The German Genius

have been blocked or frustrated. Schnitzler indicts anti-Semitism, not simply for being wrong, but as the symbol of a new, illiberal culture brought about by a decadent aestheticism and by the arrival of mass society which, together with a parliament “[that] has become a mere theatre through which the masses are manipulated,” gives full rein to the instincts, and which in the novel overwhelms the “purposive, moral and scientific” culture represented by many of the Jewish characters. Schnitzler was a committed realist who thought, for example, that “the battle between imagination and fidelity” was “a fact of life.” 5
    Hugo von Hofmannsthal (1874–1929) went further. Born into an aristocratic family, his father introduced his son to the Café Griensteidl set when Hugo was quite young, so that the group around Bahr acted as a forcing house for the youth’s precocious talents. In the early part of his career, Hofmannsthal produced what has been described as “the most polished achievement in the history of German poetry,” but he was never totally comfortable with the aesthetic attitude and, noting the encroachment of science on the old aesthetic culture of Vienna, he wrote in 1905, “The nature of our epoch is multiplicity and indeterminacy. It can rest only on das Gleitende [the slipping, the sliding].” Could there be a better description about the way the Newtonian world was slipping after Boltzmann’s and Planck’s discoveries? “Everything fell into parts,” Hofmannsthal wrote, “the parts again into more parts, and nothing allowed itself to be embraced by concepts any more.” 6 Like Schnitzler, Hofmannsthal was disturbed by political developments in the dual monarchy and in particular the growth of anti-Semitism. For him, this rise in irrationalism owed some of its force to science-induced changes in the understanding of reality; the new ideas were so disturbing as to promote a large-scale reactionary irrationalism. He therefore abandoned poetry at the grand age of twenty-six, feeling that the theater offered a better chance of meeting current challenges. Hofmannsthal came to believe that (in the Greek manner) theater could help to counteract political developments. His works, from the plays Fortunatus and His Sons (1900–01) and King Candaules (1903) to his librettos for Richard Strauss, are all about political leadership as an art form, the point of kings being to preserve order and control irrationality. Yet the irrational must be given an outlet, Hofmannsthal says, and his solution is “the ceremony of the whole,” a ritual form of politics in which no one feels excluded. 7 His plays are attempts to create ceremonies of the whole, marrying individual psychology to group psychology in dramas that anticipate Freud’s theories. As he put it, the arts had become “the spiritual space of the nation.” Hofmannsthal always hoped that his writings about kings would help Vienna throw up a great leader, someone who would offer moral guidance and show the way ahead. The words he used were uncannily close to what eventually came to pass. What he hoped for was a “genius…marked with the stigma of the usurper,” “a true German and absolute man,” a “prophet,” “poet,” “teacher,” “seducer,” an “erotic dreamer.” 8
    Just as Hofmannsthal’s aesthetics of kingship and “ceremonies of the whole” were a response to das Gleitende , induced by scientific discoveries, so too was the new philosophy of Franz Clemens Brentano (1838–1917). Brentano was a popular man, with students—among them Freud and Tomáš Masaryk—crowding his lectures. A statuesque figure, he was frequently to be seen swimming the Danube. He published a best-selling book of riddles. Josef Breuer was his doctor.
    Brentano’s main interest was to show, in as scientific a way as possible, proof of God’s existence. For him, philosophy went in cycles and there had been three—ancient, medieval, and modern—each divided into four phases: investigation, application, skepticism, and mysticism. These he laid out in the following grid:
     
     
    CYCLES
     
    PHASES: Investigation
    Ancient : Thales to Aristotle
    Medieval : Thomas Aquinas
    Modern : Bacon to Locke
     
    PHASES: Application
    Ancient : Stoics, Epicureans
    Medieval : Duns Scotus
    Modern : Enlightenment
     
    PHASES: Skepticism
    Ancient : Skeptics, Eclectics
    Medieval : William of Occam
    Modern : Hume
     
    PHASES: Mysticism
    Ancient :