Michael Haneke wins the Palme D’ Or again. Austria. The perplexing, contradictory and often ambiguous battle ground between the liberal enlightenment, the tradition of Vltaire and Diderot and its almost strange complicity in producing a counter-Enlightenment in the person of Heidegger. This mish-mash Austro-Hungarian empire that could produce a Kafka, a Freud, and a Hayek. That witch’s brew really began during the reign of Maria Theresa, and the subsequent series of psychotic breaks that the Romantic age would engender. This was neo-Classicism and the beginning of bourgeois mass culture which would ultimately trigger the patterns of collapse that Haneke is so deft at representing; the conflict between the id and ego, and the pressures leading to the latter’s implosion. Freaks of nature, fantasies are produced, and perverse pleasures become the even stranger pleasures of madness…
---Would you speak to your conception of the family as it is portrayed La Pianiste? I wanted first of all to describe the bourgeois setting, and to establish the family as the germinating cell for all conflicts. I always want to describe the world that I know, and for me the family is the locus of the miniature war, the first site of all warfare. The larger political-economic site is what one usually associates with warfare, but the everyday site of war in the family is as murderous in its own way, whether between parents and children or wife and husband. If you start exploring the concept of family in Western society you can't avoid realizing that the family is the origin of all conflicts.---Read More:http://www.kinoeye.org/04/01/interview01.php image: http://www.artnet.com/magazineus/features/kuspit/franz-xaver-messerschmidt10-7-10_detail.asp?picnum=4
Before long gossip got about that the Emperor Franz was flirting, that there were private, very amusing supper parties with a pretty dancer. It was not a delicate age and morals in Vienna were far from tidy. Comedy both on stage and off was apt to be coarser and bawdier than either in England or in France. Such an event as the birth of an heir to the throne could be greeted with exceedingly gross public utterances. Some of Mozart’s songs, written for the amusement of his friends in merry evenings at home, are, like the scatological letters to his little cousin in Augsburg, scarcely printable, but they are not at all out of keeping with the age and place.
Perhaps her husband’s peccadilloes provoked the Empress’s innate puritanism into action. Her decision was on a typically imperial scale: she would simply abolish vice throughout her realm. She was perfectly sure she could rule morals as efficiently as she handled taxationand supplies for the army. And so in 1747 she proceeded to set up a Chastity Commission, its purpose simply to enforce virtue in public and private.
Chastity police were posted at theatres and ballrooms. They patrolled the streets with orders to arrest girls found walking alone. At the Austrian borders they ransacked the luggage of travelers and even went through diplomatic mailbags to extract naughty books- or the works of the French philosophers.Prostitutes were transported to southern Hungary, where a possibly unique village was said to have been populated entirely with the banished ladies. Streetwalkers learned quickly to avoid arrest by walking demurely, head down, ostentatiously fingering a rosary.
---Studio of Court Painter Martin van Meytens: The Coronation Banquet of Joseph II in the Römer in Frankfurt, oil painting, after 1764 © Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien /Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna---Read More:http://english.habsburger.net/module-en/alte-zeiten-2013-neue-zeiten-die-kroenung-josephs-ii-in-frankfurt/die-kroenung-josephs-ii-in-frankfurt/MB-ST_R1-MOD1-02.jpg/?size=preview&plus=1
Casanova visited Vienna just then with a mistress on whom he had bestowed the gratuitous title of countess. The day after their arrival they were surprised at breakfast by a visit from the chastity police , and when Casanova admitted that he was a bachelor, he was forced to move immediately into separate quarters. Ruefully, he wrote that “there was plenty of money and plenty of luxury in Vienna, but the bigotry of the Empress made Cytherean pleasures extremely difficult.” It can be said that Casanova did not know the ropes; the mistresses had now morphed into “chambermaids.”
Certainly, the Chastity Commission did not deter in the least the Empress’s own husband. During the carnival season of 1756 Franz took as his mistress a gray-eyed beauty of the court, Princess Wilhelmina Auersperg. The attachment lasted until his death ten years later…
Wilhelm Reich: Our politicians, however, are far from having such natural reactions. One might rightly say that it is of the essence of the world of the politicos not to learn from experience. Austrian monarchism kindled the first world war in 1914; then, it engaged in armed warfare against the American democrats. In the second world war, in 1942, it demanded, with the aid of American politicians, to have the
Hapsburg dynasty reinstated, in order “to avoid new wars.” This is irrational political nonsense.Read More:http://www.whale.to/b/reich.pdf
--- from Wilhelm Reich:"The most visible results of this mass contamination can, on the one hand, be found in the insane asylums, and on the other, unfortunately, in our—children. They in particular are the sad product of the irresistibly spreading contamination of our sexual life; the vices of the parents are revealed in the sicknesses of the children." The "vices of the parents" means only one thing here: that they mingled with Jewish blood, whereby the Jewish "world plague" found its way into the "pure" Aryan blood. It is remarkable how closely linked is this theory of pollution with the political thesis of the pollution of Germanism by the "world Jew Karl Marx." The irrational fear of syphilis is the most potent source of National Socialist political Weltanschauung and antisemitism. The logical goal is then, of course, the purity of the race, the purity of the blood. Hitler emphasized again and again that the approach to the masses should not be by way of knowledge, arguments and proof, but only by emotions and belief. The language of National Social
as exemplified by Kayserling, Driesch, Rosenberg, Stapel and others, is so mystical and nebulous that this characteristic deserves a special analysis. The question is, what is behind this fascist mysticism which so greatly fascinated the masses? Read More:http://www.whale.to/b/reich.pdf image:http://english.habsburger.net/module-en/angelo-soliman/angelo-soliman/MB-ST_G5-MOD1-02.jpg/?size=preview&plus=1
ADDENDUM:
Wilhelm Reich:The violence and the ubiquity of these “race prejudices” show their origin from the irrational part of the human character. The race theory is not a creation of fascism. No: fascism is a creation of race hatred and its politically organized expression. Correspondingly, there is a German, Italian, Spanish, Anglo-Saxon, Jewish and Arabian fascism. The race ideology is a true biopathic character symptom of the orgastically impotent individual. The sadistic perverse character of the race ideology is also seen in the attitude toward religion. Fascism, we are told, is the [xi] arch-enemy of religion, and a regression to paganism. On the contrary, fascism is the extreme expression of religious mysticism. As such it appears in a specific social form. Fascism is based on that religiosity which stems from sexual perversion; it changes the masochistic character of the old patriarchal religions into a sadistic religion. It takes religion out of the other-world philosophy of suffering and places it in the sadistic murder in this world.
Fascist mentality is the mentality of the subjugated “little man” who craves authority and rebels against it at the same time. It is not by accident that all fascist dictators stem from the milieu of the little reactionary man. The captains of industry and the feudal militarist make use of this social fact for their own purposes. A mechanistic authoritarian civilization only reaps, in the form of fascism, from the little, suppressed man what for hundreds of years it has sown in the masses of little, suppressed individuals in the form of mysticism, top-sergeant mentality and automatism. This little man has only too well learned the way of the big man and now gives it back, enlarged and distorted. The Fascist is the top-sergeant type in the vast army of our sick civilization. Read More:http://www.whale.to/b/reich.pdf
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