George Hunka

I want to start the month off by recommending Marjorie Perloff’s Edge of Irony: Modernism in the Shadow of the Habsburg Empire, published by the University of Chicago Press. The book defines what Perloff calls “Austro-Modernism,” a form of modernist thinking engendered in the years 1914 through 1933, when the Habsburg Empire collapsed and its territories became awash in a bewildering brew of nationalism, anti-Semitism, exile, and blood. Perloff differentiates Austro-Modernism from its German cousin, forged in the political cauldron of the Weimar Republic. As she writes:

Weimar was the workshop for radical ideas, from Marxist theory to Heidegger’s ontological exploration of being-in-the-world to the film theory of Krakauer, Rudolf Arnheim, and [Walter] Benjamin himself. But this is not to say that Austro-Modernism, from Freud to Wittgenstein and Kraus, to Musil and Roth, to Celan and Bachmann, is to be understood as a weaker version of the strong intellectual formation of the Weimar Republic. It was merely different. Given the particular situation of the Habsburg Empire and its dissolution, given the eastern (and largely Jewish) origin of its writers, it developed in another direction, its hallmark being a profound skepticism about the power of government — any government or, for that matter, economic system — to reform human life. In Austro-Modernist fiction and poetry, irony — an irony less linked to satire (which posits the possibility for reform) than to a sense of the absurd — is thus the dominant mode. The writer’s situation is perceived not as a mandate for change — change that is always, for the Austrians, under suspicion — but as an urgent opportunity for probing analysis of fundamental desires and principles. (13; final emphasis my own)

Perloff’s analysis stretches from the “probing analysis” and documentary social satire of Kraus’s The Last Days of Mankind to the “probing analysis” and socio-erotic frisson of Celan’s later lyric poetry, with an excellent coda that muses upon Wittgenstein’s obsession with the Christian gospels towards the end of his life. Ironic satire is a dominant mode in the fiction of both Musil and Roth, but it’s a satire that, as Perloff notes, doesn’t lead to political action, but instead to contemplative action. “In the face of war, in the face of the twin evils of Fascism and Communism and of the corruption that seemed to threaten democracy at every turn, one could expose the follies and evils of one’s world, but meaningful change could only be personal,” Perloff writes. “The aim, as Wittgenstein put it — and Musil and Roth concurred — could only be ‘to become a different person.'” (15)

Although all of Perloff’s subjects were German-speakers, many didn’t start off that way. They were born not in the Empire’s capital Vienna — though Vienna remained a shining beacon of ambition for each of them — but rather on its periphery, and in many cases its easternmost periphery, speaking languages other than German. Karl Kraus was born and raised in the town of Jičín (then a part of the Austrian Empire, now a part of the Czech Republic); Joseph Roth was born and raised in the town of Brody, a small town near Lemberg, now Lviv, in East Galicia (then a part of the Austrian Empire, now a part of Ukraine); Elias Canetti was born in Ruse, Bulgaria (an independent nation then, but with close ties to the Empire); Paul Celan in the Romanian town of Czernowitz (then a part of the Austrian Empire, now also a part of Ukraine). That they can be considered various facets of that common experience that led to Perloff’s “Austro-Modernism” points to the role that the Empire played in their upbringing.

The Habsburg Empire in 1914 was a mess. Franz Josef I was considered a weak and vacillating leader; its polyglot culture made it all but impossible to administer effectively (especially by a somewhat corrupt and inept central bureaucracy); what we now call its “multiculturalism” was just as bewildering. But it was a mess that somehow functioned, and for much the same reasons. The same Empire gave rise to a Central European form of Modernism that produced composers like Arnold Schoenberg, philosophers like Freud and Wittgenstein, writers like Arthur Schnitzler, painters like Klimt and Schiele. Austrian Jews enjoyed particularly broad freedoms following the 1782 Edict of Tolerance issued by Joseph II, and in 1867 Franz Josef I formally bestowed equal rights on the Jewish population of the Empire. Indeed, in recent years revisionist historians like Pieter M. Judson have emphasized its strengths (even if, ultimately, its weaknesses led to its dissolution in 1918), suggesting that its tolerance could be something of a model for the polyglot multicultural societies of the 21st century.

