The Idea of Central Europe and Conservative Austrians of Jewish Origin: Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Leopold von Andrian and Otto Maria Karpfen (Carpeaux)

Abstract

In the context of modern European nation states, the Habsburg Empire was an anachronism. Its multi-ethnic and multicultural conception, however, guaranteed a peaceful, equal coexistence that was appreciated by various minorities, especially by the Jews. After the end of the First World War, these remained in the new nation state of German Austria or the Republic of Austria as a kind of minority without minority status. In the idea of „Central Europe“, a substantial part of the ideology that had held the empire together at the end of 19th century survived. It found its way into the nostalgic elements of a new identity of those Austrians who were resistant to the pan-German tendencies, but was also held by conservative Catholic intellectuals of Jewish origin who were looking for a bastion against anti-Semitic and ultra-nationalist tendencies. Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Leopold von Andrian and Otto Maria Karpfen (Carpeaux) developed political ideas that seem extremely conservative and even anachronistic from today’s perspective. At a closer look, however, it becomes clear that the Mitteleuropa idea forms a humanistic core within the anti-modern gesture, a specific kind of resistance to the totalitarian wave of the 1930s. This article attempts to trace the particular nature of the three conceptions in their specificity as well as their unifying features.