There Once Was an Empire
Over a century ago, Austria-Hungary collapsed and a generation of writers wrote about what it was like to have your whole world melt away
When it comes to history writing, one of the most recognizable frames is the story of the “rise and fall.” Although broad and often misused, it is a trope that excites the public imagination. Nowadays, one doesn’t need to look far to find anxieties over our own alleged fall. Discussions on “decline” and even “collapse” have become more commonplace online.1 And more generally, across all published literature, mentions of doom and gloom have reached new heights, irrespective of political leanings.2
But despite the cultural climate, catastrophes are hard to imagine, and even the doomsayers themselves usually say such things half-heartedly. This is because so few people alive and born in the Western world have experienced anything truly like it. Personal memories of war have also faded for most. Limited by experience, historical perspectives help to fill in the gaps of our imagination.
When we think of collapse, the immediate example that comes to mind is the Soviet Union. Even within the highest levels of American intelligence, its sudden end came as a complete surprise.3 Anthropologist Alexei Yurchak characterized the feeling for the average Soviet person as “everything was forever until it was no more.”4 The shock was explored further by Adam Curtis in his 2022 documentary series TraumaZone. In it, the viewer is carried through the experience year by year of “what it felt like to live through the collapse of communism and democracy” during the 1990s, told through archival footage of everyday people and their misfortune.5
The former Soviet Union is just one leading example. Both “decline” and even “collapse” carry so much weight because the last century was so strongly defined by them, particularly the first half. Political philosopher Hannah Arendt correctly noted that the first half of the twentieth century spawned “homelessness on an unprecedented scale, rootlessness to an unprecedented depth.”6 In such a short amount of time and without precedent, so many states and ways of living were swept away, and forced to start over. Today, these realities have left us with many ghosts: past ways of living that were suddenly cut short but persist as haunting memories, still affecting the present in very real ways.
One such ghost, often forgotten but lasting an exceptionally long time when it was real, is Austria-Hungary. Both Austria and Hungary were ruled by the Habsburg dynasty for what certainly felt like forever, centuries upon centuries, finally merging as a dual monarchy in 1867.7 Its emperor, Franz Joseph, reigned from 1848 to 1916, which only added to the perception of its eternal stability. But in the last year of World War I, the country collapsed and a generation of writers reflected on what they once took for granted permanently being no more.
Because its capital Vienna was a cosmopolitan city long famous for its literary tradition and art, the language to describe this loss came naturally. The result was a corpus of writing unlike any other, uniquely about the experience of coping with a world lost. As historian Eric Hobsbawm observed:
Of all the great multi-lingual and multi-territorial empires that collapsed in the course of the 20th century, the decline and fall of the Emperor Franz Joseph’s, being both long expected and observed by sophisticated minds, has left us by far the most powerful literary or narrative chronicle.
Austrian minds had time to reflect on the death and disintegration of their empire, while it struck all the other empires suddenly, at least by the measure of the historical clock, even those in visibly declining health like the Soviet Union. But perhaps the perceived and accepted multi-linguality, multi-confessionality and multiculturalism of the monarchy helped them to a more complex sense of historical perspective.8
This much is evident in the literature. While their German neighbors opted for more programmatic political solutions, Austrian writers settled into a more ironic style, sometimes even tinged with humor and a penchant for absurdity, alongside a cynical attitude toward the state’s ability to reform human life.9 When read today, such sentiments seem oddly contemporary as if speaking to our current detached sensibilities.
