Mobilizing the aristocrat: Pre-war Vienna and the poetics of belligerence in Herzl, Hofmannsthal, Kraus, and Schaukal

This project is a study of the attitudinal and aesthetic aspects of the aristocrat in fin-de-$si\grave ecle$ Vienna. Drawing upon the work of Pierre Bourdieu and Norbert Elias, I take the aristocrat both as a model for identity formation and as a habitus, a kind of body disposition to be imitated or self-fashioned. Such self-fashioning unfolds, I contend, against the background of a general aristocratism at the turn of the century, as well as within a dense patchwork of individual and collective initiatives in Austria. Around 1900, to adopt the conduct and carriage, the manner, etiquette, and life-style of a noble fulfills a complex behavioral imperative, indeed, represents a nuanced form of socialization. Viennese literature of these years marks an experimental field upon which the figure of the aristocrat is made and remade. The research presented in this dissertation begins from the premise that elite self-fashioning involves not only titled nobles but a much broader variety of figures who appropriate for themselves the public posturings, the imaginary identifications and the ritual displays of an aristocrat. That the aristocrat served as a kind of imaginary ideal for bourgeois artists and intellectuals around the turn of the century is, of course, a central theme in the work of Carl Schorske. Yet while Schorske sees the ambition to style oneself as an aristocrat as a withdrawal from social activism into a private aestheticism, I argue that Viennese writers claim for themselves a far more engaged aristocrat from the Austrian past. The aristocratic habitus, I contend, is aggressive and offers a symbolic pose for the expression of belligerent impulses and combative attitudes. From this perspective, I suggest, the aristocrat presents a link between what are often seen as two unrelated moments: the fin de siecle and the outbreak of war (from Vienna) in 1914