Fin-de-siècle Vienna and the Larger Central Europe 1900:
The Experience of Prague's Intellectuals
Gary B. Cohen, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities
The modernist breakthroughs in Viennese intellectual and artistic life around 1900 have
attracted great interest over many decades. The remarkable concentration of innovative figures,
the originality and significance of their work, the important personal connections among of them,
and the apparent cultural fertility of the Viennese environment in that era have captured the
attention of scholars and the educated public alike. Carl Schorske's masterful Fin-de-siecle
Vienna, now some thirty-six years old, has introduced many readers to the intellectual and
cultural world of Vienna and offered students a basic framework for understanding the
foundations and patterns of some of the most important innovations.
One must be careful, though, not to exaggerate the uniqueness of Vienna around 1900 or
to see the city as the single most important cradle of twentieth-century modernism. We recognize
that intellectuals and artists in Paris, Berlin, New York, Munich, Budapest, and other major
European and North American cities were also breaking away from the nineteenth-century
liberal rational synthesis in ways that had wide impact, engaging in their own secessions from
established modes of thought and expression with the particular fields or disciplines involved
and the exact timing of the revolts dependent on local circumstances. It is good to remember that
for Schorske and others who have investigated particular cities in this or other eras of radical
breakdown, examining intellectuals and artists in a single urban community has been a means to
understand better the parallels and connections between activities in the various disciplines or
genres and to identify the conditions, motivations, and impulses that were common to the
2
innovators in various fields. Schorske, like other North American intellectual historians of his
approximate generation, was shaped by the Great Depression and World War II. They were
exposed to the efforts, often inspired by progressive ideologies, to renovate political history by
giving increased attention to social inequality and social conflict and to the emergence in
research on American history of a field called "social and intellectual history." Schorske and
other historians of modern European intellectual history such as H. Stuart Hughes, Fritz Stern,
George Mosse, and Peter Gay were committed to doing what Gay like to call a "social history of
ideas."1 Characteristically, Schorske published the articles which eventually found their way into
the Vienna book in The Journal of Modern History and The American Historical Review. I doubt
that he ever considered publishing in The Journal of the History of Ideas or History and Theory
any more than he wanted to publish in specialized journals of art history, literary studies, or
psychoanalytic thought.
It is only fair to say here that when Schorske and others of his generation wrote their
socially contextualized intellectual and cultural histories, they sometimes treated in rather
generalized terms the social and political circumstances which they built into the scaffolding of
their interpretations. In Schorske's case, it should be remembered that he published his first
Vienna essay, "Politics and the Psyche in Fin-de-siècle Vienna: Schnitzler and Hofmannsthal,"
as long ago as 1961, when the scholarly literature on late nineteenth-century Austrian politics
was largely limited to descriptive narratives and there was little scholarship on the structures of
civil society or popular political engagement. The latter fields of research emerged two decades
or more later with studies like those of John Boyer, William Hubbard, Pieter Judson, and myself.
Schorske wrote in the introduction to his book, for example, on the strong cohesiveness of
Vienna's bourgeois elites to the end of the nineteenth century and judged that "most of the
3
pioneering generation of culture-makers who appear in these studies were alienated along with
their class in its extrusion from political power." 2 We now recognize some limitations about just
how far such extrusion and alienation of the upper bourgeoisie from the seats of power or from
political action actually went. Nowadays, we appreciate how many of Austria's formerly liberal
middle-class Germans after the 1890s, whether they then called themselves German Progressives
or German National, continued to engage in political life through local political associations,
town councils, and provincial diets which had limited suffrage and in the official chambers of
commerce and industry or by lobbying sympathetic members of the state and provincial
bureaucracy.
