Heidi Rauscher Tilghman, University of Washington

Viennese Longings: Berlin and Chicago in the Modernist Imagination

Many of Vienna’s most notable fin-de-siècle modernists were, in fact, reluctant citizen’s of Europe’s tradition-bound cultural capital. According to Karl Kraus, Adolf Loos, Oskar Kokoschka and Robert Musil, for instance, Vienna—stodgy, false and style-less—was the antithesis of the vibrant, edgy metropolis of modernist imaginings. Two cities dominate the urban longings of Kraus and Loos in particular. Busy, traffic-filled, dirty, politically torn and dangerous Berlin was the focus of Kraus’ longing. He claimed to see the world more clearly from the cafes on Potsdamerplatz; Café Central, by contrast, offered only a psychologized and hence decadent perspective. Adolf Loos viewed Chicago in much the same light: there life was wild and free; economical, practical, authentic, wild.

Interestingly, however, neither Loos nor Kraus chose to leave their Viennese comfort and move abroad for good. Instead, the cities served the oppositional imaginations of the modernists: they provided the juxtaposition from which the Viennese could critique their homeland and, in so doing, create a uniquely Austrian modernist view. Viennese modernism, in other words, especially second-wave Viennese modernism, was defined through satire. Without the boldly modernist “other” imagined through Berlin and Chicago, such a vision would not have been possible.

The paper traces Berlin and Chicago in the published essays, diaries and postcards of Kraus and Loos. It contrasts the essayists’ idealized images of the two cities with the critiques of Vienna and shows how the modernist view emerged from the juxtaposition.