Defining Deutschtum

Abstract

Abstract Defining Deutschtum: Political Ideology, German Identity, and Music-Critical Discourse in Liberal Vienna Defining Deutschtum offers a nuanced look at the intersection of music, cultural identity, and political ideology in Liberal Vienna by examining music-critical writing about Carl Goldmark, Antonín Dvořák, and Bedřich Smetana, three notable composers of the day who were Austrian citizens but not ethnic Germans. Vienna’s critics are treated here as agents within the public sphere whose writing gave voice to distinct ideological positions on the question of who could be deemed “German” in the multinational Austrian state. Historian Pieter M. Judson’s perspective on Austro-German liberalism as an evolving but always exclusionary ideology provides a suggestive approach to interpreting this music-critical discourse. For Eduard Hanslick and Ludwig Speidel, German liberal nationalists who came of age around 1848, Germanness was theoretically available to any ambitious Bürger, including Jews and those of non-German nationality, who professed German cultural values. The national liberalism that characterized the work of the younger Theodor Helm was an outgrowth of the tensions between Germans and Czechs that first flared up in the 1860s. Later came a new generation of Wagnerian critics whose racialist antisemitism and irredentist German nationalism reflected the radical student politics of the 1880s. The critical reception of the three composers in question reveals a continuum of exclusivity, from a conception of Germanness rooted in social class and cultural elitism to one based in blood. The book thus offers insight into how educated German Austrians conceived of Germanness in music and understood their relationship to the “non-Germans” in their midst.

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