Polis to Metropolis: Reconfiguring Fin-de-siècle Vienna Position paper for the Conference on Vienna 1900, October 2016, New Orleans Modernity Panel It is significant that fin-de-siècle Vienna has become the first theme for the Haus der Geschichte Österreich. It offers a way for Austria to declare itself European, an agent of universal modernity, and yet remain Austrian. As Viennese modernity was shaped in confrontation with the rising destructive forces of nationalism and antisemitism, the Haus der Geschichte Österreich gets an opportunity to acknowledge the less savory chapters of twentieth- century Austrian history, while remaining on the side of the good guys – the modernists who have become icons of Western culture. Fin-de-siècle Vienna also provides an unproblematic bridge to imperial Austria beyond two republics, foundation of which marked the collapse of empires, the first pluralist and federalist, the Habsburg Monarchy, the second racial, the Third Reich. Austrians, who live among the vestiges of the imperial past, artists, intellectuals and tour guides, find fin-de-siècle Vienna speaking to their contemporary concerns. Yet, fin-de-siècle Viennese modernism provides too thin, fragile and discontinuous ligatures to the Austrian past, and the Haus der Geschichte Österreich can return to it only in a more capacious form. Schorske’s Vienna represented a narrow elite project, the liberal sons’ response to the fathers’ popular failure. Over the last three decades, scholars have narrowed down even further its reach, pointing, for example, to its predominantly Jewish character. Schorske’s Vienna overlooked the city’s imperial role: The capital appeared not as a cultural metropolis, a center of imperial cultural networks, but as an autonomous polis. Schorske bid farewell to the Habsburg Empire, and a generation craving a therapeutic bond to the Austrian past, yet having no use for the Empire, celebrated his project on Austrian modernism. But, now, 2 © Hacohen 10/2016; no quote Haus der Geschichte New Orleans a few decades later, with Austrian nationalism and xenophobia rising and the European Union in crisis, new models are needed. Austrian modernism will not do: It cannot provide a national Austrian narrative. To reestablish historical bonds to the Austrian past, the Haus der Geschichte Österreich would need to turn to the panel on “imperial connections,” rather than to my own on modernity. In a popular essay in the Wiener Journal, posted jointly with this paper, I have offered my socialist friends a way for rethinking their relationship with the imperial past. Here, I will highlight the historical origins of “fin-de-siècle Vienna” and its limits, and propose we emulate Musil by turning Schorske’s polis into a cultural metropolis. Origins of “fin-de-siècle Vienna” Fin-de-siècle Vienna came on stage in the early 1980s and took the theater scene over in a storm. The show had been long in the making but nothing suggested its amazing future success. Schorske had been laboring on Viennese modernism since the early 1960s, publishing several essays that found their way into the book. He was working through the fissures of modernity in ways unique, perhaps, among contemporary American liberals (many of Jewish origin), addressing their anxieties about McCarthyism and Cold war politics, then responding to the 1960s’ student movement. In Vienna, the cultural political magazine FORVM, edited by remigré writer, Friedrich Torberg (1908-1979), and clandestinely financed by the CIA, featured fin-de-siècle modernist writers and painters, a breath of fresh air in the stultified atmosphere of the postwar years. In FORVM, Viennese modernism was part of a larger project, nostalgic in character, displaying German-speaking Austrian Jewish writers, and other imperial cultural hybrids, as the authentic representatives of Central European culture, now lost. Finally, a group of Hungarian historians (often of Jewish origins), led by Péter Hanák(1921-1997) began reimagining in the 1970s fin-de-siècle Central European urban centers, wistfully contemplating, 3 © Hacohen 10/2016; no quote Haus der Geschichte New Orleans perhaps, further relaxation of communism that might allow ties across the Iron Curtain to be reforged. In late 1970s Vienna, a group of younger members of the City Council, led by conservative Deputy Mayor (and future Vice-Chancellor), Erhard Busek, searched for new ways of connecting to the Austrian past. They represented a generation that had no Austrian history they could love, and managed a City promoting tours into a glorious imperial past without having a narrative that tied contemporaries to it. Kreisky had just made emphatic overtures toward émigré culture, and the socialist 68ers, reeling from 1968, were looking for ways of reacquiring a past that went beyond Red Vienna and the revolutionary council movement of 1918-19. Schorske’s Vienna was a revelation, and with the support of Mayor Zilk, the Wien Museum opened in 1985 its legendary exhibition, Traum und Wirklichkeit. Schorske’s Vienna and Socialist Vienna came together. At the same time, Busek, anticipating