"In his early stories Thomas Mann produced several lively portraits of a widespread turn-of-the-century type, the apocalyptic aesthete. The story “At the Prophet’s,” written in 1904, begins with an ironic ode to artistic megalomania.
Strange regions there are, strange minds, strange realms of the spirit, lofty and spare. At the edge of large cities, where street lamps are scarce and policemen walk by twos, are houses where you mount til you can mount no further, up and up into attics under the roof, where pale young geniuses, criminals of the dream, sit with folded arms and brood; up into cheap studios with symbolic decorations, where solitary and rebellious artists, inwardly consumed, hungry and proud, wrestle in a fog of cigarette smoke with devastatingly ultimate ideals. Here is the end: ice, chastity, null. Here is valid no compromise, no concession, no half-way, no consideration of values. Here the air is so rarefied that the mirages of life no longer exist. Here reign defiance and iron consistency, the ego supreme amid despair; here freedom, madness, and death hold sway.
In Mann’s 1902 story “Gladius Dei,” a young man named Hieronymus strides through Richard Strauss’s hometown of Munich, scowling at the extravagance around him. He goes inside an art shop and berates its owner for displaying kitsch—art that is merely “beautiful” and therefore worthless. “Do you think gaudy colors can gloss over the misery of the world?” Hieronymus shouts. “Do you think loud orgies of luxurious good taste can drown the moans of the tortured earth? … Art is the sacred torch that must shed its merciful light into all life’s terrible depths, into every shameful and sorrowful abyss; art is the divine flame that must set fire to the world, until the world with all its infamy and anguish burns and melts away in redeeming compassion!”
All over fin-de-siècle Europe, strange young men were tramping up narrow stairs to garret rooms and opening doors to secret places. Occult and mystical societies—Theosophist, Rosicrucian, Swedenborgian, kabbalistic, and neopagan—promised rupture from the world of the present. In the political sphere, Communists, anarchists, and ultra-nationalists plotted from various angles to overthrow the quasi-liberal monarchies of Europe; Leon Trotsky, in exile in Vienna from 1907 to 1914, began publishing a paper called Pravda. In the nascent field of psychology, Freud placed the ego at the mercy of the id. The world was unstable, and it seemed that one colossal Idea, or, failing that, one well-placed bomb, could bring it tumbling down. There was an almost titillating sense of imminent catastrophe.
Vienna was the scene of what may have been the ultimate pitched battle between the bourgeoisie and the avant-garde. A minority of “truth-seekers,” as the historian Carl Schorske calls them, or “critical modernists,” in the parlance of the philosopher Allan Janik, grew incensed by the city’s rampant aestheticism, its habit of covering all available surfaces in gold leaf. They saw before them a supposedly modern, liberal, tolerant society that was failing to deliver on its promises, that was consigning large parts of its citizenry to poverty and misery. They spoke up for the outcasts and the scapegoats, the homosexuals and the prostitutes. Many of the “truth-seekers” were Jewish, and they were beginning to comprehend that Jews could never assimilate themselves into an anti-Semitic society, no matter how great their devotion to German culture. In the face of the gigantic lie of the cult of beauty—so the rhetoric went—art had to become negative, critical. It had to differentiate itself from the pluralism of bourgeois culture, which, as Salome demonstrated, had acquired its own avant-garde division.
The offensive against kitsch moved on all fronts. The critic Karl Kraus used his one-man periodical, Die Fackel, or The Torch, to expose what he considered to be laziness and mendacity in journalistic language, institutionalized iniquity in the prosecution of crime, and hypocrisy in the work of popular artists. The architect Adolf Loos attacked the Art Nouveau compulsion to cover everyday objects in wasteful ornament, and, in 1911, shocked the city and the emperor with the unadorned, semi-industrial facade of his commercial building on the Michaelerplatz. The gruesome pictures of Oskar Kokoschka and Egon Schiele confronted a soft-porn art world with the insatiability of lust and the violence of sex. Georg Trakl’s poetry meticulously documented the onset of insanity and suicidal despair: “Now with my murderer I am alone.”
If members of this informal circle sometimes failed to appreciate one another’s work—the bohemian poet Peter Altenberg preferred Puccini and Strauss to Schoenberg and his students—they closed ranks when philistines attacked. There would be no backing down in the face of opposition. “If I must choose the lesser of two evils,” Kraus said, “I will choose neither.”
The most aggressive of Vienna’s truth-seekers was the philosopher Otto Weininger, who, in 1903, at the age of twenty-three, shot himself in the house where Beethoven died. In a city that considered suicide an art, Weininger’s was a masterpiece, and it made a posthumous bestseller of his doctoral dissertation, a bizarre tract titled Sex and Character. The argument of the book was that Europe suffered from racial, sexual, and ethical degeneration, whose root cause was the rampant sexuality of Woman. Jewishness and homosexuality were both symptoms of a feminized, aestheticized society. Only a masculine Genius could redeem the world. Wagner was “the greatest man since Christ.” Strange as it may seem in retrospect, this alternately incoherent and bigoted work attracted readers as intelligent as Kraus, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and James Joyce, not to mention Schoenberg and his pupils. The young Alban Berg devoured Weininger’s writings on culture, underlining sentences such as this: “Everything purely aesthetic has no cultural value.” Wittgenstein, who made it his mission to expunge pseudo-religious cant from philosophy, was quoting Weininger when he issued his aphorism “Ethics and aesthetics are one.
The entire discourse surrounding the Viennese avant-garde demands skeptical scrutiny. Certain of these “truths”—fatuous generalizations about women, obnoxious remarks about the relative abilities of races and classes—fail to impress the modern reader. Weininger’s notion of “ethics,” rooted in Puritanism and self-hatred, is as hypocritical as anyone’s. As in prior periods of cultural and social upheaval, revolutionary gestures betray a reactionary mind-set. Many members of the modernist vanguard would tack away from a fashionable solidarity with social outcasts and toward various forms of ultranationalism, authoritarianism, even Nazism. Moreover, only in a prosperous, liberal, art-infatuated society could such a determinedly antisocial class of artists survive, or find an audience. The bourgeois worship of art had implanted in artists’ minds an attitude of infallibility, according to which the imagination made its own laws. That mentality made possible the extremes of modern art".
Alex Ross
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