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Egon Friedell (1878-1938) | |
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Austrian critic, essayist, cabaret performer, and amateur cultural historian, best known for his brilliant and stimulating magnum opus, A Cultural History of the Modern Age (1927-31). Friedell hoped for a rebirth of Western culture. At the eve of World War II, he committed suicide by jumping from a window of his apartment. The German writer Thomas Mann ranked Friedell as one of the greatest stylists of the German language. "The bioscope is killing human gesticulation, as sound film is killing the human voice - and the same is true of the radio; at the sometime, it is freeing us of the necessity of concentration, and we are now able to enjoy Mozart and sauerkraut, or the Sunday sermon and a game of cards, at one and the same time." (from A Cultural History of the Modern Age, vol. 3, 1931) Egon Friedell was born Egon Friedmann in Vienna, the youngest son of Moriz Friedman, a Jewish cloth manufacturer and Karoline (Eisenberger) Friedmann. Friedell lost both of his parents in his childhood. Shortly after his birth, his mother deserted her family. Moriz Friedmann died in 1891, after which his relatives took care of Friedell, first his aunt, who lived in Frankfurt am Main. Friedell was educated in Frankfurt, Baden near Vienna, Berlin, and Heidelberg. His studies Friedell did not take very seriously. In 1894 he was dismissed from his school and it was not until 1899 when he graduated from secondary school at Bad Hersfeld. A few years earlier he had renounced the Jewish faith. Eventually Friedell converted to Protestantism. At the turn of the century, majority of the liberal, intellectual elite of Vienna was Jewish, and like Friedell, many of them changed their religion. However, in Vienna, as Arthur Schitzler remarked, "it was impossible, especially not for a Jew in public life, to ignore the fact that he was a Jew." Sigmund Freud, whom Friedell criticized for bolstering irrationalism with tools of rationalism, never hid his strong Jewish identity. Friedell's attitude toward Freud was ambivalent. Psychoanalysis had according to Friedell all the characteristics of a religious sect, but on the other hand Friedell acknowledged Freud's achievement in revealing the significance of the unconscious. Friedell studied German literature and philosophy at the University of Heidelberg under the philosopher and historian of philosophy Kuno Fischer, receiving his doctorate in 1904. His dissertation about Lichtenberg (1742-1799) was rejected, but the following attempt, dealing with Novalis' universal science and dedicated to Kuno Fischer, was finally accepted although declared poor. Novalis als Philosoph was printed under the name Fri(e)dell, but officially Friedell changed his name in 1916. From 1905 to 1910 Friedell was the artistic director of the Vienna cabaret Fledermaus, named after Johann Stauss' operetta. His plays, written in collaboration with Alfred Polgar, included Goethe (1908), in which he played the title role, Der Petroleumkönig; oder, Donauzauber (1908), and Soldatenleben im Freden (1910). Goethe, in which the famous author fails an examination in German, gained a huge success and is still being performed. In 1914 Friedell published a translation of Carlyle's On Heroes, Hero Worship and the Heroic History, which emphasizes the role of the individual in history. Friedell, Peter Alternberg, and Polgár were the stars of the literary circle at Café Central. Friedell also wrote a study on Peter Altenberg, Ecce Poeta (1912), and edited a collection of writings, Das Altenbergbuch (1922). Viennese coffeehouses, the meeting places of intellectuals, were laboratories of new ideas. All epoch-making personalities knew each other in this unique world of grand cafés, where professors, writers, musicians, and artists freely argued at tables, enjoying at the same time a cup of coffee and perhaps a strudel. Friedell's other friends included nearly all the major authors of the period, Franz Werfel, Hermann Broch, Robert Musil, Rainer Maria Rilke, Arthur Schnitzler, Hugo von Hofmannsthal. In Vienna Friedell worked also as the codirector of Intimes Theater. Due to his alcohol and weight problems, Friedell spent some time in a sanatorium near Munchen. The outbreak of WW I was greeted all over Europe with joy and celebration. Like a numbrer of