So happy to see you back. As soon as I saw the title, I thought, "Oh good someone else has been thinking of Joseph Roth, too," because of course I'm often thinking of Roth's journalistic work at the end of history. Saving this for when I can really sink into it.
What a fantastic essay. I've been wondering whether there is literature from another place or time that describes feelings of permanence/collapse and rootlessness/memory that I feel in the world today. I hadn't thought to look at Austria-Hungary but you have opened my mind to a new way of looking at the old empire. Thank you for that.
You are an outstanding writer. I have to admit I have a shallow understanding of the time/place of late Austro-Hungary, but this essay makes me want to learn more. The eternity, alienation, and decay seem to have many parallels to the 21st century West.
This mirrors post-Soviet discourse in an absolutely unfathomable way. People usually have a very one-sided view of Soviet society, but many genuinely believed in the ideals upheld by the system including the creation of an Homo Soveticus (look at how Central Asia and Azerbaijan overwhelmingly voted to stay a part of the Ussr during the 1991 referendum poll despite at first glance being from "foreign" civilizations and cultural spheres).
This is a brilliant essay, thanks for writing and sharing! It really brings home how profoundly the carnage of the First World War, and the twentieth century more generally, uprooted the fabric of so many societies. This theme of rootlessness and a loss of certainty feels timely given the sense of disconnect so many people feel today. It takes me back to a quote from Bertrand Russell, who was discussing the vast changes he had seen in his lifetime: "The world in which I was young was a solid world, a world where all kinds of things that have now disappeared were thought to be going to last forever. It didn’t dawn on people that they might cease."
Phenomenal article. The break that WW1 represents captured my imagination like few other time periods. It’s incredible how many alternate versions of the great powers we’ve narrowly avoided or been forced past, from 1789/1848/1914/1918/1945/1989. So many epochs now! I guess we’re in the Post-unipolar post-cold war post-modern geopolitical structure now. Maybe more rootless than ever. Who knows what we’ll sleepwalk into with our digital perspective.
The links in this article are great fodder to follow. Thank you so much!! Do you recommend any of the books themselves, or are they more historically interesting than narrative wise?
Viel Dank (many thanks), A wonderful reminder of my two years in Wien (Vienna) 1959-61. I've read the writers mentioned here. I was one of fifteen COs (conscientious objectors) engaged in rebuilding the Lutheran Karlsschule am Karlsplatz, a 7-year project finished in 1961. What a story of a world coming apart and collapsing and then having the gift of these classic ruminating writers.
You forgot one young Austrian who drew different conclusions from this collapse: Adolf Hitler. He hated the multinational, liberal Habsburg empire, and wanted a strong state. We all know how that turned out.
If the tragedy of WWI could have been avoided, perhaps the Habsburg empire could have been a model for a European Union, where each community has its own language and culture, but inside a multinational framework. The idea of creating national states out of the collapsed empire brought disasters.
Yet another point of view is provided by Jaroslav Hašek's "The Adventures of the Good Soldier Švejk During the World War". As opposed to nostalgia-ladden books of Zweig and Roth (Musil is a bit different), Hašek takes a humoristic perspective, making fun of the dysfunction of the dual monarchies institutions. Some nostalgia still seeps through, although that may be just an artifact of reading it 100 years later.
"Europe, he asserted, “needs an Austria” to “comprehend the East.”"
My pet theory is that Hitler was far better at meddling in Eastern Europe than any contemporary leader in the West, or today, because he was born and raised in Austro-Hungary and understood the nuances.
Fascinating essay. I have a rise and fall perspective on our 21stc. Western condition that persists however hard I try to contextualise it as just the banal and predictable extrapolation of my own elderly age. I also interrogate it by remembering how lucky we boomers have been compared to our world war-facing parents and grandparents. But the sense of Liberalism's inherent Icarus-like doom via overreach survives all these attempts to rationalize it away. I suspect that our amazing technologies of mass communication will one day be our undoing.
It is a great disservice to humanity at large to reference an historian or writer's perspective when said person is constantly 'on the sauce.' Just where exactly does an alcoholic come off describing a society with any accuracy whatsoever? It seems obvious such an individual contributes to the failings of a culture rather than helping to give it wings. Yes indeed, corruption on the inside is the most accurate measure of society on the outside. The Austro-Hungarians failed as intelligent beings even as the American west—from Alaska in the north to Tiera del Fuego in the south—is similarly failing today.....believing or denying as it does, the reality or unreality of the endless stream of propaganda spouting from the drooling mouths of those deluded few who own the press. In short, if society sucks then society is doomed. So it should be...and thank goodness.
So happy to see you back. As soon as I saw the title, I thought, "Oh good someone else has been thinking of Joseph Roth, too," because of course I'm often thinking of Roth's journalistic work at the end of history. Saving this for when I can really sink into it.
