Anton Cebalo at Aeon Magazine:
Young Vienna was indebted to one man who seemed to be speaking directly to their condition. In the 1890s, the philosopher and physicist Ernst Mach developed a devoted following by asserting that the self is a ‘convenient fiction’. Mach seemed to confirm the impressionistic impulse arriving from Paris: sensory life was a means for understanding one’s fractured interiority. Altenberg likened his own writing to a kind of ‘telegram-style of the soul’. Mach was giving this style an empirical basis, and his words electrified Young Vienna. For them, whose literary life was defined by happenstance and instability, to write and live in the coffeehouse was to embody Mach’s ideas. Art had to be reinvented to suit this new sense of self. Young Vienna took up these ideas passionately through aphoristic writing, semi-journalistic feuilletons of daily life and sketches – composing their works in the coffeehouses they haunted.
As Vienna enjoyed the security to write freely, one critic felt otherwise. Karl Kraus is remembered as a firebrand satirist who began his career lambasting the Viennese literary scene that congregated around Café Griensteidl (often pejoratively called ‘Café Megalomania’).
more here.
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