writers, Friedell volunteered for military service. However, he was rejected for physical reasons. From 1924 Friedell worked with Max Reinhardt and acted in his productions at the Vienna Burgtheater and in Berlin at the Deutschen Theater. Die Judastragödie (1920), produced in Vienna, portrayed Judas as a hero. It was followed by a prose work, Das Jesusproblem (1921). Friedell's film, drama and literary criticism appeared in such magazines and newspapers as Schaubühne, published in Berlin, Fackel, establised by Karl Kraus, and Neuen Wiener Journal. Friedell also translated or edited works by Emerson, Hebbel, Lichtenberg, Carlyle, Hans Christian Andersen, Johann Nestroy, and Macaulay. Die Reise mit der Zeitmaschine (1946, The Return of the Time Machine), which Friedell wrote in the mid-1930s, was a homage to H.G. Wells's classic science-fiction novel The Time Machine (1895). It included a spoof corresponcence between Friedell and Wells's secretary. Friedell's main interest in his work, which depicts later adventures of Wells's hero, is in the theory of the time machine. Friedell, who wrote self-assuredly about Einstein's relativity theory in A Cultural History of the Modern Age, develops a complex mathematical scheme to prove the ultimate futility of time travel, "the resistance of Earth time". In order to reach the past, one must first travel into the future. A Cultural History of the Modern Age , inspired by H.G. Well's The Outline of History (1920), was dedicated to Max Reinhardt. Its first volume dealt with Renaissance and Reformation, the second Baroque, Enlightenment and the French Revolution, and the third part Romanticism, Liberalism, Imperialism, and Impressionism. Friedell's view is subjective and intuitive – all history is saga and myth and it is nothing more than a difference in degree between historian and poet. "All the classifications man has ever devised are arbitrary, artificial, and false," Friedell wrote, "but simple reflection also shows that such classifications are useful, indispensable, and above all unavoidable since they accord with an innate aspect of our thinking." Following the Hegelian lines of though, Friedell sees his subject basically as a the process of spiritual history. Oswald Spengler's (The Decline of the West, 1918-1922) pessimism and atheism he rejects. From the English writer, historian, and critic Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) Friedell adopted the romantic "great man" theory of history, the hero-worship, totally ignoring its ominous connection with the political reality of his day. Every era and every generation has according to Friedell its own hero, a genius, who personifies the Zeitgeist, the spirit of the age. Nietzsche was for Friedell the epitome of the pre-WW I era. After finishing A Cultural History of the Modern Age Friedell started to work with the two-volume cultural history of antiquity, Kusturgeschichte des Altertums, which he did not complete. However, its first part was published in Zürich in 1936. The Nazis invaded Austria in March 1938 and the country was incorporated into Hitler's Reich. Anti-Semitism broke out in full force. Jewish apartments and synagogues were ransacked and men and women were beaten on the streets. From 1937 Friedell's books had been banned and his position was not only intolerable but he knew he could be arrested by Gestapo. On March 16, 1938, shortly after the "Anschluss" (annexation), Friedell leaped from a window to his death, as he believed that storm troopers were coming up the stairs to his apartment. His last words, according to a dark anecdote, were: "Watch out, please!" For further reading: Encyclopedia of World Literature on the 20th Century, vol. 3, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999); Egon Friedell: Momente im Leben eines Ungewöhnlichen by Wolfgang Lorenz (1994); Egon Friedell by R. Wiseman (1987); Schriftspieler, Schausteller: Die künstlerischen Aktivitäten Egon Friedells by Heribert Illig (1987); The Austrian Mind: An Intellectual and Social History 1848-1938 by William M. Johnston (1983); "Egon"; The Misunderstood Clown. Egon Friedell and His Vienna by G.M. Patterson (1980); Der Partylöwe, der nur Bücher frass by P. Haage (1971); Der junge Friedell by K.P. Denker (1970) - For further information: Die Rückkehr der Zeitmaschine ; www.kabarettarchiv.at Selected works:
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