Prague around 1900 provided a very different local social, economic, and political
context from those of Vienna or Budapest for its intellectual and artistic life. Rich in
architectural treasures and historical memories, it was the seat of an Austrian crown land
government, not a great metropolitan capital of a large state with offices of a central bureaucracy
and parliament. In 1900 the municipality of Prague and its densely developed inner suburbs had
a total population of just under 400,000, compared to the 1,675,000 in Vienna (I-XIX) and
716,000 in Budapest. Over the next decade the populations of Vienna and Budapest each grew
by a formidable 21 percent compared to only 12 percent for Prague.3 All three cities in this
period grew primarily through migration, but the new arrivals in Prague came overwhelmingly
from the surrounding regions of Bohemia, while Vienna drew from all the Austrian crown lands
and also Hungary. Budapest drew from all over the Kingdom of Hungary and Galicia, Bukovina,
and Moldavia-Wallachia as well. The populations of Vienna, Prague, and Budapest all had clear
Catholic majorities, but the size of their Jewish minorities varied noticeably with Jews
accounting for less than 7 percent (26,000) of the civilian population of the Prague municipality
4
and inner suburbs in 1900, compared to 9 percent (147,000) in Vienna and nearly 25 percent
(around 186,000) of the Budapest population.4
By 1900 Prague's economy had a large manufacturing sector, comprised of both diverse
small industrial concerns and the large factories of the machine works in the outer districts. In
Vienna and Budapest larger shares of the working populations drew their livings from
manufacturing than in Prague. On the smaller scale of Prague, government employment,
education, and the professions counted for a substantial share of the workforce. The presence of
the crown land administrative apparatus, law courts, institutions of university, technical college,
and musical education, and a significant arts establishment had an important impact on Prague's
workforce and the overall character of the city. In 1910 government employment, secondary and
higher education, and the free professions accounted for fully 10 percent of the economically
active population (berufstätig) in Prague, about equal to their share for Budapest that year. In the
much larger Viennese metropolis that share was actually a little smaller, just over 8 percent.5
In 1900 one could hear nearly all the languages of the monarchy spoken on the streets of
Vienna and many of them in Budapest as well, but both those cities were at least officially
monolingual. The immediate hinterland of Vienna was overwhelmingly German-speaking as
Budapest's immediate central Hungarian hinterland was Magyar-speaking, but for some
declining pockets of Swabian German peasants. Prague, in contrast, was the capital of a crown
land that was recorded in the census as nearly two-thirds Czech-speaking, but more than onethird of its population were reported as German-speaking. The Bohemian capital was a bilingual
city although the German-speaking share of the population was steadily declining during the late
nineteenth century, with only around 8 percent registered as German-speaking in the 1900
census.
5
Prague's political and social life tended to divide sharply on Czech-German national lines
after the 1850s, although there were always some in the population who remained ambiguous or
mutable in their loyalties. Czech political forces gained a majority in the Prague city government
in the early 1860s, primary and secondary education divided into parallel Czech and German
systems after the 1850s, and the Prague technical college divided into separate Czech and
German institutions in 1869. The Austrian Ministry of Religion and Instruction ordered the
division of the Charles-Ferdinand University in 1882 into parallel Czech and German
universities, trying to reduce friction between Czech and German nationalist elements there.6
After the early 1860s Czech and German political activists in Prague did their best to persuade
their constituencies to respect the national divisions in voluntary associations, schooling, public
gatherings, and cultural life and to keep those divisions strong, although much contact between
Czech- and German-speakers continued in business activities and the personal or private sphere
of everyday life. In cultural affairs, some institutions like the conservatory of music and the
principal art museums continued to have a nationally neutral character, and individuals might
attend the theaters of the other nationality when performances of interest attracted them, despite
the nationalist preachments against this.7
While nationalist activists divided bourgeois liberal politics in Prague and throughout the
Bohemian crown lands into separate Czech and German national camps, they treated culture and
the arts as vehicles of ideological and political expression. In those circumstances, the bourgeois
liberal cultural orthodoxies which developed during the second half of the nineteenth century
acquired nationalist colors. Leaders of the national political movements expected writers and
artists to provide a mirror for national existence and identity, as the sociologist Derek Sayer puts
it, and they celebrated their great writers as national heroes.8 Nationalist political activists
6
enforced nationalist divisions in intellectual and artistic pursuits and they saw national qualities
and character in popular culture and in the arts, even if more than a few of these characteristics
actually had a recent provenance.9 In a city such as Prague, to raise a critique or modernist
challenge to bourgeois liberal cultural orthodoxy meant to challenge nationalist cultural
orthodoxy, and efforts to uphold nationalist political loyalties in the decades around 1900 added
to the defenses of established liberal rationalist culture. Eventually, Prague had its rebels and
secessionists in the arts and literature, both Czech-speaking and German-speaking, particularly
after 1895; and their initiatives had social and political motivations as well as more purely
cultural impulses. When cultural rebels challenged liberal rationalist norms and styles, they
reached out to models of contemporary innovation in Paris, Berlin, Vienna, Munich, or London.