The cataclysmic collapse of the Empire in 1918 left Austria a rump state. The Habsburgs were gone; in its place an unstable republic, an easy target for neighboring fascists, that would last for only 16 years (the monarchy ruled for nearly 400 years). This left Perloff’s writers, working in the years between the two world wars, with a sense of loss — that they’d been cut adrift from the land and culture of their youth. Kraus and the others weren’t sentimental about what was gone, but they recognized its strengths and opportunities as well, giving rise to what might be called an ironic conservatism in their outlook. Ultimately, the collapse was a collapse of cultural identity as well. Despite the almost unimaginable size of the empire’s territories, Musil, Celan, Roth, and the others shared a historical culture, which inevitably led to a common recognition — a recognition reflected in habits of thought, social conventions, mind, language — of their tragic situation. They harbored no optimism for the restoration of the monarchy in the years after 1918. Indeed, they harbored no optimism at all — except for the possibilities inherent in what a “probing analysis of fundamental desires and principles” might reveal about us as individuals and how we live. For this reason alone, Edge of Irony is worth a look.

I happen to be a child (or, at least, a grandchild) of the periphery of the Austrian Empire myself. My paternal grandfather Maxsym Hunka arrived at Ellis Island in 1914 from Ukraine (probably from Berezhany, Ternopil, then a part of the Austrian Empire, now a part of western Ukraine); he too was an exile from a collapsing world, perhaps sharing (in the peculiar ways of his own situation) in the habits of thought, social conventions, mind, and language of the subjects of Edge of Irony. He was far from an intellectual, receiving only a fifth-grade-level education according to US Census reports from later years. But if there can be said to be a cultural DNA just as influential upon us as our biological DNA, passed down in the form of these habits through the generations, they might generate in us an affinity for characteristics of our ancestral cultures, its origins barely recognized in our individual histories unless we look for them.

For my birthday last week I treated myself to watching 1776, the 1972 film adaptation of the Sherman Edwards/Peter Stone musical about the creation of the Declaration of Independence. It’s about as accurate as a musical comedy about the Declaration can be, what with John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and others singing and prancing around Independence Mall, built on a Hollywood back-lot; Wikipedia has a substantive list of the considerable liberties taken by the musical to history, and critic Roger Ebert was decidedly negative about the film. Nevertheless it still retains a great deal of silly charm, and as even The Columbia Companion to American History on Film concedes, “few [of the inaccuracies] are very troubling.” 1776 was the ur-Hamilton in a way, an attempt to render early American history palatable to those who may feel it rather dry and boring; as Hamilton anachronistically uses hip-hop to get its musical points across, 1776‘s score is more reminiscent of Gilbert and Sullivan, fifes and drums added to the arrangements, than Mozart, a genuine contemporary of the Founding Fathers (though there are still enough gavottes and waltzes to go around). And I still find most of the performances delightful. To me, John Adams will always be William Daniels, never Paul Giamatti.

I first saw 1776 upon its original release in 1972, when I was ten years old. It was released then with a G rating; these days, what with its occasional swearing, sexual innuendo, and bathroom humor, it would likely earn a PG (perhaps we live in more, not less, innocent times today). But I was already familiar with Old City Philadelphia and its environs to a certain degree. I was born in center city — at Pennsylvania Hospital at 8th and Spruce Streets, which itself was founded in 1751 — and visited there very often. My family lived in the city’s outskirts, but because my father’s parents still lived on Fairmount Avenue in the Northern Liberties section of the city, we made it into town just about every weekend, and my brother and I were dragged along to Independence Mall, the Liberty Bell, the Betsy Ross House, Elfreth’s Alley, and other historical points of interest before we were ten. So I have rather deep roots in the city.

