1
The Enlightenment
The Enlightenment in Austria was the project of an elite of state officials and lawyers for
which Maria Theresa’s administrative renewal had paved the way. The ‘Josephine decade’,
lasting from 1780 to the death of Joseph II in 1790, was marked by fundamental reforms. The
Patent of Toleration provided for an equal recognition of all religions as early as 1781, while
an ‘extended freedom of the press’ ensured a liberalisation with regard to censorship. Austria
was regarded a model country in terms of enlightened absolutism: such German writers as
Lessing and Wieland even considered moving to Vienna. Among the population, however,
these radical measures met with resistance.
The decision to establish (high) German as the official language throughout the multi-ethnic
Habsburg Empire had far-reaching consequences for literature. The Burgtheater was
proclaimed ‘German National Theatre’, and Mozart was entrusted with establishing the
‘Singspiel’, a form of German-language musical drama. Writers like Franz Christoph von
Scheyb based their work on the teachings of Johann Christoph Gottsched, a reformer of the
German language. Joseph von Sonnenfels, Austria’s most prominent leader of the Illuminati
movement, responded to criticism of the local situation expressed by the younger Berlinbased Illuminati around Friedrich Nicolai with his own weekly moral newspaper: Der Mann
ohne Vorurtheil (The Man without Prejudice) made use of the figure of the uncivilised
stranger, a popular character during the Enlightenment, to comment upon the status quo.
The Illuminati of Germany also showed little appreciation for the preference of Austrian
authors for parody and such ‘bouffonerie’ as Franz Xaver Huber’s Der blaue Esel (The Blue
Ass) or the continuation of Voltaire’s Candide in Johann Pezzl’s Faustin.
Subchapter 1:
Wicked ‘Hanswurst’
The figure of ‘Hanswurst’ (a German-speaking version of Punch) appeared in improvised
comedies from the sixteenth century onwards and was originally a hybrid between the astute
Arlecchino from the Italian commedia dell’arte and the meddlesome German ‘Pickelhering’
(Pickle Herring). The figure became famous through Joseph Anton Stranitzky. His
‘Hanswurst’ was a ‘pork and cabbage cutter’ from Salzburg – a subversive figure that
annoyed both language reformers and censorship authorities. Stranitzky’s successor Gottfried
Prehauser removed the figure from its rural background, so that eventually ‘Hanswurst’ was
able to slip into a great variety of roles.
The ‘Hanswurst’ controversy reached its acme with Felix von Kurz playing Bernardon, a
servant. The hardship allowances he received for blows and kicks attest to the bawdiness of
his ‘Benardoniades’. The liberalisation of theatrical spectacle in 1776 led to the opening of a
great number of theatres, including the Leopoldstadt Theatre, where Johann La Roche’s
distinctly less anarchic ‘Kasperl’ became an audience favourite. Philipp Hafner’s
‘Hanswurstiades’ were a further step towards educational bourgeois comedy.
Subchapter 2:
Sailing against the Wind
If Leopold II still had had figures of the Enlightenment among his advisors, Francis II sought
to rigorously suffocate its spirit from 1792 onwards, under the influence of the French
Revolution. In the Jacobin Trials of 1794/95, many proponents of the Enlightenment were
sentenced to long prison terms, some of them even to death. On 8 January 1795, Franz
Hebenstreit, known as the ‘Jacobin of Vienna’, was executed by hanging because of high
treason.
Those in power preferred to ‘rule as it was the fashion one hundred years ago’, Johann Baptist
Alxinger wrote to Christoph Martin Wieland in 1792, adding: ‘Censorship is also stricter than
ever, and Joseph’s great spirit has deserted us completely.’
Among those convicted was also Martin Joseph Prandstätter, who died in prison in 1798. In
1780 he had been the editor of the Wienerischer Musen Almanach (Viennese Muses Almanac),
launched by Joseph Franz Ratschky and Gottlieb Leon in 1777 as a platform for Austrian
literature. Aloys Blumauer, who merely received a reprimand during the trials, continued the
periodical until 1796.
2
In Napoleon’s Shadow
As a consequence of Austria’s joining the War of the Third Coalition against Napoleon in
1805, Vienna came to be occupied by the French for a period of two months. In 1809, Austria
once again armed for war against Napoleon. In the Battles of Bergisel, the Tyrolean Rebellion,
led by Andreas Hofer, held its ground against Napoleon’s troops and their Bavarian allies. A
poem by Julius Mosen, a German author of Jewish descent, about the execution of Andreas
Hofer still serves as the text for today’s Tyrolean anthem. When the French marched towards
Vienna again in early May 1809, a militia including the young Franz Grillparzer offered
resistance. Several weeks later, Archduke Carl managed to defeat Napoleon for the first time.
Nikolaus Lenau was to write later on: ‘Nobody forgot what Aspern’s rolling thunder had
spoken […], for Napoleon’s magic touch was broken’. Yet in July 1809, the Austrian troops
were beaten by Napoleon in the Battle of Wagram. Following the Napoleonic Wars, Europe
was politically reorganised at the Congress of Vienna in 1814/15. In the course of the conflict,
numerous patriotic poems had been published, such as Heinrich Joseph von Collin’s
Wehrmannslieder (Songs of a Soldier). Adolf Bäuerle’s burlesque Die Bürger in Wien (The
Citizens of Vienna) of 1813, introducing the character of the umbrella-maker Chrysostomus
Staberl to popular theatre, deals with the city’s occupation in a satirical manner. It was
followed one year later by a further burlesque, Die Fremden in Wien (Foreigners in Vienna),
featuring Habersack, a landlord who seeks to make money by renting rooms to delegates at
the Congress of Vienna.
The fascination for Napoleon as the epitome of a successful broker of power inspired literary
production time and again – one example being Ernst Jandl’s deconstruction of the Napoleon
myth in the sound poem ode auf n (ode to n).
3
Moving while Standing Still: The Biedermeier
In 1814/15, following the Napoleonic Wars, Europe was politically restructured at the
Congress of Vienna. Its goal was to restore the status quo that had existed before the French
Revolution. Prince Metternich played a prominent role in the organisation of the Congress,
and, in the Carlsbad Decrees of 1819, achieved the wholesale restriction of political activities.
National and liberal movements were rigorously suppressed. The freedom of the press and of
universities was considerably curtailed, and publications of all kinds were censored severely.
Citizens withdrew to family life and the domestic sphere, with walks in nature signifying a
new lifestyle of modesty.
The ambivalent attitude towards life in the Biedermeier period found expression in Franz
Grillparzer’s fairy-tale drama Der Traum ein Leben (The Dream Is Life), which premiered in
1834: escaping the narrow-mindedness of life as an idyllic reality is only possible in a dream,
which becomes a nightmare and ends in a reconciliation with the circumstances. Nikolaus
Lenau wrote in German, but saw himself as a Hungarian author. The work of Lenau, the most
outstanding Austrian poet of his time, combines pessimism and criticism. In his Schilflieder
(Songs of the Reeds) of 1832, a cycle of poems, a melancholic atmosphere prevails. The
theatre offered itself as a surrogate for the active participation of the population in politics.
Performances of the plays by Ferdinand Raimund and Johann Nestroy were extremely
popular. Despite austere censorship, Nestroy succeeded in directing verbal blows towards
Metternich and the authoritarian state. Anastasius Grün openly criticised the system of
government in his volume of poetry Spaziergänge eines Wiener Poeten (Walks of a Viennese
Poet) of 1831, which was published anonymously. Charles Sealsfield’s fictitious travel report
Austria As It Is, published in London in 1828, is a harsh and reproachful analysis of his native
country.
Subchapter 1:
Johann Nestroy
The fantasies, local farces, and parodies by the playwright and satirist Johann Nestroy still
number among the plays staged most frequently in the German-speaking area. Nestroy started
out as an actor and singer. After several guest performances in Amsterdam and Pressburg
(Bratislava), theatre director Carl Carl called him to the Theater an der Wien in 1831. Nestroy
had his greatest successes at the Leopoldstadt Theatre, which, in 1847, was festively reopened
under the new name of Carltheater. In 1854, Nestroy became its director.
His plays, such as the classics Der böse Geist Lumpacivagabundus oder Das liederliche
Kleeblatt (The Evil Spirit Lumpazivagabundus or The Roguish Trio) of 1833, Der Talisman
(The Talisman) of 1840, Einen Jux will er sich machen (A Day Well Spent) of 1842, and Der
Zerrissene (A Man Full of Nothing) of 1844, are characterised by caustic wit, irony, satire,
and absurd humour. Nestroy played the leading roles himself and sometimes even personified
several characters. Censors considered him a nuisance: in 1836 he was forced to serve several
days in prison for extemporising, which was forbidden.
Well-known English adaptations of Einen Jux will er sich machen (A Day Well Spent) are:
The Merchant of Yonkers (1938) and The Matchmaker (1955) by Thorton Wilder and On the
Razzle (1981) by Tom Stoppard.
Subchapter 2:
Ferdinand Raimund
Ferdinand Raimund started his career with several small engagements at the Josefstadt
Theatre in Vienna in 1814. Besides his being an actor he also worked as a stage director and
wrote his first plays. From 1817 onwards, he performed at the Leopoldstadt Theatre, whose
director he was between 1828 and 1830. Raimund repeatedly suffered from depression. In
1836, having been bitten by a dog, he feared to have contracted rabies. He attempted suicide
and died several days later as a result of it.
Raimund’s fantastic fairy tales revolve around fortune, contentment, moderation, and
relinquishment and end up in the utopia of a well-ordered world of love and freedom. Unlike
Johann Nestroy, he did not openly criticise the social circumstances. Raimund believed in
man’s improvement through education and a virtuous life. His most well-known plays include
Das Mädchen aus der Feenwelt oder Der Bauer als Millionär (The Girl from the Fairy World
or The Peasant Millionaire) of 1826, Der Alpenkönig und der Menschenfeind (The King of
the Alps and the Misanthrope) of 1828, and Der Verschwender (The Spendthrift) of 1834.
4
Franz Grillparzer: Writer and Civil Servant
A few days after Franz Grillparzer’s death in 1872, the author Ferdinand Kürnberger wrote an
obituary, cautioning against the poet’s posthumous misappropriation: ‘And this is the mask of
Grillparzer’s life: sent as a blazing thunderstorm to purify the country’s air, he moves across
Austria a small cloud, wet and grey, its edges trimmed with the purple of evening light. And
the cloud is about to collapse!’ A melancholic and a sceptic, Grillparzer, who had described
the distribution of power – including that between men and women – and written about
violence, individual megalomania, and nationalist blindness, became an Austrian classic:
praised by many and read only by few.
Grillparzer first tried to obtain a position in the imperial court library in 1811; but his dreams
of becoming a librarian imploded. In 1815 he entered the civil service working in the Court
Chamberlain’s Office, the future ministry of finance, and in 1832 he was appointed director of
its archives. In 1848, the year of the revolution, the archives moved into a new building,
today’s ‘Grillparzerhaus’. The attitude of the poet, who was in favour of an enlightened
system of monarchy, towards the reality of the Habsburg state remained equivocal. His poem
Campo vaccino, a criticism of religion written during a journey to Italy in 1819, had brought
him into conflict with Metternich’s censors. These conflicts were to last. On the other hand, in
his praise of Feldmarschall Radetzky (Field Marshal Radetzky), a poem written in 1848, he
joined the reactionaries’ side. The contradiction between art, politics, and individual lifestyle
– a subject addressed in his early tragedy Sappho (1817) – occupied Grillparzer throughout
his life.
