Die Einflüsse der Wiener Moderne auf Person und Werk Erich von Stroheims (German Edition)

---

AsChapter 1 shows, even aristocrats whose families were less well known than the Habsburgs obtained a special charisma of decline between the wars, which had a cultural value of its own. The German officer class was another visible group among the former imperial subjects who remained connected transnationally. Some intellectuals who were former officers became mediators of a cosmopolitan memory of war, as the second chapter discusses. Intellectuals belonging to the former diplomatic, military, cultural, and political elites of the Russian and German empires became important mediators for cosmopolitan cultural communities, maintaining prestige by virtue of their detachment from nations, as Chapters 3 5 demonstrate.

The Austrian journalist Karl Kraus had first identified a new social type among this group which he called the aristocratic writers. The particular 73 J. Hobson, review of Count R. Izd-vo Evropeiskogo universiteta v StPb, For social status and the construction of social reality, see John R.

Harvard University Press, This gave their personal reflections on family history and autobiographic perspectives on European history, which populated newspapers, journals, and memoirs in the interwar period, more appeal. Many among them were of German descent, which did not necessarily mean that they were German or Austrian subjects: As authors, the aristocratic writers of German background exercised a particular form of dilettantism that had been typical of nobility for a long time, but appeared in a new light in post-war Europe.

Between the s and the early s, a strand of philosophy now known as vitalism, or the philosophy of life, an early form of existentialism, had become fashionable in Europe. Its chief characteristics were a critical stance towards classical European philosophy and its systems, and towards traditional academic discourse more generally. Instead, philosophy was to become more personal, closer to the senses of life itself.

Items in search results

In France and Germany especially, authors such as Henri Bergson and Georg Simmel focused on such ideas as the perception of time and the sense of self. Against this light, some aristocratic writers specialized in being aristocratic. In the ideological formation of fascism and National Socialism, transnational elite communities played an ambivalent role.

They were facilitators of these new ideological movements in their earlier phases, as Chapter 6 shows. But as discussed in Chapter 7, they were equally important for the cultural formation of dissident communities whose transnational ethos had formed from sympathy with causes such as the critique of the Versailles peace treaty, the republicanism of the Spanish Civil War, or international anti-fascism.

The task of this book is not to evaluate the relative complicity of the old elites in revolutions or reaction. Seuil, ; With regard to the literature of the s, see Boris Maslov, Tradicii literaturnogo diletantisma i esteticheskaia ideologia romana Dar, in Yuri Levin and Evgeny Soshkin eds. Nabokov I nasledniki Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, , See also H.

Rudolf Vaget, Der Dilettant: The ideas and emotions of these Europeans belong to the cultural prehistory of European integration as it began with the Rome agreements of Towards a transnational and synaesthetic archive My approach to the study of the survival of imperial and inter-imperial memory in post-imperial Europe was transnational in scope, which also meantthatisoughttogiveequalweightingtodiplomaticandgovernment archives as I did to private archives and the archives of organizations such as the publishing houses.

It was characteristic of imperial archives and their national successors alike to be extremely shrewd about controlling their own memory. The way to read against their archives is to look at archives gone out of control, in a sense: Fragments of multiple imperial and national archives have found their way by accident or by design to such places of purchased memories as the archives of the Hoover Institution and some American university libraries, or the archives which the Nazi government confiscated across Europe, which were subsequently confiscated by the Soviet army and are now housed in Moscow s special collections.

In addition, the living memory of people today, accessible through recorded conversations and by , is another source of knowledgeaboutthepast. European political thought of this period was a product not only of rival political languages and philosophies but also of spontaneous speech and unfinished processes of thinking.

It was also visibly synaesthetic, considering that thinking about post-imperial transformation happened in the age of new media such as radio and later film, as well as the illustrated press. These were not just new modes of reproducing and sharing 78 For a genealogy of ideas about Europe, see Anthony Pagden ed. Woodrow Wilson Center and New York: Polity-Building and Policy-Making London: On the intellectual history of European reconciliation in transnational context, see especially Vanessa Conze, Das Europa der Deutschen.

Intellectuals and the European Idea, Oxford: By the late s, recorded sound and visual flashbacks of a reimagined historical past formed an irreducible part of not only present discourse but also ongoing political conflicts. My interest in focusing on medium-sized periodicals was to capture the difference between the expression of uncertainty towards the viability of revolutions and the inability to express certain judgements about a political situation.

www.farmersmarketmusic.com: Sitemap

In these witness accounts and works of fiction, a clear hero is absent, traditional forms and scales of representation were replaced with new forms of representing sound and vision. They spoke of a dusk of humanity, of a decline of the West, and a European 79 On affective contagion and trauma, see Jill Bennett, Empathic Vision: Stanford University Press, Ten Essays Stanford, Calif.: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory Cambridge, Mass.: Lewis Coser ; Chicago: Blackwell, originally Basel: Haus zum Falken, Smith, Elder, and Co.

These are determined by key moments of historical or remembered experience, when the European empires were under threat, and in which representatives of Germanic dynasties or German imperial elites emerge as central figures of decline. They do not necessarily correspond to a more familiar narrative of twentieth-century European history in this period.

