Hugo von Hofmannsthal and the Austrian Idea

Description

The Austrian writer Hugo von Hofmannsthal (1874-1929) was one of the great modernists in the German language, but his importance as a major intellectual of the early twentieth century has not received adequate attention in the English-speaking world. One distinguished literary scholar of his generation called Hofmannsthal a "spiritual-moral authority" of a kind German culture had only rarely produced. This volume provides translations of essays that deal with the Austrian idea and with the distinctive position of German-speaking Austrians between German nationalism and peoples to the East, whether in the Habsburg Monarchy or beyond it, as well as essays that locate Hofmannsthal's thinking about Austria in relation to the broader situation of German and European culture.
Foreword

Preface

Introduction

1. The Poet and Our Time (1906)

2. Boycott of Foreign Languages? (1914)

3. The Affirmation of Austria (1914)

4. Our Foreign Words (1914)

5. We Austrians and Germany (1915)

6. Grillparzer’s Political Legacy (1915)

7. Austria in the Mirror of Its Literature (1916)

8. The Idea of Europe (1916)

9. The Austrian Idea (1917)

10. The Prussian and the Austrian (1917)

11. Adam Müller’s Twelve Lectures on Eloquence (1920)

12. Three Small Observations (1921)

13. K. E. Neumann’s Translation of the Holy Writings of the Buddhists (1921)

14. View of the Spiritual Condition of Europe (1922)

15. New German Contributions (1921)

16. Czech and Slovak Folk Songs (1922)

17. Address on Grillparzer (1922)

18. Stifter’s Indian Summer (1924)

19. The Written Word as the Spiritual Space of the Nation (1927)

20. The Value and Dignity of the German Language (1927)

Bibliography

Index

Sujets

• Histoire
• Austria
• Hungary
• History of Europe
• History
• Europe

Informations

• Publié par: Purdue University Press
• Date de parution: 15 mai 2011
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781612491943
• Langue: English

Extrait

Hugo von Hofmannsthal and the Austrian Idea
Central European Studies
Charles W. Ingrao, senior editor Gary B. Cohen, editor Franz Szabo, editor
Hugo von Hofmannsthal and the Austrian Idea
Selected Essays and Addresses, 1906-1927
Translated and Edited by David S. Luft
Purdue University Press West Lafayette, Indiana
Copyright 2011 by Purdue University. All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hofmannsthal, Hugo von, 1874-1929.
[Selections. English. 2011]
Hugo von Hofmannsthal and the Austrian idea : selected essays and addresses,
1906-1927 / translated and edited by David S. Luft.
p. cm. -- (Central European studies)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-55753-590-0
1. Hofmannsthal, Hugo von, 1874-1929--Translations into English. 2. Hofmannsthal, Hugo von, 1874-1929--Political and social views--Sources. I. Luft, David S. II. Title.
PT2617.O47A2 2011
838 .912--dc22
2010044563

