Documenti di Didattica
Documenti di Professioni
Documenti di Cultura
Schorske
Fin-de-Sicle Vienna
Cultural Community
In London, Paris, or Berlin the intellectuals in the various branches of high culture, whether academic or aesthetic, journalistic or literary, political or intellectual, scarcely knew each other. They lived in relatively segregated professional communities. In Vienna, by contrast, until about 1900, the cohesiveness of the whole elite was strong. The salon and the caf retained their vitality as institutions where intellectuals of different kinds shared ideas and values with each other and still mingled with a business and professional elite proud of its general education and artistic culture. -- page xxvii
Austrian Liberalism
Socially, they [the liberals] believed that the aristocratic class, having been above throughout most of history, was either being liberalized or sinking into a harmless, ornamental hedonism. The principles and programs which made up the liberal creedc were designed to supersede systematically those of the feudals, as the aristocrats were pejoratively called. Constitutional monarchy would replace aristocratic absolutism,; parliamentary centralism, aristocratic federalism. Since would replace religion. [German c ulture would raise the subject peoples to enlightenment]. Finally, laissezfaire would break the arbitrary rule of privilege in the economic sphere and make merit, rather than privilege or charity, the basis of economic reward. -- page 117
Challenges to Liberalism
New social groups raised claims to political participation: the peasantry, the urban artisans and workers, and the Slavic peoples. In the 1880s these groups formed mass parties to challenge the liberal hegemony -- the anti-Semitic Christian Socials and Pan-Germans, Socialists, and Slavic nationalists. Their success was rapid -- page 5
Liberal Values
The moral and scientific culture of Viennas haute bourgeoisie was intellectually committed to the rule of the mind over the body and to latter-day Voltairism: to social progress through science, education, and hard work. -- page 6
Gefhlskultur
More significant is the evolution of the aesthetic culture of the educated bourgeoisie after the mid-century, for out of it grew the peculiar receptivity of a whole class to the life of art, and, concomitantly at the individual level, a sensitivity to psychic states. By the beginning of our century, the usual moralistic culture of the European bourgeoisie was in Austria both overlaid and undermined by an amoral Gefhlskultur. -- page 7
THE FEUILLETON
The feuilleton writer, an artist in vignettes, worked with those discreet details and episodes so appealing to the nineteenth centurys taste for the concrete. But he sought to endow his material with color drawn from his imagination. The subjective response of the reporter or critic to an experience, his feeling-tone, acquired clear primacy over the matter of his discourse. To render a state of feeling became the mode of formulating a judgement.. -age 9 Cf. Herb Caen, especially the Sunday pieces
Narcissism
The feuilletonist tended to transform objective analysis of the world into subjective cultivation of personal feelings. He conceived of the world as a random succession of stimulti to the sensibilities, not as a scene of action. The feuilletonist exemplified the cultural type to whom he addressed his columns: his characteristics were narcissism and introversion, passive receptivity toward outer reality, and, above all, sensitivity to psychic states. -- page 9 See Altenbergs Little Things, in The Vienna Coffeehouse Wits, pages 126-127