Still, their disposition should not be misinterpreted as being excessively pessimistic or even fatalistic. On the contrary, Austrian writers during this time produced works that stressed realism, almost like a documentarian would, but with an appreciation for drama. In their world, the writer's purpose was to provide a "probing analysis of the fundamental desire and principles” that constituted society.10 And so they came from all corners of the multicultural empire that was Austria-Hungary, intending to present and show life “how it really was.”11
It is understandable why such a social climate produced the likes of Sigmund Freud and his theories of the unconscious. He, too, was someone whose perspective noticeably darkened after the collapse of his homeland. Deeply affected, he wrote on Armistice Day, 1918:
Austria-Hungary is no more. I do not want to live anywhere else. I shall live on with the torso and imagine that it is the whole.12
To these writers and thinkers, the world was to now be understood and written as if it were fragile and ephemeral, much like Austria-Hungary’s fate. They were a generation that uniquely internalized collapse as a literary tradition. As Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote in the summer of 1918 while on military leave: “Everything we see could be otherwise. Everything that we can describe at all could also be otherwise. There is no order of things a priori.”13
When Austria-Hungary Was Forever
Three months into World War I on November 1, 1914, a short essay appeared in the Austrian paper Österreichische Rundschau titled “The Affirmation of Austria.” Its author, novelist-poet Hugo von Hofmannsthal, took a triumphantly positive tone. The wartime difficulty ahead would be a powerful stimulus, he argued quoting poet Johann Wolfgang Goethe, for when “things are not sufficiently anticipated, much greater human efforts and achievements are often called forth.”14 Austria-Hungary had, after all, only begun to live. “The life-feeling that is emerging among us,” he wrote, “is far more the life-feeling of a young organism than of a dying one.”15
Hofmannsthal believed himself to be channeling the popular energy of his day. He had come from a long line of wealthy industrialists and merchants, and his words represented the self-assured feelings of the upper classes of Austria-Hungary, especially the artists and intellectuals whom he had gotten to know frequenting Vienna’s famous cafes. Many of them would be employed by the War Office and War Archives during World War I.16
One fellow writer who frequented the famous Viennese Café Central alongside Hofmannsthal was Robert Musil. He wrote that summer in 1914 words he would later come to regret:
A new feeling was born. A stunning sense of belonging tore our hearts from our hands. Now we feel gathered into a ball, fused together by an inexpressible humility, in which the individual suddenly counts for nothing besides defending the tribe. This feeling must have always been present: it is now awakened… a bliss, and over and above its earnestness, a huge security and joy.17
Another regular of the Viennese Café Central, the writer Stefan Zweig, spoke of the new popular mood with the same excitement. Although a pacifist, he, too, found himself caught up like Musil. The jubilation at the war’s outbreak was seemingly everywhere.
To be perfectly honest, I must confess that there was something fine, inspiring, even seductive in that first mass outburst of feeling. It was difficult to resist it. In spite of all my hatred and aversion for war, I should not like to have missed the memory of those first days. As never before, thousands and hundreds of thousands felt what they should have felt in peacetime, that they belonged together. A city of two million, a country of nearly fifty million, in that hour felt that they were participating in world history, in a moment which would never recur, and that each one was called upon to cast his infinitesimal self into the glowing mass, there to be purified of all selfishness. All differences of class, rank, and language were flooded over at that moment by the rushing feeling of fraternity. Strangers spoke to one another in the streets, people who had avoided each other for years shook hands, and everywhere one saw excited faces. Each individual experienced an exaltation of his ego, he was no longer the isolated person of former times, he had been incorporated into the mass, he was part of the people, and his person, his hitherto unnoticed person, had been given meaning.18
The sentiments expressed by Hofmannsthal, Musil, and Zweig at the start of the war are attested to by many others who lived through it. Austria-Hungary possessed an eternal quality for its patriots and they believed themselves to be special among European states. Unlike the rest of Europe, it did not aspire to be a nation-state, but was a uniquely cosmopolitan world unto itself. Emperor Franz Joseph’s son, Crown Prince Rudolf, famously went to great lengths to document every corner of the empire in its diversity.19 In the decades before World War I, the state increasingly began to see its positive role as arbitrating between its many national groups. Ethnic attribution became something of a bureaucratic obsession.
