Ironie am Abgrund: Die Moderne im Schatten des Habsburgerreichs: Karl Kraus, Joseph Roth, Robert Musil, Elias Canetti, Paul Celan und Ludwig Wittgenstein

by Marjorie Perloff

Among the brilliant writers and thinkers who emerged from the multicultural and multilingual world of the Austro-Hungarian Empire were Joseph Roth, Robert Musil, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. For them, the trauma of World War I included the sudden loss of the geographical entity into which they had been born: in 1918, the empire was dissolved overnight, leaving Austria a small, fragile republic that would last only twenty years before being annexed by Hitler’s Third Reich. In this major reconsideration of European modernism, Marjorie Perloff identifies and explores the aesthetic world that emerged from the rubble of Vienna and other former Habsburg territories—an “Austro-Modernism” that produced a major body of drama, fiction, poetry, and autobiography.

Perloff explores works ranging from Karl Kraus’s drama The Last Days of Mankind and Elias Canetti’s memoir The Tongue Set Free to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s notebooks and Paul Celan’s lyric poetry. Throughout, she shows that Austro-Modernist literature is characterized less by the formal and technical inventions of a modernism familiar to us in the work of  Joyce and Pound, Dada and Futurism, than by a radical irony beneath a seemingly conventional surface, an acute sense of exile, and a sensibility more erotic and quixotic than that of its German contemporaries. Skeptical and disillusioned, Austro-Modernism prefers to ask questions rather than formulate answers.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Literary Criticism, European History, Literature, Criticism, German Literature

270 pages, Kindle Edition

First published May 6, 2016

Reviews

[James Klagge · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a group of 6 essays, each on a different author, all of whom had some connection to the Austro-Hungarian Empire. I was already quite familiar with 3 of them--Kraus, Musil, and Wittgenstein--and pretty unfamiliar with the other 3--Joseph Roth, Elias Canetti, and Paul Celan. So I learned a lot.
The unifying theme is that while the empire centered on Vienna, these writers brought a Modernistic perspective from outside of Vienna--from the "edge." Perloff explains that the book makes no attempt to be all-inclusive. It does not cover Kafka, for example, because he is so well-known, while she "prefers to discuss those other Austrians who deserve wider dissemination" (p. xii).
Perloff also limits her attention to those whose native speech is "the German language--more specifically the Austro-German Language" (p. 11). This is understandable, but disappointing to me because it rules out Jaroslav Hašek, who is certainly deserving of "wider dissemination" if anyone is. His long and unfinished novel (reminiscent in this respect of Musil's "Man without Qualities") The Fateful Adventures of the Good Soldier Svejk, Book One was written in Czech. But it is very much from the edge and full of irony. It makes an interesting complement to Kraus's "Last Days of Mankind"--both are tragic and comic almost simultaneously; and it is almost completely ignored by literary critics.

[Mark · Rating 5 out of 5]

In her examination of the works of Karl Kraus, Robert Musil, Elias Canetti, Joseph Roth, and Paul Celan, author Marjorie Perloff identifies the literature of what she call Austro-Modernism: "the deeply ironic war literature of the defunct, multicultural, and polyglot Austro-Hungarian Empire." This is the literature created by "writers from the far-flung frontiers of the dismembered empire—writers, mostly Jewish, who had received a classical German education, as authorized by the centralized k. & k. (kaiserlich und königlich) government". What unites these Austro-Modernist writers is the German language—more specifically, the Austro-German language—into which they were born. "Children of a polyglot empire, they all spoke (and often wrote) more than one language. Canetti’s street language, for example, was Bulgarian, and he learned English as a child in Manchester; Musil spoke Czech, and Roth Yiddish (a language he later disavowed). But the scene of writing, for all of the above, was emphatically German. ... In Austro-Modernist fiction and poetry, irony—an irony less linked to satire (which posits the possibility for reform) than to a sense of the absurd—is thus the dominant mode....From Kraus to Celan, in any case, Austrian literature had its own particular identity. The nostalgia for an empire within which it had flourished and the ever-impending threat of war and expulsion cast a long shadow on its particular scene of writing—a scene in which the High German acquired in childhood and youth by students of Goethe and Heine, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche (as well as of Grillparzer, Nestroy, and Raimund), was tempered by the fact that the writers in question were regularly in contact with the languages of the empire’s Others. Austro-Modernist literature of the long war years was, quite literally, a literature on the edge."

Fantastic book, highly recommended to anyone familiar with the work of related writers like Kafka and Stefan Zweig. Perloff fleshes out a literary canon that is slowly rising back to the surface of modern literary consciousness, and is gradually being rediscovered.

[Alex Kudera · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm enjoying bouncing around in this book. Often the biographical information is more intriguing than the analysis of the content of the writers' works, but that's no doubt due to their lives on the go between world wars. Authors considered include Joseph Roth, Karl Kraus, Musil, Celan, Canetti, and Wittgenstein. So far, the Musil, Canetti, and Celan sections are my favorites. I hope to tackle at least a long section of The Man Without Qualities before I'm as dead as these ironic Austro-Hungarians.

[Illiterate · Rating 2 out of 5]

The studies of individual authors are fun, but the general claims about Austrian modernism remain sketchy.