In Prague the innovators found themselves contending with defenders of established
Czech or German national cultural styles, whether they personally intended to challenge national
loyalties or not. Some of Prague's innovative spirits tried to retreat into an aesthetic world of art
for its own sake, particularly those who turned to the values of decadence; but in such an
intensely politicized atmosphere it was difficult to escape politics, and few actually tried. After
around 1905, members of the Prague equivalent of Schorske's second Viennese generation began
to look for new constructs and modest or conditional new syntheses in art, architecture,
literature, music, or understandings of language, society, or human experience, which led in the
direction of expressionist art and literature, radical critics of contemporary society, radical leftist
or Zionist politics, and eventually modernist architecture and new theories of language.
One finds the most salient initial modernist cultural breakthroughs in Prague initially in
the visual arts and literature, with architecture following soon after and music and theories of
language really only after World War I. The Czech-speaking modernists had to struggle not only
7
with conservative defenders of middle and late-nineteenth century values and modes of
expression but also with those who accused them of betraying national traditions. Germanspeaking intellectuals and artists increasingly divided between völkisch German nationalists on
the right and democratic left liberals, left Zionists, and Marxian socialists to the left.
The modernist breakthroughs in the arts in Prague came in two stages. Already in 1887
Czech artists who were eager to break free of academic conventions and stylistic orthodoxies had
organized the Society of Visual Artists Mánes (Spolek výtvarných umělců Mánes), and by the
1890s that organization was well established as a secessionist association sponsoring a vigorous
program of exhibitions of local and international painters and sculptors. A more radical and fully
articulated revolt against late Romantic realism in the visual arts and literature and historicism in
architecture came in October 1895, when the poet Josef Svatopluk Machar (1864-1942) with the
aid of friends published in the Prague literary journal Rozhledy [Outlooks] “The Manifesto of
Czech Modernism,” calling for a revolt against the Czech political, literary, and artistic status
quo. After that Rozhledy and the artists and intellectuals in the Moderna group took up
iconoclastic positions in culture and politics. Many of them advocated a socially engaged art and
literature and called for a much more progressive and forward-looking Czech politics committed
to radical democratization and full rights for women and workers.
Machar himself lived for more than thirty years in Vienna, and the Czech Moderna
developed close ties with the Viennese writers associated with the journal Die Zeit and Hermann
Bahr. The Czech modernist movement in Prague took an avowedly cosmopolitan stance and
looked for affinities and models in Vienna and German cities as well as in Paris and other West
European capitals, as Katherine David-Fox and other scholars have noted.10 Their manifesto
openly challenged the conceits of advocates of a self-consciously Czech national culture with its
8
"imitation national songs" and artfully cultivated folklorisms while still asserting their loyalty to
Czech art and artists: "In no way do we accentuate Czechness: be yourself and you will be
Czech . . . . We will seek mutual understanding with our German countrymen."11
The iconoclastic and cosmopolitan tendencies among the Czech literary avant-garde in
the 1890s took other directions among the writers who gathered around the critic and translator
Arnošt Procházka (1869-1925) and the colorful decadent poet and critic, Jiří Karásek ze Lvovic
(1871-1951), and their journal, Moderní revue pro literaturu, umĕní a život [Modern Review for
Literature, Art, and Life], which began publication in 1894. This group rejected the progressive
social and political engagement of many in the Moderna group and found inspiration in the
French symbolists, among decadent writers in various European lands, and in the writings of
Friedrich Nietzsche. Satirizing contemporary social mores was one option, and fascination with
individual psychology, the sensual, mysticism, or symbolism also characterized the work of
many who gathered around the Moderní revue.12 Like Rozhledy, however, Moderní revue
advocated new directions in Czech literary life; and it also pushed for a stronger engagement
with foreign literary trends, particularly with the writers and artists in Berlin connected with
Stanislaw Przybyszewski, others in Germany and German-speaking Austria, and some of the
German-speaking writers in Prague.13 Moderní revue published, for example, poems by the
Prague-born Rainer Maria Rilke, in German as well as Czech translation, and articles and
reviews by the Prague German writer Paul Leppin.14
To my knowledge, no one has examined systematically the political engagement or nonengagement of the writers and artists who gathered around Rozhledy and Moderni revue as
groups, but many of them displayed strong political impulses. A number participated in the
"Progressive" movement of Czech university students, as they called themselves, between 1889
9
and 1893 or had connections with the Progressives and continued in succeeding decades that
movement's advocacy of civil liberties, social reform, more Czech national autonomy, and
reform of the educational system.15 They witnessed the political bankruptcy and precipitous
decline of the Old Czech Party at the beginning of the 1890s after its long collaboration with the
conservative aristocracy, Catholic hierarchy, and Count Taaffe's coalition Austrian government
and then the increasing fragmentation of Czech politics as competing parties and interest groups
struggled to link the pursuit of national self-government with popular democracy, progressive
social policies, and direct appeals to specific interest groups. Many of the Czech modernist artists
and intellectuals in the 1890s were deeply conscious of the disintegration of the Czech national
liberal synthesis of the preceding decades and sought simple escape or pursued new political
alternatives. Some around the Moderní revue retreated from politics altogether into the more
individualist worlds of art or the self. Many more, I think, particularly those around the journal
Rozhledy and the new groupings which emerged in the first two decades of the new century,
committed themselves to finding new forms of social and political engagement and ways to use
their art and writing to advance change. For some like the great literary critic F. X. Šalda and the
musicologist and biographer Zdeněk Nejedlý, this meant eventually a turn toward Marxian
socialism. The playwright, essayist, and journalist Karel Čapek gravitated to social reformist
politics and after 1918 was interested in the policy discussions of the circle around the president
of the Czechoslovak Republic, Tomáš G. Masaryk. Yet others, like the novelist and satirist
Jaroslav Hašek, author of The Good Soldier Švejk, followed a path to anarchism.