The first event is , the year when the Habsburg puppet emperor Maximilian loses his life to Mexican republicans. At the same time, in Europe, Austria concedes to a share of power with the Kingdom of Hungary, changing the constitution of rule in the Habsburg Empire into a Dual Monarchy. For the intellectuals discussed here, such events were remembered as part of their personal intellectual formation. Other postimperial moments include the memory of public events such as the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, but also more personal experiences of revolution around the years , when the Russian and German empires disintegrated.

The analysis concludes with the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, when Anglo-American intellectuals and public figures propose a framework for reconstructing the idea of Europe in the wake of Germany s defeat. The book invites a new perspective on Europe in the period between and the history of Europe s institutional and economic integration associated with the Treaty of Rome of During this time, a German-speaking liberal fraction wove their experience of revolution into a common European memory of empire.

EUROPEAN ELITES AND IDEAS OF EMPIRE,

In what follows, I hope to show what was characteristic of their mentality, how this network was formed, and the many individuals and groups belonging to this circle who were subsequently forgotten. Rowohlt, , or T. Eliot, The Waste Land London: Perhaps the most famous image of imperial decline in the twentieth century is the photograph of Franz Ferdinand shot on the last day of his life in Sarajevo.

The Habsburg family did not just represent its empire but embodied it. This explains the particular shock caused by the death of Franz Ferdinand not only to Europeans but to a global readership of world news. A photograph shot just minutes before the assassination such an utterance poignantly expresses the tint of celebrity surrounding this particular death.

The first chapter places the effect of his death in the context of a longer affective genealogy of dynastic decline. In the last decades of Habsburg rule, members of the Habsburg family, like those of other dynasties such as the Romanoffs, were plagued by fears of assassination. We can grasp imperial decline both from a first-person perspective of its rulers, and indirectly, by observing the changing function of dynastic families in the period of declining empires.

From the intellectual formation of the last ruling Habsburgs in the climate of cultural globalization, we get to the odd wartime ethnography of aristocratic officers serving Germany and Austria in the First World War. In the same generation, they went from a sentimental education in the grand tours of the Belle Epoque to a very different kind of mobility. Their deployment as officers in the First World War gave them techniques and technologies of detachment from the theatre of war. Looking at imperial transformation through the eyes of the dynastic and military elites exposes the connections between imperial societies both during and after imperial decline.

Whether empires ended gradually or abruptly, by way of partial devolution and decolonization, like Britain, or revolution, like Russia, they did not collapse independently from each other. The old imperial elites were mutually connected and remained so after the demise of their former rulers. The Archduke originally planned to travel incognito, but throughout his journey, he was received and entertained by members of the highest nobility. The group included two consuls of the Austro- Hungarian Empire, and four military officers of the imperial Ulan Guards.

One of the officers was the descendant of an old dynasty of Crusaders, and others belonged to the innermost circle of the Habsburg emperor. Yet in some sense, in , he was indeed unknown to the world. Few outside of Austria-Hungary, Germany, and the higher European aristocracy would have actually recognized him by first name. His trip around the world, for all its excesses in luxury, was typical of someone of his standing, as were many of his other activities. Before assuming the title of Archduke, the prince had been mostly interested in hunting exotic animals. He had purchased a hunting estate from a financially troubled Bohemian nobleman, Prince Lobkowicz.

Here, at Konopischt, he displayed the spoils of his exploits shooting Bohemian deer to a select number of guests. Neuer Wissenschaftlicher Verlag, , Between and , several incumbents to the throne of the Romanoff, Wittelsbach, Hohenzollern, Saxe-Coburg Gotha, and Habsburg families all went on trips around the world.

Even the route that Franz Ferdinand s group had taken was mainstream: Global personal renown only reached the Archduke on the day of his death by assassination on 28 June As Emil Ludwig, one of his generation s most celebrated political biographers, put it, the assassin, under the doubly symbolic name of Gabriel Princip had let loose a worldcataclysm for all of Europe s remaining emperors. The shots resonated in European cultural memory decades after they were no longer heard in the streets of Sarajevo.

The symbolic construction of this event was a major collective accomplishment of Europe s journalists and historians. Photographs of Franz Ferdinand, originally intended for celebratory purposes, marking the Archduke s state visit to one of his future domains, obtained documentary value because they were billed as having been taken just minutes before he was assassinated.

There is hardly a political leader in European history whose assassination was as constitutive of his fame, in proportion to his lifetime identity and achievements, as Franz Ferdinand. Putnam s, , If one man s pistol shots had brought about the French Revolution and he had left the world for a prison to re-enter it after Waterloo, his eyes would not have looked at such a change as will Gavrilo Prinzip s in or earlier, if the Allies win. True, Prinzip s shots were not really the cause of the war; the cause lay deeper.

A hundred years on, no historical analysis of the Great War can really do without some account of Franz Ferdinand s assassination. The contrast between the rather local significance of Franz Ferdinand before his death, and the global fame of his decline, raises the question as to the reasons for this celebrity. On the surface, aside from the legendary Franz Josef I, who died in , none of the Habsburgs who lived in the twentieth century had any significant political role. Even Franz Josef himself ended up witnessing the gradual devolution of his powers: The last Habsburg emperor, Karl, tried to preserve his own power by promoting the creation of puppet kingdoms in Poland and Ukraine, with Karl Stefan and Wilhelm von Habsburg as regents, but this plan never succeeded.

