Nervositäten, Fremdheiten und Wahrnehmungen des „Anderen“. Anmerkungen zur „Wiener Moderne“
Nervousness, Strangeness and Perception of the Other: Reflections on the “Wiener Moderne”

Summary/Abstract: The wide field of the inner landscape of the I, the fragile construction of personality as put in doubt by the reflections of E. Mach and the territory of the “Other” generally are considered to form main topics of the literary, philosophical and esthetical exploration of Austrian literature and culture of the Fin de Siècle period called “Wiener Moderne”. Starting with a concise review of the more recent research positions in the following essay these topics will be re-discussed giving space and attention to the differences to contemporary Modernism in Germany (Berlin) as well as to the remarkable and quite analytic interest of Viennese authors towards aspects of the “Other,” the forbidden and hidden spaces of identity which often were covering experiences of modern estrangement, dissociation of the personality and an existential discontent as well as an attitude towards aestheticism worked out in the essay on D’Annunzio by H. v. Hofmannsthal, in some of his early dramatic pieces or in Andrian’s Garten der Erkenntnis. On the other side it was accompanying the perception of cultural differences; among those the Slavic component represented a recurrent phenomena overlapped in more than only few cases by stereotypical concepts. Finally there will be taken in examination the strange things which lie in wait below the threshold of consciousness (H. Bahr) like the role of corporal identity, violence and sexuality in the intricate relationships between the dominant social codex and institutions as in Hofmannsthal’s Reitergeschichte or in modern urban, capitalistic challenges and contexts like Beer-Hoffmann’s Camelias.

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