Writing in 1917, just a year before the empire disintegrated, Hofmannsthal still clung to this cosmopolitan dream. In his essay “The Austrian Idea,” he summarized his homeland’s historical duty as the “compromise between the old European, Latin-German, and the new Slavic world.”20 Europe, he asserted, “needs an Austria” to “comprehend the East.” For Hofmannsthal, Austria-Hungary’s historical mission was to be a bridge between worlds. But aside from this imagined destiny, the empire also viewed itself as a protector of ethnic minorities from the exploits of neighboring states. So strong was this view that even in the last two years of the war, a majority of Slavs in the empire still felt the Austro-Hungarian state was their best defense against the imperial desires of other great powers like Russia and Germany.21
This multinational foundation was a leading fascination for those who nostalgically looked back after the country’s demise. One such writer, Joseph Roth, characterized Austria-Hungary as an empire of “hyphenated” peoples. The hyphen was like a bridge between its many groups, he wrote in 1919, and when it disappeared “the Dual Monarchy was finished.”22 Speaking of its capital Vienna, Stefan Zweig viewed the city as one that “harmonized all national and linguistic opposites in itself.”23 “Free of narrow-minded prejudice,” he glowingly wrote, “nowhere was it easier to be European” — a place where “every citizen of Vienna also became a supranational, cosmopolitan citizen of the world.”24
In some sense, Vienna and the greater empire were a microcosm of our globalized world today. When World War I broke out, the official proclamation came out in nine official languages: German, Czech, Polish, Ukrainian, Slovene, Croatian, Serbian, Romanian, and Italian.25 Joseph Roth himself spoke German, Yiddish, Polish, Russian, and French. The empire was also multifaith, the latest addition being Islam which was added as a state religion in 1912.26 Migrations and movements of people were common. By 1900, close to 40% of all Austro-Hungarians were living outside their traditional hometowns (heimat).27
While cosmopolitanism may have been a core feature of the culture, it was the state that created the feeling it was all permanent. Austria-Hungary’s bureaucracy strongly prided itself on hierarchal rank be it by education, class, or lineage.28 Regional loyalties to the state were forged by appealing to noblemen of particular ethnic groups. It was a very rigid society of excessive adherence to decorum to a fault. One joke was that the empire was slow to embrace the telephone because it took too long to get through everyone’s titles before the conversation began.
Robert Musil in his unfinished, multi-volume novel The Man with No Qualities (1930-1943) described the state as "clerical, but everyday life was liberal.”29 He humorously writes:
There was a Parliament, which asserted its freedom so forcefully that it was usually kept shut.
There was also an Emergency Powers Act that enabled the government to get along without Parliament, but then, when everyone had happily settled for absolutism, the Crown decreed that it was time to go back to parliamentary rule.30
For Musil, Austria-Hungary was a state content with being “second-weakest among the great powers,” for whom words like “colony and overseas” sounded “untried and remote.”31 Even its only colonial project, the occupation of Bosnia and Herzegovina from 1878 onward, was viewed as close to home and ambiguous. Politics was so often an afterthought for a large segment of the noble classes and the empire’s bourgeoisie.32 Many instead preoccupied themselves almost zealously with culture and the arts.
The many different languages, cultures, and peoples in Austria-Hungary—together with a state that firmly stressed order and rank—made for an empire that felt like a permanent and self-contained world. Nowhere is this forever feeling captured best than in Stefan Zweig’s The World of Yesterday (1941), right down to the opening sentences:
When I attempted to find a simple formula for the period in which I grew up, prior to the First World War, I hope that I convey its fullness by calling it the Golden Age of Security.
Everything in our almost thousand year-old Austrian monarchy seemed based on permanency, and the State itself was the chief guarantor of this stability.33
“Stability” is a common theme stressed in Zweig’s nostalgic stories of prewar Austria-Hungary. Zweig writes that he was “not born in a time of passion,” but instead a time of normalcy, and a complacency about the future.34 For middle-to-upper-class families like his, especially those in Vienna, it was a world of “clear social structure and easy transitions between the parts of that structure.”35
He who had a fortune could accurately compute his annual interest. An official or an officer for example, could confidently look up in the calendar the year when he would be advanced in rank, or when he would be pensioned. Each family had its fixed budget, and knew how much could be spent for rent and food, for holidays and entertainment; and what is more, invariably a small sum was carefully laid aside for sickness and the doctor's bills, for the unexpected. Whoever owned a house looked upon it as a secure domicile for his children and grandchildren; estates and businesses were handed down from generation to generation. When the babe was still in its cradle, its first mite was put in its little bank, or deposited in the savings bank, as a "reserve” for the future.
