Austrian Intellectual History before the Liberal Era: Grillparzer, Stifter, and Bolzano

Abstract

In 1960, Robert A. Kann pointed out inA Study in Austrian Intellectual History: From Late Baroque to Romanticismthat “[h]istorians of the future will still have to meet the challenging task of writing the comprehensive German-Austrian intellectual history.” The value of the project Kann called for is generally acknowledged, but there is no clear agreement in the field about what a survey of German-Austrian intellectual history should look like. In 2007, I argued in an article forThe Austrian History Yearbookthat the scope of Austrian intellectual history still needs to be circumscribed and characterized adequately—geographically, linguistically, and comparatively. Rather than concentrating on Vienna or extending the field to the whole of the Habsburg monarchy, including Hungary and Galicia, I proposed that we concentrate our approach to this question on the historic core of the Austrian state: the Austrian and Bohemian Crownlands, a unity from at least 1749 to 1918. This was the region where state-building, centralization, and reform were most coherently pursued in the century after 1749, when the German language was dominant in education and public life. I contrasted this view to the disembodied approach to the German intellectual life of the entire Habsburg monarchy, which relies on conventions that were developed for dynastic and diplomatic history, conventions that also work quite well for economic history or even for cultural history, neither of which is so directly dependent on language. The region I have in mind is the southeastern part of the German Confederation that was included in the Frankfurt Parliament in 1848 but excluded from Bismarck's Germany in 1866. The very existence of this region, let alone its long and rich history since the Middle Ages, often gets lost in political narratives of German nationalism and the Habsburg monarchy (Figure 1).