While recent scholarship stresses the modernism of the literature of Viennese Modernism, in the 1960s Claudio Magris highlighted its fundamental regressivity – a diagnosis that today may appear surprising. The following contribution seeks to explore why the young Magris focused on the retrospective sentimentality of modern Austrian culture rather than its forward-looking traits. This will be investigated through the reconstruction of the intellectual tradition within which he developed his thesis of the “Habsburg myth”.