In this vast empire everything stood firmly and immovably in its appointed place, and at its head was the aged emperor; and were he to die, one knew (or believed) another would come to take his place, and nothing would change in the well-regulated order. No one thought of wars, of revolutions, or revolts. All that was radical, all violence, seemed impossible in an age of reason.36
For those obstacles that did persist, time was thought to resolve them: a belief in progress was widespread much like a religion. And within this progress, writes Zweig, the most valued asset of them all was security in life, which was steadily expanding to include more and more people in its circle.37 Compared to just a generation or two ago, people were said to be visibly healthier as hygienic infrastructure was introduced on a mass scale. Sports organizations were, too, sprouting up all over the empire. New modern conveniences, like electricity and the telephone, were being introduced. The development was swift and appeared almost natural. Amid these transformations, it is unsurprising that many felt that the “technical progress of mankind must inevitably result in an equally rapid moral rise.”38
Writing in the 1930s, Zweig was aware that this Age of Security was merely a “castle in the sky," but to his parents, it was lived as if it were a “solid stone house.”39 It was hard to imagine any alternative, and so easily was their world self-contained.
The Boer War, the Russo-Japanese War, and the Balkan War itself did not penetrate the existence of my parents. They passed over all reports of war in the newspapers just as they did the sporting page, and truly, what did it matter to them what took place outside of Austria?40
Reading these words today, such descriptions may come off as surprisingly naive. Such criticisms were even put forward when The World of Yesterday was published, by Hannah Arendt and others.41 So, it is difficult to decipher how much of this past Zweig describes was real or imagined. Austria-Hungary was an empire fraught with dysfunction and division as well. Nationalists pejoratively spoke of its bureaucracy as a “prison of nations.” Still, even with these reservations, one must also consider Zweig’s difficult frame of mind. Being a Jew whose birthplace was annexed by Nazi Germany in 1938, Austria-Hungary understandably took on special meaning for him. It was remembered as a time before the collective madness, when one could live normally in Europe.
Such feelings cannot be readily dismissed. In fact, many of Austria-Hungary’s leading nostalgics were its Jews. For Zweig, this longing became so extreme that he committed suicide just days after submitting The World of Yesterday to his publisher. Obsessed with memories, both real and imagined, he found himself deeply alienated from actual life. He wished to return to that lost time when "everything appeared long-lasting.”42
Zweig may have described halcyon days, but other forces were clearly at play beneath this veneer of stability. Somehow this world of “calm transition and without haste” sleepwalked into a world war. Since 1866, Austria-Hungary had only been involved in minor military incidents, and just a short war with Serbia was planned in 1914. Looking back, Robert Musil likened the shock to “like sleeping in the Pullman car of a train and being awakened only by the crash.”43 The possibility was unthinkable.
When That Forever Ends
As I’ve recounted, Vienna and the greater Austro-Hungarian empire erupted into palpable excitement in the summer of 1914. Similar widespread jubilation over the war was recorded in the German Empire to the north. To us today, privileged with hindsight, the reaction seems nonsensical, even mad. But with modernity and its amenities then having little precedent, and with progress as its religion, everything appeared like an extension of the present. For many, war was the stuff of romance and heroic stories.44 Now was merely their moment to become heroes.
As Stefan Zweig notes, unlike the war of 1939 which had a deeper meaning, “the war of 1914 was ignorant of realities” for it was naively “still serving a delusion, the dream of a better world, a world that would be just and peaceful. And only delusion, not knowledge, brings happiness.”45 So that year, “the warring nations were in a state of over-excitation,” happiness was certainly in the air, “and the worst rumor was immediately transformed into truth, the most absurd slander believed.”46 The cultural climate left little room for worry and caution. In short, it had grown remarkably unaware of the “unimaginable.”