To be sure, in Prague around 1900 there were still intellectuals and political figures who
defended the nineteenth-century Czech national cultural heritage. These rejected the more
cosmopolitan outlook of many modernists and opposed many of their literary and artistic
10
initiatives. The Czech nationalist and academic orientation of the journal Dílo [The Work of
Art], for instance, expressed the older Czech nationalist cultural position.16 Another group of
young Czech visual artists rejected the advocacy of contemporary Berlin art in Moderní revue
and in 1896 founded the journal, Volné směry [Free directions], under the aegis of the Mánes
Society. Nonetheless, the Mánes Society and Volné směry combined strong support for Czech
arts and artists with their own advocacy of innovation and engagement with artistic trends
elsewhere in Europe, including France, Russia, Croatia, Poland, Denmark, Germany, and Britain.
The Mánes Society sponsored major exhibitions in Prague devoted to Auguste Rodin in 1902,
Russian art in 1904, Edvard Munch in 1905, French impressionist painters in 1907, and the
French late impressionists and post-impressionist Les Independants in 1910. These exhibitions
had a lasting impact on local artists and intellectuals as well as the broader Prague public, both
Czech- and German-speaking.17
Many of the Czech modernist artists and writers focused most of their efforts and
manifestoes on Czech confreres and Czech audiences, but some reached out very deliberately to
German-speaking counterparts in Prague, more broadly in Bohemia and Moravia, and in Austria
more generally. Inspired by the Edvard Munch exhibition in Prague, a group of eight young
painters, called simply Osma [The Eight], united in spring 1907 for an independent exhibition,
which displayed their affinities to the Fauvists in France and the emerging German
expressionists, particularly Die Brücke. Osma included the Czech painters Bohumil Kubišta,
Emil Filla, Otakar Kubín, Emil Artur Pittermann, and Antonín Procházka and also the Bohemian
German Willi Nowak and the German-speaking Jews Max Horb and Friedrich Feigl.18 In 1911
Kubišta, Filla, Procházka, and Josef Čapek, the painter brother of Karel Čapek, broke away from
the Mánes Society to create the Skupina výtvarných umělců [The Group of Visual Artists], which
11
sponsored its own major exhibitions in 1912, 1913, and 1914. These highly influential
exhibitions included works of Braque, Derain, Picasso, Die Brücke, Gris, and the group’s own
members; and they helped open the way to cubist and expressionist art more generally in
Prague.19 In 1911-12 Josef Gočár designed a cubist structure, the department store "At the Black
Mother of God," at the corner of Ovocný trh and Celetná in the Prague Old Town; and in 1913,
Josef Chochol designed a cubist apartment building in Neklanová street in the Vyšehard district.
