“Fernbild”: On Otto Friedlaender Writing Vienna 1900 in Vienna 1938–1942/45

Abstract

Th ey nostalgically, but also critically, evoke the Habsburg myth of the mutually sustaining powers of Empire and Church and thus of the empire's spiritual unity through the shift ing lens, his "Standpunkt," as he puts it, of inner exile between 1938 and 1945. To the best of my knowledge, neither book has received any critical att ention. I introduce them here by way of asking several questions about this author and his texts: Who was Ott o Friedlaender? What connects his variants of the Habsburg myth? What are the roles of image and word in them? In answering these questions, I argue that, rather than one-sidedly aligning nostalgia with image and critique with word, Friedlaender invests image and word together and dialectically with both. Th e main focus of this essay will be Letzter Glanz (1948), occasionally compared to its pendant, Wolken drohen (1949). Th roughout I will att end to the visuality of the two books, which is emphasized in their subtitles and is central to Friedlaender's technique of spatial and temporal layering of past and present. To do this I will avail myself of the concept of the "Fernbild" fi rst introduced to art theoretical discourse by the sculptor Adolf von Hildebrandt (1847-1921) in his infl uential book Das Problem der Form (1893) and then adopted in art historical language and also in Walter Benjamin's cultural criticism. 1 In a nutshell, the "Fernbild" oscillates between, on the one hand, temporal and spatial distance, and, on the