The “unimaginable” is a term used by critic Karl Kraus, one of the few Austrian writers who was against the war from the beginning. Kraus had become one of the most controversial men in the empire for his critical writings, often bordering on apocalyptic and full of vitriol. During the war, he compiled damning quotes from the press, later montaging them in full into a 1922 play called The Last Days of Mankind. Unlike Stefan Zweig, Kraus was a Viennese man who did not look at his city with rose-tinted glasses—for Vienna, he wrote, had become the “experimental station for the end of the world” due to its blind patriotism, self-obsession, and decline of language.47
In December 1914, just months after the war broke out, Kraus described the “unimaginable” in an essay titled “In dieser Großen Zeit” (“In This Great Time”), published in his magazine Die Frackel. It was written in a way as to confuse the censors.
In this great time, who I still knew when she was so small; which will become small again if it still has time…
In this time in which what one could not imagine happens, and in which what one can no longer imagine must happen, and could one do it, it would not happen. In this serious time which died laughing at the possibility that it could become serious; which, surprised by its tragedy, longed for distraction, and which, catching itself engaging in some new action, searches for words.48
[…]
In the realm of impoverished imagination… what is not thought must be done and what is only thought, unspeakable.
For many, the war unveiled the unimaginable for the first time: progress turned against humanity, science in service of war, anomie, collapsing states, and the loss of one’s homeland. By 1915, Kraus had already begun looking into the future, for he feared that the postwar period would lead to “more death and disease… than could ever have been contrived by the war itself.”49 Whatever this “unimaginable” was, it became intensely psychologized. Freud’s theories—that civilization was a facade that merely repressed deep, psychosexual and violent urges—gained widespread currency after the war. In 1918, Kraus published an essay titled The Techno-Romantic Adventure in which he imagined war as a scientific testing ground for immoral curiosities.
Coming to Terms with Loss
If we look at the literature after the collapse of Austria-Hungary, we find a variety of reactions to the loss. Many of them would be recollected not in the intermediate aftermath, but far later, after reality had time to settle. Joseph Roth noted that, unlike the prewar period where “anything that perished took a long time to be forgotten,” the postwar period thrived “on the ability to forget quickly and emphatically.”50 And for many, this was certainly the case.
Robert Musil’s writing is an exception, however. Writing as early as 1919, he was already connecting observations for what would later play a part in his novel The Man with No Qualities. Today, he is commonly considered to be Austria-Hungary’s greatest analyst, producing a body of work that grapples with the empire’s many failing parts. In 1919, he wrote that “one of the most telling symptoms of the catastrophe was the totally laissez-faire attitude toward the teams of specialists in running the machinery of the state.”51 This view of a governing class on autopilot, unable to see itself honestly, is a common theme in post-WWI literature—as are such descriptions like “sleepwalking” to describe the state of society before the war.52 The state had assumed its own permanence and had neglected the actual functioning of society for lofty goals and abstract ideals, not fully understanding their violent ends.
The shock of the war, Musil argued, “had called into question the very possibility of a coherent theory of history,” partly because it had completely defied rationality.53 In his characteristically humorous style, he wrote in 1922:
We haven’t really changed much, a little presumptuous before, a little hungover afterward. First, we were bustling good citizens, then we became murderers, killers, thieves, arsonists, and the like, but without really experiencing anything… I think there is only one explanation for this: we were lacking the concepts with which to absorb that which we experienced.54
Musil’s observations here add yet another dimension to the experience of loss. Not only is there the “unimaginable,” but one so often lacks the language to absorb that which has happened. Such is the fate of the protagonist in The Man with No Qualities who is acted upon by this strange Austro-Hungarian world that, unbeknownst to him, is on the cliff’s edge. The novel is in dialogue with what were once certainties about the West being called into question. As if suspended in time, it is both in conversation with the past and the worsening postwar future.