Subchapter:
Franz Grillparzer: The Dramatist
‘The course of modern learning leads / from humanism / via nationalism / to bestiality.’ Franz
Grillparzer severely criticised the nineteenth century. The pessimism with which he regarded
history is revealed at length in his two great dramas König Ottokars Glück und Ende (King
Ottokar, His Rise and Fall) of 1823 and Bruderzwist in Habsburg (Family Strife in
Habsburg) of 1828–50. In Family Strife, the struggle between the – national – interests of
individuals leads up to the catastrophe of the Thirty Years’ War. In King Ottokar, the reckless
power monger Ottokar, who bears Napoleon’s traits, falls victim to his own actions.
The play Libussa (1825–48) goes way back to ‘Bohemia’s most ancient history’ and ends
with the foundation of the city of Prague, which marks the shift from a natural and primordial
state of peaceful coexistence to that of urban culture. Libussa’s big closing speech is a vision
predicting the way of human history, the final result being a male-dominated age of purposeoriented rationalism.
5
1848: The Revolution that Failed
In 1848 protesters in Europe joined forces in a number of revolutionary upheavals,
complaining about the outdated conservative order and passionately demanding political
rights. Unrests also occurred throughout the Habsburg Empire. Disquiet was at its most fervid
in Vienna. Led by a militia – the so-called ‘National Guard’ – and students, the revolution
broke out on 13 March 1848. Chancellor Metternich, the much-despised figurehead of the
Restoration, resigned that very same day and fled to England. On 15 March, Emperor
Ferdinand I made the first concessions: he promised to abolish censorship and install a
constitution. This constitution, which had been drafted without the people’s involvement,
produced a new uprising, with parts of the working class joining the protesters.
A final rebellion took place in October, when revolutionaries tried to prevent imperial troops
from marching off to Hungary, which was also in revolt. They even succeeded in bringing
Vienna under their control for a brief period of time. Yet the imperial army eventually broke
their resistance. The gains made by the March Revolution were almost completely lost after
Emperor Francis Joseph I ascended the throne in December 1848. Conservative forces once
again gained the upper hand.
The attitude of artists and writers towards the revolution was ambiguous. While Franz
Grillparzer had reservations about the developments, Eduard von Bauernfeld celebrated the
abolishment of censorship. He addressed his disappointment about the further course of
events in the satirical comedy Die Republik der Thiere (The Republic of Animals) of 1848,
which likewise ended with the victory of the Restoration. Johann Nestroy’s play Freiheit in
Krähwinkel (Freedom in Krähwinkel), which premiered at Vienna’s Carltheater on 1 July
1848, was a derisive résumé of the revolution’s first months. In it, the inhabitants of the small
town of Krähwinkel desired their own revolution, only for it to be almost suffocated by
provincialism. The year literally became a family business for the composers Johann Strauss I
and II: the father countered his son’s March of the Revolution with his Radetzky March.
6
Don Juan and Faust
Such prominent literary plots as Don Juan and Faust lent themselves to new interpretations in
the epochs to come, and authors continue to respond to them to this very day.
The Austrian writer Heinrich Joseph von Collin said: ‘If I were to write a Faust, I would
resort to contrast in order to remain true to my principle of avoiding desolation.’ Collin
intended to have his Faust accompanied by a God-fearing monk instead of Mephistopheles;
however, his work was never written.
One author who took a stab at both themes was Nikolaus Lenau. His dramatic poem Don Juan
remained unfinished, but in 1888 the young Richard Strauss relied on the fragment as a basis
for his tone poem Don Juan (Op. 20). Lenau’s Faust was conceived as a counterpart to
Goethe’s. The man of deeds personifying the optimism of the rising bourgeoisie is turned into
a weak figure who seeks meaning and reflects the attitude towards life prevailing in Lenau’s
time. ‘This Faust belongs to humanity as a whole,’ wrote Lenau to his German colleague
Justinus Kerner in 1833.
The novella Das Goggelbuch (The Goggel Book) by Albert Drach, written in the author’s
exile in 1942, combines Faust’s contract with the devil and the story of Don Juan. Xaver
Johann Gottgetreu Goggel serves two Don Juans at the same time, kowtowing to the bigwigs
and trampling on those below. Robert Menasse’s Don Juan de la Mancha is a knight of the
sorrowful countenance roaming the 1970s, while Elfriede Jelinek’s play FaustIn and Out, a
‘secondary drama’ on Goethe’s original Faust, focuses on Gretchen’s tragedy. Gretchen’s
prison turns into the dungeon in which the Austrian businessman Josef Fritzl abused his
daughter over several decades.
7
Imaginations of an Alien World
Alien lands are unfamiliar and exotic places lending themselves to projection and fantasy.
And foreigners are people whose presence is felt to be eerie, threatening, or fascinating.
Foreigners regularly appear in literary texts, as outsiders or intruders, or as embodiments of
what is considered fundamentally different or new. Who is presented or perceived as alien
largely depends on the historical, political, and cultural context.
In the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, the regions on the empire’s fringes – first and foremost
Galicia and Bukovina – and their inhabitants were often put forward as models of alien worlds
and alien peoples: be it in Karl Emil Franzos’s collection of travel reports tellingly entitled
Aus Halb-Asien (From Half-Asia) or Joseph Roth’s reportages and novels, such as
Radetzkymarsch (Radetzky March). Last, but not least, the so-called ‘Crown Prince’s Work’
(The Austro-Hungarian Monarchy in Words and Pictures) is similarly a compilation of
ethnographic documents concerning the ‘Wild East’, which, though part of the monarchy, was
distinguished from the ruling social strata by the appearance, clothes, and traditions of its
population.
The Balkan Peninsula has always been and still is a region that fires imagination and is
closely connected to Austria’s history and literature. Dimitré Dinev is only one among many
authors who exchanged their Slavic mother tongue for the German language and deal with the
history of the Danube region in a literary format. Dinev’s epochal family novel Engelszungen
(Angels’ Tongues) of 2003 is an outstanding example of this genre that links our collective
history to an individual one and brings to life the idea of the Balkans with his stories and
figures.
Subchapter 1:
Strangers
‘Strangers’ cast into doubt the familiar and simultaneously make us more aware of it. They
mostly appear as archetypes and act as educators or scapegoats. They are romanticised or
demonised and are represented as a danger or as endangered. Frequently, natives feel attracted
to and repelled by them at the same time. The ‘beautiful stranger’ can also function as a
projection screen for sexual fantasies. Time and again, the subject also involves problems of
exercising and securing power. Prevalent power relations lastingly influenced by European
colonisation clearly manifest themselves. The description of strangers, which frequently relies
on cliché or racist ideology, provokes counter-texts and also invites efforts to overcome the
confrontation between familiar and alien worlds.
Subchapter 2:
Franz Kafka’s ‘America’
Franz Kafka knew America only from travel books, lectures, and oral reports. In the novel
Der Verschollene (The Man Who Disappeared), he sought to describe ‘the most modern New
York’, as he wrote to his publisher Kurt Wolff. The novel, which was edited by Kafka’s
friend Max Brod under the title Amerika (America), constitutes an exception among his texts,
as it mentions concrete places and describes them realistically, albeit with certain deviations;
for example, he writes about ‘Oklahama’ instead of ‘Oklahoma’. The protagonist, the
seventeen-year-old Karl Roßmann, is sent to America by his parents because he had been
‘seduced’ by a housemaid. There he experiences the thorough functionalisation and
rationalisation of life, which is governed by the laws of the market and technological progress.
The ‘Kafka Sheet’, which Stefan Zweig donated to the Theatre Department of the Austrian
National Library in 1937 together with one hundred other manuscripts, is considered Kafka’s
only handwritten literary text in Austria.
Subchapter 3:
America
At the age of thirty, Nikolaus Lenau set out for North America in the hope for a freer life and
in search of inspiration for his poetry, which he believed to find in the continent’s unspoilt
nature. After less than a year he returned to Europe, ‘deprived of a wonderful illusion and all
the more weary’, as Lenau wrote on 15 July 1833 to his friend Alexander von Württemberg.
In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, many associated America with dreams, longings,
and great expectations of a world different from ‘Old Europe’. This is demonstrated by the
very book covers of many novels about America of the 1920s and 1930s, which reflect what
appeared so alluring: progress, modernity, freedom, and the promise of something new and
fresh. Quite a few returned ‘Amerikamüde’ (‘Weary of America’), as is the title of a famous
text by Ferdinand Kürnberger. Carl Postl, on the other hand, became the successful writer
Charles Sealsfield through his flight into the USA.
8
Adalbert Stifter
Adalbert Stifter, that other Austrian classic author alongside Franz Grillparzer, was ahead of
his own century, the nineteenth, but would never be properly received by the readership of the
twentieth. The reason for this may be the author and painter’s aesthetic radicalism. His
coming-of-age story Der Nachsommer (Indian Summer) of 1857, filling hundreds of pages
although merely referred to as a ‘tale’, and his sprawling novel Witiko (1865–67), set in
medieval Bohemia, demand a great deal of readers. They are rewarded for their persistence
with a prose that anticipates Thomas Bernhard’s radical criticism and is unequalled in terms
of precise observation. This is illustrated by the description of the ‘House of Roses’, a model
of which has been reconstructed here: in Indian Summer all roads lead away from and
subsequently also return to this place.
That Stifter is difficult to grasp may also have to do with the construction of a world order
that seems untouched by the social upheaval of the Industrial Revolution. Stifter has always
been suspected of being a non-political author who finds his place in the Biedermeier rather
than in a ‘realistic’ epoch. In his later texts, however, bliss is incorporated into the narratives
to such an obsessive degree that the reader is overcome by distrust: such an abundance of
happiness cannot be. But the author’s works also contain numerous signs of a disturbed or
unfathomable order of things, such as the enormous shock caused by the solar eclipse of 8
July 1842. In Stifter’s writing, the horror and astonishment aroused by nature’s indifference
are felt just as deeply as the horrors provoked by the violence of historical events.
9
On the Road
At the age of forty-four and living in Vienna, Ida Pfeiffer was seized by a wanderlust that was
to stay with her until her death in 1858. She died of the consequences of a malaria infection
picked up on her last dangerous expedition to Madagascar, a country then hardly known. Her
travel reports, which were highly popular in the nineteenth century, are impressive accounts
of a woman who covered some 300,000 kilometres with no more than a little money and
partly entered territory that was considered inaccessible. Ethnographic case studies, her
writings inform us about how a European traveller with a bourgeois background viewed ‘alien’
people and countries. Ida Pfeiffer donated numerous remarkable objects to the collections of
the Museum of Natural History and the Museum of Ethnography in Vienna. The Museum of
Natural History alone holds more than 4200.
Alice Schalek captured the insights she gained on her journeys not only in her travel features
for the daily newspaper Neue Freie Presse and such books as Indienbummel (A Tramp to
India) of 1912 or An den Höfen der Maharadschas (At the Courts of Maharajahs) of 1929,
but also in more than 6000 photographs. From the turn of the century until well into the 1930s,
she, too, travelled the globe. After World War I, her reportages concentrated on the situation
of women and social and political changes in the respective countries.
The texts of both authors exhibit principles central to travel literature: a curiosity for the
unknown, an analysis of how foreign cultures are perceived, and the encounter with different
value systems. What is more, these texts also always address the relationship between Europe
and the colonised countries.
10
Across the Alps – Kyselak
The civil servant, hiker, and mountaineer Joseph Kyselak is said to have been one of the first
graffiti artists. The anecdote that he once succeeded in indelibly inscribing his name on the
emperor’s desk during an audience remains unconfirmed, but illustrates how Kyselak not only
became the subject of legends, anecdotes, and caricatures, but also of an avant-gardist text by
Gerhard Rühm and Konrad Bayer.
This ‘ordinary Viennese tax collector’, who worked as a clerk at the Court Chamberlain’s
Office, sought to render his name famous by all means: ‘Had he been a high-ranking official,
he would certainly have tried to plot a world war in order to reach his goal. But as he was only
an ordinary Viennese clerk, he was forced to limit himself to scribbling his name onto all the
rock summits, ramparts, and lavatory walls,’ said Egon Erwin Kisch, the ‘Raging Reporter
from Prague’. ‘Scribble’, however, would be too modest an expression to describe Kyselak’s
signature, which stands out on account of its careful calligraphy.