As the years went by I investigated Philadelphia more and more on my own. I live in New York now, and New York has its own history, but it isn’t living history to the extent that Philadelphia’s is. Just getting from one place to another in downtown Philadelphia — from home to work, say, or a night out on South Street — you regularly passed Carpenter’s Hall and the State House, these buildings still carefully maintained in an 18th century style, especially around 1976, the nation’s bicentennial, when Philadelphia expected an onrush of tourists that never really materialized. A part of the bicentennial celebration was a tab version of 1776 performed in an outdoor theatre on the Mall through the summer of ’76.

I watched 1776 last week with the Declaration of Independence fresh in my mind. Turning from that film to the New York Times political headlines the next day, I was reminded of this observation from Henry Adams, John Adams’ great-grandson, who wrote about President Ulysses S. Grant in his 1918 autobiography The Education of Henry Adams. Adams refers to himself in his memoirs in the third person:

What worried Adams was not the commonplace; it was, as usual, his own education. Grant fretted and irritated him, like the Terebratula, as a defiance of first principles. He had no right to exist. He should have been extinct for ages. The idea that, as society grew older, it grew one-sided, upset evolution, and made of education a fraud. That, two thousand years after Alexander the Great and Julius Cæsar, a man like Grant should be called — and should actually and truly be — the highest product of the most advanced evolution, made evolution ludicrous. One must be as common-place as Grant’s own common-places to maintain such an absurdity. The progress of evolution from President Washington to President Grant, was alone evidence enough to upset Darwin.

And that was Grant, 100 years before Nixon, Reagan, the Bushes, and Trump. Henry Adams can thank his God that he died in 1918, before this recent rush of evidence disproving evolution.

To fill in the film’s gaps and as a corrective to its inaccuracies, I’ve also been reading Richard Beeman’s Our Lives, Our Fortunes and Our Sacred Honor: The Forging of American Independence, 1774-1776, a popular history of the events leading up to the Declaration. It’s quite the page-turner and I recommend it highly. As I read it, two things are occurring to me.

First, as Henry Adams suggests, Adams, Jefferson, Hancock, and the others were undoubtedly great men: Philadelphia from 1760 to 1800 was one of those unique locations in history to be blessed with people who participated in an intelligent, radical rethinking of the human spirit. The Declaration was not law, to be sure — it was propaganda directed at the world. But what effective propaganda it was. Of course, it reflects the flaws of its creators as well, its attitudes to slavery and women chief among them — though even here the founders allowed within the Constitution itself a way to amend it through the years; it was a living document. The Declaration, and the Constitution that would follow a decade later, made America unique among the modern nations in that its founding was based upon principles and ideals. That those principles and ideals were laid out in two documents that it may take you about two hours to read carefully is something of a miracle. It’s the only modern nation to come with an owner’s manual, and unlike the owner’s manual that came with your microwave, it reaches occasional poetic heights that it would behoove us to re-examine today.

Second, these ideals and principles are still clearly in the air. They are a part of our basic belief system as a nation and a people — religious tolerance, open discussion, a free press, the need for representative deliberation, but most especially, I think, for the right to agitate and become radicals against tyrannical powers of government. Eventually a “wait-and-see” attitude towards George III became impossible and unconscionable, a crime against the rights of man. They are as much in the air as history palpably surrounds you on the streets of Old City Philadelphia.

I often wonder whether such documents could have been created anywhere but Philadelphia in the late 18th century. Philadelphia is itself unique in world history, a city founded upon Quaker principles of religious tolerance, self-reliance, simplicity, humility, and the certainty of an Inner Light in each and every individual regardless of race, gender, or talent. Those principles fell by the wayside rather quickly — William Penn last saw Philadelphia in 1701, and even then the tide of immigration was revising those religious principles in the name of expansion, democracy, and commerce. But even now, walking Philadelphia’s streets, there is something of that sentiment still available to anyone willing to recognize it. But of course you do have to acknowledge it. And that, too, takes humility. Both of my children were born at St. Vincent’s Hospital in Greenwich Village — they are native New Yorkers and always will be. But, in my own way, I’m a native Philadelphian, and always will be. That said, I can’t wait until I have the opportunity to drag them around Independence Hall as well. And hell, 1776 is a musical — maybe they’ll even enjoy that one day.

On the periphery

The egg