If Musil is Austria-Hungary’s great analyst, then Joseph Roth is its premier elegist. But in classic Austrian style, Roth always keeps his ironic distance. As he wrote when the emperor Franz Joseph died in 1916 during the height of the war:
Even as I was condemning it, I already began to mourn it. And while I bitterly measured the proximity of the death to which the dead Emperor was sending me, I was moved by the ceremony with which His Majesty was being carried to the grave. I had a clear sense of the absurdity of the last years, but this absurdity was also part of my childhood. The chilly sun of the Habsburgs was being extinguished, but it had at least been a sun.55
For Roth, Austria-Hungary was not at all the best of all possible worlds. Unlike his later friend Stefan Zweig, he was born on the periphery of the empire in relative poverty in what is modern-day Ukraine. Often feeling like an outsider, difficulty followed him his whole life, along with a serious drinking problem that began during the war. After Austria-Hungary’s end, he largely lived from his suitcase as a permanent traveler. His nostalgia grew as the years went on due to being a marginalized Jew whose only homeland disappeared. His magnum opus Radetzky March (1932) is one of the great eulogies of a world lost, the story of a family whose decline over three generations tracks the slow fall of the once mighty Austro-Hungarian empire. World War I only enters the picture in the last few pages.
Roth’s elegy centers around individuals searching for security and in doing so, they often make a religion out of the empire. But they become disenchanted because “the state disappoints as God does.”56 Like God, the state is viewed as the source of both good and evil. As Roth writes in the forward to Radetzky March, “I loved this fatherland, I loved the virtues and merits of this fatherland, and today, when it is dead and gone, I even love its flaws and weaknesses.”57 For Roth, the Austro-Hungarian idea was a worldview like Christianity or Judaism. Rarely, if ever, did Roth speak of his Judaism as a religion. And when such worldviews are shaken and fall apart, little is left, not even emotion. “Nothing ties me,” Roth wrote in 1925, “I am not sufficiently sentimental to believe in categories like future, family, etc.”58
Roth’s elegies have a certain timeless quality because they show how supposedly eternal ideas are caught up in ephemeral times. Roth does not have a politics as much as he believed in fate and the passage of time being erosive to human institutions. In Radetzky March, Austria-Hungary is described as having succumbed to the age as if it were destiny. Roth perhaps would have accepted this fate easier had Europe not been in such dire circumstances afterward. By 1933, he began to have apocalyptic visions for the continent. As he wrote to Stefan Zweig that year, “The barbarians have taken over. Do not fool yourself, hell reigns....” In another letter to his friend Zweig a few months later, Roth tells him:
I hope you get home feeling calmer and stronger.
I can’t get away.
I need a new publisher and promise of new earnings.
Things are grim—both in the world at large, and for us as individuals.
We all overestimated the world: even me, an absolute pessimist.
The world is very, very stupid, and bestial. There are more brains in a cowshed.
Everything: humanity, civilization, Europe, even Catholicism: the cowshed is cleverer.
As far as I’m concerned:
I see myself compelled to follow my instincts and conviction, and become an absolute monarchist.
In 6 or 8 weeks, I will publish a short book about the Habsburgs.
I am an old Austrian officer. I love Austria. I view it as cowardice not to use this moment to say the Habsburgs must return.
I want the monarchy back, and I will say so.
Several thinking persons are of the same view.
I hope I succeed.59
In 1938, shortly before the Nazi takeover of Austria, Roth was sent on a mission to Vienna to persuade Chancellor Schuschnigg to re-establish the Habsburg Monarchy. Otto von Habsburg, the heir-apparent, was in exile at the time in Paris. Roth proposed that he take the throne to prevent Anschluss.
The absurd idea was a non-starter. The Austrian police ended up expelling Roth without him ever having met the Chancellor. The following year, Roth succumbed to tuberculosis, which worsened in no small part due to his chronic alcoholism.
An Ephemeral World
In July 2011, some 100,000 spectators watched a funeral procession make its way to the Imperial Crypt in Vienna, Austria. Broadcast on live television, thirteen days of mourning were announced. Otto von Habsburg, the same royal whom Joseph Roth had unsuccessfully lobbied to rule Austria some 73 years ago, had died. Somehow, Austria-Hungary had found its way into the present, complete with representatives from the nation-states of the former empire. They all gathered in a strange twilight zone moment alongside ghosts from the distant past and traditions few remembered anymore.
