This article argues that the work of Friederike Mayröcker brings into focus the idea of a 'lateness' distinctive to the Anthropocene. A close reading of the poem 'tropisches Knabenkraut, wild, im Schnabel' demonstrates how interspecies encounters lead to the coming together of asynchronous Umwelten. This raises complex questions about temporality, in relation to language, writing and the human lifespan, Mayröcker's own 'late style' and the notion of a specific lateness present in Anthropocene theory. Extending existing ideas about lateness and late style, the article concludes that Mayröcker's work registers and reveals the distinctive belatedness of the Anthropocene.

Reviewed by: Vienna: The International Capital by Angus Robertson Andrew Barker Vienna: The International Capital. By Angus Robertson. Edinburgh: Birlinn. 2021. 448 pp. £25. ISBN 978–1-78027–691–5. In autumn 2021, a translation of Ilse Barea's seminal study Vienna: Legend and Reality (1965) finally appeared in German, published by Edition Atelier. Coincidentally, its launch coincided with that of Vienna: The International Capital. Having searched 'far and wide for a dedicated account of the city as an international capital', but 'failing to find one in either German or English' (p. [End Page 206] 366), Robertson, apparently unaware of Barea's precedent, decided to write one himself. Like her, he sees Vienna as 'a pivot for diplomacy, culture, intellectual thought, music, art, design and architecture for hundreds of years' (p. vii), but his prime focus is on political, diplomatic and military history. Moreover, unlike Barea, whose account effectively finishes in 1914, Robertson takes full account of the fraught century to follow. In 'From Vindobona to Vienna', however, the city's first sixteen centuries are shoehorned into one twenty-page chapter. By the seventeenth century, Vienna had become synonymous with Christendom's stand against Islam, and Robertson revels in the Habsburg dynasty's arcane court practices. He is less gripped by other aspects of Vienna at the height of the Baroque, a term barely mentioned, hence Abraham a Sancta Clara goes unmentioned. When Maria Theresa and Joseph II take centre stage, another litany of potentates, palaces and battles ensues. Henry Swinburne's contemporary account of a cramped, stinking city eventually strikes a less regal note, and the narrative broadens to relate how Haydn and Mozart cemented Vienna's 'status as the world musical capital' (p. 72). However, its treatment of Mozart raises unasked questions about Vienna's resentful relationship with some of its greatest creative figures. A century later, Gustav Mahler would also discover that the Weana Herz is not always golden. The narrative quickens with the account of the formative Congress of Vienna that closed the Napoleonic era, but does the 'perception of diplomacy to this day' really still involve 'dances, ballrooms and high society celebrations' (p. 106)? Robertson acknowledges 'domestic repression' in the Metternich era (p. 138), but makes little of Vienna as the capital of a police state. The notion of 'Biedermeier' itself warrants a paragraph (p. 140). Demotic life is covered by some observations of the Irish correspondent Martha Wilmot (pp. 143–44), whose report of the imperial family's foot-washing Maundy ritual attracts extended attention. By now, Vienna's 'unvarnished anti-Semitism' was all too clear to see (p. 152), but this is not generally presented as a defining feature of the city's character. The chapter on Franz Joseph concentrates on the period 1848–67, and is again heavy on dynastic and military matters affecting the empire overall. Here too, the narrative is unbalanced. Four engaging pages are devoted to two Maori visitors to Vienna, presented to the emperor in 1860, but the explosion of the city's Jewish population after 1860, with inestimable consequences for more than just Vienna's modern history, passes without comment. Major scholarly sources by Steven Beller, Robert Wistrich and Bruce F. Pauley are untapped. Whenever Viennese culture is invoked, as in 'Nervous Splendour: Fin de Siècle', what mostly follows comprises little more than lists of authors, painters or composers. Indeed, throughout much of the book, despite its title, Vienna itself repeatedly plays second fiddle to Robertson's fascination with the Habsburgs and their empire. In 'Waltzing to War', the city barely figures in an otherwise excellent summary of Austria-Hungary's role and demise in the First World War. [End Page 207] Throughout, the author's grasp of detail is uncertain: Mozart's opera is not Die Entführung aus dem Serail (p. 81); Lord Nelson lodged at the 'Haus aller Biedermänner', not the linguistically impossible 'Haus zum Biedermänner (p. 93); the Biedermeier poet was Friedrich Halm, not Hall (p. 140); 'Sisi' was not a 'Wittlesbach' (p. 165); her husband was defeated at Solferino, not Solforino (p. 171); Olbrich, not Hoffmann, designed the Secession building (p. 220). The Swiss painter is B...

