“Imperialism of the Spirit”: Fictions of Totality and the Self in Austrian Modernism

Abstract

In Austrian Studies, the debate continues as to whether postcolonial theory is applicable to the Hapsburg monarchy. This article seeks to contribute to this debate by analysing discursive structures common to the continental empires rooted in medieval structures and to modern colonial empires, as well as critically assessing some of their specificities. To this end, I analyse the Utopia of an “Imperialism of the Spirit” present in the essays of two central Viennese modernists, Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Robert Müller, demonstrating the discursive construction of a particular kind of imperialism and nationalism based on culture and the arts. I further show, focusing on Robert Müller’s and Robert Musil’s major novels, how imperialism functions as a fulcrum of the complex relation of modernist literature with the paradigm of modernity. At the same time, imperialism is also the object of critique and rewriting in the context of the resolution of the many crises of modernity, especially that of the Subject.