Kyselak not only left behind his autograph, which appeared on rocks and the walls of castles,
ruins, and churches (18 such signatures have survived and are documented), but also a
detailed report of his journey on foot, which took him through today’s Austria and Bavaria in
1825. His travel report was the first touristic description of a number of more or less remote
places. It is the prototype for a multitude of texts about the Alps, ranging from Ulrich
Becher’s Murmeljagd (The Woodchuck Hunt) of 1969 to Werner Kofler’s Der Hirt auf dem
Felsen (The Shepherd on the Rock) of 1991 and Martin Prinz’s Über die Alpen (Across the
Alps) of 2010.
11
The Village
The spectrum of literary forms dealing with the village spans from idyll to satire. Villages are
the scenes of ideological and aesthetic disputes and are viewed from diverse perspectives.
Many stories by the aristocratic writer Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach are set in rural areas:
modernisation and social contrasts present the village as a place of transition. Inspired by
intensive night- and wintertime reading, Franz Michael Felder, a farmer in the Bregenz Forest,
evolved into a social reformer and writer. A subscriber to national and international
newspapers, he found a small number of like-minded comrades in his native village of
Schoppernau, and Rudolf Hildebrand, a German philologist and pedagogue in Leipzig,
became his most important mentor in Germany.
For such authors as Karl Heinrich Waggerl, the village was the antithesis of the modern,
technologised city and the stage of an anti-modernist programme that centred on nature and
the phantasm of an unspoilt, innocent civilisation. A novel like Brot (Bread), written in 1930,
lent itself to appropriation by both Austrofascist propaganda and the National Socialists’
ideology of blood and soil. After World War II, this was opposed by such experimental
propositions as those by Ernst Jandl or such radically different novels of critical regionalism
as Thomas Bernhard’s Frost of 1963 and Josef Winkler’s trilogy Das wilde Kärnten (Wild
Carinthia), written between 1979 and 1982. The individual is shown to be prisoner of a
narrow-minded rural life governed by Catholicism. Norbert Gstrein and Felix Mitterer, on the
other hand, deal with the profound impact of mass tourism on rural structures.
Subchapter 1:
Gerhard Roth: ‘The Silent Ocean’
Gerhard Roth approaches the places and people figuring in his novels as both a writer and
photographer. He documents his meticulous research in extensive accumulations of materials
that shed light on the evolution of his texts. In his village novel Der Stille Ozean (The Silent
Ocean) of 1980, Dr Ascher, a physician, withdraws to the province of Southern Styria after a
fatal case of malpractice. He intensively devotes himself to the observation of nature, whose
patterns he also seeks to understand with the aid of a microscope. Roth’s taking inventory of
rural life turns out to be a critical comment on Austrian realities, in which the distribution of
power is maintained despite social and economic differences. The Silent Ocean is the second
part of the cycle Die Archive des Schweigens (The Archives of Silence), a seven-volume
analysis of Austria’s recent history, on which the silence about the shared guilt in the crimes
of National Socialism has left its imprint.
Subchapter 2:
Peter Handke: ‘Deep into Austria’
In March 1976, Peter Handke started a writing project entitled ‘Deep into Austria’, which
encompassed altogether eight notebooks. In the beginning, a particular plan as to how to
structure his writing was not yet apparent; the whole thing rather consisted of spontaneous
records of impressions and perceptions and of notes made during excursions and travels,
which he also documented with a Polaroid camera. His journeys took Handke as far as Alaska,
but also to the rural regions of Upper and Lower Austria and to Lower Carinthia, his native
land. From the project emerged a loosely connected tetralogy consisting of the stories
Langsame Heimkehr (A Slow Homecoming) of 1979, Die Lehre der Sainte-Victoire (The
Lesson of Mount Saint-Victoire) of 1980, Kindergeschichte (A Child Story) of 1981, and Über
die Dörfer – Dramatisches Gedicht (Walk about the Villages – A Dramatic Poem) of 1981.
Valentin Sorger, the protagonist in A Slow Homecoming, originally was to return to ‘his
Europe’ and eventually to Austria from Alaska. His homecoming coincides with Handke’s
embrace of literary tradition and the evolution of a new poetry of slowness.
Subchapter 3:
Reinhard P. Gruber and Klaus Hoffer
Aus dem Leben Hödlmosers. Ein steirischer Roman mit Regie (From the Life of Hödlmoser. A
Styrian Novel with Stage Direction) of 1973 by Reinhard P. Gruber is a classic provincial
satire. The author’s play with stereotypical ideas of ‘the inhabitant of Styria’ can also be read
as an ironical comment on an ethnographic practice that views ‘natives’ from the stranger’s
perspective while remaining on the surface. The constricting circumstances are satirically
exaggerated to the degree of grotesque brutality.
In his two-part novel Bei den Bieresch (With the Bieresch) of 1979, Klaus Hoffer introduces a
secluded society that functions according to its own laws and values. His real models were the
‘béresek’, agricultural workers in bondage living on farms in the borderland between
Burgenland in Austria and Hungary. Hans, a city dweller, breaks into this community, which
exists in a no man’s land. In his futile attempts to decipher a foreign world he resembles Franz
Kafka’s constantly rebuffed protagonists.
12
The Salon as a Networking Institution
In the Romantic era, women of higher social strata had begun organising intellectual circles
that functioned as forums of communication and offered informal opportunities of
establishing contacts.
During the Congress of Vienna, Fanny von Arnstein’s palace was such a meeting place.
Charlotte von Greiner’s salon, which had been frequented by such important figures of the
Enlightenment as Aloys Blumauer, Joseph von Sonnenfels, and Ignaz von Born, was carried
on by her daughter, Karoline Pichler. Among the guests Pichler received were Ferdinand
Raimund, Joseph Schreyvogel, and Franz Grillparzer, with her house serving as a place of
encounter for German Romanticists in Vienna and as a stopover for such transients as the
French writer Madame de Staël. During the Ringstraße era, the villa of Josefine von
Wertheimstein and her daughter Franziska became a cultural hub where Betty Paoli,
Ferdinand von Saar, and the young Hugo von Hofmannsthal read their texts. In her Algerian
exile, Bertha Zuckerkandl wrote her memoires in the form of a journal of telephone
conversations with her friends, including Gustav Klimt, Otto Wagner, and Arthur Schnitzler.
It was at her salon that Alma Schindler met Gustav Mahler, her future husband, in 1901.
Subsequently, both Alma Mahler-Werfel’s villa in Vienna and her summer residence south of
the city in turn developed into such gathering places.
Artists like Oskar Kokoschka, Adolf Loos, and Arnold Schönberg taught at Eugenie
Schwarzwald’s educational institution, the first grammar school for girls in Austria, and they
also frequented the pedagogue’s salon. In 1935 she organised the first reading of Elias Canetti
and supported Robert Musil, who caricatured her in the figure of Ermelinda Tuzzi in his
Mann ohne Eigenschaften (The Man without Qualities). After her return from exile, Hilde
Spiel, a graduate of Schwarzwald’s school, continued the tradition of literary salons.
Subchapter 1:
The Viennese Coffee House
While the advocates of the Enlightenment frequented the Café Hugelmann, the circle rallying
around Franz Schubert chose the ‘Silbernes Kaffeehaus’ as a meeting point; among its regular
guests were also Franz Grillparzer and Nikolaus Lenau, who conceived some of his poems
there.
Around 1900, the choice of one’s coffee house became a matter of attitude. A legendary haunt
was the Café Griensteidl, among whose habitués were Peter Altenberg, Arthur Schnitzler, and
Richard Beer-Hofmann, as well as the politicians Viktor Adler and Engelbert Pernerstorfer.
The Café Central, which Peter Altenberg gave as his postal address in Kürschners Deutscher
Literatur-Kalender (Kürschner’s German Literature Calendar) of 1897, was immortalised by
Franz Werfel in his novel Barbara oder die Frömmigkeit (Barbara or Piety). Friedrich
Torberg became the historiographer of the Café Herrenhof.
The tradition of the coffee house as a hangout and workplace also lived on after 1945. The
circle of Hans Weigel met at the Café Raimund; the Wiener Gruppe gathered at the Hawelka;
Elfriede Gerstl could be found at the Café Korb; Thomas Bernhard was a regular at the
Bräunerhof; and Robert Menasse and Robert Schindel frequent the Café Sperl and the Café
Engländer.
Subchapter 2:
Forms of Organisation
Informal networks modelled after the salon formed time and again in private environments, as
the result of regular meetings in cafés, or in the context of magazine projects.
Such literary societies as the ‘Ludlamshöhle’ (‘Ludlam’s Cave’), which was founded in 1819,
were organised along more formal lines. The politically repressive climate of those days was
counteracted through the establishment of a so-called ‘Society of Fools’, whose members
used such imaginative aliases as ‘Saphocles the Istrian’ (Franz Grillparzer). In the 1840s
followed the ‘Gnomenhöhle’ (‘Cave of Gnomes’), which was joined, among others, by
Eduard von Bauernfeld.
In 1895 writers appearing as a group organised themselves within an incorporated association
for the first time. In 1923 the Austrian section of the International PEN Club was established,
with Arthur Schnitzler as its honorary president. After 1945, the Austrian PEN – in the face of
the Cold War – long refused to open up towards the critically minded younger generation.
The cultural and political awakening of the 1970s led to the foundation of the ‘Grazer
Autorenversammlung’ (GAV) as an alternative association of writers.
13
Vienna: Paths towards Modernism
‘Vienna around 1900’ – this powerful formula was to become the signature of an entire epoch.
In the years between 1870 and World War I, fundamental shifts occurred in terms of lifestyle,
worldviews, and beliefs. The large-scale construction of residential buildings for the working
class in the suburbs and the architectural splendour of the newly designed Ringstraße in the
city centre were visible expressions of economic and political transformations. Hermann
Bahr’s assessment of the Historicist eclecticism of the Ringstraße’s style and architecture was
a mixture of admiration and annihilating criticism: according to him, Occidental art was
‘nothing but an immense quarry of motifs’: ‘No nothingness has ever been blessed with such
flourishing abundance, no triviality has ever displayed such charming eloquence.’
Given the new insights gained in the natural sciences and the accelerated pace of social
transformation, art could not help appearing obsolete. Its much-quoted crisis was due to its
shattered foundations: tradition, religion, the guarantees of a bourgeois lifestyle, and gender
relationships – all would be renegotiated. A heightened awareness of this crisis prompted the
cultural achievements of Viennese modernism, which were not as uniform as the term might
suggest. What they shared was their focus on issues of perception: a compilation of prose
sketches by Peter Altenberg is entitled Wie ich die Welt sehe (How I See the World), with an
emphasis on ‘see’. On the one hand, the visible reveals itself on the very surface of things and,
on the other, it is hidden in a reality of dreams, buried under linguistic and social conventions.
It was to be exposed via and in a work of art, by the artist’s subjectivity and sensitivity and his
employment of entirely new means of expression – fresh images and words.
Subchapter 1:
Gender Relationships
‘Is woman condemned by her sex to a definitely circumscribed mentality, or is there the same
possibility of unlimited individual modifications in the feminine nature as in the masculine?’
This is the question from which Rosa Mayreder starts out in her compilation of essays Zur
Kritik der Weiblichkeit (A Survey of the Woman Problem) of 1904. A pseudo-scientific book
suggestively entitled Geschlecht und Charakter (Sex and Character), which had appeared the
previous year (1903), clearly answered the question to the woman’s disadvantage. Otto
Weininger’s theories had an enormous and lasting impact on male authors. Together with
Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s bestseller Psychopathia sexualis of 1886 and the texts of
Sigmund Freud, they also opened up a literary battleground on which the relationship between
the sexes and the nature of sexuality were renegotiated: from Peter Altenberg’s dreams of
girls to Arthur Schnitzler’s cross-sections of bourgeois society around 1900.