Through a close re-reading of Stifter’s canonical story, the article investigates how a geological setting, a mountain named Gars, becomes a venue that both prefigures and challenges contemporary Anthropocene discourses. The abstract, elemental language used to describe the higher regions of the mountain, on which two children get lost on Christmas Eve, turns an apparently stable “nature” into a stage for disorienting and alienating aesthetic spectacle. On the mountain, the children’s movements become subject to an austere Alpine calculus, articulated in variants of the word fortgehen, which recur obsessively throughout the text, pointing at an unsettling force beyond the human.

On his journey to the 'Orient' in 1856, the cultural entrepreneur from Vienna Ludwig August Frankl (1810–94) discussed the recent Hatt-ı-Hümayun, the new constitution promulgated by Sultan Abdülmecid I for the Ottoman Empire, with a Turkish state official. Frankl said that the European nations wondered whether the Ottoman Empire would be able to enact this revolutionary legislation, especially given the fact that they themselves had not yet implemented the full emancipation of religious minorities in their countries. 'Equal rights for all religions,' he exclaimed. 'While England orders this legislation for an, Your Mightiness will excuse the common expression, uncivilized nation, they do not comply with it in their own Parliament' (Ludwig August Frankl, Nach Jerusalem! (1858), i, 191). While criticizing England's hypocritical policy, Frankl, as an Austrian Jew, was actually referring to the discriminatory legislation against Jews in his own country, the Habsburg Monarchy. European Jews, whose legal emancipation had been postponed since the eighteenth century, were in awe of the Ottoman reforms that fundamentally reversed the relationship between Muslims and non-Muslims with the stroke of a pen. The chequered relationship between the Ottoman Empire and the European powers, or more precisely, the Habsburg Monarchy, from the nineteenth century until the First World War, is the topic of Barbara Haider-Wilson's comprehensive study Österreichs friedlicher Kreuzzug 1839–1917.

Visitors to the Tyrol tourism website are welcomed by the following paragraph, which conjures up an ideal vision of holidays in the Alps, promising an authentic and welcoming experience in the comforting fashion of Austrian hospitality: 'Wer nach Tirol kommt, erlebt ein Land, dessen majestätische Bergwelt einen sofort verzaubert.Weil sie die Seele berührt, unzählige Aktivitäten ermöglicht und weil sie sich in den Menschen spiegelt, die hier leben und die Erholungssuchenden willkommen heißen' [Anyone coming to Tyrol will experience a country whose majestic mountains enchant them immediately.Because they touch the soul, offer the opportunity for countless activities, and because they are mirrored in the people who live here and welcome those in search of relaxation]. 1 This vision of an ideal Austria relies on two main factors which have been central to formulations of Austrian identity and its tourist image since at least the mid-twentieth century: a sublime Alpine landscape and an image of rural authenticity and comfort, encapsulated within the notion of Heimat as a safe space in 'a society of shifting values and uncertain truths'. 2 A significant component of Heimat is its position as a 'spatial identity', which is wholly subjective on a personal level but in the Austrian cultural and social context bears the hallmarks of a traditional collective identity, and an idealized vision of the countryside for touristic purposes. 3 The Tyrol tourism website exemplifies how the Austrian Heimat ideal has become a highly marketable venture: pictured as a place in which modern amenities meet strong local traditions, Tyrol is presented as an ideal escape destination with a homely feeling.The site even offers a range of sublime Tyrolean landscape photographs

The article examines the topical notion of Austria being ‘a world apart’, which was usually applied ironically from the nineteenth century onward to hint at the Habsburg Empire's improbability in the age of nationalism. But the political idea of a ‘world apart’ may also be used to re-evaluate literary representations of (societal) totality — the task of epic, or the novel. Many early twentieth-century contributions to the modern ‘German’ novel and its theory reflect this; the ‘modern’ aesthetic problem of totality and fragmentation may be seen in the light of living against the grain of a seemingly inevitable historical development. Hugo von Hofmannsthal's sole, unfinished novel project, Andreas (1907–27) can be read against the background of this specific historical/aesthetic situation.