the expansion of reform communism, launched Projekt Mitteleuropa, an effort to resurrect a Central European culture, now all but gone. The two projects developed along different trajectories. The socialist youth had no use for Mitteleuropa, and Schorske’s Vienna became a project of Viennese modernity cultivated by friends whom I love to call, “The Republic of Vienna” – a progressive group, highly critical of the Austrian past, with limited patience for any authority, let alone an imperial one. With the collapse of communism, the conservative Mitteleuropa project came to an end, and the European Union emerged as holding the greatest promise for European Austria. The promise of the pluralist imperial past, which was part of many earlier conceptions of fin-de-siècle, was lost. The final major display of fin-de-siècle Vienna was Metropole Wien – a major international conference in the Ringturm in 1996, leading to a two-volume publication in 2000. It pushed 4 © Hacohen 10/2016; no quote Haus der Geschichte New Orleans Schorske’s elitist Vienna towards social and cultural history, expanding from the Ringstraße to the Viennese working-class suburbs. While Vienna was called Metropolis, the framework remained, as in Schorske, comparison with Western metropolitan modernities. Fin-de-siècle Vienna did not open up to the Habsburg Empire. If the effort to expand fin-de-siècle Vienna from elite to working class culture had also the secret hope of reforging Red Vienna’s alliance between the intellectuals and the working class – something 1968 had failed to do – such hopes have never been fulfilled. We know that the votes of the working class suburbs of Vienna do not exactly stem the rise of xenophobic nationalism in contemporary Austria. In its Schorskean metamorphosis, fin-de-siècle Vienna has become a political dead end. (If you wish to learn more about the trajectories of these fin-de-siècle projects, join us at the fifth workshop of Empire, Socialism & Jews this coming spring, May 23-24, at the Wien Museum and Verein für Geschichte der Arbeiterbewegung. Fourth workshop is accessible here: https://sites.duke.edu/esj4/) Der kaiserliche Weg ins Freie Schorske staged Viennese modernism as a retreat from popular politics. Over the last decades, voluminous literature has accumulated, and international conferences held, to discuss his paradigm. This is not the place to review them other than indicate that, while critics differed with Schorske about his characterization of Viennese modernism and his explanation for its rise, with very few exceptions, none challenged his conception of it as an elite project. Steven Beller drew attention to the Jewish profile of fin-de-siècle liberalism, Pieter Judson showed most liberals to have been vehement nationalists, John Boyer underlined the middle class nature of the liberals’ putatively populist opponents, the Christian Socials, Allan Janik emphasized continuity 5 © Hacohen 10/2016; no quote Haus der Geschichte New Orleans in liberal modernism, and, in my Popper biography, I underlined the existence of an alternative progressive liberal Vienna, hopeful about modernity’s prospects. We have been debating the nature of Viennese liberalism, the roots of its crisis, and its relationship to modernism but we have all been belaboring within the Schorskean paradigm. The Haus der Geschichte Österreich may well call it quit. Comrades, what is to be done? In his interwar novel The Man Without Qualitie, Robert Musil turned the Empire into a laboratory of modernity. There was no love for the Monarchy in Musil’s literary circles, and, with pity and sarcasm, the novel exposed Kakania as contradictory and absurd, “absolutism moderated by sloppiness.” Yet, Kakania represented a universal condition. There was no alternative: Nationalism was disruptive, a dangerous substitute for religion, the invention of a self-serving intelligentsia. Conscious of the Monarchy’s waning traditionalism, Musil used Kakania to stage the problem of modernity and the writer, and inquired after the possibility of literary creativity, genuine ethics, and authentic philosophy. Precisely the absence (in contrast with Germany) of cohesive legal system and political ideology, precisely the absurdity, created the modern condition, a reality of loss and confusion. Austria- Hungary, a traditional continental empire, not quite a modern state, became the paradigm of modernity, a laboratory for the future, and a global experiment. Carl Schorske would redeploy Musil’s model in Fin-de-siècle Vienna: Late imperial Vienna became modernism’s birthplace – but without the Empire. I suggest we track back from Schorske to Musil and restore Vienna as a Habsburg imperial metropolis. I will end with a few examples of historical works that have already done so. James Schedel’s Art and Society: The New Art Movement in Vienna, 1897-1914 shows the imperial bureaucracy adopting the liberals’ program and suggests that, notwithstanding their 6 © Hacohen 10/2016; no quote Haus der Geschichte New Orleans electoral defeats, the liberals continued to have a hold on power through the Verwaltung.