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nationalities tearing away at the appearance of a unified monarchy.
Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Hungarians, and Germans all made even
the impotent parliament of the monarchy an uncontrollable stage for
brawls, arguments, and inaction. Mark Twain wrote one of the
many hilarious, satiric descriptions of chaotic sessions of the
parliament in Vienna at the turn of the century. Beyond the
question of nationalities, conflict among social classes and political
groups in turn-of-the-century Vienna was severe. Socialists,
Christian-Socialists, pan-Germans, conservative monarchists, and
liberals all made a mockery of any claim to national unity .
Compare America. Ethnicity has successfully outdistanced the
myth of common citizenship. Are we not a collection of ethnic,
social, regional, and economic factions, all acting on narrow
grounds of self-interest with a weak sense of the common public
good? Our recent economic deterioration further separates groups in
the nation by economic status, race, and region. The extent to which
we have strengthened our factional identities, often only as members
of professional or vocational cadres, has seriously weakened the
capacity of the political process to generate the feeling that we are all
part of one body politic with comparable political and social ideals.
The resulting character of our domestic politics is analogous to the
Austrian and Viennese predecessor: national paralysis in the face of
serious economic and social challenges and of declining military
power, international prestige, and confidence in leadership.
On the issue of leadership, turn-of-the-century Vienna, like
America in the past decade, was rocked by internal political scandal,
involving treason and bribery. Events like the Redl affair revealed
corruption and hypocrisy in the civil service and the military . From
Watergate and Abscam to Reagan appointees Allen and Donovan,
the persistence of mediocrity and venality among politicians has
engendered a cynicism about politics worthy of the intellectuals and
artists of fin-de-siecle Vienna.
The cultural responses to these comparable political and social
conditions of fragmentation, leaderlessness, ineptness, corruption,
and general dissolution are understandably similar. Consider the
world of music. Mahler and Schoenberg, two of the most vaunted
innovators from the turn of the century, were in their own estimate
not so self-consciously revolutionary or modern as we might like to
think, especially in Schoenberg's case before 1914. Schoenberg'S early
compositions in particular reflected an effort to reclaim the forms
and techniques of musical tradition from the grasp of a cliched and