Subchapter 2:
Language and Dream
Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s fictional Brief des Lord Chandos an Francis Bacon (Letter of Lord
Chandos) of 1902 expresses a fundamental uneasiness about such grave concepts as ‘spirit’,
‘soul’, and ‘body’. There is no longer a direct way leading from language to things: ‘My case,
in short, is this: I have lost completely the ability to speak or think of anything coherently.’
In Richard Beer-Hofmann’s Der Tod Georgs (The Death of George) of 1900, a first-person
narrator driven by fantasies of omnipotence experiences the whole world as a dream.
Consciousness is the stage on which events of the past – an antique temple ritual – and of the
present – the death of a young woman – take place. In Leopold Andrian’s Der Garten der
Erkenntnis (The Garden of Knowledge) of 1895, things of the outer world and those
happening in dreams are of equal significance: it is only through the will of the experiencing
self that they ‘took on meaning, relevance, and colour’. The aestheticism of these texts
describes the crisis of literature around 1900, but offers no lasting solution.
Subchapter 3:
Young Vienna
The catchphrase of ‘Modern Poetry’ is inextricably associated with Hermann Bahr, the
mouthpiece of the ‘Young Viennese’ and theorist of a new literary movement in Austria: roles
that inevitably made him the target of satirist Karl Kraus, who referred to him as ‘a certain
gentleman from Linz’ – a wording reflecting the suspicion with which Bahr was eyed in
Vienna. In the periodical Moderne Dichtung, which shortly after its foundation in 1890 was
renamed to Moderne Rundschau, many of Bahr’s programmatic essays appeared. Over the
years, they brought a number of ideas into play, as is suggested by their very titles: Die
Décadence (Decadence), Symbolisten (Symbolists), Impressionismus (Impressionism), Die
Überwindung des Naturalismus (Overcoming Naturalism), and, last but not least, Die
Moderne (Modernism) and Das unrettbare Ich (The Unsalvageable Ego).
The visit of the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen in Vienna in April 1891 became a crucial
event for the movement. Ibsen was seen as the liberator who exposed the ‘old’ lies and was
adopted as a mentor by the young generation, including the seventeen-year-old Hugo von
Hofmannsthal.
Subchapter 4:
Scandal and Discourse
The upheavals in the arts were accompanied by far-reaching political and social currents:
particularly anti-Semitism manifested itself more distinctly than ever. It was directed against
Jewish artists as the main agents of the period’s cultural and scientific revolutions. AntiSemitism also brings to mind the name of Karl Lueger, Vienna’s mayor between 1897 and
1910. Lueger succeeded in taking advantage of anti-Jewish resentment for power politics. On
the other hand, the Zionist movement launched by Theodor Herzl was a magnet for many. Its
intellectual foundation was Herzl’s book Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State) of 1896.
Prominent examples of cultural scandals were the so-called ‘Faculty Paintings’ by Gustav
Klimt for the University of Vienna and the ‘Scandalous Concert’ at the Vienna Musikverein
on 31 March 1913. The tumults had been triggered by two Altenberg Lieder, orchestral songs
based on picture-postcard texts by Peter Altenberg and set to music by Alban Berg.
Subchapter 5:
Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach and Ferdinand von Saar
Exponents of Austrian realism, Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach and Ferdinand von Saar
belonged to a generation that stood on the threshold between two prominent chapters of
Austria’s literary history: Franz Grillparzer and ‘Young Vienna’.
Some of their texts appeared in the same periodicals and with the same publishing houses as
those by the young authors rallying around Schnitzler and Hofmannsthal. They even explored
similar themes, such as the hypocrisy of bourgeois morals. However, their interest in the
period’s social upheaval and urban development was definitely more pronounced.
The young authors actively sought the company of their two older colleagues: in 1890, Felix
Salten contacted Ebner-Eschenbach; in 1893, Karl Kraus invited her to take part in an
anthology project; in 1897, Hermann Bahr organised a reading of her texts; and almost all of
the ‘youngsters’ had contributed to an anniversary volume that appeared on Saar’s seventieth
birthday.
Subchapter 6:
Sense and Sensibility
The Vienna Prater offers its visitors both nature and culture – a vast park area with
meadowlands, ponds, promenades, and hidden paths on the one hand and a scene of spectacle
and entertainment on the other: ‘Wurstelprater’ (‘Punch’s Prater’) and ‘Lusthaus’ (‘House of
Pleasure’) are telling names used for its attractions. The authors of Viennese modernism were
not the first to discover the Prater as a literary subject, yet the texts presented here attest to the
great appeal it particularly had in the years around 1900.
Peter Altenberg’s prose of the moment was kindled by the sensations buried in everyday life,
with a ‘mysterious beauty and the value of the world’ emanating from its hidden corners.
Marie Eugenie Delle Grazie’s memories of the Prater evoke a magic place she remembers
from her childhood and youth. The book about the Prater by the essayist and writer Felix
Salten and the photographer Emil Mayer from 1911 combines photographic snapshots with
atmospheric studies of social milieus.
Subchapter 7:
Off into the Darkest Parts of Vienna
Marie Eugenie Delle Grazie’s play Schlagende Wetter (Firedamp) is the only naturalistic
drama in Austrian literature. Ada Christen’s novel Jungfer Mutter (Virgin Mother) leads us
into Vienna’s gloomy suburbs, where the rapid population growth had brought about a serious
housing shortage and social misery.
In his first social reportage, which appeared in the Arbeiter-Zeitung in August 1901, Max
Winter described the miserable living quarters of construction workers, most of them migrants
from the monarchy’s impoverished regions, under the title Höhlenbewohner (Cave Dwellers).
In December 1902 he responded to a police raid with reports about the life of the homeless in
Vienna’s system of sewers. The book version Im unterirdischen Wien (In Underground
Vienna) was published by Wiener-Verlag in 1904 and simultaneously appeared as No. 13 of
the fifty-volume series Großstadt-Dokumente (Metropolitan Documents), edited by the
Berlin-based writer Hans Ostwald.
In 1904, Emil Kläger revisited the sewer system in the company of Hermann Drawe, a judge
and amateur photographer whose spectacular pictures were presented as a slide show.
Subchapter 8:
Grand Drama at the Burg
Viennese society took a lively interest in theatre life and the fate of its great actresses and
actors. For authors it meant a final ennoblement when their plays were performed at the
Burgtheater.
The old Burgtheater on Michaelerplatz, Europe’s second oldest spoken-word theatre after the
Comédie-Française, was directly connected to the Hofburg, the imperial palace. The last
performance there was Goethe’s Iphigenie auf Tauris (Iphigenia in Tauris) on 12 October
1888. Two days later, the new house on the Ringstraße was opened with Grillparzer’s Esther
and Schiller’s Wallensteins Lager (Wallenstein’s Camp).
The new building by Gottfried Semper and Carl von Hasenauer imitates the style of the
Baroque era and thus alludes to a period when the power of the House of Habsburg had
reached its acme. The Parliament, the Town Hall, the University, and the Burgtheater – four
buildings erected in close proximity of each other – represent the pillars of Austrian
liberalism: national assembly, municipal government, education, and acting.
Subchapter 9:
The Ringstraße as a Stage
An imperial decree of 1857 providing for the demolition of the old fortifications ensured
Vienna’s urban development and renewal. The Ringstraße, a boulevard four kilometres long,
was built around the inner city and lined with magnificent public buildings, museums, and
bourgeois palaces.
Its festive opening in 1865 was the first great Ringstraße spectacle, which would be followed
by many others. For instance, a legendary parade was staged to celebrate the imperial
couple’s silver wedding in 1879 under the direction of the painter and decorator Hans Makart,
whose opulent style agreed with the period’s taste. Such terms as ‘Ringstraße era’ or ‘Makart
period’ became synonymous with the ‘Gründerzeit’ years in Austria.
The Ringstraße served as a promenade for Vienna’s high society and was at the same time an
urban hub where social and political claims were articulated in public space. As early as
1 May 1890, an invigorated labour movement also organised its first march there.
Subchapter 10:
1873: Stock Market Crash and World’s Fair
The seven years between 1867 and 1873 – marking what is traditionally referred to as
‘Gründerzeit’ (Founding Epoch) – brought about an economic boom that was fuelled by the
preparations for the World’s Fair and led to excessive construction activities and large-scale
speculations.
Following London in 1851/1862 and Paris in 1855/1867, the World’s Fair in Vienna was held
in the Prater from 1 May to 2 November 1873. More than 50,000 exhibitors from thirty-six
nations participated in the event.
One week after it was opened, the stock markets crashed. On the Black Friday of 9 May 1873,
the fathers of Sigmund Freud and Arthur Schnitzler were among those who lost parts of their
fortunes, and the Hofmannsthal family of industrials also suffered considerable losses. Johann
Strauss was unconcerned by all this, for Jetty, his wife, had invested their funds in real estate.
That same year he composed the duet ‘Glücklich ist, wer vergisst, was doch nicht zu ändern
ist’ (‘Happy Is He Who Forgets What Cannot Be Changed’) for the operetta Die Fledermaus
(The Bat) as a popular comment on the stock market crash.
14
Vienna as a Multilingual Metropolis
The hub of a multilingual and multi-ethnic empire, Vienna attracted migrants from all regions
and social strata. Around 1900, about one third of the 1.6 million inhabitants living in Vienna
came from parts of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy where languages other than German were
spoken; 410,000 had arrived from Bohemia and Moravia alone. From the second half of the
nineteenth century onwards, more and more writers with foreign native tongues settled in the
imperial capital. They played important roles in a transfer of culture that resulted in a lasting
exchange between Vienna and the monarchy’s ‘provinces’.
In Vienna, numerous texts were composed in foreign languages, including the manifesto
české moderny (1895). Authors like Ivan Cankar portrayed the city and its people, for
example in his Hiša Marije Pomočnice (The House of Our Lady Help of Christians) of 1904.
Next to Oton Župančič, who had studied in Vienna, Cankar is considered the founder of
modern Slovenian literature. The periodical Mladost (Youth), founded in Vienna by students
in 1898, marked the beginnings of Croatian modernism. Tadeusz Rittner, a native of Lemberg
(Lviv), wrote in both German and Polish and published accounts of Vienna’s everyday life
and cultural events for a Polish readership in his column in the Krakow-based daily Czas
(Time). In Za štestím (For Good Luck) of 1894, Karel Klostermann, who mostly lived in
Pilsen (Plzeň), wrote – as the subtitle reads – ‘about the life of Bohemians in Vienna’.
Klostermann wrote his first texts in German (Böhmerwaldskizzen/Sketches from the Bohemian
Forest, 1890) before switching to Czech as his literary language. His protagonists, however,
still spoke German. Today there are still numerous bi- or multilingual authors living in Vienna,
such as Julya Rabinowich, Semier Insayif, Radek Knapp, Vladimir Vertlib, Seher Çakır, and
Dimitré Dinev.
15
The Last Days of Mankind: World War I
For many authors of the multinational Austrian state, the outbreak of World War I turned out
to be a touchstone for their own intellectual and artistic positions. Many felt that the war had
brought them out of a phase of decadence and indecision: ‘The state, whose misfortune it was
to have lost its historic centre of gravity without having definitely found another is relieved of
this concern for the duration of the world historical crisis,’ wrote Hugo von Hofmannsthal in
1914 in an article entitled Die Bejahung Österreichs (The Affirmation of Austria). His
publication Die Österreichische Bibliothek (The Austrian Library), which ran to a total of 26
volumes in the years between 1915 and 1917, was intended to provide the intellectual basis
for a supranational, albeit (German) ‘concept of Austria’.