Karl Stefan died in his Galician castle, while Wilhelm von Habsburg was killed in a Soviet military camp in Increasingly, the Habsburgs had come to excel at another sort of renown: As I want to suggest, the deeper reasons for this celebrity lay not in their real achievements, not in the actual promises that their persons held for their empires, but in the symbolic significance that their figures had both internally and abroad.

As Europe s oldest elites, they were also figures of public identification in the age before democratic representation. Their existence gave persons of different social, ethnic, and religious status to sense some commonality. This sense of a common background became even more important when the empires that these Habsburgs had ruled declined. This status is achieved when the name of the person itself gives the public the illusion of knowing the person behind the name, even if they know very little about the person, and independently of the person s actual deeds and 7 Timothy Snyder, The Red Prince.

They have practised a careful art of self-fashioning, and other factions in their environment were historically interested in contributing to the fashioning of aristocratic identity in their own interests as well. Moreover, the greatest majority of family members with illustrious names spent their life doing very little in the spheres of politics, science, or art, being engaged in purely representational activities, or just living their lives.

Most societies know them primarily through the image they associate with their name, supplemented with personal attributes. Celebrity is the last remnant of charismatic forms of grace; the King s touch is still visible to us through the gaze of the celebrity. The origin of the term celebrity is not accidentally connected to the sphere of the sacred, such as the celebration of mass.

Weber had taken the theological concept of charisma to describe a particularly premodern and pre-rational form of granting someone authority. Modernity is the period in which celebrity is not only a mass spectacle but the spectacle also has multiple, and seemingly impersonal, organizers. Reaktion, , Rojek, Celebrity, 13; P. David Marshall, Celebrity and Power: Fame in Contemporary Culture Minneapolis: Asch, Aristocracy and Gentry, entry in Europe: Encyclopedia of the Early Modern World, ed. Jonathan Dewald, 6 vols.

The difference between premodern and modern forms of celebrity, or rather between celebrity in early capitalist and advanced capitalist society, is not in the quality of the celebrity s authority over a public, which remains magical; rather, the change affects the forms in which the celebrity s image is socially mediated.

The key question for the historian is at which moment the mechanism of celebrity construction kicks in. In the case of Franz Ferdinand and the Habsburgs generally, these moments are the points in time at which their particular achievements and position come to be perceived as being representative of something far larger than they are. For Franz Ferdinand, this larger than his life effect had to do with his activities as a patron of culture. Upon his return, Franz Ferdinand began to take his duties as a curator of imperial culture as seriously as his uncle.

Travelling to remote parts of the Habsburg Empire, he promoted the development of regional folk arts; he also continued collecting and expanding the family s ethnographic collection for the now-established museum. Seen through the eyes of the Habsburg Archdukes, Europeanness can be grasped through two concepts of detachment: Members of dynastic families played the role of identity builders, not only as politicians, but also in the sphere of symbolic power, as collectors, as patrons of allegorical self-representation, and as the first dilettante ethnographers.

Celebrities did not emerge at the same time as the circulation of print and the mass market; rather, what changed in the modern period was that their image became much more widely commodified, and that as commodities, they were in competition with others. As commodities, they could not go to market and make exchanges of their own account, as Marx had put it in Capital, the first volume of which was published in In order to understand the symbolic significance of dynastic death a peculiar kind of celebrity in modern Europe, we need to place it in 13 Karl Marx, Das Kapital.

Oxford University Press, , Between and , there were more assassination attempts against members of European ruling families than had ever before occurred in a comparable time span of recorded European history. Even non-ruling or minor members of a ruling family, as well as vice-regents coming from non-dynastic aristocratic families, became victims of political assaults. This is surprising not least because dynastic legitimacy was an old and carefully constructed system of beliefs; the ruling families, which had controlled much of the cultural production in their realms, sustained it by encouraging displays of their special genealogy, which secured a selective memory of their ancestors.

Many groups and factions of European society maintained or at least passively accepted the image of ruling dynasties as symbolic sources of their common identity. Publicly mediated news of assassinated royals and their voluntary or involuntary abdication allowed contemporaries to conceptualize imperial decline through the notion of death, which was both metaphorical and literal. But this picture of imperial decline, captured in the figure of the deposed or assassinated monarch, would remain incomplete if we did not consider other ways in which imperial decline was represented allegorically.

The celebrated late-victorian anthropologist James Frazer had remarked that assassinating a monarch used to be one of the fundamental taboos of primitive societies, more significant than the taboo of murder. Yale University Press, , ff. Princeton University Press, ; for more recent treatments of the theme, see Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being: Duquesne University Press, Macmillan, , see esp.

But even if this is the case, the widespread tendencies to break with the old imperial order must still be explained in terms of their impact and their social function. The legal and cultural forms taken by these abolitions contributed significantly to the shaping of post-imperial societies in Europe, from national democracies to authoritarian dictatorships. As violence against the ruling dynasties took on cultural as well as political forms, these families themselves responded to the acts of terror by enacting policies of commemoration.

Monuments were built in a historicist style, recalling a bygone era of greatness, whether neo-gothic neo-classical, or neo-mughal. Throughout Europe, an unprecedented number of monuments to living and recently deceased members of ruling families were erected in the decades between the Franco-Prussian War and the First World War. This also coincided with historicist painting coming into fashion, presenting newly made nations with the illustrated history of their rulers. When they prepared to succeed in power, the representatives of the old empires in Europe were aware of the precariousness of imperial rule.