These initiatives during the last years before World War I reaped a rich harvest in the
efflorescence of modernist art and architecture in the city after World War I.20
Prague's German-speaking artistic and literary community around 1900 was of necessity
much smaller than its Czech counterpart, although some of the German-speaking figures are
better known internationally than the Czechs. Among the German minority in Prague and
elsewhere in Bohemia, the pressures were also strong to uphold a national cultural and artistic
orthodoxy, but here, too, growing numbers of young intellectuals after 1890 felt the need to
break free. The German-speaking intellectuals and artists in Bohemia, of course, had options not
available to their Czech counterparts, in that they could draw lines of affiliation with Germanspeaking counterparts elsewhere in Austria, Germany, and Switzerland and still claim loyalty to
a German cultural tradition. In 1895 a “Young Prague” group, including Camill Hoffmann, Paul
Leppin, Gustav Meyrink, Hedda Saur, Oskar Wiener, and others, organized the Association of
German Artists in Bohemia (Verein deutscher bildender Künstler in Böhmen), signaling a break
with the Concordia Association which had dominated German liberal literary life in city during
the preceding decades.21 In turn, the Young Prague group helped pave the way toward the more
radically modernist writings of Franz Kafka, Max Brod, Franz Werfel, Rudolf Fuchs, Otto Pick,
and Paul Kornfeld, which emerged over the succeeding two decades.
12
After the late 1880s the student fraternities and student intellectual life of Prague's
German university and the German technical college divided sharply between increasingly racist
German nationalist elements, who found a constituency in the largely German-speaking border
regions of Bohemia and Moravia, and more liberal and leftist students, who included a
significant number of Jews from Prague and other cities. The division between German
nationalists on the Right and liberal and leftist elements created a fundamental cleavage in the
political and cultural life of the German-speaking population of Prague and Bohemia up to 1939.
Some of Bohemia's rightwing nationalist German writers offered readers an outspokenly
nationalistic literature in Heimat fiction which depicted the struggle to maintain German
settlements and identity against the Slavic enemy in communities on the so-called linguistic
borders. Such writing was exemplified by the novels of Karl Hans Strobl and the sharply antiCzech stories by radical nationalists such as Karl Türk, Karl Hermann Wolf, and others.22
The German-speaking intellectuals and artists who were born and raised in Prague during
the late nineteenth century included a strong Jewish contingent. Both the Jews and Christians
among them had a strong sense of the weakening of German liberal politics and similar impulses
as their Viennese counterparts to escape politics or find new political alternatives, impulses that
were as strong if not stronger than in Vienna because of the intensity of the nationalist political
conflicts in Prague and Bohemia in general and the growing popular pressures to democratize
politics after the early 1890s. As in Vienna and other major European cities after the early 1890s,
some writers here, like Gustav Meyrink, retreated from a decaying bourgeois liberal culture into
mysticism, symbolism, or spiritualism. Others, such as Franz Werfel or Max Brod in some of
their early novels, explored the depths and conflicts of individual psychology and sexuality.
13
In the book, Prague Territories: National Conflict and Cultural Innovation in Franz
Kafka's Fin de siècle (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2000), Scott Spector has treated masterfully
the concerns of the German-speaking writers of Prague around 1900 as they faced the postliberal environment.23 What defined them as a group, Spector argues, was their engagement with
issues of cultural and political identity and the question of what political and social territory they
could occupy as they faced the decline of liberal politics and the rise of populist radical
nationalism and antisemitism, whether among Austrian Germans or Czechs. While some of the
writers turned inward for shorter or longer periods to explore the psychological space of the self
and the senses, others explored determinedly new political and ideological alternatives, whether
it be social democracy, revolutionary socialism, or Zionism. In many ways, the modernist
impulses of Prague's German-speaking literary and artistic avant-garde took them in broadly
similar directions as the Czech avant-garde, and we must remember that Brod, Kafka, Willy
Haas, Paul Leppin, and Otto Pick each had some familiarity with contemporary Czech belleslettres.24 Max Brod put himself forward as mediating between the two cultures, touted Jaroslav
Hašek and his Good Soldier Švejk to German readers, translated the librettos of most of Leoš
Janáček’s operas into German, and worked assiduously for their performance in German and
Austrian opera houses. Brod's review for a Berlin journal of the first exhibition of the Osma
artists in spring 1907 typified his vocal support for new literary and artistic departures and for
crossing the national dividing lines in Prague’s public life:
Spring! Spring! Germans and Czechs have gathered together, eight artists
without regard for their nationality. Here in Prague, in the epicenter of
struggles, where bowling club and lyric ensemble alike convene under the
shadow of national-colored banners. It is difficult to convey to anyone who is
14
not from Prague the comical and delicate nuances of our linguistically
stratified society, which so eagerly cultivates its talent for accentuating only
those things that divide both tribes and never what they have in common . . .
