The aim of this article is to delineate the symbolic position of the Slavonic, and in particular
the Czech, in German-language Austrian culture of the period 1890–1940. My approach will
be informed by psychoanalysis. A subsidiary aim is to try to demonstrate uses of psychoanalysis
in the study of central European culture. What is at issue here is an historical set of social
power relations that find their expression in culture, that is to say, in art and literature, and
that can be interpreted by psychoanalysis. All too often psychoanalysis avoids the social and
the political outside the framework of the individual and her or his predictable traumas
emanating from domestic life.1 This article, however, constitutes an exercise in inter- and
intra-cultural psychoanalysis: intra-cultural as an investigation of psychoanalytic dynamics
within German-language culture; inter-cultural as an examination of the relationship between
German-language and Slav cultures in psychoanalytic terms
