Biedermeier

   A term with multiple meanings in the cultural history of Austria and Germany, Gottlieb Biedermeier was a totally fictional schoolteacher, pious, dutiful, and placid, the satiric invention of a mid-19th-century Swabian humorist, Ludwig Eichrodt. Following the Revolutions of 1848, the word applied not only to the personalities of those like Mr. Biedermeier himself, but an entire civic culture between 1815 and 1848 in the Austrian Empire. The period is also called the Vormärz, or pre-March, because the revolutions in the Habsburg Empire first erupted in Vienna in that month. The Biedermeier outlook was associated with the middle classes of the time, who allegedly thought far more of personal comfort and private aesthetic satisfactions than of grand schemes for political and intellectual change. The intrusive censorship of the contemporary Habsburg government contributed much to this attitude. These ideals, however, also had a higher philosophical resonance, as shown in the writing of Adalbert Stifter.

   The locus of Biedermeier cultural life was the well-appointed bourgeois home or homelike setting, such as upscale coffeehouses or elaborate countryside picnics. For those of more modest means, there were suburban wine gardens (Heuriger) and dance locales. Indeed, the better-endowed members of society frequented these places, too. Landscape painters such as Ferdinand Waldmüller (1793–1865) and Rudolph von Alt (1812–1905), whose work drew heavily on the English painter Thomas Lawrence, fashioned exquisitely detailed but idealized pastoral scenes that diverted Vienna’s middle classes from changes that modern industrialization was already bringing to the landscape around them. Waldmüller and Friedrich von Amerling (1803–1887), among several notable painters, did miniatures for which the subjects as well as the patrons came from the bourgeois families of the day.

   The furniture styles of the era juxtaposed classically graceful lines and pronounced lines, which were often reinforced by bentwood components. Highly polished veneers, metal filigree ornamentation, and bright colors further heightened the sharp appearance of these products. The first luxury home furnishing store to be opened in Vienna, run by a designer of the period, Josef Ulrich Danhauser, featured such items, along with table, tea, and coffee services. Subsequent schools of Viennese art and design, most notably the Secession and the Wiener Werkstätte, consciously exploited many of these patterns. Biedermeier styles are still incorporated into contemporary Austrian interior decoration; original Biedermeier artifacts can be very valuable.

   Despite all that Habsburg officials did to suppress intellectual originality, the period 1815–1848 was a high point in Austrian music, literature, and art. The Society of the Friends of Music, founded in 1812 as a private organization by a group of music-lovers, continues to sponsor concerts of the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra. The composer Franz Schubert and the playwrights Franz Grillparzer, Ferdinand Raimund, and Johann Nestroy, exasperated though they often were with their restrictive environment, worked brilliantly in it.

   See also Architecture; Metternich, Klemens Wenzel Nepomuk Lothar, Prince of.