Analysis of information sources in references of the Wikipedia article "Situation Hopeless... But Not Serious" in English language version.
As documented by the Viennese Kraus Archive, it was another Viennese writer, Alfred Polgar, who was the first to coin the phrase, inverting the commonplace 'the situation is serious but not hopeless'
In Berlin the situation is serious but not desperate; in Vienna, the situation is desperate but not serious....The point of the quip is to show the different outlooks of Prussians and Austrians: the first soldiering on to the end in dogged hope, the second in fatalistic acknowledgment that while the curtain may indeed be about to fall, there is no point forgoing life's normal pleasures in the interim.