Monuments were erected both in the centres and at the fringes of the empires. The Habsburgs built the neo-gothic Votivkirche at the heart of their empire in Vienna; completed in , it commemorated both Franz Josef s survival of a failed knife attack by a Hungarian nationalist in and the death by firing squad of Emperor Maximilian of Mexico.

Similarly, in , the Romanoffs commemorated the death of Alexander II both at the centre and the periphery; the Cathedral of Spas na krovi literally: Savior on the Blood , built on the spot in St. Petersburg where Emperor Alexander II had been assassinated in , looks like a smaller copy of the St.

Basil s Cathedral in Moscow. Like the Habsburgs, the Romanoffs also made sure to build monuments to the assassinated emperor at the more contested fringes of their empire, such as the city of Kazan itself, where a monument was erected in Beyond Europe, Lord Curzon s calls to build monuments in India to the deceased Queen Victoria resulted in construction not only in the former colonial centre of Calcutta but also at the periphery, in Lucknow, where the famous Sepoy rebellion had strongly shaken her rule in At the same time, Lucknow became a tourist sight attracting global interest in imperial decline.

The symbolic commemoration of violence gave dynastic rulers a special kind of charisma. Control over the representation of this threat 17 Thomas R. Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ; Veena T. Oldenburg, Colonial Lucknow, Oxford: Throughout the territories of former imperial control, the very places where monuments had been erected became loci of resistance. The most famous images of toppling hegemony came from revolutionary Russia.

Another example of self-promotion projects with unintended consequences was the historical archive initiated by the Habsburgs. In ,the Habsburg family agreed to open its archives to the public, starting a long process of collecting documents and building a representative edifice for their presentation. The Hohenzollerns, too, opened a museum for the public at this time. But just as in the case of the Hohenzollern museum, the completion of the Habsburgs Court and state archive in would eventually coincide with the demise of the dynasty and its empire.

The increased circulation of images of destruction in the international press, books, and films meant that the power of these images transcended the borders of the former empires that the dynasties had represented. Destruction in one location was visible in several locations at once. Images of the decline of dynasties acquired a double meaning as symbols of decline. The dynastic families who had been the makers of identity became objects of an almost ethnographic interest in the past, a European self-ethnography. The Archdukes as collectors: Columbia University Press, Leopold Freiherr von Chlumetzky, Theodor v.

Hofdruckerei, , 9 11, 9. His personal art collection, they indicated, comprised portraits of famous ancestors from across Europe, from Poland in the east to Spain in the west. In doing so, they laid the foundations for comparative thinking in which class affinities with non-europeans trumped racial separation between Europeans and non-europeans. The work of collecting cultural artefacts, promoting imperial culture at home and abroad, and maintaining their family s prestige was traditionally undertaken by non-ruling family members who were next in line to the throne, and the fact that both Maximilian and Franz Ferdinand were Archdukes made heritage maintenance a central activity for them.

The title of Archduke is itself, in a sense, an early testament to European identity politics. It reflects the shrewd way in which this family, whose origins can be traced to a small castle in Switzerland first recorded in the twelfth century, secured its power over the centuries, not only by military conquests and marital alliances but also by careful cultivation of the family s public image.

The title derives from a fourteenth-century incident when a Habsburg, Rudolf IV, wanted to obtain the privilege of electing the emperor. To this end, he commissioned a forged document, the Privilegium Maius, which claimed that Austria, now the family s chief seat, was an Archduchy. Francesco Petrarca proved the document to be a forgery not long after its production, but his discovery of the forgery never undermined the now widely asserted power of the ruling family. The title persisted for more than a hundred years beyond the lifetime of the Holy Empire itself and, interestingly, even Otto von Habsburg bore the title of Archduke when he died in While the symbolic power of the title had waned since the fourteenth century, its economic significance only waxed in importance in the eighteenth.

Although neither Ferdinand Maximilian, as the future emperor Maximilian had been known, nor Franz Ferdinand was born in the direct line of succession to the throne, news of their new position reached them at the age of 16 and 26, respectively. Ferdinand Maximilian s uncle, who had a neurological disorder, was urged to resign in ; when his father also resigned, this left his brother Franz Josef in charge. After their uncle stepped down in the wake of the revolutions of , Ferdinand Maximilian s elder brother Franz Josef served as the head of the House of Habsburg, Emperor of Austria, King of a large part of central Europe and parts of the Middle East, including Jerusalem, and at this point was still President of the German Confederation.

By contrast, Ferdinand Maximilian as a young man believed that he could be himself because he was free from the burden of rule. He was one of the first promoters of early photography and developed a habit of writing his travel journal in verse. Despite his military education, Maximilian preferred the arts and sciences to his brother s politics.

Supplied with the intellectual support of Alexander von Humboldt, whose own explorations dated back to the beginning of the nineteenth century, the frigate travelled to Asia, South America, and Australia, collecting specimens of the culture, flora, and fauna of each. In the jungle of Bahia, he believed, the mutual dependence needed to survive against the forces of nature appeared to trump social status. In one poem about the jungle of Bahia, written in January , Maximilian conjured up a mysterious sound coming from the forest, a ghostly army that begs for revenge against the white people its children s butchers.