Several of the most prominent writers, including Stefan Zweig, Alfred Polgar, Felix Salten,
and Rainer Maria Rilke joined the ‘literary group’ of the ‘Imperial and Royal War Archives’;
Hugo von Hofmannsthal worked at the press office of the ‘War Welfare Organisation’ while
others joined the ‘War Press Office’.
Aus der Werkstatt des Krieges (From the War Factory), a compilation of journalistic texts
published by the War Archives, provoked sarcasm from Karl Kraus, editor of the periodical
Die Fackel. His play Die letzten Tage der Menschheit (The Last Days of Mankind), meant to
be performed in a ‘Martian theatre’, stands alone in literature. Kraus had been a clear-sighted
and level-headed opponent of the war from the very beginning, and his polyphone satire was a
relentless criticism of those responsible for the tragedy, exposing the true face of language
and how it was abused: ‘Clichés walk around on two legs while men are having theirs shot
off.’
Georg Trakl’s last poems Klage II (Lament II) and Grodek were written shortly before he died
in the psychiatric ward of Cracow’s military hospital on 3 November 1914. In September
1914, Trakl, serving in an ambulance unit, had witnessed one of the bloodiest battles of World
War I at Grodek near Lviv. The experience had left him desperate and helpless in the face of
the death of masses of soldiers.
Subchapter:
‘Austrian Library’
Having graduated from a military academy for infantry cadets in Prague, the writer and
officer Robert Michel arrived in Vienna in 1895, where he formed a friendship with Leopold
von Andrian and Hugo von Hofmannsthal. His first literary attempts appeared in Hermann
Bahr’s weekly journal Die Zeit und and in the Neue Deutsche Rundschau, followed by
Ludwig von Ficker’s cultural periodical Der Brenner. Between 1911 and 1914, Michel
initially worked at the War Archives and was then a war correspondent at the War Press
Office until 1916; between 1917 and 1918 he served on the front lines. He advised Hugo von
Hofmannsthal in the edition of the latter’s Österreichische Bibliothek (Austrian Library), a
series of books that appeared with Insel-Verlag in Leipzig between 1915 and 1917, and
himself published a volume entitled Auf der Südostbastion unseres Reiches (On Our Empire’s
Southeastern Bastion).
16
Prague – Vienna
‘The Germans I shall set upon your heels, / To snap at you, until the pain and rage / Will
rouse your sluggish limbs, and you will jump, / As horses do when spurred.’ This threat,
directed against the inhabitants of Prague’s Lesser Town in Franz Grillparzer’s play König
Ottokars Glück und Ende (King Ottocar, His Rise and Fall) of 1823, did not exactly
contribute to the king’s popularity among his Bohemian subjects. When the Prince of
Windisch-Grätz defeated those protesting in the Czech rebellion in Prague in June 1848, the
dream of an Austro-Czech compromise was shattered, and Czech Nationalism increasingly
took on militant dimensions. Students on both sides organised themselves into secret leagues
and fraternities, which were countered by ‘halls for free reading and speech’ frequented by
Max Brod and Franz Kafka, among others.
A city that had largely been German became one that was almost purely Czech. German
speakers represented a minority of some 32,000, more than half of which comprised Jews.
Whereas German was spoken almost exclusively in the city centre, the rest of the town
conversed in Czech. This insularity sustained a form of German that had peculiarities and
inflections typical of Prague (‘Prager Deutsch’), a literary language devoid of dialect and
characterised by a paucity of words only comparable to the German then spoken in Laibach
(Lubljana). While Johannes Urzidil praised the purity produced by such isolation, Rilke
complained that he was forced to speak either pidgin Bohemian or German (‘Kuchelböhmisch’
or ‘Kucheldeutsch’). The coexistence of German, Czech, and Yiddish in Prague inspired the
language philosopher Fritz Mauthner to undertake research in this field. His writings had a
considerable impact on Austrian literature around 1900. Although – or indeed perhaps
because – Prague was a hot bed of national, social, and religious conflict within the empire, a
German and Jewish literature of world renown developed there.
Subchapter 1:
Humour, Grotesque, Irony
Exhibiting a subversive sense of humour, Jaroslav Hašek’s picaresque novel Der brave Soldat
Schwejk (The Good Soldier Švejk) ridicules Austria-Hungary’s military bureaucracy and the
ideology of the multinational Habsburg state. Hašek himself had defected to the Russians in
World War I and subsequently joined the Czechoslovakian Legion.
Fritz von Herzmanovsky-Orlando’s texts are bizarre descriptions of Old Austria characterised
by anarchic wit. Bohemia’s language and culture provided him with a rich repertoire for
funny and grotesque plays of thought. Father Knjakal’s edifying sermon ironises the
nationality conflict in Bohemia and is simultaneously a satire of the church’s manipulative
handling of saints’ legends.
Peter Hammerschlag was one of the most charismatic figures in Viennese cabaret during the
interwar years. His friend Friedrich Torberg worked as a journalist for the Prager Tagblatt. In
their correspondence, which is characterised by mockery, irony, and a mutual fondness
between them, they repeatedly discussed Hammerschlag’s moving to Prague after the Civil
War of February 1934.
Subchapter 2:
Rainer Maria Rilke
The objects exhibited here are also to be seen in the context of the nationality problem and
World War I. In July 1914, the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein asked Ludwig von Ficker,
the editor of the periodical Der Brenner, to distribute the sum of 100,000 crowns among
‘impecunious Austrian artists’. Rainer Maria Rilke, who for many of his admirers was the
German-language poet, received 20,000 crowns. In a letter to Ficker, he thanked the
anonymous donor in the form of transcripts of his still unfinished Duineser Elegien (Duino
Elegies).
In Rilke’s Zwei Prager Geschichten (Two Stories of Prague) of 1899, the radical student
Rezek is the leader of a nationalist Czech secret society named ‘Omladina’ (‘Youth’). The
struggle over language, culture, and national identity eventually paved the way for
independence.
In 1918, the philosopher and statesman Tomáš G. Masaryk was triumphantly received in
Prague after his return from exile and became the first president of the newly installed
Republic of Czechoslovakia. The successful Austrian writer Jakob Wassermann paid tribute
to him in 1933.
17
Expressionism and the Avant-garde
One of the typical features of Austrian literature is the close connection between text, image,
and music. Expressionism in particular harboured versatile talents, for example Albert Paris
Gütersloh and Oskar Kokoschka. Later this would also be true of Gerhard Rühm, an
enthusiastic explorer of Expressionist texts and a proponent of the avant-garde movement,
who appeared on the scene in the 1950s.
Newly coined words, austere language, and the forthright expression of ugliness and taboo
can be said to be the core elements of Expressionist formal vocabulary. With their melange of
fin-de-siècle melancholy, desperation, and satirical poignancy, such texts as Albert
Ehrenstein’s Tubutsch of 1911 were seismographic responses to the mood prevailing in the
years before the Great War. Several years later, texts had begun to strike an increasingly
political note, with the pathos expressed in Franz Werfel’s ‘Oh Man’ giving way to political
activism. The vagabonding poet Hugo Sonnenschein (‘Brother Sonka’) took Leon Trotsky’s
concept of a permanent revolution seriously, adopting it in his own life.
Short-lived periodicals primarily founded in the period of transition after 1918 offered the
most important opportunities to publish. Thanks to psychoanalysis, Marxism, dance therapy,
activist politics, and art, these years were an experimental laboratory of ideas and artistic
expression. In the early 1920s, Dadaism took time out in Tyrol. Vienna became a place of
exile for the Hungarian avant-garde, and architecture and film provided vital sources of
inspiration.
Subchapter 1:
Dadaism in Tyrol
During the summer months of 1921/22, leading exponents of the international Dada
movement met in the small village of Tarrenz in Tyrol, putting into practice a proposal by
Max Ernst. The visitors included Tristan Tzara (co-founder of the Dada movement in Zurich)
and his life companion Maya Chrusecz, Johannes Theodor Baargeld (Cologne), and Hans Arp
(Zurich), who were later joined by André Breton (Paris) and Paul Éluard (Paris) and his wife
Gala, who would later marry Salvador Dalí.
The Dadaists were pleased with Tyrol’s low living expenses and the new landscape
experience far away from the metropolis of Paris, where the Dada movement had increasingly
been shaken by controversy from 1920 onwards. The atmosphere among the artists present
was boisterous and productive, resulting in such joint works as the text Aufruf zu einer letzten
Alpenvergletscherung (Call to a Final Glaciation of the Alps) and the manifesto DADA AU
GRAND AIR / DER SÄNGERKRIEG IN TIROL (BATTLE OF THE SINGERS IN TYROL),
which was published as the final issue of the DADA periodical.
Subchapter 2:
Vischer, Serner, Hausmann
With his book Sekunde durch Hirn (Second through Brain) of 1920, Melchior Vischer, an
author coming from Prague, presented a linguistic work of art freed from external constraints.
Vischer described his book, which exhibits the principal features of literary Expressionism, as
a ‘novel rotating incredibly fast’. Kurt Schwitters designed the book’s cover. Vischer was in
contact with the international Dada movement, including Tristan Tzara and Francis Picabia.
The manifesto Letzte Lockerung (Last Loosening) of 1920 by the Bohemia-born author
Walter Serner ranks among the most important texts of the Dada movement. His later novel
Die Tigerin (The Tigress) of 1925 caused a scandal due to its sexualised language. Raoul
Hausmann, a born Viennese, was an important member of the Berlin Dada group. In 1919 he
founded the periodical Der Dada, and in 1920 he co-organised the First International Dada
Fair.
Hausmann’s onomatopoetic poem fmsbw inspired Kurt Schwitter’s famous Ursonate
(Primeval Sonata).
Subchapter 3:
Lajos Kassák in Vienna
The Hungarian writer and painter Lajos Kassák was the editor of the vanguard periodical MA
(‘Today’) in Budapest, in which he published texts and pictures by the international avant-
garde. Following the downfall of the Hungarian Republic of Councils, Kassák emigrated to
Vienna in 1920, where he continued his magazine project. Under the spell of the painter,
photographer, and stage designer László Moholy-Nagy, who later taught at the Bauhaus in
Berlin, the periodical embraced Constructivism and propagated a close tie between
technological progress and art, as well as a new, ‘liberated’ typography.
Moholy-Nagy and Kassák co-edited the Buch neuer Künstler (Book of New Artists) in Vienna
in 1922. Numerous pictures presented the latest achievements in the visual arts, architecture,
music, and technology. In 1926, Kassák returned to Hungary and founded the ‘Circle of New
Commercial Artists’ together with Kurt Schwitters. It applied avant-gardist forms of
expression in an entirely new field.
Subchapter 4:
Albert Ehrenstein and Oskar Kokoschka
‘His humour is new, extreme, and delicate – fantastic even when describing the most ignoble
things, superior, and delicious,’ wrote the author Berthold Viertel in 1912 about Albert
Ehrenstein’s piece of prose Tubutsch of 1911, adding that some would feel shocked and
disgusted, while others would be touched and delighted. Among those who were disgusted
was Ludwig Wittgenstein, for whom Goethe was the literary measure of all things. Stefan
Zweig was one of those who were fascinated: ‘This was something new […] in an
enchantingly rhythmical and deliberately ranting language maliciously jumping from
Ottakring dialect to antiquarian sophistication.’
The first edition of Tubutsch was illustrated by Oskar Kokoschka. The latter’s one-act play
Mörder, Hoffnung der Frauen (Murderer, Hope of Women) of 1909 paved the way for
Expressionist theatre. A strongly rhythmical language, colour and light effects, and ecstatic
dance scenes are intended to emphasise an all-embracing ‘theatre of cruelty’. The fight
between man and woman is governed by sexuality as a mythically elevated, archetypical force.
The play was set to music by Paul Hindemith in 1921.
18
Franz Kafka
Franz Kafka came from a Jewish family of merchants living in Prague, where they were part
of the German-speaking minority. Today the author’s condensed and allusive texts, which
were inspired by the environment in which he lived, belong to the canon of world literature.
