page_title: Wiener Moderne
section_title: Literature
hierarchical_section_title: Wiener Moderne / Significant personalities and works / Literature
caption_attribution_description: Café Griensteidl in Vienna
context_page_description: The Wiener Moderne or Viennese Modern Age is a term describing the culture of Vienna in the period between approximately 1890 and 1910. It refers especially to the development of modernism in the Austrian capital and its effect on the spheres of philosophy, literature, music, art, design and architecture.
context_section_description: The most notable literary grouping of this period was the Young Vienna movement, a society of "coffeehouse literati" centred on the writer and critic Hermann Bahr. Bahr's 1890 work Zur Kritik der Moderne (On Criticism of Modernity) established the word modernism as a literary term, whilst Die Überwindung des Naturalismus (The Surpassing of Naturalism) published the following year, declared the then current style of naturalism to be at an end. He was influenced in this by developments in French literature, notably symbolism, which he had encountered while studying in France (1888–1890) where he had come to know the works of avant-garde writers such as Joris-Karl Huysmans, Paul Bourget and Maurice Barrès. Bahr proclaimed a new Romantik der Nerven (romanticism of the nerves), which concentrated on the impressions and sensations of the human soul; in this he referred back to developments in the still new science of psychology and his critical writings were consequently influenced not only by literary writers but also by psychologists, notably Sigmund Freud, and the philosopher of science Ernst Mach. The literary consequence of this Romantik der Nerven was the encouragement of literary forms that foregrounded the perceptions of the individual, among them the unreliable narrator and the interior monologue.
  Bahr used his position in Vienna as a theatre critic and feuilletonist to promote other members of the Young Vienna circle, most notably Hugo von Hofmannsthal, who met at the Café Griensteidl and later at the Café Central. Other members of the group included Arthur Schnitzler, Peter Altenberg, Felix Salten, and Stefan Zweig, all of whom, though disparate in styles and interests, demonstrate different facets of the character of the Wiener Moderne in their writing. Schnitzler created one of the earliest examples of modernist stream of consciousness writing in Lieutenant Gustl (1900), and his most famous work, Reigen (La Ronde) (1897), is typical of the fin de siècle interest in sexuality. Hofmannsthal's early poems show the influence of the French symbolists and Stefan George's aestheticism, whilst his work as a librettist for Richard Strauss reflects the interpenetration of the different branches of the arts typical of the epoch. The aphorist Altenberg is notable as much for his archetypically bohemian lifestyle as for his writing. Salten, best known nowadays for his later children's books, is widely regarded as the author of the infamous pornographic novel Josephine Mutzenbacher, a sign arguably of the decadence that was associated with the period. Zweig (also a librettist for Strauss) was, in addition to his own stylistically polished writing, a noted translator of the symbolists, and later a passionate defender of a collective European culture in the face of aggressive nationalism, reflecting the openness of the epoch to foreign cultural influences and indeed the melting pot of different cultures that was part of fin-de-siècle Vienna.
  The other dominant voice in Viennese literature during this period was the satirist Karl Kraus. Originally Kraus had been associated with the Young Vienna writers but he broke with them and attacked them in his 1897 essay Die demolierte Literatur (Demolished Literature), which was written after Café Griensteidl burnt down. In his periodical Die Fackel (The Torch), Kraus regularly satirised lazy journalism, which he considered to be exemplified in the feuilleton writing of many of his contemporaries, but his interests ranged over many of the other issues which were prominent in the cultural life of fin-de-siècle Vienna, among them Zionism, psychoanalysis, political corruption and nationalism, all of which he attacked in the pages of Die Fackel. The antagonism between Kraus and other leading Viennese cultural figures, which in the extreme case of his criticism of Felix Salten's feuilletons led to Salten assaulting him in the street, but also encompassed spats with Freud, Theodor Herzl and Hugo von Hofmannsthal among others, might be seen as a sign of the vigorous debate characteristic of the pe
caption: Café Griensteidl, gathering place for members of the Young Vienna circle, in 1896 (Reinhold Völkel)
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