaders.
Richard Wagner answered the call,” and became “the German superhero, the
embodiment of the Dionysian ideal for which Nietzsche yearned.”
Vienna circa1900 was, as Steven Beller points out, “a vibrant centre of radical
cultural and intellectual innovation, with consequences that reverberated
through the twentieth century.” Its
culture was heavily influenced by the largest Jewish community in Western
Europe:
In Vienna especially the Jewish role was predominant.
Some of the major figures of Viennese modern culture … such as Adolf Loos
and Georg Trakl, Ernst Mach and Ludwig Boltzmann, were not Jewish, but the vast
majority were. The Jewish presence among creative figures in the plastic arts
was not that large, although Jews were prominent as patrons, art critics and
propagandists, and eventually as art historians. In most other modern cultural
fields … such as psychoanalysis, the Vienna Circle, Austro-Marxism and literary
Young Vienna, the people involved were in a large majority Jewish or of Jewish
descent. The liberal professions —
lawyers, physicians and journalists — also had a majority Jewish presence, and
it has often been claimed that the public for Viennese modern culture was also
heavily Jewish. This Jewish
predominance was based on solid socio-economic grounds, for the social reservoir
of Viennese modern culture, the educated part of the liberal wing of the city’s
bourgeoisie, was largely Jewish.
Jews comprised 10 per cent or so of Vienna’s population, and even less, about 3 per cent, of the population of the lands of the later Austrian Republic. Yet Jews had a large presence in Vienna’s liberal socio-economic sectors, being 30 per cent of Vienna’s commercial self-employed. According to Beller, the Jewish emphasis on education was also much greater than normal: “Approximately two-thirds of all boys with a liberal bourgeois background who graduated from Vienna’s central Gymnasien [the elite secondary schools] between 1870 and 1910 were Jewish. (The equivalent proportion among girls was higher still.)”
As
Louis Breger notes,
The new religious freedom that followed the German revolution of 1848 was
accompanied by the lifting of restrictions and special taxes that Jews had
suffered for many years. Now, they enjoyed the rights of full citizens; the
professions were open to them, they could employ Christian servants, own real
estate, and live outside the ghettos. These new opportunities had stimulated a
flood of Jewish immigrants from the provinces during the second half of the
nineteenth century. In 1860, there were 6000 Jews in Vienna; by 1900, the number
was 147.000, the largest Jewish community of any country in Western Europe. In
the capital, they found expanding economic, educational, and cultural avenues;
by the turn of the century, they were a powerful presence in banking and
industry, in medicine, law, journalism, literature, and music.
Vienna: Ringstrasse
“The whole Ringstrasse had a magic
effect upon me, as if it were a scene from the Thousand-and-one-Nights.”
(Adolf Hitler)
Members of the Austrian nobility considered it beneath their station to engage
in trade, finance, and the professions, leaving these fields open to
enterprising and educated Jews who were able to achieve positions of wealth and
prominence. By the latter half of the 19th century, they dominated a number of
fields. As Louis Breger observes:
By the 1880s, 12 percent of the population of Vienna was Jewish, yet they made
up one-third of the student body of the university, with even higher numbers in
certain fields: 50 percent in medicine and almost 60 percent in law. All the
liberal newspapers were owned by Jews and a large proportion of the journalists
were Jewish. As the turn of the century approached, the majority of the liberal,
educated, intellectual elite of Vienna was Jewish. The politicians
Victor Adler —
brother-in-law of Freud’s school friend Heinrich Braun — and
Otto Bauer — older brother
of the woman who became his famous case, ‘Dora’; the journalist
Karl Kraus; the writers
Arthur Schnitzler,
Hugo von
Hofmannsthal, and Stefan
Zweig; the composers Gustav Mahler, Arnold Schoenberg, and
Alban Berg — all came from
Jewish families. Even that most Viennese of musicians, Johann Strauss, was, it
is now believed, part Jewish.
Leon Botstein
points out that the Jewish presence in Vienna “increased from less than half of
1 per cent in the Vienna of Schubert’s day, to around 5 per cent in 1862 when
Brahms settled in the city, to over 10 per cent when Mahler left for Kassel in
1883. The Vienna in which Mahler died comprised over 175,000 Jews; the city he
first encountered in 1875 comprised only about
Modernity attracted Jews from the periphery toward the center — as Philip V.
Bohlman
observes — “to the metropole, to the cosmopolitan culture of modernism,
to the arts and sciences fostered by great universities, to the monumental
synagogues, and to the concert halls and cabarets.” Jewish modernism took shape
as a counter-history to the rise of European modernism, and Jewish music in the
modern era inscribed its otherness “in such ways that it would circulate in a
modern public sphere.” During the modern era, Bohlman points out, “the otherness
of the [European] periphery increasingly shifted towards the center”:
Europe and the Enlightenment, and its Jewish form, the Haskala … are keys to
understanding a revolutionary transition in Jewish music and Jewish music
history. … Before the modernity articulated by
Moses Mendelssohn
and other … Jewish Enlightenment
thinkers, “music” was largely vague as an aesthetically autonomous object in
Jewish society. In a strict sense
everything in the synagogue was music — prayer, Torah and Haftorah, cantillation,
ritual and liturgical interjection — therefore it was impossible to limit it to
any single category. … The cyclical
nature of liturgical practices bounded music within ritual and prevented it from
flowing over into the temporal world outside the synagogue.