The adjective ‘Kafkaesque’ has even been taken up by ‘Duden’, the standard dictionary of the
German language. The expression is also used in many other languages in order to stress that
certain something in modern reality that seems menacing in an inscrutable way.
Kafka’s work is linked to the central themes of the twentieth century, and a special
mysteriousness is inherent in his stories. In Die Verwandlung (The Metamorphosis) of 1912,
the protagonist Gregor Samsa one day wakes up as a monstrous insect. Kafka’s short story In
der Strafkolonie (In the Penal Colony) of 1914 describes how an antiquated machine carves
the sentence into the delinquent’s back, killing him in the process.
Much of Kafka’s writing was only published posthumously by his friend, the writer Max
Brod. This includes the famous fragment of a novel entitled Der Process (The Trial) of
1914/15. Protagonist Josef K. is caught up in the wheels of justice, but is never informed of
the crime of which he stands accused. Kafka’s description of the bureaucratic apparatus
sometimes takes on slapstick qualities. Ultimately, Josef K. dies without having had a chance
to defend himself. Kafka’s diaries and letters reveal what fuelled his writing, although the
author suffered from writer’s block and self-doubt.
Subchapter 1:
‘Letter to His Father’
One of the central motifs in Franz Kafka’s œuvre is the conflict-ridden relationship to his
father. When Hermann Kafka had reproached his son for his engagement to Julie Wohryzek,
who was below his social rank, Franz wrote him a 103-page letter, which, however, was never
dispatched. Its text was only published in 1952 under the title Brief an den Vater (Letter to
His Father).
Franz Kafka’s final letter was addressed to his parents in Prague. Given his physical weakness,
he was not able to finish it. Kafka’s last love, Dora Diamant, helped him out. At the bottom of
the letter, she wrote: ‘I’ve taken the letter out of his hand. It was a feat anyway. Just a few
more lines, which, judging from his pleas, seem very important to him.’ These last lines
Kafka was unable to write.
Subchapter 2:
Kafka and Vienna
In 1914, Franz Kafka wrote in a letter that he did not wish to come to Vienna because it
would be ‘much too ugly’ for him there. Yet he was in regular contact with authors in Vienna.
Kafka was particularly impressed by the Austrian writer Otto Stoessl and sent a clipped
advertisement about the latter’s book Morgenrot (Dawn) of 1912 to Felice Bauer. In 1917,
Kafka was invited by Fritz Lampl to join a circle of artists believing in the ‘vital force of the
ancient Austrian folk genius’. Kafka declined by letter, saying that he did not feel ‘part of an
intellectually uniform Austrianism’. Kafka greatly admired Franz Grillparzer and was
magically fascinated by the life of a bachelor the Austrian classic led with the Fröhlich sisters,
with whom he shared an apartment in Vienna’s Spiegelgasse.
Subchapter 3:
Kafka’s End
In the early 1920s, Kafka’s health deteriorated noticeably. Max Brod wrote to the head
physician of the Grimmenstein Sanatorium south of Vienna in order to prepare the stay of his
friend, who suffered from a lung disease. However, in order to avoid an encounter with his
lover Milena Jesenská, Kafka chose a health resort in the High Tatra Mountains. Having been
treated at the Laryngological Clinic in Vienna, Franz Kafka was transferred to the Hoffmann
Sanatorium in Kierling on 19 April 1924, where he died on 3 June 1924.
In his last will and testament, Franz Kafka instructed Max Brod to burn what he had left
behind as a writer ‘in its entirety and unread’. Brod found Kafka’s will on a slip of paper
amidst Kafka’s manuscripts. It was one of the first texts from Kafka’s literary estate that Brod,
disregarding his friend’s wish, published posthumously.
19
1918: Phantom Pain and the Habsburg Myth
In late 1918, the first government of German-Austria was installed under Karl Renner, a
Social Democrat. The war having been lost, there was widespread famine and a housing
shortage, and hundreds of thousands of soldiers returned from the front disillusioned and
without perspective. Inflation led to devaluation, and the empire’s collapse brought about a
fundamental political and intellectual crisis. Joseph Roth, whose work – like that of no other –
can be read as a literary statement on the loss of the monarchy, ended his novel Die Flucht
ohne Ende (Flight without End) of 1927 about a returning soldier with the lines: ‘He had no
occupation, no love, no desire, no hope, no ambition, and not even any self-love. No one in
the world was as superfluous as he.’ Sensitive Count Hans Karl Bühl (Kari) in Hugo von
Hofmannsthal’s society comedy Der Schwierige (The Difficult Man) of 1921 has an entirely
different sense of superfluity: he is the embodiment of both old Austrian noblesse and
indecisiveness.
The term ‘Habsburg myth’ was coined by the Italian writer and scholar of German literature
Claudio Magris. It became a catchphrase expressing the diverse literary responses to an
immaterial legacy circulating in stories and memories after 1918 in the form of countless
clichés and stereotypical images. Franz Theodor Csokor’s play 3. November 1918 (3
November 1918) of 1936, which is also referred to as ‘Requiem for Old Austria’, stages the
collapse of the old empire and its army by describing a group of Austrian officers, each of
whom represents the monarchy’s different nations. Heimito von Doderer’s great novel Die
Strudlhofstiege (The Strudlhof Steps) of 1951 is set in Vienna during the years 1910/11 and
1923–25. The year 1918 – that crucial date – goes undiscussed. Skipping over this political
fault line, the novel suggests a continuity of everyday life and experience. Fritz von
Herzmanovsky-Orlando’s literary universe is populated by the endearing, idiotic, resourceful,
manipulative, and good-hearted personnel of a monarchy that has long been carried off into a
world of dreams.
20
The Labour Movement
Literature and art played an important role in the labour movement: they were to contribute to
the comprehensive education of the working class and to the dissemination of Socialist ideas.
The network of municipal libraries was consequently expanded in ‘Red Vienna’ of the 1920s
in order to make books accessible for all social strata and age groups. The Social Democratic
Arts Council organised symphony concerts for the working class and provided theatre tickets
at reduced rates. Working-class songs and choirs were integral parts of carefully
choreographed parades and mass events.
The numerous publicly funded tenement buildings were a visible symbol of social progress.
Josef Luitpold Stern, a poet and head of the Social Democratic Centre of Education, and the
artist Otto Rudolf Schatz praised social housing in their book Die neue Stadt (The New City)
of 1926. Alfons Petzold’s Das rauhe Leben (The Rough Life) of 1920 and Adelheid Popp’s
childhood memories Die Jugendgeschichte einer Arbeiterin, von ihr selbst erzählt (The
Autobiography of a Working Woman) of 1909 number among a series of autobiographic texts
that impressively describe the poverty in Vienna around 1900 and simultaneously show ways
to escape the misery. Literature for children and young readers also dealt with social issues,
for example Hermynia Zur Mühlen’s proletarian fairy tale Was Peterchens Freunde erzählen
(What Little Peter’s Friends Tell) of 1921, illustrated by George Grosz. Such everyday
objects as a matchbox, an iron pot, and a blanket tell the stories of their lives whilst making
reference to the living situation of the working class at the same time.
21
Robert Musil: ‘The Man without Qualities’
The novel Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (The Man without Qualities) by Robert Musil
describes the fall of Old Austria as mirrored by a multiplicity of figures and a literary form in
which pure fact frequently gives way to essayistic contemplation. The protagonist is Ulrich,
the eponymous man without qualities. His view of the world pairs a ‘sense of reality’ with a
‘sense of possibility’. In August 1913, Ulrich decides to take a year’s ‘holiday from his life’.
With the irony that distance affords him, he observes the preparations for the seventieth
jubilee of Emperor Francis Joseph’s reign, which is to be celebrated in 1918. Because the
same year also marks the thirtieth anniversary of the accession of Emperor William II of
Germany, the circle coordinating the complicated planning christens itself ‘Parallel Action’.
Musil began writing the book in 1921 and continued working on it until he died in his exile in
Geneva in 1942. His initial plan, in which the project was referred to as ‘espionage’, was to
analyse the causes of World War I using literary means. However, this approach had to be
dropped, as there was a pressing need to respond to current political developments. The first
two volumes of The Man without Qualities appeared in Germany in 1930 and 1932. Adolf
Frisé published the third volume in Lausanne in 1943, resorting to materials from the artist’s
estate.
In his book Musil referred to the Austro-Hungarian monarchy as Kakania (a play on ‘k. & k.’
for ‘imperial and royal’). The author also devoted an entire chapter to the court library
(today’s Austrian National Library) and the intellectual order it represented. The preliminary
materials for the first two parts, including newspaper clippings from which Musil borrowed
by and large indirectly, illustrate the writer’s working method and the systems he used to
orient himself in the more than 5000 manuscript pages.
22
A New Popular Play: ‘Tales from the Vienna Woods’
The Austro-Hungarian author Ödön von Horváth revived the tradition of popular theatre by
presenting plays in a new guise. In 1931 his most famous piece, Geschichten aus dem Wiener
Wald (Tales from the Vienna Woods), premiered in Berlin. In it, the author relates the shortlived bliss and long fall of Marianne, a Viennese girl who leaves her corpulent fiancé Oskar, a
butcher, in order to run away with a fop named Alfred. This man, however, can neither
provide for her nor their child’s future. Marianne becomes involved with the red-light milieu
and is repudiated by her father, the owner of a shop selling magician supplies. Eventually the
young woman ends up back where she began.
Horváth once said that ‘today’s popular theatre cannot do without today’s people’. In his
plays, he employs a special form of cultivated jargon. His characters quote from the Bible or
literature and pronounce everyday wisdoms whilst inverting their meanings. At the end of the
play, Oskar sums up Marianne’s fate in a single line: ‘I once told you, Marianne, you won’t
escape my love.’ Synthesising earnestness and irony, the author established new forms of
theatre that no longer had anything to do with traditional popular plays.
In the 1970s, writers like Peter Turrini and Felix Mitterer, who were later joined by Werner
Schwab, sought to continue Horváth’s ambitions. Their plays, like Horváth’s, do not present
popular theatre as a form of dumb regionalism, but propagate a radical form of literary
enlightenment.
Subchapter 1:
Werner Schwab
Inspired by punk and other contemporary forms of artistic expression, the Styrian playwright
Werner Schwab brought a new tone of voice to the theatre stage in the early 1990s. Such
scatological dramas as his play Mein Hundemund (My Dog Mouth) of 1992 reflect the social
filth in which his figures live. Hundsmaulsepp (‘Dog Mouth John’), a kind of peasant
philosopher, is a radical character living in a delirium in which he builds his own world. The
term ‘Schwabian’ was coined to refer to the artificial idiom the author had designed for his
figures – an outcry against social reality uttered by one of Austria’s most radical writers.
Subchapter 2:
Peter Turrini
Peter Turrini, an author born into a working-class family in Carinthia, became first known
with his plays Rozznjogd (Shooting Rats) of 1971 and Sauschlachten (Slaughtering the Pig)
of 1972 and subsequently attracted attention with the television series Alpensaga (Alpine
Saga) of 1974–79. In Shooting Rats, two young lovers seek refuge in a waste dump in order to
be alone. Their provocative language and the hopelessness of their existence are highly
irritating. In the end, both are shot like rats. The play Slaughtering the Pig highlights the
brutality of village life. Valentine, the son of a farmer, refuses to speak and only grunts, so
that the farm people treat him like a real pig and finally slaughter him. Peter Turrini describes
social conditions in a grossly exaggerating manner.
Subchapter 3:
Felix Mitterer
The mother of the Tyrolean playwright Felix Mitterer was an agricultural worker. Given up
for adoption after his birth, he grew up in a family acquainted with his mother. Mitterer’s first
play Kein Platz für Idioten (No Place for Idiots) of 1977 is about a farmer’s disabled son and
deals with the question whether the child should stay at the farm or be moved into a home. In
his play, the author uses an artificial language imitating dialect. Controversial social themes
are discussed on the basis of traditional literary forms. Felix Mitterer became widely known
through the television series Die Piefke-Saga (The Piefke Saga) of 1990–93, for which he
wrote the script.
