Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

Of the many writers who struggled to find their way in this bewildering world, Hugo von Hofmannsthal (1874–1929) is as reasonable a starting-point as any, for he clarified a good part of the confusion. Von Hofmannsthal was born into an aristocratic family, and blessed with a father who encouraged – even expected – his son to become an aesthete. Despite this, Hofmannsthal noted the encroachment of science on the old aesthetic culture of Vienna. ‘The nature of our epoch’, he wrote in 1905, ‘is multiplicity and indeterminacy. It can rest only on das Gleitende

[the slipping, the sliding].’ He added that ‘what other generations believed to be firm is in fact das Gleitende

’.⁴⁸

Could there be a better description about the way the Newtonian world was slipping after Maxwell’s and Planck’s discoveries? (These are covered in the conclusion.) ‘Everything fell into parts,’ Hofmannsthal wrote, ‘the parts again into more parts, and nothing allowed itself to be embraced by concepts.’⁴⁹

Hofmannsthal was disturbed by political developments in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in particular the growth of anti-Semitism. For him, this rise in irrationalism owed some of its force to science-induced changes in the understanding of reality; the new ideas were so disturbing as to promote a large-scale reactionary irrationalism.

In addition to Hofmannsthal, Ibsen, Strindberg and Nietzsche together represent the final northwards movement of European thought, after the centre of gravity had shifted, following the Thirty Years War. These latter three owe quite a lot of their prominence to Georg Brandes, a Danish critic who, in 1883, in his book of that title, identified Men of the Modern Breakthrough.⁵⁰ The ‘modern minds’ that he highlighted included Flaubert, John Stuart Mill, Zola, Tolstoy, Bret Harte and Walt Whitman, but above all Ibsen, Strindberg and Nietzsche. Brandes defined the task of modern literature as the synthesis of naturalism and romanticism – of the outer and inner – and cited these three men as supreme examples.