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By Root 1233 0

“yet terribly sad in his precocious worldliness,” Hofmannsthal was a combination of Edwardian Werther and Viennese Dorian Gray. Like Wilde an artist in language, he played on German as on a harp and in 1893, his next drama, Tod und der Tor (Death and the Fool), confirmed in him a poet who could raise his native language to the harmony of Italian. When words are used for their own sake the result may be musical but the thought murky. In 1905 Hofmannsthal concluded an essay on Wilde, in perfect if unconscious emulation of his subject, “He who knows the power of the dance of life fears not death. For he knows that love kills.” To his contemporaries he seemed “absolute poetic perfection come into being.” As an acolyte, for a time, of the circle which genuflected to Stefan George in Munich, von Hofmannsthal was absorbed in problems of symbol and paradoxes of “the truth of masks.” As a Viennese he did not escape the pessimism that infused the capital of the oldest empire in Europe.

In Vienna, the Kaiserstadt, seat of the Congress that had pasted Europe together after Napoleon, the time was twilight. As the center of a centuries-old mixture of races and peoples and the unwilling allegiances of restless nationalities, the capital of Austria-Hungary had too many problems of political life too difficult to cope with—and so turned its attention to other matters: to culture and connoisseurship, dalliance if not love, refinement of manner above everything and seriousness in nothing but music. The tempo was easygoing, the temper flippant, the mood hedonism and a nonchalant fatalism. It was the land of the Lotus-Eaters, the “Capua of the Mind.” Its Emperor was seventy-five in 1905 and had been holding together his difficult domains through a reign of fifty-seven years. Its sad wandering Empress was dead by an Anarchist’s knife. Its court had retreated to the aristocratic purity of sixteen quarterings for every member. It was a place where something was visibly coming to an end; everyone knew it and no one spoke of it.

Vienna looked down on Berlin as parvenu and crude and expressed its feeling in a popular song:

Es gibt nur eine Kaiserstadt

Es gibt nur ein Wien,

Es gibt nur ein Räubernest

Und das heisst Berlin.*

In the city of Beethoven, music and opera were king and the man in the street discussed the rival merits of the bands who played in the Prater. Art and the artist were esteemed. In politics, in government, in morals, Vienna was “affably tolerant of all that was slovenly,… in artistic matters there was no pardon; here the honor of the city was at stake.” That honor was maintained by the bourgeoisie and the cultivated Jews, who were the new patrons of art. Franz Joseph had never read a book and nursed an antipathy to music. The nobility not only kept its distance from artistic and intellectual life but feared and contemned it. They had, however, the most accomplished social manners in Europe, and when Theodore Roosevelt was asked what type of person he had found most sympathetic on his European travels, he replied, “the Austrian gentleman.”

In internal affairs the strongest political sentiment was anti-Semitism, which was outspoken but more routine than heated. Karl Luger, the handsome blond-bearded Mayor of Vienna and head of the Christian Socialist party, was the leading anti-Semite, though more officially than personally. “I myself decide who is a Jew,” he used to say. Known as der schöne Karl, he was the most popular man in the city and his funeral in 1910 was a major event. Despite their handicap the Jews, who represented 10 per cent of Vienna’s population, were fertilizers of its culture. They played a prominent part in press, theatre, music, literature, finance, medicine and the law. They supplied the conductor of the Vienna Court Opera and the country’s leading composer in Gustav Mahler as well as Vienna’s truest mirror in Arthur Schnitzler.

A doctor like Chekhov, Schnitzler was marked by the same melancholy underlying a tone of irony and mockery. Except in his tragedy of Professor Bernhardi, the Jewish doctor