23
Precision and Soul
The ‘Wiener Kreis’ (Vienna Circle) was an internationally recognised group of philosophers,
scientific theorists, mathematicians, and political economists. Headed by Moritz Schlick, the
group met regularly in Vienna from 1922 on. The rise of National Socialism led most of its
members to leave the country. When Schlick was shot by a former student on the
Philosophers’ Steps at the University of Vienna on 22 June 1936, their meetings ended.
The philosophical approach taken by the Vienna Circle is generally referred to as ‘logical
empiricism’. Its primary concern was to base all disciplines of scientific activity on precise
terms and methodological accuracy. Ludwig Wittgenstein’s analytic philosophy played a
crucial role in its formulation, and Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle also had a direct and
lasting influence on Austrian literature. In Robert Musil’s Mann ohne Eigenschaften (Man
without Qualities), Ulrich sees the world disintegrate into a rational and an emotional part. In
order to remedy this contradiction he (ironically) suggests establishing a ‘Terrestrial
Secretariat of the Soul and Precision’. For his novel Karl und das 20. Jahrhundert (Karl and
the Twentieth Century), Rudolf Brunngraber used the latest statistical methods; Hilde Spiel
wrote about the Vienna Circle in her memoirs; Hermann Broch referred to epistemological
theories in his epochal novel Die Schlafwandler (The Sleepwalkers); and Ingeborg Bachmann
dealt with Ludwig Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle in several essays.
24
Profiteers and Speculators
While the former middle classes became impoverished due to the war and inflation, war
suppliers, profiteers, and speculators came into enormous wealth. Their riches, which they
displayed without restraint, triggered social unrest and underpinned the notion of the ‘Golden
Twenties’. Many contemporary Austrian novels drew upon daily events for their plots and
contributed to ‘Social Realism’ in literature – a contribution that has long been
underestimated. Außenseiter der Gesellschaft – Die Verbrechen der Gegenwart (Outcasts of
Society – The Crimes of the Present), a literary series launched by the Berlin-based publisher
Die Schmiede in 1924, represented the new literary genre of the ‘non-fiction novel’ and
featured renowned Austrian authors.
Hugo Bettauer dealt extensively with the social problems of his time, both in such novels as
Die freudlose Gasse (Joyless Street) of 1924 and in his periodicals. ‘It is difficult for reality to
keep up with this writer. He cannot spin enough of the literary yarn that happened to collide
with life,’ wrote Alfred Polgar in 1924. Bettauer, who fell victim to a radical right-wing
assassin on 10 May 1925, responded to an increasingly anti-Semitic atmosphere that was
frequently being fuelled by the cliché of the Jewish profiteer with his novel Die Stadt ohne
Juden (The City without Jews) of 1922.
In 1930, Upton Sinclair’s book Money Writes, a study of American literature, was published
in Berlin by Malik-Verlag. The translation was provided by Elias Canetti and the design for
the book jacket by John Heartfield, an artist famous for his political photomontages. The story
of the censoring of this legendary book jacket not only throws the fight for power and money
into sharp relief, but is also an example of the wit of the book’s makers.
25
The New Woman
World War I left middle-class family life shattered. Fathers and sons had been killed in the
war or had returned bewildered; war bonds and inflation had eaten up family funds. Yet
young women had experienced a new independence, assisting in military hospitals or being
forced into working life by the privations of the 1920s.
A symbol of women’s new position in society was their short haircut, referred to as the Eton
crop or bob cut. The lifestyle sections of newspapers and magazines were taken up with
modelling womanhood’s new face. And the fact that a whole generation of women authors
was now penetrating literature was unprecedented.
Vicki Baum, a writer and journalist working for the Ullstein publishing house’s lifestyle
magazine, had a crucial impact on this development. When her novel about a successful
career women, stud. chem. Helene Willfüer (Helene), started to be pre-printed in the magazine
Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung, impressions rose from 200,000 to almost two millions. Vicki
Baum was a household name ‘as was Melissengeist [a popular home remedy] or Leibniz
biscuits,’ said Joe Lederer, who herself had published a popular novel in 1928: Das Mädchen
George (The Girl George) carefully differentiates between cliché and reality as a new woman
experienced it. That same year, Mela Hartwig’s volume of novellas Ekstasen (Ecstasies)
appeared. Like Gina Kaus, she described the distribution of power between the sexes and
sexuality from a psychoanalytical perspective. All of the women authors mentioned here were
forced into exile in 1938, which may be a reason why many of their works have had to wait
until recent times to be rediscovered.
26
The Medium of Film
In the early days of film, German-speaking authors, unlike the French, had reservations about
the new medium, viewing it with a culturally critical eye. However, starting in 1910 and
particularly during the 1920s, film became an enormous attraction. It was first and foremost in
Berlin that a film industry based on the US model emerged.
Vicki Baum’s novel Menschen im Hotel (Grand Hotel) of 1929 had been pre-printed by
Ullstein with great success in the Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung before it was published as a book.
Its English translation also ensured the novel’s triumph in the United States: a theatre version
was staged on Broadway in New York in 1930, followed by a film in 1932. The scenic
structure of this ‘dime novel with undercurrents’ – as the subtitle of the German edition reads
– was crucial for its transition to stage and film set. The hotel is the stage on which the cast of
the 1920s, from a bankrupt baron to an assistant bookkeeper, makes an appearance.
Gustav Meyrink’s bestseller Der Golem (The Golem) appeared in 1915. Meyrink evoked the
old Jewish ghetto of Prague in atmospherically intense descriptions. In 1920, Paul Wegener
made the novel into a film. Der Golem, wie er in die Welt kam (The Golem: How He Came
into the World) became Expressionist silent film’s first worldwide success. It is the novel’s
psychoanalytical structure and, above all, its doppelgänger motif that lend the film its
suggestive force. For the narrator, the encounters with the Golem turn into confrontations with
the destructive energies of his own repressed instincts.
In 1926, the film version of Rosenkavalier marked the crossing of a threshold between silent
film and talkies. Hugo von Hofmannsthal, who had supplied the libretto for this highly
successful opera by Richard Strauss, had envisaged a film full of opulent imagery conjuring
up the age of Maria Theresa. He called the film version by Robert Wiene, who had followed
the plot of the opera rather faithfully, the ‘most amateurish and cloddish film one can
imagine’. Many authors were forced to experience that they had little influence on the filmic
adaptations of their literary models.
27
15 July 1927
The fire in the Vienna Palace of Justice on 15 July 1927 was one of the First Republic’s most
dramatic events: the young state’s political conflicts exploded violently. On the eve of the fire,
a jury had acquitted three members of a right-wing association of World War I veterans of
having shot two people during an attack on a Social Democratic gathering in the village of
Schattendorf in Burgenland.
The verdict unleashed massive protests on the next day. Around noon, a crowd of
demonstrators arrived in front of the Palace of Justice in Vienna, several of whom entered the
building and set fire to files and furnishings. Johann Schober, the Viennese chief of police,
supplied the troops with army rifles. Having been given the order to fire, they shot 84
protesters, while the death toll among the executive amounted to five.
The traces left by the Palace of Justice fire in Austrian literature cannot be overlooked. Karl
Kraus documented the events in his periodical Die Fackel and used posters to urge the chief
of police to resign immediately. Elias Canetti used material related to the events for his
important treatise Masse und Macht (Crowds and Power) of 1960 and referred to the motif of
fire in his novel Die Blendung (Auto-da-Fé) of 1936. Heimito von Doderer devoted a central
chapter of his novel Die Dämonen (The Demons) of 1956 to the Palace of Justice fire. In
Ingeborg Bachmann’s novel Malina of 1971, the female protagonist mentions the event. The
fire is detached from its historical date and becomes a general metaphor for the Austrian
attitude.
28
The Fascination of Berlin
Following a brief phase of recovery, there were hardly any opportunities for authors to
publish their works in Vienna after World War I. ‘Many Viennese are now in Berlin. Entire
caravans leave the Austrian desert for this city, which, in spite of everything, seems like a
green oasis,’ wrote Alfred Polgar in 1922. In the mid-1920s, a genuine brain drain began:
actors, musicians, stage and film directors, and numerous writers sought their luck in Berlin,
which was a breeding ground for the arts and the media. Such Viennese authors as Albert
Ehrenstein, Egon Friedell, Gina Kaus, Anton Kuh, Alfred Polgar, and Berthold Viertel
contributed substantially to the two major periodicals of the Weimar Republic – Stefan
Großmann’s Tagebuch and Siegfried Jacobson’s Weltbühne. No longer covering primarily
Viennese events, they mostly wrote about what they saw and experienced in Berlin.
Apart from material motives, it was above all the city’s ‘American’ atmosphere that even
attracted such ‘Old Austrians’ as Joseph Roth. In the fast-paced metropolis, Austrian operetta
dreams like Im weißen Rößl (The White Horse Inn) came true, thanks to funding supplied by a
highly professional entertainment industry. The Austrian emigrant Fritz Lang produced his
film Metropolis – a vision of the new city per se – in Berlin.
Berthold Viertel’s remark about Alfred Polgar that the latter seems to have dissolved the
‘complaisant style’ of the Viennese feuilleton in ‘pungent acid’ may not have applied to all of
the Viennese writers in Berlin, but is a fitting metaphor for the contrast between old-fashioned
Vienna and modern Berlin. In 1933, when the Nazis rose to power, the fascination of Berlin
turned into a nightmare.
29
Cabaret
In 1901, Felix Salten founded Vienna’s first cabaret by opening the ‘Jung-Wiener Theater
zum lieben Augustin’ at the Theater an der Wien. However, the beginnings of cabaret culture
in Austria were not what one would call promising. After only seven performances, the
establishment was closed down.
A lasting cabaret scene only really began to establish itself from 1906 on. The cabaret ‘Hölle’,
where Fritz Grünbaum and Karl Farkas enjoyed their first successes, was also at home at the
Theater an der Wien. One year later, the ‘Theater und Kabarett Fledermaus’ opened on
Vienna’s Kärntnerstraße. Its protagonists on stage and behind the curtain were Peter
Altenberg, Alfred Polgar, and Egon Friedell, who later held the position of artistic director.
As a cabaret, the ‘Fledermaus’ survived only until 1913, when it became a variety show called
‘Femina’. In 1912, the ‘Simpl’ opened on Vienna’s Wollzeile. This cabaret and variety theatre
still exists and numbers among the leading institutions in Austria for this genre of
entertainment. In the 1920s, the congenial duo Farkas/Grünbaum and such artists as Lina
Loos, Armin Berg, Egon Friedell, and Hermann Leopoldi played to packed audiences there.
In 1926, the ‘Sozialistische Veranstaltungsgruppe’ launched the ‘Politisches Kabarett’, which
attacked the policies of the conservative camp in the course of thirteen programmes. The
collective of authors included, among others, Jura Soyfer, who was involved in the
productions of several theatres during the 1930s and whose most famous plays – Der
Weltuntergang oder Die Welt steht auf kein’ Fall mehr lang (The End of the World or The
World Will Certainly Go Under) and Der Lechner Edi schaut ins Paradies (Journey to
Paradise), both of which were written in 1936, are still performed today.
Peter Hammerschlag was another successful cabaret author at the time. He wrote satirical and
grotesque texts and poems for various Viennese theatres. Hammerschlag became known as an
author and actor of ‘Der liebe Augustin’, a cabaret theatre that had been founded in 1931 by
the actress Stella Kadmon in the basement of the Café Prückel. In addition to his texts, he also
published numerous illustrations and caricatures. Fritz Grünbaum, Peter Hammerschlag, and
Jura Soyfer died in the National Socialist concentration camps.
