The Chronic Crisis of Modernity

IN THE INTRODUCTION TO THIS STUDY I outlined some of the aspects of modernity that impacted Austria in the early twentieth century and gave rise to an acute sense of cultural and political crisis in central Europe: the sense of living in the shell of a spiritually empty ancien régime whose path into the modern era appeared structurally blocked; the awareness among intellectuals critical of the government that Austria constituted a particularly evident case of fragmentation, in contrast to which the moribund Habsburg realm paradoxically symbolized the very totality that had for them been irrevocably lost. The nature of modernity as a Janus-like phenomenon — with a positive and a negative face, with beneficiaries and victims — has been proposed. It could produce quite contrary responses in those who experienced it, ranging from radical experimentation and the desire to construct new, private utopias to nostalgia for the “lost” past and despair. Modern Austria, it has been suggested, acts like a prism in which the central crises of modernity are refracted in a particular range of colors. Thus far my discussion has concentrated on general features of modernity and the broad contours of the Austrian context. But how did the emergence and evolution of modernity come to be experienced by Musil, Roth, and Bachmann in quite specific, even idiosyncratic ways?