ABSTRACT
Servility An example from the end of the era Fin-de-siècle Vienna, Prague and Budapest were metropolises in which social, intellectual and cultural life was still strongly cast in a courtly-aristocratic mould. ‘The Aristocracy and the Aristocratization of the Bourgeoisie’ – not for nothing did Rossbacher so title a chapter in his book on literary culture during the Ringstrasse era (Rossbacher 1992: 117-14). If the Habsburg Monarchy did not produce courtly society on quite the French scale, the imperial court at least outshone its English counterpart, and even more its Prussian one. ‘Viennese Modernism’ (cf. the eponymous anthology, ed. by Wunberg 1984) is full of pieces in which a strongly aristocratic culture with psychologizing tendencies, with a faiblesse for ornamental aestheticism and music, rubs shoulders with a scientific and philosophical culture rooted in middle-class expertise and working-bourgeois professionalism. A world of salons and other venues for prestigious self-display now beckons. Schnitzler’s Reigen [Hands Around, also: La Ronde], Broch’s fröhliche Apokalypse [gay apocalypse] shed light on this milieu, as do Vienna’s many operettas (cf. Csáky 1996). Then there is Doderer’s Strudlhofstiege [The Strudlhof Steps]1 or Musil’s Mann ohne Eigenschaften [The Man without Qualities], whose much-touted ‘Parallel Campaign’ takes place mainly in or around the salons, each one presided over by a female luminary of stately beauty, wit and taste. If we accept Lhotsky’s ideas (Lhotsky 1974) on the rise of Austrian man – his yardstick is 1526, the year which saw the first origins in the creation of a single aristocratic class spanning Austria, Bohemia and Hungary – we can readily postulate diffusion processes that shaped the corresponding affective structures. Here it is imperative to analyze, in terms of its psychic effects, the phenomenon of courtly aristocracy (as opposed to military-related feudal aristocracy, which was already treated above).
