Hitler's Viennese Waltz (Page 2)

Most problematic of all, perhaps, is Hamann's treatment of Viennese Modernism. Schönerer, Lueger, quirky Viennese racists and their theories of Aryan supremacy--that Hitler was influenced by such things is not exactly surprising. Hamann, again, gives a lucid and thorough account of the pervasiveness of these insidious forces in fin de siècle Vienna, and she does an excellent job of documenting Hitler's initial reactions to them, which is no easy task, since the sources here are extremely unreliable. They consist almost exclusively, in fact, of statements made by Hitler's acquaintances in Vienna, many of which were altered, for obvious reasons, during and after the Third Reich. Where they can be checked against municipal records, Hamann has done the legwork. But she forecloses on the more complicated, more interesting question of the role Viennese Modernism played in Hitler's fascist apprenticeship. Hamann raises this question by noting that Hitler admired one of Vienna's most prominent "Modernists," Mahler, while underlining Hitler's general antipathy toward Viennese Modernism.

How could Hitler have idolized Mahler's Modernism just as he was laying down the foundation for his own monumental hatred of Modernism? Hamann's answer is disappointing. She contends that Viennese Modernism was really about letting sexuality out of its bourgeois cage, and the eminently unerotic Mahler was therefore only a sort of marginal Modernist. Since Hitler went on famously to denounce "degenerate art," it is fair to say that he received an anti-Modernist aesthetic education in Vienna.

Yet Hitler's encounter with Viennese Modernism was more complex. Indeed, his profound respect for Mahler points to another level of influence, one that Hamann moves past dismissively when she writes, "As in all of Europe, in Vienna modernism was defined by its revolt against the prudishness of the all-too-bourgeois nineteenth century. The artists of Expressionism fought for the liberation from moral constraints, against a cloying idyll, for truth, enlightenment, and the exposing of social ills and ugly realities." The accent here is on the erotics of Modernism. Its other aspects are listed as secondary or tertiary, as Hamann desultorily adds the naturalist cause, "the exposing of social ills," to the Expressionists' agenda. What is missing, or almost missing, is the Viennese Modernists' push for social redemption through art. That was, to use Schorske's terms, at the center of the Viennese Modernist sons' attempt to transcend their fathers' failed liberal politics. It is also just what Hitler seems to have been so impressed by in Mahler. Mahler was no "fascist modernist," but his zealous rigor did demand a kind of emotional submission from his audience, even as it challenged them to rise to his difficult standards. And, suggestively enough, Mahler's severity was disturbing to liberal bourgeois Viennese opera-goers, who sensed that his searching veneration of art was profoundly different from their "cloying" cult of beauty.

When Mahler lost his position as conductor of Vienna's opera, Hitler fulminated against his critics and expressed his appreciation of Mahler's intensity and the select community of recipients it evoked. Can we infer from Hitler's defense of Mahler that Hitler not only learned to hate Modernism in Vienna but also learned from it? Was Viennese Modernism Hitler's unwitting mentor before it became his victim? Certainly anything like a Mahleresque insistence on formal integrity is difficult to locate in Nazi stagings of Wagner's most turgid moments. Yet subtle influences are easy to lose sight of amid the garishness of Nazi spectacles. Anti-Modernists are seldom, if ever, consistently anti-Modernist. Hitler's obsession with taking art beyond the safety of dilettantish bourgeois aesthetic experience may be grounded not only in Wagner's bombastic ideal of the Gesamtkunstwerk but also in Mahler's ecstatically precise performances. In Mahler, too, there is a post-bourgeois aesthetics; art is supposed to promise more than symbolic capital, anodyne distraction, a bit of bonheur.

Of course, Viennese Modernism is not "guilty" of helping to make the Holocaust possible. But the connection of violent anti-Semites like Schönerer and Lueger to Hitler's use of anti-Semitism is incriminatingly thick. They taught him how to employ hatred of the Jews to great political effect, and their legacy is therefore directly linked to the Holocaust. It is quite another thing to indict less incendiary figures just because they were particularly Viennese. Hitler would have turned out differently had he not spent seven formative years in Vienna. But it is unfair and unproductive to flatten the obstructionist Viennese politicians who shut down Parliament--many of whom were not anti-Semitic and none of whom called for a dictatorship--with the crushing charge of mentoring him. To do so is to elevate moralizing anachronism to a historiographical principle. Yet Hamann does not raise the question of influence simply to lay blame. She also sets out to probe improbable and disturbing proximities. Even if these probings do not constitute the core of her book and are not always executed successfully, they are enough to make Hitler's Vienna compelling. For the suggestion toward which they push us occupies, again, but a peripheral position in Schorske's Fin-de-siècle Vienna. Schorske may remark on how Klimt, Schönberg and Freud scandalized Viennese audiences, but nowhere does he examine this audience in detail. And only one of the essays in his book attempts to survey the political catastrophes that left "the sons" disillusioned with politics and looking for redemption in art. The brutal Vienna in which Egon Schiele was incarcerated as a pornographer and Karl Kraus was repeatedly assaulted for satirizing fellow satirists is confined to the background. We are reminded of its ugly importance. What we see, however, are the beautiful achievements to which we feel so indebted.

Fin de siècle Vienna becomes, first and foremost, a time of intense creativity and relentless intellectual exploration, as the signs of crisis that remain in the picture are easily explained away as that faithful concomitant of interesting art: the personal identity crisis of the artist. And so we are invited toward ambivalence, to recognize that certain features of that society may have been serviceable to Nazism, which should shake us out of our often easy enthusiasm for, and identification with, Viennese Modernism. It should prompt difficult critical reflection, which is what Viennese Modernism was all about--at least some of the time.

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