Another poem called The Dethroned Prince described a strange scene: He is the Prince of the Camacan, who was once the lord of his people and the forests. Now, defeated by a rival tribe, the old man cries about his own decline [Untergang] ; this man who had ruled all his life is now seen with his thin legs shaking tiredly. In the city of Petropolis, Maximilian turns to a critique of urban life typical for Europeans of his generation, describing the appearance of a railway in the jungle. As Heinrich Heine put it in 26 Karl Scherzer ed.

Into the Wilds of Psychoanalysis Cambridge, Mass.: MIT University Press, Duncker und Humblot, , Erzherzog Maximilian, Gedichte, vol. As Heine put it: Montezuma s gift of a crown of feathers to his future Spanish murderers at the Habsburg court left a material memory for its future heirs. Heine thought that Vitzliputzli, the blood-thirsty God of war, evoked both fear and laughter.

Between the French Revolution and the end of the Napoleonic era, authors like Johann Gottfried Herder, August von Kotzebue, and Heinrich von Kleist produced works in which they expressed sympathy for the oppressed native peoples and the slaves of the new world. As Susanne Zantop and others have argued, the idealization of the native others was formative for these German authors own conceptualization of national identity as a form of resistance against empire.

French troops then worked with international, including German, mercenaries to crush the rebellion. University of Chicago Press, Before the First World War, narratives of Maximilian s life had been based mostly on accounts of the last three years of his life, which are but a short episode in the international history of Europe and the United States.

Interpreters defined his life variously as a symbol of the struggle between republicanism and imperialism, Europe and the new world, or Romanticism and realpolitik. A brief account of these three years shall suffice here. This he deemed necessary for reasons of state, as emergent republican forces in Mexico had declared themselves bankrupt, which affected French creditors.

Moreover, it was a fortunate moment for an intervention because these republicans, who generally enjoyed support from the United States against the more conservative clerical faction of the country, were left briefly to their own devices since the United States were themselves involved in a civil war. Napoleon s idea was to invade on the pretences of reclaiming an old right. One of the former rulers of Mexico was the Habsburg family, who had named a province their own after their European possession in Spain Nueva Galicia. The question was this: Napoleon s choice fell on Archduke Maximilian, the brother of his only recently defeated enemy, Emperor Franz Josef.

As contemporary critics such as the journalist Karl Marx anticipated in an article for the New York Daily Tribune published in , it was one of the most monstrous enterprises ever chronicled in the annals of international history. The childless Maximilian and his Belgian wife Charlotte forcefully adopted their son in order to have a future heir. But all was in vain: The blood to be shed was that of many people: Mexican insurgents, French officers, Mexican supporters of the empire, and others.

Napoleon s plan was to ship Maximilian to Mexico and install him there as a new Emperor, which he did. In , Maximilian arrived on his own frigate Novara, a boat he had originally destined for scientific explorations around the world. From the beginning, this was more than just a French intervention, even though it served the interests of primarily French financiers.

But the agents involved were international. On top of that, in , the American Civil War had ended, thus increasing the capacity of Americans to support the Mexican republic. Maximilian s officers had joined him for Romantic reasons: But a few months later, the Europeans Mexican adventure was over; all European parties involved the Habsburgs in Austria, the Bonapartes in France, and the Saxe-Coburg-Gothas with their parliamentary government in Britain, as well as financial investors in the campaign throughout Europe had lost spectacularly.

Franz Josef tried to keep the scandal of Maximilian s death under control. Charlotte, his widow, had, in the meantime, lost her mind and lived secluded in one of her father s castles in Belgium. Maximilian s former aide-de-camp, Prince Salm-Salm, who had been instructed to gain access to Maximilian s documents at his residence in Miramar and other locations, complained in his memoirs that the family did not allow him to access the papers he needed to fulfil the promise he had made to Maximilian before he died.

The royal court tried to acknowledge the tragedy in its own way. The Votivkirche in Vienna, whose original construction had been Maximilian s personal project, was rededicated in his memory. Franz Josef also dutifully assembled the artefacts which Maximilian s boat the frigate Novara had brought from Mexico in a public display in the Hofmuseum s permanent ethnographic collection.

He even prohibited the song La Paloma, which had become the unofficial anthem of the Mexican republic, to be played in the empire, a rule that still applies in the Austrian navy. The tune La Paloma originally had nothing to do with the Habsburgs. The singer who sang it first, Concepcion Conchita Mendez, became a royal artist at the theatre recently reinstated by Charlotte at Mexico City. However, as the republican forces gained strength, they appropriated La Paloma, supplied it with a new title and used it to deride Charlotte of Belgium as Mama Carlota on her departure from Mexico. In , as Charlotte was leaving Mexico to seek support for her husband from European monarchs, Conchita Mendez was asked by the crowds to perform the song in the theatre under the new, republican, title.

The news that she refused to do so reached Emperor Franz Josef, who praised Conchita s loyalty in a birthday note in The subsequent story of La Paloma, which became one of the world s most popular tunes, only testifies the extent to which the House of Habsburg had lost control over its own media image. News of Maximilian s 36 Emperor to Aged Singer. It could only be withheld from the public by one day.

