Publication details
Postimperiales im bürgerlichen Imperium der "prächtigen Menschen". Ludwig Winders Roman Die rasende Rotationsmaschine (1917)
| Title in English | Post-imperialism in the bourgeois empire of the ‘splendid people’. Ludwig Winder's novel Die rasende Rotationsmaschine (1917) |
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| Year of publication | 2024 |
| Type | Chapter of a book |
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| Description | In the middle of the First World War, Winder formulates a radical scepticism towards the educated bourgeois sphere of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy in the character of Theodor Glaser, the ruthless, power-obsessed newspaper man in the novel Die rasende Rotationsmaschine (1917). Although Glaser still operates on the outline of Austria-Hungary and adapts very well to its cultural milieu on the surface, he is guided by extreme antagonism towards this model of society, culture and knowledge. With it, the empire ends a few decades before its actual political end, primarily as a late bourgeois subject form. This is the subject of Glaser's most vehement attack. Paradoxically, this attack is motivated by the nexus of pre- and post-bourgeois subject models. The Eastern Jewish determinism, long unspoken and even longer unreflected by Glaser, is overlaid by radically modern, Nietzschean fantasies of power. Here, the empire is stripped of its basis of existence through the intervention of the extreme Eastern Jewish periphery and actors of extreme modernity, who are represented by the functioning of the capitalist mass press. |
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