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PARTISAN REVIEW
sense of the slow, irreversible decline of the Habsburg monarchy; their
inability or unwillingness to synthesize the totality of human thought
and experience into any coherent system; and their attachment to or else
their revolt against the prevailing climate of aestheticism in Vienna -
all
these factors encouraged a disengagement from politics and an elitist dis–
trust of mass democracy. As Karl Kraus put it in a polemic against the
socialist
Arbeiter-Zeitung
in November of 1917: "The definition of the
problem in terms of Democracy versus Autocracy is as empty a formula–
tion as the vacuum of the age, which is merely more marked here in
Austria than elsewhere in Europe."
What really preoccupied Karl Kraus and his contemporaries was how
to rescue the culture of the free individual from the dehumanizing pres–
sures of modernity. As a hive of anti-Semitic reaction, Vienna was one of
the first major cities of Europe to discover the darker, pathological sides
of modernity, one feature of which, the irrationalism of the masses, still
remained a central and troubling component. This condition made the
salvaging of what was preservable in the Central European enlightenment
tradition seem particularly difficult and more precarious to the liberal
Jewish intelligentsia . This was
not,
it should be stressed, a uniquely
Viennese but a shared European experience of the
fin-de-siecle,
confronted
with the preliminary rumblings and the first glimmer of the twentieth–
century revolt of the masses. Today, the special fascination exerted by
Vienna's former cultural elites seems to derive, at least in part, from their
precocious disillusion with what has been called the failed progressivism
of modernity. Almost a century later, what Herman Broch once called
the "Gay Apocalypse" has all the discreet, beguiling, and fatal charm of a
light opera rescripted by Oswald Spengler, to celebrate somewhat pre–
maturely the decline ofWestern civilization.
