FROM RATIONALITY TO SUBJECTIVITY
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them is interpenetrated by, and interwoven with, the others. At times these
domains ceaselessly compete with one another; at other times they fal l into
firm alignments; at still other times a single domain appears dominant.
A tripolar dynamism now pushes the pendulum of the American
political culture. Although thoroughly severed from the old dualism, this
new configuration is unique and unlike that of any other post-industrial
nation. It stands as well in stark contrast to the iron cage model. Max
Weber's sociology, at the fin de siecle, assists the identification of its con–
tent, parameters, tensions, and internal dynamics.
Eliot Pruzan:
Our next speaker is Professor Alfred Pfabigan from the
University of Vienna. His books include
Karl Kraus und der Sozialismus
and
Max Adler: Eine Politische Biographie.
He will speak on "A View From
Central Europe."
Alfred Pfabigan:
Vienna 1896-Vienna 1996: a hundred years changed a
lot, and the city which was once the capital of an empire is now the cen–
ter of a minor state that lost untold talents due to the expulsion of the Jews
and the Holocaust. But it is the same city, the famous buildings are still
standing and people bear the same names. However a visible difference in
discourse can be noted, especially different atti tudes towards the "new,"
(Ende
and
Wende),
which I want to define.
The fin de siecle Vienna of the last century is said to be an exemplary
battlefield of conflicts typical for modernism, but also relevant for post–
modernism. The enormous creative potential which gathered in the capital
of a declining empire articulated these problems in a way that, for one his–
torical moment, made the city into one of the centers of world culture.
The background of these achievements was the crisis of Austrian liberal–
ism, which was more than a crisis of an ideology or the party which
represented it. After the crisis year of 1873, broad sections of the rising
generation of intellectuals fel t alienated, doubted the validi ty of the seem–
ingly irreversible, power-protected synthesis of liberalism and reason, and
cultivated fantasies of "world's end." The shock of modernization
occurred under the conditions of a decomposition of public and private
values. Schopenhauer, Wagner, and Nietzsche provided the ingredients for
new concepts of life reacting to the collective crisis of identity.
Aestheticization of the body politic was the remedy for one faction, while
the other one had the idea that only a war could save culture.
The general denial of history in the first years of the second republic
extended to fin de siecle Vienna. An entire generation of rising intellectu–
als had to discover "their" Klimt, Kraus, Loos, Schiele, and Wittgenstein in
opposition to its teachers and to educational institutions. American schol–
ars like Carl E. Schorske helped to "reimport" fin de siecle Vienna, and
