Belle Necropolis by Arens Katherine

Author:Arens, Katherine
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Peter Lang AG

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Schorske’s Modernist fin de siècle

Schorske introduces Fin de siècle Vienna as a book that addresses a historiographical question: his era’s crisis in history. As he notes: “The modern mind has been growing indifferent to history because history, conceived as a continuous nourishing tradition, has become useless to it” (xvii). Translating that into more contemporary terms, it seems that he is addressing the loss of history as a master narrative, as a “continuous nourishing tradition” justifying hegemonies, as today’s scholars would stress. Like his contemporaries who offered histories of the region, the bulk of Schorske’s work on topics other than Vienna has focused on histories written from the point of view of states, nations, classes, treaty organizations, or economic units—the kinds of histories that, by the late 1970s, were being called into question.

Schorske clearly realizes that the era of the master narrative of history is over. Nonetheless, he is trying still to preserve the concept of an “era” as an organizer for a slice of history, a choice that has led him to take up Vienna because it seemed different: “Behind my selection of Vienna as a focus of inquiry lies no particular training or expertise as a historian of the Habsburg Empire” (xviii). He understood that master narratives exist to guide discussions of the nineteenth century—historiographic conventions that, for example, point to significant moments of transformation or moments as focal points for historical understanding: “rationalism and romanticism, individualism and socialism, realism and naturalism” (xix). Yet he could not find an equivalent grand narrative that could guide narratives about Vienna around 1900. In consequence, he turned to other disciplines and their methodologies to find new models for historical narratives. He found such models in his era’s “new” literary studies (New Criticism, dating from the years in which he began these essays), and in the functionalism that was taking over the social sciences, both approaches stressing synchronic analysis, not the diachrony associated with his generation’s historiographies: “But now that the new internal methods of analysis in the humanistic disciplines disclosed in works of art, literature, and thought autonomous characteristics of structure and style, the historian could ignore them only at the risk of misreading the historical meaning of his material” (xxi).

Schorske found a convincing way to discuss politics and culture in tandem: psychoanalysis, which allowed him to address not the spirit of and age (xxii), but rather how the premises and tensions of an era produce individuals with multiple motivations and neuroses. Thus he found new formulae that would help narrate the historical moments of modernism resisting traditional narrative forms:

← 117 | 118 → At the most obvious level, [psychoanalysis] would see the sharp break from a tie with the past as involving generational rebellion against the fathers and a search for new self-definitions. […] Here [in modernism] historical change not only forces upon the individual a search for a new identity but also imposes upon whole social groups the task of revision or replacing defunct belief systems.

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