Austrian Studies 28 (2020), 198–222© Modern Humanities Research Association 2020 Reviews Berthold Viertel: Eine Biografie der Wiener Moderne. By Katharina Prager. Vienna, Cologne and Weimar: Böhlau, 2018. 364 pp. €36.00. ISBN 978–3205 –20503–6. Katharina Prager’s excellent biographical study of Berthold Viertel (1885–1953) is less theoretical than other new critical research fostered by the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for the History and Theory of Biography (Vienna). Metabiographical reflection on Viertel’s authorship is generalized in a critique of privileged male self-immortalization, yet follows cues from his own fragmentary projects and his ‘resistance’ to the autobiographical genre, his nonconformity to Philippe Lejeune’s model of the ‘autobiographical pact’ (p. 33), and the difficult search — given Viertel’s aloofness from the collective voices of the workers’ or women’s movements — for a form to express what he called the ‘ewig schreitende Häutung der Illusionen’ (p. 29). The raison d’être of this book is its meticulous reconstruction of Viertel’s life and times from his piecemeal memoirs and related archival material, such as personal correspondence and diaries, and the broadening of the selfreflection of this unjustly neglected author and pioneering theatre director into a ‘biography of Viennese Modernism’. By the 1930s, Viertel had started an autobiographical novel trilogy that he never completed, but which served him as a focus on Austrian history as well as on his personal life. His texts are scrutinized less for the tropes of life writing than as sources that supplement ongoing archival research, whether on his family history or on tensions in his marriages that were caused in part by the economic and political instability of the times — even this early proponent of gender equality regressed, as hierarchical sexual norms were reinstated under wartime pressures. The book’s structure departs from linear chronology by framing Viertel’s life writing from the perspective of exile and his ‘re-migration’ into postwar Austrian society, outlining a precarious life of often frustrated creative endeavours: his experimental theatre groups ‘Die Truppe’ and the ‘Wiener Volksbühne’, his celebrated work (post-1945) with the Berliner Ensemble and the Burgtheater, and his years in the United States in the 1920s and 1930s, where he tried his luck as a screen writer in Hollywood, at which his actress wife Salka Steuermann had more success. Yet inasmuch as his notebooks, his ‘virtuelle[s] Zuhause’ (p. 56), record a peripatetic life amid the surrounding chaos, he is deemed representative of a whole generation of Jewish intellectual exiles. Within this frame, the main chapters segment Viertel’s early life and subsequent career in terms of key lieux de mémoire, contextualizing the pressures on Jewish identity (from his roots in Galicia to the increasing antisemitism of ‘Lueger’s Vienna’ and its multiple ethnic polarities, where it Reviews 199 was the family’s Catholic maidservant who initiated the boy into the dominant German-language culture). Judaism for Viertel, as for Karl Kraus, was as much a discourse as a religion, it is suggested, and traces of the city’s antisemitism are noted in his intended anti-liberal cultural critique. Yet Viertel is also quoted as linking the ‘kritische Wiener Moderne’ of Kraus, Peter Altenberg or Gustav Mahler to their sense of being a minority as Jews (p. 181). The main thread of the book’s argument takes its cue from Viertel’s own generational model of ‘fathers’ and ‘sons’, which underlies his socialist-inspired diagnoses of the Austrian cultural and political establishment and its opponents. He thus bracketed the literary circle Jung Wien with the ‘fathers’, that is, with the Burgtheater, the liberal press and the celebrated Viennese operetta. In opposition, for him, stood the ‘sons’, his intellectual mentors who challenged the cultural and political mainstream. Yet the category is contradictory: he saw the Socialist leader Viktor Adler, a family friend, as a cross between Lenin the revolutionary and the ageing Emperor Franz Joseph, and even Kraus he later reassigned as a ‘father’, no longer a ‘son’, after the latter’s conservative turn. The arbitrariness of Viertel’s categories is most apparent when ‘sons’ includes the ultra-conservative Archduke Franz Ferdinand and even Adolf Hitler for a time. Moreover, a more...