In the decade that followed, numerous memoirs, plays, and historical accounts were published and translated into a variety of languages, including French, Spanish, English, Hungarian, Czech and Slovak, Russian,Portuguese,andothers. What has become of the eager competition with which the most warlike Monarchy in the Old World and the most self-asserting Republic in the New seemed bent upon disputing the supremacy and high protectorate over so vast a part of the Western Continent?

Hoffmann, and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. From the Notebook of a Mexican Officer London: A Tragedy [in three acts and in verse] Dublin: Duncker und Humblot, ; transl. Librairie Internationale, ; into Spanish, as Elevacion y caida del emperador Maximiliano. Chavez, ; in Czech, as Maxmilianuv podvraceny Trun v Mexiku. Zevrubne vypsani bournych I krvavych udalosti Mexickych Prague: Gerold s Sohn, Memoirs of His Private Secretary, transl. Yale University Press, , first published as Maximiliano intimo: El emperador Maximiliano y su corte: Maximilian s notes revealed a republican spirit.

In , while Franz Josef was struggling against France in the battle of Solferino, Maximilian at the nearby castle Miramar celebrated Lucca, where Libertas had flourished in times of a long and true peace, because it was satisfied with the small and never strove for the big. After the First World War, more works on Maximilian appeared when the collapse of the Habsburg Empire left scholars free to access hitherto private family papers at the Haus-, Hof- und Staatsarchiv in the Hofburg.

I forgive everyone, and I pray that everyone may forgive me. May my blood, now to be shed, be shed for the good of Mexico. The circumstances of Maximilian s death gave Europeans one more, albeit negative, source of identity. As the British Empire faced what became the last decade of rule in India, historian Daniel Dawson described how, at the time of Maximilian, the scorching sun of a Mexican summer shone on an Empire in dissolution. Both were Habsburg enterprises, but only Maximilian obtained the peculiar status of a celebrity in virtue of his failure.

Catherine Alison Phillips, 2 vols. New York and London: It had multiple centres of distribution: A Journal of Civilization. The impoverished Manet had cut up the painting, to be sold in parts. But his friend Edgar Degas later purchased the fragments and reassembled them. The subsequent success of this nearly complete painting eventually popularized the story of Maximilian along with Manet s own in the twentieth century.

Manet had never been to Mexico but used photographs, accounts circulating in the French press, as well as an image by Goya of the Spanish resistance against Napoleon, as a basis. He was not trying to get as close to reality as possible; but he wanted to capture the true spirit of the event. Immediately interpreted as an open critique of Napoleon III, the painting and even its lithographic reproductions were banned in France. Art changes, just as houses and dresses, morals and ideals change, and one and the same artwork changes, as if it was still being worked upon, even after it had been hanging behind a glass frame.

Piper, , 7. It was then sold on to another French buyer for 12, By , German buyer Bernheim found that it was worth 60, francs. By , the Mannheim art gallery bought the painting for the equivalent of 90, francs. The purchase was facilitated from a government grant by a special permission of John Maynard Keynes and Lord Curzon, who were being advised by Roger Fry.

One of the economic consequences of the war was a rapid depreciation of art. Keynes and Curzon formed an ad hoc committee from the National Gallery and travelled to Paris, just as Germany was bombing the city, to acquire the painting at an auction. It was a bargain: The Paris art salon had established a tradition for depicting decapitated and deposed monarchs, but prior to Manet, they focused mostly on France and Britain.

Paul Delaroche was so drawn to depicting subjects such as the executions of Marie Antoinette and Charles I Stuart that Heinrich Heine was prompted to remark: Mr Delaroche is the court painter of all decapitated majesties.

Some factors are specific to each case. Maximilian s brief rise and decline was, as we have seen, entangled with several aspects of European and transatlantic politics, making the affair an international event. Franz Ferdinand s imminent succession to the throne gave his activities more weight. Besides, both shared the familial charisma of the Habsburgs, which still carried some weight. But I believe that the most 50 Ibid.

Shop by category

Hoffmann und Campe, , Michael Imhof Verlag, As scholars have argued, through institutions such as the collection of ethnographic objects, museums, and other forms of cultural heritage, the Habsburgs gave their subject shared and divided forms of identity. In their absence, the character of this identity was put into question. Even before Franz Ferdinand was assassinated, Sigmund Freud observed that his patients had obsessive dreams that were based on their repressed fears of agents provocateurs. Anarchism and the Anti-Colonial Imagination London: Melancholie no date, probably , in James Starchey ed.

It was fantastical writings like Heine s that inspired Maximilian to widen his Grand Tours beyond the confines of Europe. But, understandably, Maximilian s attitude towards the nobleness of the natives and his own European heritage was more ambivalent than that of the Romantics. He empathized with an indigenous prince, and yet also admired the idea of empire. He brought Mexican antiquities to Europe, but when he took up residence in Chapultepec Castle, an eighteenth-century palace erected for the Spanish viceroys on the tip of a sacred Aztec site, he had it redesigned in the style of Neuschwanstein the epitome of neo-gothic Europeanism.

As between these two achievements of imperial power, he preferred the Crystal Palace to the Leviathan.

When, in Granada, the cathedral s Quasimodo handed him the regalia of his ancestors for a few moments, Maximilian wanted to purchase them. Proudly and yet sadly I took in my hand the golden ring and the once powerful sword. Would it not be a brilliant dream to draw the latter in order to win the former?

