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PARTISAN REVIEW
and intellectual elite of the country is still punishing its parents, which may
perhaps even be desirable; the idea being that "what happened to our parents
will never happen again." Given the chance, we will make it better.
In any case, the future lies in the repetition of the past, which reminds
me of Milan Kundera's description of peoples' relations towards the past
and the future. No one, he says, is really interested in the future, an "indif–
ferent emptiness ... On the other side the past is full of life, her face makes
us angry and insults us, so that we want to destroy it or paint it new. People
only want to be masters of the future to change the past." But isn't this a
remake of the de-realization described by the Mitscherlichs?
Again, as in the new evaluation of fin de siecle Vienna, views from the
outside remain helpful. The German political scientist, Claus Leggewie, for
instance, published a widely-discussed article about Austria as a "normal"
country. This comparison destroys the idea of Austria's uniqueness as good
or bad-a central part of its identity. At the moment, one can observe a
new process of self-re£lection, beyond Messianism and demonization, in
the framework of "normalization." An essential part of normalization is
Austria's self-definition as a minor state, as a country learning to act inde–
pendently in the European Union and accepting the second republic as a
lucky historical period-in which a hitherto unknown social stability was
combined with prosperity, social justice and democratic participation.
The concepts of "rationality" and "subjectivity" are ambiguous; I pre–
fer to use them in the following way: that after a period of "de-realization,"
of a collective "subjectivity," which was a manifest form of irrationality,
Austria has achieved a new collective "rationality" which I believe is pre–
ClOUS.
Robert Wistrich :
My question is for Mr. Pfabigan. My lmpression of
Austria's fin de siecle culture was that even though a number of artists and
thinkers were indeed forward-looking, the overall sense of that period was
also very nostalgic for an earlier age of stability. In many respects it seems
to me that even then there was a retreat into the past. What we call mod–
ernism and modernist culture, in its Viennese version, contained strong
conservative elements, which was part of its special £lavor. I would say that
Austrian modernism, unlike its counterparts in Berlin or Paris or London,
had a more conservative and apolitical character which derived from things
which you in fact indicated: a crisis of liberalism, a public sphere which
was not receptive to social change, a paralysis in political life. Of course, a
hundred years ago there existed a cosmopolitan, multi-national empire
with very creative contributions coming from a huge
hinterland
of Jews,
Hungarians, and Slavs which is not available today.
The second point relates to the thesis of Lord Dahrendorf about the
Social Democratic century. I have some difficul ties in looking at the