Official representations of the Habsburg Empire focused on a fantasy of unity in diversity, as in the multi-volume project known as the Kronprinzenwerk. A different model can be discerned in writings on Galician Jewry by German-language Austrian authors including Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Karl Emil Franzos, Joseph Roth and Soma Morgenstern, among others. The East–West geographical imaginary the empire offered was the occasion for a double-consciousness in many Habsburg writers who engaged in the kind of ‘orientalism’ pertaining to modern German engagements with Eastern Judaism. The ‘Austro-Jewish dialectic’ at work in these texts mobilizes the dynamic contradiction of East and West, innovating literature and positing an implicit critique of the modern West.

Austrian Studies 27 (2019), 1–12© Modern Humanities Research Association 2019 Introduction: Being in Place ANDREW J. WEBBER University of Cambridge It seems appropriate to begin this introduction with reference to a scholar who made some of the most important contributions to our thinking about Arthur Schnitzler and his contemporaries over the last decades: the late Edward Timms,1 who is remembered, not least as founding co-editor of Austrian Studies, in a tribute by Ritchie Robertson in this volume. In the wake of new attention in the 1980s to the cultural vibrancy of Vienna around 1900, most notably Carl E. Schorske’s hugely influential Fin-de-Siècle Vienna. Politics and Culture (1980), Timms accounted for that vibrancy with an appeal to a model of socio-cultural geometry. Extrapolating from the Vienna Circle of empiricist philosophy, he proposed — first in different iterations in the two volumes of his monumental study, Karl Kraus, Apocalyptic Satirist — that the rich cultural life of Vienna in the period around 1900 and until the hegemony of National Socialism could be understood as the product of a set of intersecting circles of intellectual and cultural activity. Schnitzler is given a prominent position in the constellations of circles in both volumes, albeit set somewhat apart from the political coordinates that frame the ‘cultural field’ in the second.2 In an article devoted to the transposition of that model of ‘Cultural Parameters’ to the interwar years, Timms drew upon the version of the circles mapped out in the second Kraus volume, thickening the description of the micro-circuitry of Viennese cultural life, in view of dimensions such as politics, economics, public life and gender relations. And he concluded his argument by acknowledging a matter that is of particular relevance for the present volume. While the geometric circuitry that he proposes, even in its more thickened forms, is necessarily an abstraction from the complex realities of the personal interactions and parallelisms (as well as the displacements and missed encounters) of cultural life in Vienna around 1900 and in the subsequent decades, it always needs to be thought in a relation with particularities of place 1 Alongside attention to Schnitzler in a number of his publications, Edward Timms reviewed successive volumes of the author’s diaries for the Times Literary Supplement between 1982 and 1988. 2 Edward Timms, Karl Kraus, Apocalyptic Satirist. Culture and Catastrophe in Habsburg Vienna (New Haven and London, 1986), p. 8; Karl Kraus, Apocalyptic Satirist, II. The PostWar Crisis and the Rise of the Swastika (New Haven and London, 2005), p. 108. Andrew J. Webber 2 and space. And place and space, in turn, need to be thought in a variety of forms. ‘Mapping cultural life in terms of “circles”’, Timms writes, seems to imply that the most significant developments occurred in the semiprivate space of coffeehouses or seminar rooms. But account should also be taken of more public spaces like the Konzerthaus (concert house) — the stage on which the different factions competed for cultural hegemony.3 Accordingly, Timms’s final monograph on Austria, Dynamik der Kreise, Resonanz der Räume. Die schöpferischen Impulse der Wiener Moderne [Dyna­ mics of Circles, Resonance of Spaces. The Creative Impulses of Viennese Modernism, 2013] expressly sounds out the different spaces in which the Viennese circles congregated and revolved. Whether moving in the sorts of sociogrammatic circles that Edward Timms draws, or in more angular or tangential formations, the cultural protagonists of Vienna around and after 1900 were always engaged in complex negotiations of cultural and social space on domestic, semiprivate and public levels. And this is certainly the case for Arthur Schnitzler, as one of the most significant of those protagonists, a figure commonly seen as the pre-eminent representative of ‘fin-de-siècle Vienna’. Not for nothing does the collocation ‘Schnitzler’s Vienna’ feature repeatedly in the literature,4 with Hugo von Hofmannsthal predicting its currency as early as 1922.5 The present volume aims to place Schnitzler anew by considering both more abstract or symbolic senses of placement (on the model of the kinds of circles that Timms draws) and more concrete, sociocultural senses. In doing so, it explores the map of (Schnitzler’s...