How does culture respond to political failure? This question—posed in the United States on the eve of the Reagan revolution, about Vienna, imperial capital, on the eve of WWI—generated a series of case studies on the “hothouse” culture of Viennese modernism that would culminate in Carl Schorske’s massively influential essay collection Fin-de-siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture. From the advent of psychoanalysis to the fantasies of nationalist mass politics, from architecture and city planning to avant-garde literature, painting, and music, Schorske identifies a thoroughgoing withdrawal into the life of the mind on the part of the scions of the bourgeoisie—a retreat into an ahistorical “garden of aestheticism” precipitated by the consensus view that the liberal political project had foundered. Political disillusionment was overcome, the argument goes, by reducing politics to psychological categories, and thereby neutralizing it. But if political prospects had withered on the vine, the space thus opened up was lush with new opportunities to refashion the self in experimental and open-ended directions. And so: Arthur Schnitzler and Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Sigmund Freud, Gustav Klimt, Oskar Kokoschka, and Arnold Schönberg, each in their respective fields, adumbrate a post-rationalist reorganization of human thought and feeling against a background of social and political dissolution. In the midst of social and political stagnation, what becomes of art’s vocation? How—in our own present of populist reaction and imperial decline—might Schorske’s search for unified meaning amidst Vienna’s “death dance of principles” help us come to grips with our own political culture and cultural politics?
In this course, we will explore the many aspects of Schorske’s central thesis, alongside scholarly responses to it and selections from the art and literature that occasioned it. Key questions guiding our exploration will include: What humanist, rational, and ethical ideas fell by the wayside with the demise of the liberal political project—and what new sensibilities arose in their stead? To what extent does the avant-garde’s retreat into aestheticism fall in with the natural inclinations of the ruling bourgeois class, and how might this be implicated in the divergent legacies of Vienna 1900—be they red or brown? What can we learn from grounding cultural production in its historical context, politically and socially? What implications does this have for interpreting the cultural artifact? How did Schorske’s attempt to understand the formalist introspection that characterized his own time lead ironically not to a return to collective horizons but to further fragmentation? What does the “pessimistic mood” among liberal intellectuals that Schorske seeks to understand reveal about the political compromises made in forging American empire? Supplementary readings will be drawn from scholars in conversation with Schorkse, including Alys X. George, Steven Beller, and Jacques Le Rider. We’ll also analyze excerpts from the writers, artists, and composers that Schorske discusses and evokes, from Schnitzler and Freud to Klimt, Schönberg, and Robert Musil.
