The “Catholic Enlightenment” and the Emergence of Austrian Literature

While Regional Literatures Vied for Prominence in the larger cultural setting of German-speaking territories, two trends shaped the development of German-language literature in the eighteenth century. One the one hand there was a trend toward linguistic standardization. On this level the exchange of books, opinions, and literary criticism formed a common ground for German-language literature. It meant that literary texts from Schleswig-Holstein could also be discussed by Swiss readers, and someone (like the enlightened reformer and writer Joseph von Sonnenfels [1733/34–1817]) polemicizing in Vienna could be severely criticized at Wolfenbüttel (by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing). The second trend manifested itself in a divergence of literary tastes in various regions and in the rise of regional literatures. As the major German-speaking territories — above all Switzerland, Austria, Prussia, Saxony, Bavaria with the Palatinate, and Brunswick with Lüneburg) — moved toward political independence, they developed their own cultural identities, and by the late eighteenth century we can speak of two new national literatures in the German language: Swiss and Austrian. This essay outlines the development of an Austrian national literature in the eighteenth century.

Within the Habsburg Empire, the literary culture of Enlightenment and Sensibility took on a form different from that of the German Protestant territories with their cultural centers in Hamburg, Frankfurt, Leipzig, and Berlin. Because both German Enlightenment and “sensibility” were shaped largely by Protestantism and Pietism, considerations of the Enlightenment are often — erroneously—restricted to the Protestant territories. But such a narrow focus overlooks the Catholic south of Germany where French, Italian, and German influences converged, allowing a special form of “Catholic Enlightenment” to develop. The Catholic Enlightenment reached its peak under Emperor Joseph II (1780–1790) and was dubbed “Josephinismus,” a hotly debated, seemingly liberal phase in Austrian political and literary culture.

The major opponent of Enlightenment and Josephinism was the conservative faction of the Catholic Church, represented in particular by the majority of Jesuits. The Church had not only acquired immense material possessions within the countries ruled by the Habsburgs, but was also involved in a multiplicity of public and private affairs . The Church provided the symbolic trappings of everyday life and of festivals, as is evidenced by the pilgrimage churches, mount Calvaries (open-air representations of Christ’s crucifixion), and wayside chapels still present in the southern German cultural landscape today.