[Sean · Rating 5 out of 5]

A thoughtful and readable analysis of early Twentieth-Century writers born into the late Austro-Hungarian Empire—Karl Kraus, Joseph Roth, Robert Musil, and Paul Celan. I was especially struck by Perloff’s focus on the multicultural hinterlands of the Hapsburg world. Our understanding of Modernity in Austria-Hungary is dominated Vienna, and there by the aural world of Schoenberg and his devotees, and by the visual world of artists such as Klimt. Literary modernism in Austria-Hungary is not as well understood in the English reading world. This book will serve the purpose of inviting me in. I was already a huge fan of Joseph Roth. Perloff encourages me to re-read Roth, and also to read Kraus, Celan and Musil.

[Lucas Sipe · Rating 4 out of 5]

Never being really exposed to Austrian/ Habsburg Empire authors before, I was expecting to be lost and confused with this work until the end. Marjorie Perloff, however, explores her collection of authors in a way that not only serves as a great introduction but also deeply and with great focus. English speakers don't often receive an introduction to modernism outside of Joyce, Woolf, and others so it was interesting to look into how other authors, from different backgrounds, wrote about modernity. The problem of these authors, almost uniformly, is that of dislocation, exile, and identity following the dissolution of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire. Perloff does an excellent job connecting these authors together without forcing them into the box either (for the most part).
One should read the work for themselves but the focus of modern post-Hapsburg Empire authors was not one of technical nor style. In many ways, they were quite conventional. Still, there was something incredibly "modern" that speaks to the shifting world and the dislocation of man. Many of the authors Perloff looks at were Jewish so there is an extra layer there as well. The title speaks of irony but I feel like that was a secondary feature of most of these works. Of course there is satire and critique, think of Kraus, but the irony Perloff hooks you with is not quite at the focus.
While I have very little major critiques of this work, my feeling is that the last two authors (Celan and Wittgenstein) are not writing in the spirit of the post-Habsburg Empire like the others. Their writing concerns the same themes but Perloff discusses them more abstractly than her other selections. Celan, in particular, seems almost disinterested in the world after World War I as it relates to the countries of the former Habsburg Empire. His is a more individual art and Wittgenstein continues that train of thought.
A thought provoking examination of many authors I may not have heard of, Perloff is to be commended for her excellent analysis. I'm looking forward to picking up many of the texts in the work and reading them for myself. Modern art has many flaws but I'm becoming increasingly enamored with the non-English speaking perspectives of the turn of the 20th century.

[Tobias · Rating 4 out of 5]

Compact collection of essays on interwar Austrian literature highlighting the role of alienation and estrangement in several major writers, including Kraus, Roth, Canetti, and Celan. Lost the thread occasionally but still a valuable guide to what made Austrian modernism unique.

[E. Merrill Brouder · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Edge of Irony is a rare triumph: a compelling monograph. Like most monographs that achieve this feat, it does so by telling a story, namely the story of how individual writers reacted to the decline and fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and how the personal elements of this historical calamity helped to direct modernism as a whole. Through this historical, literary, and biographical project, Perloff creates a framework for understanding modernism that applies beyond the realm of art criticism, offering uncanny insights (and warnings) for our own political and cultural moment.

[Anton Cebalo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Who thinks of Austria-Hungary these days? It's often remembered as this dying, aristocratic remnant in a continent that was then liberalizing along nation-state ideas. It died because it was old and anemic, so it goes, another "sick man" like the Ottoman Empire that was bound to go eventually.

But in truth, to live in Austro-Hungary was to experience a kernel of modernity so familiar to us today. It was uniquely cosmopolitan, a multicultural state among nation-states, and this was reflected in its literature. They wrote candidly about living in a society of many worlds, of almost a dozen languages, its center being a vibrant Vienna which was then on the cutting edge of arts, ideas, music, and political thought. But how quickly it evaporated in just a few short years, producing a generation of writers who understood what it meant to exist "on the edge." Their world gone after World War I, these artists and writers developed a skeptical style that sought to understand life "as it was." They realized nothing was permanent, not even the centuries-old Austria-Hungary they once called home. As Marjorie Perloff documents, from the remnants of Austria-Hungary we see the writings of real modernism, of uprooted people living in a confused but cosmopolitan world that now had to start over.

As Perloff documents, Austro-modernism was defined by profound skepticism about the powers of government and its ability to "reform human life." An irony linked to the absurd is the dominant mode of address; all change is suspect; and the writer's purpose under such auspices is to simply provide a "probing analysis of fundamental desires and principles."Perhaps there is something to be said about the fact that Freud and his theory of the unconscious mind emerged from this environment, a culture so amenable to diagnoses of social neuroses - visible in its everyday people who were constantly on the move from the periphery to the core, in all their variety, classes, rank, and different ways of thought. Given its unique circumstances, Austria-Hungary produced writers who deeply understood the socio-cultural realities of decline, nihilism, and malaise at the root like no other: from Joseph Roth to Karl Krauss to Robert Musil. It is here that the "man with no qualities" was to be found, as Musil wrote.

Perloff makes a compelling case for why Austro-modernism produced literature that transcended the era in which it was written, precisely because its writers were living on the edge. Today, these texts from almost a century ago speak to us in our cynical time, when things feel not as permanent as they once were. As Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote in the summer of 1918 while on leave from the military front, “everything we see could be otherwise."