The event mostly amounted to formalities, paying respect for a time no one could claim to truly know. But even in the immediate years after the empire’s collapse, that past had already become unrecognizable. Stefan Zweig, writing in the 1930s, recounted how even then “all bridges are broken between today, yesterday, and the day before yesterday.”60 The supposedly eternal empire had quickly become unimaginable, just like its collapse was unimaginable before the war.
Since the Second World War, Austria-Hungary has gone under deeper reexamination. The cosmopolitanism of its late period possessed a kernel that was much like ours today, even down to its deep faults and malaise. Italian writer Claudio Magri felt that within Austria-Hungary was something “paradigmatic of the lost or fractured identity of the modern individual.”61 Perhaps this is why its literature, loosely called “Austro-modernism,” continues to be widely read. Franz Kafka’s existentialist themes of alienation and loneliness, for example, were in no small part affected by his experience in the overly bureaucratic empire. And if we look beyond Europe, works of the period have been consistently reimagined in other contexts, still resonating with readers. In China, Stefan Zweig is one of the only foreign writers who has been read every decade since the 1920s and he remains one of the most popular authors in the country.62 Famous for his emotional dramas, Zweig’s novels have influenced Chinese films and plays such as Letter from an Unknown Woman (2004), an adaptation of his 1922 Viennese novella of the same name but set in Beijing, 1948.
So often, Austro-modernist literature speaks to a sentiment that can be called “mono no aware.” It is not a term its authors used, but rather an old Japanese saying about life’s inherent ephemerality. In the works of Roth and Musil, the protagonist navigates a transient world, and is often left with just memories, confusion, humor, and oneself. Such sentiments need not be far from present-day realities. Today, we have seen an unraveling of expectations and an immense difficulty in imagining the future. So clearly are we, too, “lacking the concepts with which to absorb that which we experienced.” Reading the literature of those who lived and lost is an antidote for the limits of our imagination and provokes us in asking, “what if it was all otherwise?”
Obsessions with decline have entered the public conversation in a major way. And for the first time, it elected a U.S. president, Donald Trump, who has been called the “first declinist president.” On the topic of “collapse,” one example is Reddit’s r/collapse forum which has exploded in popularity since 2018.
According to published literature, there has been a sharp increase in anxiety and worry in many parts of the world. This was the conclusion of a recent UN report in its review of more than 14 million books published over the last 125 years in three major languages (English, German, and Spanish).
Between 1986 and 1988, Robert M. Gates, the director of the CIA, still spoke of “an expansionist, invulnerable Soviet Union in more than a dozen speeches and articles.” In 1989, the Berlin Wall fell.
Yurchak published a book with this title, Everything Was Forever Until It Was No More, in 2005. It is an anthropological account of the last Soviet generation.
From the preface to the first edition of Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism.
The Habsburgs ruled Austria since 1282 and Hungary since 1526.
Marjorie Perloff. On the Edge of Irony: Modernism in the Shadow of the Habsburg Empire (2016), pg. 6.
On the Edge of Irony: Modernism in the Shadow of the Habsburg Empire, pg. 13.
On the Edge of Irony: Modernism in the Shadow of the Habsburg Empire, pg. 13.
On the Edge of Irony: Modernism in the Shadow of the Habsburg Empire, pg. 15.
Taken from Sigmund Freud’s diary as quoted by writer Joseph Roth.
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (TLP) §5.634
Hugo von Hofmannstahl. “The Affirmation of Austria” in Hugo von Hofmannstahl and the Austrian Idea (2011), pg. 57.
“The Affirmation of Austria,” pg. 59.
