Fin-de-Siècle Vienna Quotes

“wir konnen warten. wissen macht frei [we can wait. knowledge liberates]. in these confident words the stalwart Ritter von Schmerling expressed the rationalistic expectations of the political process at the beginning of the liberal era in 1861.

at the end of that era, the poet Hugo von Hofmannsthal, scion of a cultivated middle-class family, offered a different formula for political success: politics is magic. he who knows how to summon the forces from the deep, him will they follow.”
― Carl E. Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture

“Its shared Enlightenment premises were gravely weakened by a combination of political factors in the early postwar years: the deepening of the Cold War, the first Soviet coup in Czechoslovakia, new”
― Carl E. Schorske, Fin-de-Siecle Vienna: Politics and Culture

“In the last one hundred years, however, “modern” has come to distinguish our perception of our lives and times from all that has gone before, from history as a whole, as such.”
― Carl E. Schorske, Fin-de-Siecle Vienna: Politics and Culture

“In The Interpretation of Dreams, published two years before his jocular announcement, Freud had laid down his first principle of understanding the problems of dreams: “A dream is the fulfillment of a wish.”
― Carl E. Schorske, Fin-de-Siecle Vienna: Politics and Culture

“Where he makes a jest, a problem lies concealed.”
― Carl E. Schorske, Fin-de-Siecle Vienna: Politics and Culture

“Now they must be directed toward an inner, psychological reality. “No one thought of looking for the promised land where it is, and yet it lies so nearby. There it is: inside ourselves!… The promised land is wherever we carry it!”
― Carl E. Schorske, Fin-de-Siecle Vienna: Politics and Culture

“Dream is not so different from deed as many believe,” he wrote. “All activity of men begins as dream and later becomes dream once more.”
― Carl E. Schorske, Fin-de-Siecle Vienna: Politics and Culture

“Wir können warten. Wissen macht frei.” (We can wait. Knowledge liberates.) In these confident words the stalwart Ritter von Schmerling expressed the rationalistic expectations of the political process at the beginning of the liberal era in 1861.29 At the end of that era, the poet Hugo von Hofmannsthal, scion of a cultivated middle-class family, offered a different formula for political success: “Politics is magic. He who knows how to summon the forces from the deep, him will they follow.”
― Carl E. Schorske, Fin-de-Siecle Vienna: Politics and Culture

“Sitte called himself a “lawyer for the artistic side,” aiming at “a modus vivendi” with the modern system of city building.41 This self-definition is important, revealing as it does Sitte’s deeply held assumption that “artistic” and “modern” were somehow antithetical terms. The “modern” to him meant the technical and rational aspects of city building, the primacy of what he repeatedly referred to as “traffic, hygiene, etc.” The emotionally effective (wirkungsvoll) and picturesque (malerisch) on the one hand, and the efficient and practical on the other, were by nature contradictory and opposed, and their opposition would increase as modern life became ever more governed by material considerations.42 The lust for profit, dictating the achievement of maximum density, governed land use and street plan. Economic aims expressed themselves in the ruthless geometrical systems of city layout—rectilinear, radial, and triangular. “Modern systems!” Sitte complained, “Yes! To conceive everything systematically, and never to deviate a hair’s breadth from the formula once it’s established, until all genius is tortured to death, all joyful sense of life suffocated, that is the mark of our time.”43”
― Carl E. Schorske, Fin-de-Siecle Vienna: Politics and Culture

“Hofmannsthal once observed that the activity of modern poets “stands under the decree of necessity, as though they were all building on a pyramid, the monstrous residence of a dead king or an unborn god.”
― Carl E. Schorske, Fin-de-Siecle Vienna: Politics and Culture

“It is too late for a politics based on law alone, too soon for a politics of grace which sublimates instinct.”
― Carl E. Schorske, Fin-de-Siecle Vienna: Politics and Culture

“Where law ignores instinct, instinct rebels and subverts order.”
― Carl E. Schorske, Fin-de-Siecle Vienna: Politics and Culture

“which can become their enemy, their torture.”13 For the poet, this trial was actually the call to his proper function in the modern world: to knit together the disparate elements of the time, to build “the world of relations [Bezüge]” among them. The poet would do his unifying work not by imposing law, but by revealing the hidden forms in which the parts of life are bound to each other. Thus the poet, rather like the historian, accepts the multiplicity of things in their uniqueness and reveals the unity in their dynamic interrelationship. He brings the discordant into harmony through form.”
― Carl E. Schorske, Fin-de-Siecle Vienna: Politics and Culture

“What he said of Friedrich Hebbel’s poetry is true of his own, that it “penetrates us in such a way that the most secret … inner depths stir in us and the actually demonic, the natural in us, sounds in dark and intoxicating sympathetic vibration.”10 With all its danger, the instinctual element in man, “the natural in us,” provided the power whereby one could escape from the prison of aestheticism, from the paralysis of narcissistic sensibility. Engagement in life, Hofmannsthal felt, demands the capacity to resolve, to will. This capacity implies commitment to the irrational, in which alone resolution and will are grounded. Thus affirmation of the instinctual reopened for the aesthete the door to the life of action and society. How did Hofmannsthal see the great world which he now entered? Modern society and culture seemed to him, as to Schnitzler, hopelessly pluralistic, lacking in cohesion or direction. “… [T]he nature of our epoch,” he wrote in 1905, “is multiplicity and indeterminacy. It can rest only on das Gleitende [the moving, the slipping, the sliding], and is aware that what other generations believed to be firm is in fact das Gleitende”11 This new perception of reality undermined the very efficacy of reason for Hofmannsthal. “Everything fell into parts, the parts again into more parts,” says one of his characters, “and nothing allowed itself to be embraced by concepts any more.”12 Hofmannsthal saw it as the trial of the noblest natures to take into themselves “a wholly irrational mass of the non-homogeneous,”
― Carl E. Schorske, Fin-de-Siecle Vienna: Politics and Culture

“What alone mattered was that the boy cultivate his faculties for the optimum enjoyment of refined leisure. The gifted son was consequently reared in a virtual hothouse for the development of aesthetic talent.* Small wonder that the adolescent Hofmannsthal became a young Narcissus, “early ripened and tender and sad.”8 Quickly absorbing the fashionable poetic and plastic culture of all Europe, his language glowed darkly with purple and gold, shimmered with world-weary mother-of-pearl.”
― Carl E. Schorske, Fin-de-Siecle Vienna: Politics and Culture

“History,” Burckhardt once observed, “is what one age finds worthy of note in another.”
― Carl E. Schorske, Fin-de-Siecle Vienna: Politics and Culture

“what was a modern style? To tear off the screens of history was one thing; to define modern man and to celebrate his nature in building was another. In the quest for a visual language suited to his age, Wagner found allies in a younger generation of Viennese artists and intellectuals who were pioneers in forming twentieth-century higher culture. In 1897 a group of them banded together to form the Secession, an association that would break the manacles of tradition and open Austria to European innovations in the plastic arts—and especially to art nouveau. The motto of the Secession could only have struck the strongest response in Wagner: “To the Age Its Art, to Art Its Freedom.” So, too, Ver Sacrum (Holy Spring), the name chosen for the Secession’s periodical, expressed the movement’s solemn commitment to regenerate art in Austria and Austria through art. One of Wagner’s most gifted younger associates, Josef Olbrich, designed the Secession’s pioneering modern building, using the form of a modernized temple to suggest the function of art as a surrogate religion for Vienna’s secular intellectual élite (Figure 39).”
― Carl E. Schorske, Fin-de-Siecle Vienna: Politics and Culture