A Delicate Task. Theaters of Diplomacy in Austria

This cultural historical course through Austrian diplomatic poetics begins with the attempts of Maria Theresia and her allies to modernize the imperial diplomatic corps through the techniques of Jesuit theatre employed in their newly formed academy. Then, it will move from Franz Grillparzer’s popular historical dramas enacted under imperial censorship at the Burgtheater to Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s phantasmagorical mourning-play Der Turm (1928). Marking an astonishing return to the baroque world-theater, Hofmannsthal’s apocalyptic final play questions the uneasy secularization of political thought in the new and brittle postwar republic. Far from its origins, diplomacy nevertheless remains, in the words of Walter Benjamin, ›a delicate task‹ whose future demands to be reimagined.