Among his many contributions to Austrian studies, David Luft's approach to cultural and intellectual history has arguably had the most enduring impact. Most readers will remember Luft's original reading, in Eros and Inwardness in Vienna (Chicago, 2003), of the treatment of gender and sexuality by Otto Weininger, Robert Musil, and Heimito von Doderer; the crucial contextual factor there, so goes the argument, was an intellectual field shaped by the competing currents of scientific materialism and philosophical irrationalism. In his new book, Luft casts his empirical-historical net yet more widely.
The Austrian Dimension in German Intellectual History is a remarkable book that will be of enduring significance to (interdisciplinary) scholars of Central Europe. It comprises a series of analysis that reveals Cisleithanian Austria—the non-Hungarian Habsburg lands west of the river Leitha that, crucially, included Bohemia—as a geographical, political, and cultural space between 1740 and 1938 that left a distinctive legacy within German-speaking intellectual history. One way of describing such an undertaking is through historical analogy: the author thus likens Cisleithanian Austria to Victorian England, or “a particular constellation of society and culture” that was “as much a period as a region” (137). However, the ambition of Luft's analysis goes deeper. In thinking of cultural and intellectual production outside the spaces subsequently delineated and claimed by neighboring nation-states, Luft offers a compelling counternarrative to the “methodological nationalism” that has all too often seen the social sciences and humanities reproduce and help legitimize nationalist frames of reference (Andreas Wimmer and Nina Glick-Schiller, “Methodological Nationalism and Beyond,” Global Networks 2, no. 4 [2002]: 301–34).
Modern German-speaking intellectual history in Cisleithanian Austria, argues Luft, constituted its own tradition, one “fundamentally sympathetic to the Enlightenment” and different from the movements that shaped discourse in the areas unified under the German empire after 1871 (139). Structurally, Luft's analysis proceeds thus: a careful positioning of the argument is followed by longue durée contextualization and a tracing of the Cisleithanian—and hence concurrently Austrian and Bohemian—tradition across four successive periods (the Austrian Enlightenment under Maria Theresa and Joseph II between 1740 and 1790; a period of conservative Josephinism until 1866; the liberal period from 1867 until 1900; and the politically tumultuous as well as intellectually transforming era from the turn of the century until 1938/39). The most substantive chapters then examine the domains and writings that saw the Cisleithanian tradition take shape. A chapter on philosophy focuses on the works of Bernard Bolzano, Franz Brentano, Ernst Mach, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and the Vienna Circle. The wide-ranging chapter on literature covers Grillparzer and Stifter, writers of the liberal era (Ferdinand von Saar, Marie von Ebner Eschenbach, Ludwig Anzengruber, and Peter Rosegger), Young Vienna (e.g., Schnitzler, Hofmannsthal, and Bahr), and “the generation of 1905,” including Kraus, Musil, (again) Hofmannsthal, Broch, Rilke, and Kafka. Finally, a chapter on the human sciences locates parts of the Cisleithanian tradition in intellectual phenomena as diverse as cameralism (i.e., the science of government), Austro-Marxism, the empirical social research of Paul Lazarsfeld and Maria Jahoda, the Austrian School of Economics, and psychoanalysis.
As this briefest possible summary shows, Luft's book is one of unusual breadth and truly interdisciplinary scope. It will appeal most immediately to graduate students and fellow scholars of Central Europe. The thematically and geographically uninitiated, meanwhile, will find themselves on a steep and rewarding learning curve—and may be well-advised to spend time pondering the historical maps included in the introductory chapters—on two hundred beautifully argued pages.
For those seeking a critical foothold in the wide-ranging terrain Luft sketches, there is one argumentative strand that may catch their attention. Part of the Cisleithanian particularity Luft identifies lies in Romanticism's “weak influence” when compared to the Northern German context (41). Similarly, Luft suggests that “much of Austrian intellectual life was anti-ideological” (56) and that its prominent philosophical schools shared a “modest positivism” (59). If, however, one follows Rüdiger Safranski's distinction (Romantik [Frankfurt, 2013], 392f) of Romanticism (as an epoch) from “the Romantic” as a Geisteshaltung—that is, a Dionysian, transgressive, often antimodern disposition—then the emerging picture may be different: Cisleithanian Austria, one may conclude, showed plenty of elements of the Romantic in Safranski's second sense, as evidenced in some of the writers Luft surveys (e.g., Stifter, Rosegger) or, as Luft has shown elsewhere, in the influence Schopenhauer and Nietzsche exercised on Vienna's generation of 1905 (“Schopenhauer, Austria, and the Generation of 1905,” Central European History 16, no. 1 [1983], 53–75).
What is more, such a broadened focus on das Romantische would sit more comfortably with alternative readings of the late imperial period, such as Ernest Gellner's account of the clash of positivism and Romanticism and of how the late Wittgenstein, for instance, turned paradigmatically from a positivist-individualism toward Romantic-communitarianism (Gellner, Language and Solitude [Cambridge, 1998], 94). Concurrently, social scientists may insist on broader definitions of “the ideological,” which may—given the role Luft attributes to the human sciences—lead to different conclusions concerning the entanglements of the Cisleithanian tradition with power. One way of reconciling such diverging nuances might, in a future analytical step, involve thinking about the fault lines internal to Cisleithanian intellectual history. Akin to Raymond Williams's distinction of “dominant,” “emergent,” and “residual” currents (Marxism and Literature [Oxford, 1977]), we may then query how competing philosophical strands (e.g., modest positivism) and cultural dispositions (e.g., das Romantische) may have occupied dominant or subaltern positions, and how those shifted over time in the geographical and historical contexts in question.
None of these observations should be misread as disagreements with the trajectory of Luft's impressive analysis. In fact, Luft modestly invites questions such as the ones sketched here when he describes his account as “exploratory” (138) and a “provisional beginning … to make visible what has not been seen” (12). The many assets of Luft's book include the inversion of an interpretative vector that is still all too common and that believes all epicenters of German intellectual production to inevitably lie in Germany. Instead, Luft alerts us to a long-standing and autonomous tradition that warrants attention, one that has profoundly shaped thought throughout and far beyond Cisleithanian lands.