As Jews from the eastern parts of the Austro-Hungarian Empire “flooded the
metropole” (i.e. Vienna), a new Jewish popular music took shape, trading in
stories that “chronicled a new city culture in the liminal space between
tradition and modernity.” The musical traditions these new immigrants brought
with them gradually spread through the public sphere. As Bohlman points out,
One of the most important conditions for the complex new popular music was
language. Each stream of immigration from a different part of the empire brought
with it different dialects, which in turn were distinct from the other dialects
found in Vienna. … Speech and language played a further role in the historical
transformation of Jewish music, not least because of the partial supplanting of
Hebrew with German in the synagogue. … The proliferation of Jewish dialects of
German and different dialects of Yiddish in Vienna had a profound impact on the
city’s popular culture. … The Wiener
Mundart (Viennese dialect) that contributed to the formation of the genre
known as Wienerlied (literally,
Viennese song, but referring to an extensive repertory of popular song in
Viennese dialect) bears direct witness to the specific influences of Jewish
dialects.
Jewish composers in early 20th-century Europe formulated a vocabulary of melodic
patterns and motivic meaning that allowed some of them —
Ernest Bloch,
Arnold Schoenberg,
among others —
to create repertories that contained specifically Jewish symbolism.
Max Brod (1884 – 1968) —
the Jewish music critic, composer, philosopher, and future champion of
Franz Kafka —
established in an essay (“Jewish Folk Melodies”, 1916) the conditions for the
Jewishness in Gustav Mahler’s music and by extension in modern Jewish music. As
Bohlman observes,
Brod’s essay … turned the Jewish question many were posing inside out by
claiming that what was presumably the most German trait of Mahler’s style, the
march, was an expression of Jewishness. … The march style Brod ascribed to
Mahler was religious and hassidic, even further removed from the firsthand
experiences of Mahler’s lifetime. Mahler’s musical connection was possible,
therefore, because of his “Jewish soul,” which was internal and thus contrasted
with his merely “external consciousness” of German music.
Theodor Adorno also searched for Mahler’s “inner identities” by reflecting on
his “musical physiognomy.” This search for Jewishness that preoccupied Brod and
other 20th-century Jewish observers produced a constellation of themes orbiting
Mahler’s music, claiming that it included — in Bohlman’s words — “specifically
Jewish gestures, presumably absorbed from growing up in the Jewish soundscape of
provincial
Moravia.”
Mahler’s hometown Iglau contained one of the oldest Jewish communities in
Moravia — a region well-known as the home to influential Talmudic scholars and
famous rabbinical dynasties. Like many Moravian and Bohemian towns, Iglau was a
German-speaking enclave within a larger Czech-speaking rural society. Czech was
the language of farmers and peasants; German was the language of success and
social advancement, the language of the educated, urban elites and the imperial
bureaucracy.
Café Central, a key meeting place for intellectuals in late-19th-century Vienna
Mahler famously remarked that he was “thrice homeless: as a Czech among
Austrians, as an Austrian among Germans, and as a Jew throughout the world.” But
Mahler was in “good company” as a prominent cultural figure of fin-de-siècle
Vienna descended from the Crown Lands of Bohemia and Moravia: His fellow
Bohemian Jews included Victor Adler, Otto Bauer, Richard Beer-Hofmann, Hermann
Broch, Egon Friedell, Karl Kraus, Stefan Zweig, Sigmund Freud, Guido Adler, Otto
Neurath, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Max Reinhardt, Arnold Schoenberg, and Otto
Weininger.
It has been
argued that Mahler’s music has links back to the Hasidic music of
Eastern European ghettos of the eighteenth century in which dance music is
deployed as a remedy to misery: “Mahler’s lifelong juxtaposition of funeral
march and dance music, dating back to his earliest childhood composition (a
polka with funeral march introduction), is thus related to a specifically Jewish
tradition. The Trio of the third movement of the First Symphony, with its
interpolation of street music into the funeral march, is heard by many as an
example of klezmer music as Mahler would have heard as a child and would
have been heard on the streets of Vienna during his time there.”
As
Philip Bohlman points out,
Mahler’s music revealed the afflictions experienced by a victim of
anti-Semitism, to which he responded in particularly personal ways.
Mahler’s marginality as a Jew, so his late twentieth-century champions
claimed, exposed him to cultural contexts distinguished by jarring
juxtapositions and pieces that failed to cohere as wholes. Mahler therefore
employed the musical language of
bricolage, somehow
characteristic of a Jewish preference for hybridity over unity.
Rudolf Louis,
one of Mahler’s anti-Semitic critics, summarized it thus in 1909: “What I find
so utterly repellent about Mahler’s music is the pronounced Jewishness of its
underlying character. … It is abhorrent to me because it speaks Yiddish. In
other words it speaks the language of German music but with an accent, with the
intonation and above all with the gestures of the Easterner, the all-too-Eastern
Jew.” Louis’s choice of words, according to
Julian Johnson, “underlines something true about Mahler’s music: it
speaks the language of the Austro-German tradition but with a different tone,
accent, and voice. It remains contested whether this difference is explained by
Mahler’s Jewish origins … or whether it results from a modernist attitude toward
language (marked by irony, parody, exaggeration) that exceeds the specific
category of Jewish identity.”
Despite his conversion, there was never any doubt in Vienna that Mahler was
Jewish. As
Leon Botstein points out, “Jewish identity was no mere matter of an
individual’s theological practices or convictions. In the eyes of Jews and
anti-Semites alike, it was a matter of birth, race, and nation, as well as
faith.”
It has been
suggested, that Mahler’s music reflects the tragic
Weltgefühl of his era.
Julian Johnson points out that Mahler’s music is like “an acoustic prism
placed at the end of one century and the beginning of another, refracting
musical voices from both historical directions, from Viennese classicism and
early romanticism to the stylistic eclecticism and polyvocality of the twentieth
century.”
Part II: The Emancipation of Dissonance
E.
R. E.
Knutsson
Permanent link:http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/authors/Knutsson-DeconstructionI.html