What a fantastic essay. I've been wondering whether there is literature from another place or time that describes feelings of permanence/collapse and rootlessness/memory that I feel in the world today. I hadn't thought to look at Austria-Hungary but you have opened my mind to a new way of looking at the old empire. Thank you for that.
You are an outstanding writer. I have to admit I have a shallow understanding of the time/place of late Austro-Hungary, but this essay makes me want to learn more. The eternity, alienation, and decay seem to have many parallels to the 21st century West.
This mirrors post-Soviet discourse in an absolutely unfathomable way. People usually have a very one-sided view of Soviet society, but many genuinely believed in the ideals upheld by the system including the creation of an Homo Soveticus (look at how Central Asia and Azerbaijan overwhelmingly voted to stay a part of the Ussr during the 1991 referendum poll despite at first glance being from "foreign" civilizations and cultural spheres).
This is a brilliant essay, thanks for writing and sharing! It really brings home how profoundly the carnage of the First World War, and the twentieth century more generally, uprooted the fabric of so many societies. This theme of rootlessness and a loss of certainty feels timely given the sense of disconnect so many people feel today. It takes me back to a quote from Bertrand Russell, who was discussing the vast changes he had seen in his lifetime: "The world in which I was young was a solid world, a world where all kinds of things that have now disappeared were thought to be going to last forever. It didn’t dawn on people that they might cease."
Phenomenal article. The break that WW1 represents captured my imagination like few other time periods. It’s incredible how many alternate versions of the great powers we’ve narrowly avoided or been forced past, from 1789/1848/1914/1918/1945/1989. So many epochs now! I guess we’re in the Post-unipolar post-cold war post-modern geopolitical structure now. Maybe more rootless than ever. Who knows what we’ll sleepwalk into with our digital perspective.
The links in this article are great fodder to follow. Thank you so much!! Do you recommend any of the books themselves, or are they more historically interesting than narrative wise?
Viel Dank (many thanks), A wonderful reminder of my two years in Wien (Vienna) 1959-61. I've read the writers mentioned here. I was one of fifteen COs (conscientious objectors) engaged in rebuilding the Lutheran Karlsschule am Karlsplatz, a 7-year project finished in 1961. What a story of a world coming apart and collapsing and then having the gift of these classic ruminating writers.
Wayne Yoder
You forgot one young Austrian who drew different conclusions from this collapse: Adolf Hitler. He hated the multinational, liberal Habsburg empire, and wanted a strong state. We all know how that turned out.
If the tragedy of WWI could have been avoided, perhaps the Habsburg empire could have been a model for a European Union, where each community has its own language and culture, but inside a multinational framework. The idea of creating national states out of the collapsed empire brought disasters.
Yet another point of view is provided by Jaroslav Hašek's "The Adventures of the Good Soldier Švejk During the World War". As opposed to nostalgia-ladden books of Zweig and Roth (Musil is a bit different), Hašek takes a humoristic perspective, making fun of the dysfunction of the dual monarchies institutions. Some nostalgia still seeps through, although that may be just an artifact of reading it 100 years later.
Excellent but disheartening essay. The parallels are unmistakable.
So what is to be done? Or should we just savor the end of the empire until the revolution or war becomes interested in us?
Magnificent essay. Thank you.
Very nice. Much nicer than the failing American Empire that controls present Europe.
But I am rather surprised that the works of Lajos Zilahy were not mentioned - "Century in Scarlet", "The Dukays" ...
"Europe, he asserted, “needs an Austria” to “comprehend the East.”"
My pet theory is that Hitler was far better at meddling in Eastern Europe than any contemporary leader in the West, or today, because he was born and raised in Austro-Hungary and understood the nuances.
Fascinating essay. I have a rise and fall perspective on our 21stc. Western condition that persists however hard I try to contextualise it as just the banal and predictable extrapolation of my own elderly age. I also interrogate it by remembering how lucky we boomers have been compared to our world war-facing parents and grandparents. But the sense of Liberalism's inherent Icarus-like doom via overreach survives all these attempts to rationalize it away. I suspect that our amazing technologies of mass communication will one day be our undoing.
It is a great disservice to humanity at large to reference an historian or writer's perspective when said person is constantly 'on the sauce.' Just where exactly does an alcoholic come off describing a society with any accuracy whatsoever? It seems obvious such an individual contributes to the failings of a culture rather than helping to give it wings. Yes indeed, corruption on the inside is the most accurate measure of society on the outside. The Austro-Hungarians failed as intelligent beings even as the American west—from Alaska in the north to Tiera del Fuego in the south—is similarly failing today.....believing or denying as it does, the reality or unreality of the endless stream of propaganda spouting from the drooling mouths of those deluded few who own the press. In short, if society sucks then society is doomed. So it should be...and thank goodness.