Immanuel Kant’s response to the question “Was ist Aufklärung?” (“What is Enlightenment?”) (1784) remains the canonical definition. It is “der Ausgang des Menschen aus seiner selbstverschuldeten Unmündigkeit” (“mankind’s emergence from its self-imposed juvenility”). It is harder to find a communis opinio on what constitutes “Die Aufklärung,” given that this was not a European process that proceeded in a simple, linear fashion (56). Within Germanophone Europe, however, thanks to the normative influence of Protestant Prussian scholars who forged German cultural historiography during the nineteenth century, “Die Aufklärung” is still widely regarded as a north/central phenomenon, elements of which belatedly trickled south into Bavaria and Austria. In reality, aspects of the “Age of Enlightenment” were manifest in Vienna before, during, and indeed after the reign of the ‘enlightened despot’ Emperor Joseph II. Despite this, the lasting but erroneous narrative was fixed of a backward, Catholic Austro-Bavarian domain that was largely impervious to intellectual trends to its north and west.
Hence, in the opening section of this tripartite study, the justifiably exasperated Vienna-based literary scholar Norbert Christian Wolf feels impelled to substantiate once again the case for Austria as a locus of the Enlightenment sui generis (33). He does not hesitate to show how the influence of Nazi-era scholarship can still surface in modern research and result in the “Ausbürgerung” (“expulsion”) from Austrian literary history of figures such as the Enlightened assimilated Jew Joseph von Sonnenfels (28).
Whereas the centrality of Vienna’s music to European culture during the later eighteenth century is undisputed, the peculiar tenor of Viennese imaginative writing after Joseph II’s relaxation of censorship in 1780 remains largely unfamiliar, even within the German literary sphere. During Maria Theresa’s rule, censorship of German and non-German authors alike was severe, and the consequences painfully clear: by 1751, Vienna could only muster five or six active creative writers (95). After 1780, however, the “Broschürenflut” of mass-produced, topically themed pamphlets on subjects ranging from the church-state relationship to the trivia of everyday life, was unique to Austria, and played a major role in the emergence of an enlightened, critically aware reading public. Although esthetically insignificant themselves, such pamphlets led to the Viennese Enlightenment novels epitomized by Johann Pezzl’s Faustin oder das philosophische Jahrhundert (1783).
In the book’s central and longest section, Wolf assesses factors that shaped the emergence of a hitherto largely absent literary culture in Vienna. Favoring France over Prussia as a comparator, he examines inter alia the failure of the Habsburgs’ mercantile business model to encourage publishing houses and bookshops; the lack of enthusiasm for German “Belletristik” both at the court and the university; the function of salons and cafés; and perhaps surprisingly, the role of freemasonry in the absence of an academy along Franco-Prussian lines. Visiting Vienna in 1784, the revolutionary German explorer and naturalist Georg Forster noted how the lodge “Zur wahren Eintracht” (“Concordia”) had brought together Vienna’s finest thinkers and writers (133). The subversive grip of the indigenous “Hanswurstkomödie” meant that didactic German Enlightenment drama never took root in Vienna, where Lessing’s domestic tragedy Miß Sara Sampson (1763) was reduced to slapstick (155). In 1772, the emperor twice saw Lessing’s Emilia Galotti and reportedly never laughed so much in his life at a tragedy. Its author was not amused (156).
Rounding off the volume, Wolf analyzes three paradigmatic texts of the Viennese Enlightenment, two of which clearly reveal their French origins. He opens with the freemason Aloys Blumauer’s anti-clerical satire Virgils Aeneis, travestirt (1782–88), a witty and entertaining verse epic based on texts by Paul Scarron and Voltaire. Hugely appreciated far beyond Vienna, it triggered imitations across the German-speaking lands and, by the early 1790s, had been translated into Hungarian and Russian. Only rediscovered in the 1970s, it has been hailed as the most famous and successful Austrian literary text of the eighteenth century (279). Yet, Blumauer and his work remain practically unknown to literary scholars in Germany (298). Next, Wolf examines Johann Pezzl’s anti-clerical Faustin, the exemplary novel of literary Josephinism (299). Indebted to Candide ou l’optimisme (1759), the “Austrian Voltaire’s” novel was itself then translated into French (301). In the preface, Pezzl sketches the familiar Enlightenment targets of his satire—“Aberglaube, Fanatism, Pfaffentrug, Despotendruk und Verfolgungsgeist” (“superstition, fanaticism, clerical deception, despotic pressure, and persecution”) (303), yet the novel itself eulogizes the autocratic Joseph II as a “säkularisierter Salvator” (“secularized savior”) (319). Finally, Wolf discusses Emanuel Schikaneder’s libretto for the “Singspiel” Die Zauberflöte (1791), where the contradictory nature of the “Wiener Aufklärung” is again made plain. Although the broad appeal of Mozart’s score guarantees its lasting popularity, Wolf maintains that to regard Die Zauberflöte as a masterpiece of ‘The Enlightenment’ per se is not tenable. No philosopher, Schikaneder was a theater practitioner who stitched together a text that happened to reflect certain widely held (Viennese) Enlightenment tropes. Schickaneder himself remarked that he wrote not for readers but the stage: “Ich schreibe nicht für Leser; ich schreibe für die Bühne” (340). Instead of trying to coerce its incongruities and contradictions into a cogent whole as others have attempted (e.g., Wolfgang Hildesheimer [1977], Jan Assmann [2018]), Wolf argues that Die Zauberflöte is best regarded as an entertainment tailored for a late-eighteenth-century “Vorstadttheater” in Vienna. It is hard to disagree.
Well-produced and richly illustrated, Glanz und Elend der Aufklärung in Wien is in most respects an impressive achievement. It offers an invaluable “Forschungsbericht” that builds on almost half a century of scholarship since the publication of Tauwetter in Wien. Zur Prosa der österreichischen Aufklärung (1977/95), the landmark study by Holocaust survivor and “antipodal Kakanian Germanist” Leslie (not Lesli) Bodi (416). Wolf consistently expands on this trailblazing work, but unlike Bodi, he does not wear his learning lightly. A “pedantische Gelehrsamkeit” (“scholarly pedanticism”) (195) is never far away, while repeated use of “[sic]” to highlight the perceived lapses of others is wearisome. Nevertheless, Wolf’s weighty study demonstrates well the limitations and achievements of a real and significant “Viennese Enlightenment” while stressing the autonomy of Austrian literature within the Germanophone tradition as a whole.