Publication of this book has been made possible through the generous support of the Horning Foundation.
Willard Haas und Edgar Beckham gewidmet
Contents
Foreword
Preface
Introduction
1. The Poet and Our Time (1906)
2. Boycott of Foreign Languages? (1914)
3. The Affirmation of Austria (1914)
4. Our Foreign Words (1914)
5. We Austrians and Germany (1915)
6. Grillparzer s Political Legacy (1915)
7. Austria in the Mirror of Its Literature (1916)
8. The Idea of Europe (1916)
9. The Austrian Idea (1917)
10. The Prussian and the Austrian (1917)
11. Adam M ller s Twelve Lectures on Eloquence (1920)
12. Three Small Observations (1921)
13. K. E. Neumann s Translation of the Holy Writings of the Buddhists (1921)
14. View of the Spiritual Condition of Europe (1922)
15. New German Contributions (1921)
16. Czech and Slovak Folk Songs (1922)
17. Address on Grillparzer (1922)
18. Stifter s Indian Summer (1924)
19. The Written Word as the Spiritual Space of the Nation (1927)
20. The Value and Dignity of the German Language (1927)
Bibliography
Index
Foreword
It is a great pleasure for the editors of Central European Studies to be able to publish this volume in the series. It includes the most significant and interesting of the great Austrian writer Hugo von Hofmannsthal s essays on Austria, the relationship of Austria to Germany and of Austria and Germany to the rest of Europe. Only a few of these pieces have ever been published in English before.
David S. Luft, a highly accomplished scholar of modern Austrian and Central European intellectual and cultural history, has selected, translated, and annotated the essays. He has also provided a thoughtful and lucid introduction to their significance and their place in the larger body of Hofmannsthal s work. The translations present the essays in idiomatic modern English, which still captures much of the beautiful literary style of the German original.
We think of Hofmannsthal as a masterful author of poetry, stories, plays, and opera libretti; but he was also a dedicated essayist who wrote on a considerable range of topics. It is lamentable that only a small portion of those essays has been translated into English up to now. Those included in this volume remind us that Hofmannsthal retained a strong engagement in the cultural and social issues of the world in which he lived, even if much about the political life of his day frustrated him. His engagement in contemporary affairs grew particularly strong during World War I, when he served as something of a cultural ambassador for Austria and gave public lectures in many places. The essays presented here, however, focus on the Austrian idea , and what Hofmannsthal saw as the intellectual, cultural, and spiritual role of Austria in European history and its mediating role between Germany, particularly modern Germany and its nationalism, and the European peoples to the east. In these essays we find many of Hofmannsthal s same concerns about language, culture, and aesthetics, which are familiar from his literary works, refracted through the prism of his searching reflections on Austria s role in Europe, both past and present. Both those readers interested in Hofmannsthal s literary works and those with broader interests in early twentieth-century European cultural history will find much to ponder and savor in these wonderful essays.
-Gary B. Cohen Series Editor
Preface
I became interested in Hugo von Hofmannsthal in recent years, after working for much of my scholarly life on another twentieth-century writer, Robert Musil. In an unusually creative generation of Austrian novelists, poets, and essayists, Hofmannsthal and Musil were perhaps the most distinguished essayists, but in certain respects my work on Musil had distanced me from Hofmannsthal, in part because Musil was more at home with modern science and technology. And, for the most part, I saw Hofmannsthal, as others did, primarily as a poet and playwright. Indeed, when I was working on Musil, Hofmannsthal s essays were still not widely known and appreciated. More recently, Hofmannsthal s appeal to me was that more than any other person he contributed to our understanding of the distinctive ethos of Austrian culture. As I worked on a book about Austrian intellectual history, The Austrian Tradition in German Culture , it became clear to me that countless widely held views of Austrian culture and intellectual life had derived from Hofmannsthal, often with little explicit reference or clarification. In some regards, we may say that Hofmannsthal invented the Austrian tradition, in much the same way that national traditions were invented around the world in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But another dimension of Hofmannsthal s work is important to me. He was one of the great German writers of the twentieth century, and he located himself very much in the tradition of German literature, despite his advocacy of what was distinctive in the contribution of Austrians to the broad experience of German-speaking people. He was also concerned with characterizing what was distinctively Austrian, and we might say that Austria was the form of his conservatism. Hofmannsthal was more centrally concerned than Musil with rescuing what was of value in the tradition-and conservative in this sense. But at the same time he was very similar to Musil in his commitment to Europe and in his deep sense of irony-qualities that were decisively shaped for both writers by the First World War. Hofmannsthal s own attempt to come to terms with the challenges of life in the modern world has a significance that goes beyond the fate of the Habsburg Monarchy and belongs to modern European literature and culture more broadly.
I began this translation edition while I was still at the University of California, San Diego, and I want to thank UCSD s Committee on Research for their support for my work. Since I came to Oregon State University in the fall of 2008, I have benefited from the generous support of the Horning Endowment in the Humanities. Several of my friends in German and Comparative Literature encouraged me to undertake this project at the outset: Burton Pike, Katherine Arens, Regina Kecht, Michael Heim, and Cynthia Walk. In the early stages of my translating, three friends were especially helpful with their comments on the opening essay: Kristin Rebien, Joe Busby, and Don Wallace. Three native speakers of German worked for me as research assistants at different stages in the project: Anne Schenderlein, Thomas Koenig, and Dieter Manderscheid (himself a professional translator) offered helpful perspectives on particularly opaque passages in Hofmannsthal s German. Kara Ritzheimer and Kristin Rebien both provided thoughtful, provocative readings of my introduction, alerting me to the perspectives of scholars in nearby fields. I also want to thank my editor, Gary Cohen, and the two readers for Purdue University Press: Frank Trommler and an anonymous reader. I especially want to thank Mason Tattersall, whose decision to leave the University of British Columbia to complete his doctorate with me in Corvallis contributed so much to my own experience at Oregon State University and to my work on Hofmannsthal. It has been a pleasure to have him as my research assistant while I was working on this project, and I have appreciated his thoughtful insights and wise editing. I have benefited from all of this counsel, but here, more than in any work, the mistakes are entirely mine. I dedicate this book to the two teachers who guided me so wisely in the early stages of learning German.
-David S. Luft August 2010 Corvallis
I NTRODUCTION
The Austrian writer Hugo von Hofmannsthal (1874-1929) was one of the great modernists in the German language, but his importance as a major intellectual of the early twentieth century has not received adequate attention in the English-speaking world. Hofmannsthal s admirers are familiar with his poetry, plays, and libretti or, perhaps, with his prose fiction, but most of his essays are still untranslated and unknown to readers of English. Yet as J. D. McClatchy has recently pointed out, Hofmannsthal s essays occupy nearly a third of his collected works, and they are in many ways the truest portrait of his mind. 1 One essay, the letter of Lord Chandos (1902), has been translated many times and is widely recognized as a crucial text for modern literature and theories of language; what is much less well known is that Hofmannsthal s essays fill several volumes. 2 Even German and Austrian scholars have shown only slight interest in Hofmannsthal as an es