Back in Europe, Maximilian was critical upon seeing the sale of women in a market in Constantinople. The Bavarian prince Rupprecht and the Prussian crown prince Wilhelm travelled to the Orient using the services of the North German Lloyd in and , respectively. Wilhelm s documentation of his trip, which followed the same route as Franz Ferdinand s, was published in in two versions, a book and a limited-edition portfolio, while Rupprecht s appeared much later, in As Queen Victoria s great-grandson, on this occasion he became colonel-in-chief of a British regiment, the Prince Albert s Hussars, an event that was also documented photographically.

Knopf, , plate facing page The Hohenzollern prince, like Franz Ferdinand, focused on his hunting of tigers and leopards in Mirzapur and Hyderabad, with one of the coloured plates showing two leopards shot by the prince on 23 January Back in Europe, Franz Ferdinand s photosofhisprey, displayed by a group of seven Indians surrounding the Archduke, had been similarly retouched at the photographic studio of Carl Pietzner, who left only his highness and the tiger, surrounded by oriental wilderness, in the frame.

In the Habsburg Empire, the commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of Franz Josef srulein coincided with the fiftieth anniversary of the revolutions against the Habsburg family. They were, in the satirical language of Robert Musil, parallel actions Parallelaktion. In this process, the old dynasties acquired a new property that of a celebrity of decline suggesting that what seemed to be parallel developments were in fact crossroads of imperial disintegration.

Posing on Sites of Violence in India, , inhistory of Photography, International Ideas and National Memories of , 2nd revised ed. As early as the s, royal courts like those of the Habsburgs and the Bonapartes had employed court photographers. Those same photographers also produced typological ethnographic images of their subjects, both in Europe producing exoticlooking images of various Slavic peoples and beyond, such as a series of images of non-europeans. But only a few decades later, those same photographers documented the executions of members of royal families, and some of them also became the chief authors of critical depictions of European imperial rule.

Imperial dynasties historically had a high level of control not only over their own image, but also over the cultural memory of actions carried out in their name. This was a form of cultural power or charisma at which the Habsburgs excelled even above the other families. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, other princely houses throughout Europe commissioned artists such as Giambattista Tiepolo to represent them in allegorical frescoes of empire. What theorist of culture Guy Debord once said of the premodern Chinese emperors applies equally to Europe s dynasties: However, in the modern era, these tools of representation increasingly escaped the control of the royal courts.

This kind of change in control over art and culture made it possible 64 Pieter Judson, Inventing Germans: See also Braudy, Secular Anointings: Similarly, during the Russian Revolution artists such as Boris Kustodiev, who had painted one of the last portraitists to represent Tsar Nicholas II in , became enlisted as the revolution s first court painters. The revolutionaries in France were also the first to open the king s private art collection to the public. By the end of the nineteenth century, many of Europe s ruling dynasties followed suit by creating public cultural institutions themselves, but they were too late the art market was becoming more international, and independent institutions were founded with private capital that did not depend on dynastic authority.

In Europe and North America, world fairs and great exhibitions encouraged the display of paintings from several countries in what historians have described as an age of cultural internationalism. What Tim Blanning described as the power of culture could also be used against those who had originally commissioned it.

Governments of every kind, including the Republican government of the United States, found it difficult to control the dissemination of visual information that could serve to critique their policies. Beacon Press, , ch. The British Museum, While governments preferred what would now be called embedded painters to depict scenes of war, or commissioned works from trusted artists after the fact, they found it increasingly difficult to prevent critical images from reaching a wider public.

For example, the famous Russian battle painter Vasili Vereshchagin, who had been originally hired by the imperial army to depict heroic battle scenes, eventually became a critic of imperialism and sympathized with anarchists and socialists. The international art market allowed him to remain independent from the payments he could have enjoyed from any of these armies. His paintings were displayed in London, Paris, St. Petersburg, Munich, Chicago, and New York, and he also sold paintings internationally.

One image showing a dying Russian soldier was banned from a St. Petersburg art salon in , but went on display in art salons in Chicago and Paris; conversely, his painting of British violence against Indians, Blowing from Guns, which revived the memory of the violent crushing of the Sepoy rebellion in , was not displayed in London but was presented in St.

In addition to realist painting, photography was on its way to becoming an effective way to apply political pressure on governments. Originally, like images of battlefields, pictures of dynastic leaders had served the purpose of what Guy Debord called a total justification for the entire social system of empire.

Enfance Voyage Guerre Paris: The Art Institute, MIT Press, , points 6 and 4,. Photography itself did not change this tradition. Walter Benjamin s claim that the mechanical reproducibility of art reduced the courts ability to retain control over the production of art could thus be extended much further: Of the dozens of ruling houses in Europe that lost power in the twentieth-century European revolutions, two in particular became repeated targets of political assassinations: The practice of photography had initially allowed dynasties to modernize their own image; members of Europe s ruling princely houses were among the first buyers of camerae obscurae, daguerreotypes, and other cameras.

The new technologies of representation favoured displays of personal, unique, and unrepeatable characteristics, which initially allowed their aristocratic owners to continue the old hagiographic tradition. People used small postcard-sized photographs as cartes de visite through a process of reproduction invented and patented in Paris in the s. Reflections on Photography New York: Public knowledge of royal assassinations far exceeded the boundaries of their empires. With new technologies improving their availability, photographs were increasingly appreciated for their documentary value; they were no longer merely hagiographic in purpose.