At the risk of offending some patriots on both sides, I wish to assert that in
Prague it is difficult to speak of a purely German or purely Czech nation, only
of Praguers, inhabitants of this wonderful and mysterious city. A melding has
occurred, blood has mixed, and cultural and economic ties lure people across
boundaries.25
In Prague the formation of the Osma group and Brod's celebration of their uniting Czech
and German creative artists were in themselves declarations of independence from the strictures
of Czech and German national liberal culture which regulated artistic and intellectual expression
from the 1860s to the early 1890s. By no means did these initiatives draw their impulses
narrowly from the Prague or Bohemian environment. Members of the Czech avantgarde looked
with curiosity to Berlin, Vienna, and Paris for inspiration and encouragement. Similarly, Prague's
German-speaking modernist intellectuals found models and support in Vienna and Berlin, and it
was no accident that several of the writers of the Prague circle had considerable success with the
aid of publishers in Berlin and Leipzig. The rebellions and secessionist initiatives in the arts and
literature of the 1890s and the explorations of a new freedom by artists and writers on an ever
wider front after 1900 signaled an important cultural watershed in Prague, just as in Vienna and
Budapest, but also in Berlin, Munich, Paris, and other European cities at the time. This suggests
that we need to consider interpretations and explanations of those modernist breakthroughs in
terms that account adequately for both what was specifically local and what was shared more
widely in this era.
15
As we think about the rich flowering of modernist art, architecture, and literature and the
efforts at new modes of analysis in philosophy and the social sciences in Prague after around
1910 and particularly after 1918 and the parallel initiatives in Vienna, Budapest, Ljubljana, and
elsewhere, it is good to consider where Schorske left off in his bold attempt at a synthesis on
Vienna 1900. He examined with great insight and sensitivity the efforts to critique and break
away from the liberal rationalist cultural synthesis in literature, the arts, and ideas about human
psychology and sketched the dawning efforts by the next generation of artists and intellectuals to
create new modes of expression by in literature, art, music, and architecture, and a new
understanding of human nature. He did not venture further into the mature work of the second
generation or those who followed in the 1920s and 1930s in developing limited new syntheses
and new modes of analysis in the increasingly fragmented intellectual and artistic sphere.
Schorske thus offered us nothing on the Austrian school of economics, the early development of
analytic philosophy, the flowering of expressionist painting and literature, the maturing of the
second Vienna school of composers, or the maturing of modernist architecture. Historians of
individual disciplines, of course, have been working in these various spheres for quite some time,
but Schorske did provide an inspiring example of how a scholar with the instincts of a general
historian can depict the parallels and connections across disciplinary lines and the linkages to the
social and political contexts that can help us understand the larger patterns in artistic and
intellectual life. I wonder whether scholars now might pursue most profitably broader synthetic
treatments of the second and third generation of artists and intellectuals after 1900 who were
trying to establish those new modes of expression and conditional new syntheses.
16
NOTES
1. According to Mark Micale and Robert L. Dietle, Peter Gay first used the term, "social history
of ideas," in his The Party of Humanity: Studies in the French Enlightenment (New York, 1964)
and discussed it more fully in his essay, "The Social History of Ideas: Ernst Cassirer and After,"
in The Critical Spirit: Essays in Honor of Herbert Marcuse, edited by Kurt H. Wolff and
Barrington Moore, Jr. (Boston, 1967), 106-120. See Mark S. Micale and Robert L. Dietle, "Peter
Gay: A Life in History," in Micale and Dietle, eds., Enlightenment, Passion, Modernity:
Historical Essays in European Thought and Culture (Stanford, CA, 2000), 396, n. 14.
2. Carl E. Schorske, Fin-de-siècle Vienna. Politics and Culture (New York, 1980), xxvii. Later,
in the chapter on Schnitzler and Hofmannsthal, pp. 8-9, Schorske talks about the pursuit of art
for art's sake in late nineteenth-century Vienna, asserting that it claimed "the allegiance of
virtually a whole class," for whom "the life of art became a substitute for the life of action."
3. G. B. Cohen, "Society and Culture in Prague, Vienna, and Budapest in the Late Nineteenth
Century," East European Quarterly 20, no. 4 (Jan. 1987): 467-84, at 469.
4 . G. B. Cohen, "Jews in German Society: Prague, 1860-1914," Central European History 10
(1977): 28-54, at 30; Marsha L. Rozenblit, The Jews of Vienna, 1867-1914 (Albany, NY, 1983),
16-17.
5. Cohen, "Society and Culture in Prague, Vienna, and Budapest," East European Quarterly 20,
no. 4: 473-75.
