Austria with attributes
'El hombre sin atributos' is a huge novel by Robert Musil, unfinished, but completed with the author's manuscripts in successive editions. In it, the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Austrian society, at once Austrian, Austro-Hungarian and also Hungarian, in short, Austria, is the protagonist. Although it is the young Ulrich who embodies this aimless stroll through the last years of the armed peace, weary and gentrified, settled in salons without present or future because science, art, politics and love had become inconsistent. Like a hedonistic Europe in an indolent waiting room in the face of catastrophe. Without energy to respond to the social and strategic challenges that led to the great war. At the end of the order arranged by the European powers, for themselves and their exhausted empires.
This atmosphere, described by Musil, contrasted with the extraordinary cultural and scientific activity that kept Vienna at the forefront of the intelligentsia, albeit with a progressive slowing of its competitiveness. He lived a little as we Europeans today lived before the crisis and the pandemic, thinking of the comforts that allowed us to enjoy our marginality, in the contours of a world running out of steam, without worrying too much about such matters. Peace weariness, it has been called, or a failure to understand and adapt to the changing times. The then self-confident European order, and later the self-absorbed liberal order, would lose some of its attributes, in both cases as a result of unforeseen events.
Nicholas Monu, a Nigerian-born African, is the protagonist of the new production of Othello now being staged in Austria, directed by the Englishman, also black, Rikki Henry. The New York Times reports it on its front page and recalls that since 1853, when an African American, Ira Aldridge, played Shakespeare's tragedy in Vienna, no black actor had starred in it. Perhaps the newspaper takes the opportunity to highlight the contrasts of a confined and under-vaccinated society where there have been uncivilised altercations in recent days, as in Holland, but revitalised by the spirit of cultural avant-garde that it treasures and keeps among its many attributes.
The halls of apathy are often filled with nonsense and uncertainty. Uncertainty turns to fear and bewilderment. Denialists, like so many other bewildered people, get lost among empty identity groups and find themselves in hybrid conflicts, pulled by the strings of a world without barriers. In Austria, as on the Polish and formerly Ukrainian borders, similarly in the UK, Greece or Spain, an atmosphere of constant anguish persists. It is growing and poorly managed by the political weakness of inconsistent leaders. In the midst of the Europe it subdued, pacified and enriched in the past, of the totalitarianisms that tore it apart, of the boundaries that defined it, Austria suffers from the disturbances caused by a disease that plagues Europe, the United States, the West and the liberal order: the ageing and deterioration of democratic attributes.