As photographs became more easily producible and reproducible, they reached an audience that was widening in terms of both social class and geography. Within a span of twenty years, photographers originally trained in Vienna and Paris had opened offices in Berlin, St. Petersburg, Moscow, New York, Mexico City, Buenos Aires, the states of Pernambuco and Bahia, and many other locations, and the press increasingly adopted the medium as documentation of events. Another photographer, though he probably did not witness the moment itself, used a montage to recreate the execution of Habsburg emperor Maximilian of Mexico in Likewise, a daguerreotype of an open carriage in Moscow documented the assassination of Grand Duke Sergius, an uncle of Emperor Nicholas II, by means of nitrogen bomb.

Revolutions against the German Barons of the Baltic provinces in Russia left vivid images of demolished country estates, which could be used both to condemn and to sympathize with the revolutionaries. Of course, not all assassinations were documented in as much detail as that of Maximilian. In the absence of photographs showing the Romanoff family being killed, photographs taken four years prior to their execution in were scrutinized in the illustrated press and popular biographies to conjure up a feeling of immediacy.

Commenting on the photograph of the Romanoff family taken a week before their execution, one article emphasized some of the matchless pearls afterwards stolen from their dead bodies 78 Helmut Gernsheim, A Concise History of Photography, 3rd ed. Courier Dover Publications, , 55ff. Painting, Politics and Censorship London: This gave viewers a punctum of tragic experience, to borrow a concept from Roland Barthes s analysis of modern mythmaking.

In the twentieth century, the Habsburgs and the Romanoffs shared what historian Boris Kolonitskii describes as the tragic eroticism of dynastic families in decline: Henry Jenkins Limited, ; New York: Recollections of Romanoffs and Bolsheviki, Boston: Small, Maynard and Company, Insel, , Ochoa he knew apparently owned the Popocatepetl.

This trip resulted in an anthropology of decadence, as biographer Laird Easton put it; Kessler would stop at palaces and haciendas belonging to the influential local elite with professional ties to his father. Born a year after Maximilian s execution, Kessler was the son of a Prussian banker, who had been ennobled by Wilhelm I, and an actress of Anglo-Irish nobility, whose father and grandfather were British imperial civil servants in Baghdad and in India. He had attended St. George s school in Ascot and was acquainted with the English admirers of modernist art, such as the Bloomsbury group and Roger Fry especially.

In later years, on his travels along the Italian coast, he passed Maximilian s castle of Miramar and observed that the last Habsburgs knew how to die in beauty; Maximilian of Mexico, the Empress Elizabeth, the Archduke Rudolf, here, the Archduke Ludwig Salvator, even the humble grave of the last emperor in the small village church on Madeira, evoke aesthetic respect.

By contrast, the last Hohenzollerns are a slap in the face of any aesthetics, even any human respect with their rawness, fickleness, wildness and lack of taste; the last Habsburgs end their days as gentlemen, the last Hohenzollerns like carters. The tourism industry around the Habsburgs had begun with the court itself licensing specific photographers to disseminate images of their estates to a wider public. Thus the copyright licence for distributing images of Miramar as well as monuments to Maximilian belonged to the Triesteborn photographer Guglielmo Sebastianutti.

But the industry far outlived the family s own power. In the context of a blooming cultural production on the theme of crisis and decline characteristic of this period, publications on Maximilian picked up. The composer Franz Liszt wrote several works dedicated to Maximilian. Vienna State Opera commissioned the modernist composer Ernst Krenek to write a stage work on the Habsburg emperor Karl V, the reluctant emperor who agreed to have his empire reduced by half and lost the Spanish part to the Bourbons in the sixteenth century, with references to Maximilian.

Outside Austria, the resonance was equally great. Easton, Der rote Graf. Harry Graf Kessler und seine Zeit Stuttgart: Bythispoint,inadditiontoManet s Spanish source for the painting, Goya s allegory of Spanish resistance, Dieterle had one more Spanish reference to consider. Photographer Robert Capa hadproducedtheworld s first image of a man being shot dead, printed for the French magazine Vu and the American journal Life, andlater discussed in his book Death in the Making.

The mediated production of this and other Habsburg tragedies, encouraged by the opening of the archives, turned the tragic story of onehabsburgprinceintoafoil,a transitional object for various narratives of European decline. His first published image had been a portrait 87 Darius Milhaud, Maximilien: Paul Zsolnay Verlag, A Detective Story Many of the hagiographic films of Habsburg decline were produced by actors, directors, and composers, who, although they had been subjects of the Romanoff and Habsburg dynasties, were no particular admirers of the family: You'll receive email and Feed alerts when new items arrive.

Turn off email alerts. Skip to main content. Refine your search for der wiener. Refine more Format Format. Best Match Best Match. Items in search results. Format see all Format. All Listings filter applied. Condition see all Condition. Item Location see all Item Location.

• La traccia del tempo (Italian Edition)
• Die Bedeutung von homogenen Gruppen beim Erwachsenwerden verdeutlicht am Beispiel der Technoszene (German Edition)
• Toddler Books: Heads, Hearts & Other Parts
• Petit bonhomme à la fenêtre (French Edition)
• The Sweetest Gift
• Schmort in der Hölle, Kalorien! (German Edition)