6. On the development of national divisions in Prague and the decline of the German-speaking
minority, see G. B. Cohen, The Politics of Ethnic Survival: Germans in Prague, 1861-1914, rev.
second ed. (W. Lafayette, IN, 2006), passim.
7. On interactions between Czech- and German-speakers in Prague in everyday life at the end of
the nineteenth century, see G. B. Cohen, “Deutsche, Juden und Tschechen in Prag: Das
Sozialleben des Alltags, 1890-1924,”Allemands, Juifs et Tcheques à Prague--Deutsche, Juden
und Tschechen in Prag, 1890-1924, edited by Maurice Godé, J. Le Rider, F. Mayer (Montpellier:
Université Paul-Valéry, 1996), 55-69; and idem, "Cultural Crossings in Prague, 1900: Scenes
from Late Imperial Austria," Austrian History Yearbook 45 (2014): 1-30.
8. Sayer, Coasts of Bohemia, 82-153.
9. See Peter Bugge, “Czech Nation-Building, National Self-Perception and Politics 1780-1914”
(Ph.D. dissertation, University of Aarhus, 1994), passim; and Vladimir Macura, Znamení zrodu.
České národní hnutí jako kulturní typ [Birth Signs: The Czech National Movement as a Cultural
Type], expanded sec. ed. (Jinočany, 1995), passim.
17
10. Katherine David-Fox, “Prague-Vienna, Prague-Berlin: The Hidden Geography of Czech
Modernism,” Slavic Review 59 (2000): 735-60; Nicholas Sawicki, "The View from Prague," in
The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, vol. 3 (Europe, 1880-1940),
edited by Peter Brooker, S. Bru, A. Thacker, C. Weikop (New York, 2013), 1074-98; Neil
Stewart, "The Wildes of Bohemia: The Cosmpolitan Voice of Moderní revue," in
Internationalism and the Arts in Britain and Europe at the Fin de Siècle, ed. Grace Brockington
(Oxford, 2009), 135-155; and idem, "The Cosmopolitanism of Moderní revue (1894-1925)," in
History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe: Junctures and Disjunctures in the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries, edited by Marcel Cornis-Pope and John Neubauer (London,
2007), 3: 63-69. For broader treatments of Czech literary life around 1900, see Jiří Kudrnáč,
“The Significance of Czech Fin-de-Siècle Criticism” and Robert B. Pynsent, “Conclusory Essay:
Decadence, Decay, and Innovation,” in Pynsent, ed., Decadence and Innovation: AustroHungarian Life and Art at the Turn of the Century (London, 1989), 88-101 and 111-248.
11. From the Manifesto of Czech Modernism, quoted in Derek Sayer, The Coasts of Bohemia: A
Czech History (Princeton, NJ, 1998), 154.
12. On the themes of decadence in turn-of-the-century Czech literature and the relationship of
that area of writing and artistic expression to Czech culture and society, the publications of
Robert B. Pynsent are indispensable. See Pynsent, Questions of Identity: Czech and Slovak Ideas
of Nationality and Personality (Budapest, London, and New York, 1994), 101-146; and Pynsent,
ed., Decadence and Innovation.
13. On the writers and artists gathered around Moderní revue, see David-Fox, "Prague-Vienna,
Prague-Berlin," 750-58; Kudrnáč, “Significance of Czech Fin-de-Siècle Criticism,” 88-92;
Pynsent, “Conclusory Essay: Decadence, Decay, and Innovation,” 111-215, passim; Sawicki,
"The View from Prague," 1076-79; and Stewart, "The Wildes of Bohemia," 135-155.
14. See Stewart, "The Wildes of Bohemia," 135-155; and idem, "The Cosmopolitanism of
Moderní revue (1894-1925)," 3: 63-69. Moderní revue published two Rilke poems in German in
1897 and one in Czech translation in 1898; see Sawicki, "The View from Prague," 1077-78; and
George C. Schoolfield, Rilke and His Time (Rochester, NY, 2009), 294.
15. On the Czech students' Progressive movement, see Karen Anne Johnson Freeze, "The
Young Progressives: The Czech Student Movement, 1887-1897" (Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia
University, Columbia University 1974); idem, "The Progressive Youth of the 1890s: Children of
the December Constitution," in Bildungsgeschichte, Bevölkerungsgeschichte,
Gesellschaftsgeschichte in den Böhmischen Ländern und in Europa. Festschrift für Jan
Havránek zum. 60. Geburtstag, ed. Hans Lemberg, Karel Litsch, Richard Georg Plaschka, and
Georg Ránki (Vienna and Munich, 1988), 275-285; and Bruce M. Garver, The Young Czech
Party 1874-1901 and the Emergence of a Multi-party System (New Haven and London, 1978),
171-185.
