52
PARTISAN REVIEW
parliamentary power on the national level in Austria had been decisively
broken.
This was the public context that favored a reassessment of the ratio–
nalist assumptions about human nature and the inevitability of progress, a
painful reorientation which underlay the prevailing climate of anxiety
and impotence in the ranks of the
haute bourgeoisie
and most of its lead–
ing representatives. The fact that this bourgeoisie, and especially its most
prominent intellectuals in Vienna, was predominantly Jewish gave an
added intensity and emotional charge to the cultural crisis and distin–
guished it from similar tendencies visible elsewhere
infin-de-siecle
Europe.
For anti-Semitism was, after all, the primary vehicle that had served to
subvert the status quo in Viennese society, sweeping away its liberal
foundations and, in doing so, calling into question the legal basis for
Jewish emancipation. These ominous developments coincided with the
entry of the masses into the political arena. Thus there was the under–
standable temptation for many Austrian intellectuals to regard the
realm
ofpolitics as a whole
as a sphere ruled by irrationality, a temptation all the
greater for the strongly-represented Jewish element within the Viennese
intelligentsia, which was the most directly threatened by the rise of polit–
ical anti-Semitism. The popular success and resonance of the new illiberal
and antiliberal mass politics of Lueger's movement created an unmistak–
able social and psychological pressure, inevitably affecting the identity and
self-perception of many Jewish intellectuals and artists, even as they
sought to flee from its ravages, whether into the temple of pure science
or that of aestheticism for its own sake.
Some, like the completely assimilated Catholic poet of partly Jewish
origin, Hugo von Hoffinannstahl, sought refuge in the Habsburg imperial
tradition, attempting to resublimate politics into a ceremonial form that
would canalize the irrational by accepting the primacy of instinct and
refining it in a new cultural thesis based on older Austrian cosmopolitan
values, ultimately rooted in the Baroque. Others, like the dramatist
Arthur Schnitzler, embittered and disgusted by the irrationality and
"demonic" character of the political realm, tried to hold on to the
skeptical individualism of the liberal heritage while abandoning its opti–
mistic belief in reason and progress. Karl Kraus, that supreme individualist,
remained equally distrustful of all the new mass movements (including so–
cial democracy) while denouncing the liberal cult of progress that "sub–
ordinated the purpose to the means of subsistence" and subjugated
mankind to the rapacious economy and the sensationalist press. The im–
age of Austrian liberalism was, for Kraus, irrevocably associated with
stock-exchange profiteering and the capitalist oligarchy whose mouth–
piece was
Die Neue Freie Presse.
This incomparable satirist who once de-
