Psychopathia Sexualis clearly foreshadowed some aspects of psychoanalysis. Krafft-Ebing acknowledged that sex, like religion, could be sublimated in art – both could ‘enflame the imagination.’ ‘What other foundation is there for the plastic arts of poetry? From (sensual) love arises that warmth of fancy which alone can inspire the creative mind, and the fire of sensual feeling kindles and preserves the glow and fervour of art.’41 For Krafft-Ebing, sex within religion (and therefore within marriage) offered the possibility of ‘rapture through submission,’ and it was this process in perverted form that he regarded as the aetiology for the pathology of masochism. Krafft-Ebing’s ideas were even more of a halfway house than Freud’s, but for a society grappling with the threat that science posed to religion, any theory that dealt with the pathology of belief and its consequences was bound to fascinate, especially if it involved sex. Given those theories, Krafft-Ebing might have been more sympathetic to Freud’s arguments when they came along; but he could never reconcile himself to the controversial notion of infantile sexuality. He became one of Freud’s loudest critics.
The dominant architecture in Vienna was the Ringstrasse. Begun in the mid-nineteenth century, after Emperor Franz Joseph ordered the demolition of the old city ramparts and a huge swath of space was cleared in a ring around the centre, a dozen monumental buildings were erected over the following fifty years in this ring. They included the Opera, the Parliament, the Town Hall, parts of the university, and an enormous church. Most were embellished with fancy stone decorations, and it was this ornateness that provoked a reaction, first in Otto Wagner, then in Adolf Loos.
Otto Wagner (1841–1918) won fame for his ‘Beardsleyan imagination’ when he was awarded a commission in 1894 to build the Vienna underground railway.42 This meant more than thirty stations, plus bridges, viaducts, and other urban structures. Following the dictum that function determines form, Wagner broke new ground by not only using modern materials but showing them. For example, he made a feature of the iron girders in the construction of bridges. These supporting structures were no longer hidden by elaborate casings of masonry, in the manner of the Ringstrasse, but painted and left exposed, their utilitarian form and even their riveting lending texture to whatever it was they were part of.43 Then there were the arches Wagner designed as entranceways to the stations – rather than being solid, or neoclassical and built of stone, they reproduced the skeletal form of railway bridges or viaducts so that even from a long way off, you could tell you were approaching a station.44 Warming to this theme, his other designs embodied the idea that the modern individual, living his or her life in a city, is always in a hurry, anxious to be on his or her way to work or home. The core structure therefore became the street, rather than the square or vista or palace. For Wagner, Viennese streets should be straight, direct; neighbourhoods should be organised so that workplaces are close to homes, and each neighbourhood should have a centre, not just one centre for the entire city. The facades of Wagner’s buildings became less ornate, plainer, more functional, mirroring what was happening elsewhere in life. In this way Wagner’s style presaged both the Bauhaus and the international movement in architecture.45
Adolf Loos (1870–1933) was even more strident. He was close to Freud and to Karl Kraus, editor of Die Fackel, and the rest of the crowd at the Café Griensteidl, and his rationalism was different from Wagner’s – it was more revolutionary, but it was still rationalism. Architecture, he declared, was not art. ‘The work of art is the private affair of the artist. The work of art wants to shake people out of their comfortableness [Bequemlichkeit], The house must serve comfort. The art work is revolutionary, the house conservative.’46 Loos extended this perception to design, clothing, even manners. He was in favour of simplicity, functionality, plainness. He thought men risked being enslaved by material culture, and he wanted to reestablish a ‘proper’ relationship between art and life. Design was inferior to art, because it was conservative, and when he understood the difference, man would be liberated. ‘The artisan produced objects for use here and now, the artist for all men everywhere.’47
The ideas of Weininger and Loos inhabit a different kind of halfway house from those of Hofmannsthal and Husserl. Whereas the latter two were basically sceptical of science and the promise it offered, Weininger especially, but Loos too, was carried away with rationalism. Both adopted scientistic ideas, or terms, and quickly went beyond the evidence to construct systems that were as fanciful as the nonscientific ideas they disparaged. The scientific method, insufficiently appreciated or understood, could be mishandled, and in the Viennese halfway house it was.
Nothing illustrates better this divided and divisive way of looking at the world in turn-of-the-century Vienna than the row over Gustav Klimt’s paintings for the university, the first of which was delivered in 1900. Klimt, born in Baumgarten, near Vienna, in 1862, was, like Weininger, the son of a goldsmith. But there the similarity ended. Klimt made his name decorating the new buildings of the Ringstrasse with vast murals. These were produced with his brother Ernst, but on the latter’s death in 1892 Gustav withdrew for five years, during which time he appears to have studied the works of James Whistler, Aubrey Beardsley, and, like Picasso, Edvard Munch. He did not reappear until 1897, when he emerged at the head of the Vienna Secession, a band of nineteen artists who, like the impressionists in Paris and other artists at the Berlin Secession, eschewed the official style of art and instead followed their own version of art nouveau. In the German lands this was known as Jugendstil.48
Klimt’s new style, bold and intricate at the same time, had three defining characteristics – the elaborate use of gold leaf (using a technique he had learned from his father), the application of small flecks of iridescent colour, hard like enamel, and a languid eroticism applied in particular to women. Klimt’s paintings were not quite Freudian: his women were not neurotic, far from it. They were calm, placid, above all lubricious, ‘the instinctual life frozen in art.’49 Nevertheless, in drawing attention to women’s sensuality, Klimt hinted that it had hitherto gone unsatisfied. This had the effect of making the women in his paintings threatening. They were presented as insatiable and devoid of any sense of sin. In portraying women like this, Klimt was subverting the familiar way of thinking every bit as much as Freud was. Here were women capable of the perversions reported in Krafft-Ebing’s book, which made them tantalising and shocking at the same time. Klimt’s new style immediately divided Vienna, but it quickly culminated in his commission for the university.
Three large panels had been asked for: Philosophy, Medicine and Jurisprudence. All three provoked a furore but the rows over Medicine and Jurisprudence merely repeated the fuss over Philosophy. For this first picture the commission stipulated as a theme ‘the triumph of Light over Darkness.’ What Klimt actually produced was an opaque, ‘deliquescent tangle’ of bodies that appear to drift past the onlooker, a kaleidoscopic jumble of forms that run into each other, and all surrounded by a void. The professors of philosophy were outraged. Klimt was vilified as presenting ‘unclear ideas through unclear forms. ‘50 Philosophy was supposed to be a rational affair; it ‘sought the truth via the exact sciences.’51 Klimt’s vision was anything but that, and as a result it wasn’t wanted: eighty professors collaborated in a petition that demanded Klimt’s picture never be shown at the university. The painter responded by returning his fee and never presenting the remaining commissions. Unforgivably, they were destroyed in 1945 when the Nazis burned Immendorf Castle, where they were stored during World War II.52 The significance of the fight is that it brings us back to Hofmannsthal and Schnitzler, to Husserl and Brentano. For in the university commission, Klimt was attempting a major statement. How can rationalism succeed, he is asking, when the irrational, the instinctive, is such a dominant part of life? Is reason really the way forward? Instinct is an older, more powerful force. Yes, it may be more atavistic, more primitive, and a dark force at times. But where is the profit in denying it? This remained an important strand in Germanic thought until World War II.