“All’s surely for the best!” ...
Aye, so shall be confessed
By your sons’ sons, marking where down we smote you as we onward pressed.
The Viennese Dramatists
Erna McArthur
One does not know quite how the modern literary movement in Vienna arose. Suddenly, some twenty years ago, there were some active young writers called “Young Vienna,” in a collective way, who were supposed to be revolutionary and bent on originality. In reality these young people had no definite literary program such as had been issued in Berlin by the leaders of the new naturalist movement. They were a circle of friends, who had heard of the new and wonderful things that had been done. They came to know Ibsen and the great Russian and French novelists; they were of the generation which was to be moved to the utmost by the philosophy of Nietzsche. Of course these influences had been working in the whole German-speaking world. Art was being taken seriously again and the young people were yearning to produce something new and original of their own.
Hauptmann had started a kind of revolution in Germany by his first play, Before Sunrise, and the Viennese, who lived a little isolated in their town, grew excited and enthusiastic over these doings.
A young writer, Hermann Bahr, was a kind of apostle for the new art in Vienna. He was a man of agility, capable of unbounded enthusiasm, who could go into ecstasy for all kinds of movements—for realism as well as neo-romanticism, for Ibsen and Zola, for Maeterlinck and d’Annunzio. He had been traveling about in Europe, had come in touch with all the leading personalities, and had brought the news home to his Viennese friends; he wanted to make a new Vienna in every way. A few years later he was active in organizing the young painters, sculptors, and architects, who evolved a very original and striking art.
So it came to pass that Hermann Bahr was considered the leader of everything modern—which meant “crazy” to the good citizen of the day. It was this same milieu of the citizen, the bourgeois, that produced all the young writers. In consequence, they were absolutely anti-bourgeois in their way of looking at things, in the very natural contrast of fathers and sons. Hence, too, they had a certain culture, good manners, and a predominant interest in æsthetic questions, as there had been no occasion for them to know the primitive cares of life. But they were tired of the narrowness and tastelessness of their milieu; they wanted to do things differently—to live and love differently; to put art into their surroundings, their dwellings, their dress; good taste—this had been a tradition of the old Vienna, lost in the transition-state when the middle-class element obtained its precedence over the old aristocracy—was now to take its place again.
Apart from the dislike of these Viennese young men for the bourgeoisie there were really very few positive tendencies that could join them into a group. Consequently very different artistic individualities developed. Arthur Schnitzler and Hugo von Hofmannsthal, the two most representative, have very little in common in their work. But there was a spirit of friendship among all of them; they liked to meet in the cafés, which had always been Vienna’s center of social life, and to talk things over—the lightest and the deepest. A certain café used to be famous as the center of the young literary world. The old people who didn’t like the whole business called it the café of the crazy self-worshippers (something to that effect), and this title has stuck to it since. Today, the house has been demolished, its glory has passed, but there are still legends and stories told of the wonderful talk, the hot and breathless debates that once filled these rooms from morning till night—and till morning again.