A few Austro-Hungarian writers that worked for the War Archives or War Office include Franz Blei (1871-1942), Egon Erwin Kisch (1885-1948), Stefan Zweig (1881-1942), Franz Theodor Csokor (1885-1969), Alfred Polgar (1873-1955), Felix Salten (1869-1945), Albert Paris Gütersloh (1887-1973), Karl Hans Strobl (1877-1946), Robert Musil (1880-1942), Leo Perutz (1882-1957), Franz Werfel (1890-1945) and Albert Ehrenstein (1886-1950). Rainer Maria Rilke was also employed for a short time.
On the Edge of Irony: Modernism in the Shadow of the Habsburg Empire, pg. 23.
Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday (2009), translated by Anthea Bell. Pg. 246.
Crown Prince Rudolf published his regional study of the empire in a 24-volume collection titled The Austro-Hungarian Monarchy in Word and Picture (1885-1902).
Hugo von Hofmannstahl. “The Austrian Idea” in Hugo von Hofmannstahl and the Austrian Idea (2011), pg. 100.
Steven Beller. The Habsburg Monarchy 1815–1918 (2018). Pg. 18.
On the Edge of Irony: Modernism in the Shadow of the Habsburg Empire, pg. 41.
The World of Yesterday, pg. 45.
The World of Yesterday, pg. 45.
Pieter M. Judson. The Habsburg Empire: A New History (2016), pg. 334.
On the Edge of Irony: Modernism in the Shadow of the Habsburg Empire, pg. 95.
Robert Musil. The Man Without Qualities, Pt. I (1994). Translated by Sophie Wilkins. Pg. 29.
The Man Without Qualities, Pt. I, pg. 29.
The Man Without Qualities, Pt. I, pg. 29.
The World of Yesterday, pg. 34.
The World of Yesterday, pg. 23.
The World of Yesterday, pg. 46.
The World of Yesterday, pg. 46.
The World of Yesterday, pg. 23-24.
The World of Yesterday, pg. 24.
The World of Yesterday, pg. 26.
The World of Yesterday, pg. 27.
The World of Yesterday, pg. 47.
Writing in 1943, Hannah Arendt in her review of The World of Yesterday criticized Zweig’s naive Habsburg nostalgia and refusal to put forward his political opinions in public. He found him solely motivated by personal dignity, purposely aloof from the major political questions of his day out of “plain cowardice.”
The World of Yesterday, pg. 24.
On the Edge of Irony: Modernism in the Shadow of the Habsburg Empire, pg. 95.
As Zweig writes in The World of Yesterday: “Besides, what did the great mass know of war in 1914, after nearly half a century of peace? They did not know war, they had hardly given it a thought. It had become legendary, and distance had made it seem romantic and heroic” (247).
The World of Yesterday, pg. 250.
The World of Yesterday, pg. 250.
Robert S. Wistrich. Laboratory for World Destruction: Germans and Jews in Central Europe (2007), pg. 352.
On the Edge of Irony: Modernism in the Shadow of the Habsburg Empire, pg. 25.
Joseph Roth. The Radetzky March (Everyman's Library, 1996), pg. 112.
On the Edge of Irony: Modernism in the Shadow of the Habsburg Empire, pg. 95.
Writer Hermann Broch names his historical-fiction panorama of World War I as The Sleepwalkers (1930). The language of states “sleepwalking” into the Great War is a common theme in postwar literature.
On the Edge of Irony: Modernism in the Shadow of the Habsburg Empire, pg. 94.
On the Edge of Irony: Modernism in the Shadow of the Habsburg Empire, pg. 95.
On the Edge of Irony: Modernism in the Shadow of the Habsburg Empire, pg. 94.
On the Edge of Irony: Modernism in the Shadow of the Habsburg Empire, pg. 94.
Joseph Roth. Joseph Roth: A Life in Letters (2012), pg. 55
Joseph Roth. Joseph Roth: A Life in Letters (2012), pg. 252.
The World of Yesterday, pg. xiii
On the Edge of Irony: Modernism in the Shadow of the Habsburg Empire, pg. 102.
Arnhilt Johanna Hoefle. China’s Stefan Zweig: The Dynamics of Cross-Cultural Reception (2018), pg. 8.
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.
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.