George Hunka

Tales of two cities: Vienna / Philadelphia

Category: Books

  • The idea of community

    Stefan Zweig in 1917

    From Stefan Zweig’s The World of Yesterday (1942), translated by Anthea Bell:

    In fact, it must be said in all honesty that a good part, if not the greater part, of all that is admired today in Europe and America as the expression of a newly revived Austrian culture in music, literature, the theatre, the art trade, was the work of the Jews of Vienna, whose intellectual drive, dating back for thousands of years, brought them to a peak of achievement. Here intellectual energy that had lost its sense of direction through the centuries found a tradition that was already a little weary, nurtured it, revived and refined it, and with tireless activity injected new strength into it. Only the following decades would show what a crime it was when an attempt was made to force Vienna — a place combing the most heterogeneous elements in its atmosphere and culture, reaching out intellectually beyond national borders — into the new mould of a nationalist and thus a provincial city. For the genius of Vienna, a specifically musical genius, had always been that it harmonised all national and linguistic opposites in itself, its culture was a synthesis of all Western cultures. Anyone who lived and worked there felt free of narrow-minded prejudice. Nowhere was it easier to be a European, and I know that in part I have to thank Vienna, a city that was already defending universal and Roman values in the days of Marcus Aurelius, for the fact that I learnt early to love the idea of community as the highest ideal of my heart. (44-45)

     

  • The world of yesterday

    Vienna, 1900.

    From Stefan Zweig’s The World of Yesterday (1942), translated by Anthea Bell:

    I myself have lived at the time of the two greatest wars known to mankind, even experiencing each on a different side — the first on the German side and the second among Germany’s enemies. Before those wars I saw individual freedom at its zenith, after them I saw liberty at its lowest point in hundreds of years; I have been acclaimed and despised, free and not free, rich and poor. All the pale horses of the apocalypse have stormed through my life: revolution and famine, currency depreciation and terror, epidemics and emigration; I have seen great mass ideologies grow before my eyes and spread, Fascism in Italy, National Socialism in Germany, Bolshevism in Russia, and above all the ultimate pestilence that has poisoned the flower of our European culture, nationalism in general. I have been a defenceless, helpless witness of the unimaginable relapse of mankind into what was believed to be long-forgotten barbarism, with its deliberate programme of inhuman dogma. It was for our generation, after hundreds of years, to see again wars without actual declarations of war, concentration camps, torture, mass theft and the bombing of defenceless cities, bestiality unknown for the last fifty generations, and it is to be hoped that future generations will not see them again. Yet paradoxically, at the same time as our world was turning the moral clock back a thousand years, I have also seen mankind achieve unheard-of feats in the spheres of technology and the intellect, instantly outdoing everything previously achieved in millions of years: the conquest of the air with the aeroplane, words travelling all over the world at the moment when they are spoken, the conquest of space, the splitting of the atom, the defeat of even the most insidious diseases. Almost daily, things still impossible yesterday have become possible. Never until our time has mankind as a whole acted so diabolically, or made such almost divine progress. (xiv; emphasis mine — GH)

     

  • Solitary tourism, in Vienna and elsewhere

    From Simon Winder’s delightful 2010 book Germania: In Wayward Pursuit of the Germans and Their History:

    Quite possibly the pleasure of this way of life would be much reduced in some other countries, particularly more insistently gregarious places such as Italy. German culture puts a high value on temporary solitude of a stagey kind. Perhaps this is its great gift. In some moods I think there is no need to do anything other than read German writers from the first half of the nineteenth century — a sort of inexhaustible storehouse of attitudes flattering to those who just like sometimes to be left alone. …

    The poetry on this subject stretches out to the most hazy, distant horizon and fed a century of German songs, culminating perhaps in the greatest of them all: Mahler’s setting of a Rückert poem, “I have lost track of the world with which I used to waste much time,” a work of such richness that it can only be listened to under highly controlled circumstances. The idea, whether in Goethe, Mörike, Rückert or Heine, is to be alone, in a wood, on a mountain, in some overpoweringly verdant garden, or just inside one’s head, almost always as a moment’s pause before plunging back into a world of love and normal human decisions. This tic is of course a bit unpolitical and some writers have seen it as passive in a way that implies a German malleability and failure to engage with disastrous implications for the future. But equally it is an anti-political, fiercely private stance, with a built-in resistance to fanaticism or mass manipulation. It seems hard on Schubert’s songs for them to be viewed as early danger signs of a failure to stand up to Nazism.

  • Marjorie Perloff (1931-2024)

    Marjorie Perloff. Photo by Alan Thomas (2016).

    Marilyn and I will be raising our glasses tonight to the memory of critic, translator, and memoirist Marjorie Perloff, who cast off this mortal coil last Sunday at the age of 92.

    Professor Perloff was a staunch champion of the American avant-garde, especially its poets (Frank O’Hara and Charles Bernstein) and its musicians and choreographers (John Cage and Merce Cunningham). But more recently she had turned her attention to the Vienna of her youth; her 2004 memoir The Vienna Paradox is a moving, beautifully written but typically intellectually uncompromising examination of her youth and early career as an emigre from Austria, and I’ve written about her 2016 Edge of Irony: Modernism in the Shadow of the Habsburg Empire — a book that deeply affected me when I read it — here. In 2022 she published a fine translation of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Private Notebooks: 1914-1916 (noted here), and her introduction graces a new translation of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, published just last month and on my next-to-read list.

    Clay Risen wrote the obituary for the New York Times, and an “In memoriam” written by Alan Thomas with the collaboration of Perloff’s family, the poet Charles Bernstein, and the University of Chicago Press appears here.

  • “The limits of my language means the limits of my world”

    Coming across Ludwig Wittgenstein’s assertion above was appropriate, as I am learning German again, even though Wittgenstein wasn’t talking about learning foreign languages specifically — I’m afraid that interpretation is far too facile. Nonetheless it’s an assertion that sticks with you whatever language you speak, and I’m confident of its truth. It’s why I’ve been a bit of a pest with my children, encouraging them to take up a second language in the sense that it will give them a second world, and additional worlds mean additional possibilities. The fewer limits, after all, the broader the world — perhaps a worthwhile corollary to Wittgenstein’s assertion.

    I came across it while reading Marjorie Perloff’s recent translation of Wittgenstein’s Private Notebooks: 1914-1916. Read in the context of an exploration of Vienna in the interwar years, it’s an enlightening experience, too. I’m neither an academic nor even a casual student of philosophy, but the notebooks also remind me that I should be picking up Damian Searls’s new translation of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, which also features an introduction by Professor Perloff. The publisher, W.W. Norton, leads me to believe it just may reward attention even from a layperson like myself — “Searls renders Wittgenstein’s philosophy clearer and more accessible than ever before,” Norton says, and that can’t hurt. You can also get a taste of this from Searls’s introduction to the book, a version of which is available here at the online magazine Words Without Borders.