16. See Sawicki, "The View from Prague," 1082.
18
17. David-Fox, “Prague-Vienna Prague-Berlin,” 757-58. On Czech modernist artists around
1900, see Petr Wittlich, “The Self: Destruction or Synthesis, Two Problems of Czech Art at the
Turn of the Century,” in Pynsent, ed., Decadence and Innovation, 82-87; and Luboš Hlaváček,
“Malířství a grafika v Praze 1900-1945” [Painting and Graphic Art in Prague 1900-1945], in
Emanuel Poche, ed., Praha našeho věku: architektura, sochařství, malířství, užité umění [Prague
in Our Era: Architecture, Sculpture, Painting, and Applied Art] (Prague, 1978), 233-71. On the
Mánes Society and Volné smĕry, see Sayer, Coasts of Bohemia, 103-04, 157-158; J. Bořecký, L.
Gočarová, and V. Špale, Spolek výtvarných umělců Mánes 1887-2007 [The Society of Visual
Artists Mánes, 1887-2007] (Prague, 2007), and Sawicki, "The View from Prague," 1074-76;
1079-82. On the Rodin exhibition, see Nicholas Sawicki, "Rodin and the Prague Exhibition of
1902: Promoting Modernism and Advancing Reputations," Cantor Arts Center Journal 33(20023): 185-197. Referring either to the 1907 Mánes exhibit of French impressionists or to the 1914
Mánes exhibit of French painters, the German-speaking Jewish writer and journalist Willy Haas
remembered vividly a Prague exhibition of French late impressionists in his memoirs, Die
Literarische Welt. Erinnerungen (Munich, 1958), 41-42.
18. On the Osma group, see Hlaváček, “Malířství a grafika v Praze 1900-1945,” 259-60;
Nicholas Sawicki, “Becoming Modern: The Prague Eight and Modern Art, 1900-1910” (Ph.D.
dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 2007); idem, “The Critic as Patron and Mediator: Max
Brod, Modern Art and Jewish Identity in Early-20th-Century Prague,” Images: A Journal of
Jewish Art and Visual Culture 6 (2012): 30-51; Sayer, Coasts of Bohemia, 157, 160; and idem,
Prague, Capital of the Twentieth Century: A Surrealist History (Princeton and Oxford, 2013),
179-180.
19. On the Skupina artists and their activities, see Milton A. Cohen, Movement, Manifesto,
Melee: The Modernist Group, 1910-1914 (Lanham, MD, 2004), 290-91; Hlaváček, “Malířství a
grafika v Praze 1900-1945,” 260-66; and Sawicki, "The View from Prague," 1082-86.
20. On cultural life in Prague in the 1920s, see Sayer, Prague, Capital of the Twentieth Century,
passim; and Poche, ed., Praha našeho věku, 7-120, 208-28, 271-91.
21. Scott Spector, Prague Territories: National Conflict and Cultural Innovation in Franz
Kafka’s Fin de Siècle (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London, 2000), 14-15; Ingeborg Schnack,
“Rainer Maria Rilke - Kindheit und Jugend 1875-1900"
[http://mitrilkedurchdasjahr.blogspot.com/2012/01/sonntagsthema-kindheit-und-jugend.html,
accessed 18 September 2013]; and Peter Demetz, René Rilkes Prager Jahre (Düsseldorf, 1953),
62-70.
22. See Pieter M. Judson, “Nationalizing Rural Landscapes in Cisleithania, 1880-1914,” in
Creating the Other: Ethnic Conflict and Nationalism in Habsburg Central Europe, ed. Nancy M.
Wingfield (New York and Oxford, 2003), 133-144; and idem, Guardians of the Nation: Activists
on the Language Frontiers of Imperial Austria (Cambridge, MA, 2006), 34-42.
23. Spector, Prague Territories, passim.
19
24. Haas, Literarische Welt, 35.
25. Max Brod, “Frühling in Prag,” Die Gegenwart (18 May 1907), 316-317; quoted and
translated in Nicholas Sawicki, “The Critic as Patron and Mediator: Max Brod,” 32-53; also
quoted in part in Sayer, Prague, Capital of the Twentieth Century, 180, and Vassogne, Max Brod
in Prag, 194.