Vienna’s Dreams of Europe. Culture and Identity beyond the Nation-State

At least since the Enlightenment, Austrian intellectuals have used Europe’s hegemonic cultures as their political and cultural reference points. The Holy Roman Empire, the Austrian Empire, and Austria Hungary all conditioned regional understanding of a European cultural space outside today’s dominant paradigm of nationalist colonialism. Today’s scholars in Anglo-American, German, and Central European studies, however, may forget that Austria’s imperial-colonial era ended in 1918 rather than 1945; its status as a nation-state integrated into contemporary European politics was consolidated only after 1989, when its forced neutrality was lifted.
The case studies presented here trace an Austrian tradition of thinking about Europe between the eighteenth and the twentieth centuries. The cultural project of many intellectuals in Vienna lies outside of the norm-referenced logicisms of the Enlightenment project, stressing a more embodied, communitarian, and humane image of the state and its citizens. Belying the dominant image of the public sphere, they used the theater and the essay as mass media to foster public discussions about contemporaneous social and political issues, and referenced their performance to Europe, not just to an imagined nation-state (and its supposed hegemonies based on ethnic nationalism, genre, or class).
From Joseph von Sonnenfels through Grillparzer, Nestroy, Schnitzler, Hofmannsthal, Handke and their contemporaries, this volume documents a persistent cultural identity politics that has largely disappeared from view. These authors provide visions of how imperial cultures might modernize and capitalize on their cultural positions and traditions, without falling prey to all the perils of global capital and global rationalization.