With this book, William Johnston, author of the acclaimed The Austrian Mind: An Intellectual and Social History 1848–1938 (Berkeley, 1972), brings a lifetime's study of Austrian cultural history to bear on the nature of Austrian distinctiveness. His contribution takes the form of detailed commentaries on some thirty-five texts by twenty-five writers published from just before World War I until 1967, when Alphons Lhotsky declared the death of the “österreichische Mensch” and debate turned to questions of conscious (national) identity rather than character typology. Combining famous names like Hermann Bahr, Hugo Hofmannsthal, Robert Musil, and Franz Werfel with lesser-known writers, Johnston brings an interesting perspective to a big theme. His hope is to offer Austrians, through often forgotten texts from a neglected period, material for reflection. Meanwhile, through a typological approach—he calls himself a “classifier” of “Geisteshaltungen” (45)—he extrapolates an ideal type, that of the Habsburg official as empathetic, reconciling “Theresianer Mensch.”

This is clearly a thought-provoking, ambitious work. It is not without its difficulties. The technique of comparing twenty-five writers presented chronologically means constant allusion to authors not yet fully introduced. Some texts analyzed tend to the speculative and fanciful, or like those on landscape, can seem blandly rhetorical. Johnston raises the issue of cross-country comparison, but the references to Russia made by Hans Prager and Rudolf Kassner, which he discusses, seem abstruse compared to the unremarked parallels in Russian attitudes to the West and Austrian attitudes to Prussia/Germany reflected in his texts: namely, the binary opposition in each case of a more monolithic, rationalistic culture to one identifying as more human and varied, closer to soil and soul. His preoccupation with formal listing of character traits can appear overzealous, as when his pleasure at Joseph Lebs' list of nine linked Austrian qualities, each with its potential negative side, leads him to rebuke other writers for not affording this tidy convenience. However, establishing a rigorous typology is important to Johnston, who is critical of much of the early discourse, whether the patriotic mythmaking of Hofmannstahl or the skeptical satire of Musil and Robert Müller. The social scientific sobriety lacking here he finds in the geographer Hugo Hassinger's 1925 notion of social “capital” embodied in the “Charaktertypus” of “einfühlender, verstehender, schmiegsamer Kulturmenschen, entstanden im Vielvölkerstaat Österreich” (198). This description of the Habsburg bureaucrat, trained (“herangetüchtet”) in the work of Central European mediation (“Vermittlungsarbeit”) and taken up later by Lhotsky, form the basis of what Johnston calls the “Hassinger-Lhotsky paradigm.” Combined with other elements, like Oskar Benda's Dienstaristokratie and Werfel's sacrificium nationis of those without homeland, and echoing Hofmannsthal and Friedrich Heer's homage to the great empress (though elsewhere he distances himself from them), it provides the framework for the idea of the “Theresianer Mensch.” That Johnston identifies with this construct is clear from repeated speculation as to whether a larger corpus of social capital could have saved the monarchy, what effect earlier ventilation of these ideas might have had, and at one point (292) whether Woodrow Wilson would have acted differently if he had been aware of them.

The basis for this attractive concept, as retrieved in the present book, is slight. The Hassinger/Lhotsky paradigm amounts to a couple of pages in a book on Czechoslovakia, briefly quoted by Lhotsky. His case for Benda providing sociological stiffening for the paradigm seems overindulgent. In Benda's phenomenologically based typology of class structure, the predominance in Austria of the Dienstaristokraten or service aristocracy (one of three branches of the upper middle class Neuaristokratie in the schema) allows the possibility of equating this with Hassinger's empathetic bureaucrats and, loosely, Carl Schorske's perspectives. But the web of abstractions that Benda weaves round his actually fluid categories and the arbitrary allotment of individual figures to them make the ground slippery. Thus the much-travelled Rilke embodies most clearly the monarchy-ranging, mediating Austrian official whose empathy stirred in him universal understanding and love, but whose sense of homelessness sprang from distaste at the ‘linguistic mishmash’ of his childhood in multicultural Prague (238–40). Benda's elitist preoccupation with social structures only in their “Sublimationsformen, d. h. die höchste Vergeistigung, deren unsere Lebensformen fähig sind” (228) also clashes with a leading theme of Lhotsky's 1967 intervention, passed over by Johnston, which was the common “österreichische Mensch,” struggling with poverty and muted by the top-down discipline of a bureaucracy more Josephinist than Theresan.

Indeed, the oft-stressed mediatory role of officialdom in the context of multiculturalism raises questions. While Austrian officialdom undoubtedly developed notable sensitivities, this was in an imperial setting. It was more democratic than that of the colonial Indian Civil Service but barely yet one of relations between equals implied by modern notions of mediation. Once the monarchy's peoples and classes outgrew Josephinist paternalism, the reconciling, tolerant “Theresianer Mensch” as social glue, whether essentially German-speaking or involving some Slavs and Magyars, lost pertinence some time before 1918, as Johnston recognizes; the concept deserves, anyway, more than brief nods to the non-German factor. It remains as plausible as most patriotic myths, but shorn of its label, hardly a novel one and as hypothetical as before. The training Austrian officials received, their patterns of service, the mental and material world they inhabited on their tours of the monarchy, the nature and durability of their impact on the common “österreichische Mensch” in the regulated society sketched by Lhotsky, are questions that continue to tantalize.

These are, however, a general historian's comments. Professor Johnston's treatment of his ideal types fits within a bid to direct Austrian cultural history down a phenomenological path (273, 330). In the interrelationship between the specific and the type that clearly fascinates him, it is, to this reviewer, specific intellectuals who engage him most fruitfully. Of the nine somewhat disparate points with which he sums up, the eighth justly suggests that his texts provide a fresh context for consideration of Robert Musil's famous book and hero, Ulrich, the Man without Qualities. Fellow cultural historians will find much to explore in this complexly layered work, which includes a “Bio-Bibliographie” of the authors discussed.