30
Civil War and Austrofascism
On 4 March 1933 the Austrian parliament was hobbled by the simultaneous resignation of the
three presidents of the National Assembly. Federal Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuß of the
Christian Social Party took advantage of the situation and installed an authoritarian
government based on the principles of state corporatism and a Fascist ideology. Unlike in the
German Reich, the regime embraced the ideas of the Catholic Church. Propaganda trumpeted
Austria as ‘Germany Superior’. The ‘Fatherland Front’ was established to replace the
Christian Social Party. Functioning as a single political party, it annihilated parliamentarian
democracy.
Civil war broke out following the labour movement revolts on 12 and 16 February 1934.
Resorting to military force and heavy weapons, the government smashed what had been left
of the Social Democratic Party. On 25 July 1934, several waves of National Socialist
terrorism culminated in an attempted coup in which the studios of the RAVAG broadcasting
corporation were occupied; the National Socialists stormed the Federal Chancellery and killed
Dollfuß.
These years are reflected in literature from various perspectives. The poet Christine Busta
obviously expected to benefit personally from being a member of the ‘Fatherland Front’.
Josef Weinheber, who had joined the German Nazi Party in 1931, offered the National
Socialists his services in 1933 and asked them to assign him ‘a place in the movement’. Fritz
Habeck recorded the events of February 1934 in his diary. That same year, the government
launched the Grand Austrian State Prize, with Karl Heinrich Waggerl being the first laureate.
The authoritarian state’s ideology of art was mirrored by the ascendancy of rural and religious
themes.
31
March 1938: The ‘Anschluss’
On 15 March 1938, Adolf Hitler held his notorious speech on Vienna’s Heldenplatz in front
of an audience of more than 250,000, thereby implementing Austria’s ‘return’ to the German
Reich symbolically. Immediately after Austria’s annexation to Germany, the systematic terror
directed against the Jewish population and the persecution of political opponents began.
Numerous artists actively participated in the glorification of National Socialist policy. A
loyalty book published in June 1938 by the ‘League of German Writers in Austria’, which had
been established in 1936, contains hymns and texts praising Hitler and the German Reich.
Discrepancies had already manifested themselves at the 11th Congress of the International
PEN Club in Ragusa (Dubrovnik) in May 1933, when Nazi sympathisers had left the Austrian
PEN.
The very titles of the poem wien : heldenplatz (vienna : heroes’ square), written by Ernst
Jandl in 1962, and Thomas Bernhard’s play Heldenplatz, which premiered on the occasion of
the 50th anniversary of the ‘Anschluss’ in 1988 at Vienna’s Burgtheater, address the mass
hysteria triggered by Adolf Hitler’s speech. Ernst Jandl had ear-witnessed the chorus of
fanatic voices and experimentally translated this experience into his most famous poem: the
lines speak of a ‘bloody foldsold voice’ and of a ‘giantic spreak stump of a voice’. The
performance of Thomas Bernhard’s play caused an unprecedented (theatre) scandal. Literary
texts have rarely succeeded in transmitting a political and moral message so convincingly and
aesthetically effectively.
32
Personal Histories 1938–1945: NS Careers, Persecution, and Extermination
Immediately after Austria’s ‘Anschluss, the country’s existing cultural institutions were
compulsorily incorporated into the German ‘Reichskulturkammer’, the Reich’s ‘Chamber of
Culture’. The institution was affiliated with the Ministry of Propaganda headed by Joseph
Goebbels and served as a central instrument for the synchronisation of National Socialist
cultural policies.
To be able to publish their works in the German Reich, writers had to be members of the
‘Reichsschrifttumskammer’, the Reich’s ‘Chamber of Literature’. Some 800 Austrian writers
were admitted after in-depth investigation of their political and racial backgrounds. For about
one tenth of them, the chances to publish were good to excellent. Between 1938 and 1945,
some of them were among the top earners of their profession.
Life in opposition to the National Socialist apparatus of power within the Reich’s territory
was nigh impossible, for the totalitarian regime controlled the entirety of cultural agendas.
The term ‘inner emigration’ should be employed with great caution: after 1945 it was used in
Austria especially to whitewash biographies and cover up culpable conduct.
The National Socialists openly persecuted Jewish writers and political opponents. Among the
millions of their victims were numerous Austrian authors. Some of them continued writing
poetry while interned in extermination camps. It took years for the literature of the persecuted
to be rediscovered in Austria, with the result that some names are still practically unknown
today.
Subchapter 1:
Alma Johanna Koenig and Elfriede Gerstl
The Austrian writer Alma Johanna Koenig, born on 18 August 1887 in Prague, was murdered
in the extermination camp of Maly Trostenets in Belarus on 1 June 1942. Koenig grew up in
Vienna. Her novel Der heilige Palast (The Holy Palace) of 1922 attracted attention because of
its erotic content. In 1938 the author was evicted from her apartment for racial reasons.
Confined to mass accommodation in Vienna, she lived in great poverty until she was deported.
A child of Jews, Elfriede Gerstl survived the National Socialist regime in diverse hiding
places in Vienna. From 1955 on, literary magazines published her poems, essays, and short
prose, which later also appeared as books. Gerstl was a keen and critical observer of the
country’s male-dominated cultural scene. Having survived the Holocaust, she dealt with the
story of her own life mostly indirectly. Her credo was: ‘Everything that can be said can also
be said en passant.’
Subchapter 2:
Three Careers
Karl Heinrich Waggerl grew up in poor circumstances in Bad Gastein. In 1938 he joined the
Nazi party and in 1939 was appointed regional spokesperson for writers in the NS Gau of
Salzburg. Waggerl’s works were widely read during the National Socialist era. His Christmas
stories have remained popular to this very day.
In the years of National Socialism, Richard Billinger was one of Austria’s most successful
authors. Entire series of his plays were brought to the stage. Billinger’s play Der Gigant (The
Giant) served as a model for Veit Harlan’s colour motion picture film Die Goldene Stadt (The
Golden City) of 1942 – a big melodrama of the Nazi period that enjoyed enormous popularity.
Erika Mitterer also benefited financially from the Third Reich’s organisation of literature. Her
works of prose Der Fürst der Welt (The Prince of the World) of 1940, Begegnung im Süden
(Encounter in the South) of 1941, and Die Seherin (The Seer) of 1942 earned her a substantial
income. In 1941 she received royalties in the amount of 24,271 Reich marks – the equivalent
of which would now be approximately 110,000 euros.
32
Personal Histories 1938–1945: Flight, Expulsion, and Exile
‘Adieu Europe’: the playwright and novelist Ödön von Horváth took his farewell with this
fragment of a novel. After Austria’s ‘Anschluss’ to the German Reich, he decided to emigrate
to the United States. He was killed by a falling branch in Paris in June 1938 whilst making his
way there.
Expulsion followed the practice of marginalisation that had set in in 1938. The roads into
exile led to England, such as happened with Erich Fried and Hilde Spiel, or to France, where
the philosopher Hannah Arendt found refuge before managing to flee to the United States at
the very last moment. In the French internment camp of Rivesaltes, the Jewish lawyer and
writer Albert Drach mobilised all of his wit and the art of disguise in order to evade
deportation. The exhausted legendary salonière and art critic Bertha Zuckerkandl fled from
France to North Africa. Still an infant, the future rabbi and poet Elazar Benyoëtz of Wiener
Neustadt and his family arrived in Palestine aboard an illegal ship. And some 6000 Jewish
exiles from Austria made Shanghai, a city completely alien to them, their last refuge.
A major part of Austria’s artistic and intellectual legacy derives from the achievements of
expelled artists and scientists, most of them Jewish. Their experiences and accomplishments
constitute an essential part of Austria’s cultural heritage. All of these biographies are
overshadowed by extermination, the history of exile being inextricably linked to the
Holocaust.
33
1945: A Call for Distrust
World War II was not followed by a ‘zero hour’ – neither in Germany nor in Austria. What
seemed then like a caesura in history today presents itself as a period of transition. ‘Indeed we
need only to continue where the dreams of a madman interrupted us; indeed we need not look
ahead, but just back,’ wrote Alexander Lernet-Holenia from his refuge in St. Wolfgang in a
letter to the periodical Der Turm in 1945. While some wished to restore the ideology of the
authoritarian Federal State of Austria, others, including the magazine editors Otto Basil and
Ernst Schönwiese, advocated the (re)discovery of international modernism, a movement that
had been considerably influenced by such expellees as Hermann Broch and Robert Musil,
who had died in his Swiss exile.
Some, including the publicist and writer Hilde Spiel, opted to delay their return to a
contradictory country where the sense of optimism prevailing during the immediate postbellum period soon gave way to a culturally hostile climate. Many came back late or not at all.
The young generation, such as H. C. Artmann, Michael Guttenbrunner, Friederike Mayröcker,
and Andreas Okopenko, eyed conservative literature with distrust, discovering Surrealism for
themselves as well as all of the variants of experimental literature. However, this does not
hold true for all of them. Fritz Habeck, a successful author of the 1950s, wrote realistic novels
about the dramatic experiences of soldiers during the war – an aspect he shared with Ernest
Hemingway.
Ilse Aichinger’s Aufruf zum Misstrauen (A Call for Distrust) of 1946, with its plea for
individual responsibility and for a considered use of language, is an expression of the
ambivalent political and mental atmosphere of the post-war years.
34
Literature’s Response to NS Terror
The poem Todesfuge (Death Fugue) by the German language poet Paul Celan, who had been
born into a Jewish family in Czernowitz (Chernivtsi) in Bukovina in 1920, was written in
early 1945. It is one of the first and most seminal texts to deal with the extermination of Jews
in Europe.
How could the National Socialist policy of extermination and its omnipresent terror be
mirrored in literature? The philosopher Theodor W. Adorno coined the dictum that it was
‘barbaric to write poetry after Auschwitz’. After 1945, the question of if and by what literary
means these inconceivable atrocities could be described was broached time and again in
German literature.
In Austria, literature was relatively late to begin dealing with National Socialism. Hans
Lebert’s great novel Die Wolfshaut (The Wolf’s Fell) of 1960 inscribes the crimes of National
Socialism in a context of both myth and realism. Numerous authors would devote themselves
to the subject in the decades to come. From the 1970s on, their books came to the attention of
a broad literary public. While joint responsibility for the crimes was not accepted in Austrian
post-war politics until well into the 1980s, literature contributed substantially to coping with
the NS past.
As its preoccupation with the subject progressed, Austrian literature developed a multifaceted
spectrum of literary forms. These range from experimental approaches (Andreas Okopenko,
Heimrad Bäcker) to various forms of narration (Peter Henisch, Marie-Thérèse Kerschbaumer,
Martin Pollack, Robert Schindel, Christoph Ransmayr) to Elfriede Jelinek’s post-dramatic
text fabrics.
Subchapter 1:
Werner Kofler: ‘Conjectures about the Queen of the Night’
While The Magic Flute is being played inside, National Socialism rages outside. In his text
Mutmaßungen über die Königin der Nacht (Conjectures about the Queen of the Night) of
1989, the Carinthian writer Werner Kofler deals with six historical productions of Mozart’s
opera. After the performances, the singers of the title role mysteriously disappear. The author
deliberately left it open whether this is based on real fact or is pure fiction. According to
Kofler, those wondering have understood the text.
In his books, Kofler repeatedly addressed National Socialism and how it lingered on in
Austrian reality of the post-war years. He uses an elaborate language of allusion that sinks its
teeth into the subject and will not let go of it. In his film Im Museum (At the Museum) of 1993,
Kofler traces the connection between the Shoah, historiography, and how Austria has come to
terms with its past.
Subchapter 2:
Andreas Okopenko: ‘Child Nazi’
In Andreas Okopenko’s autobiographical novel Kindernazi (Child Nazi) of 1984, the
chronology of episodic memories of a childhood in the Third Reich has been reversed. The
story about a fifteen-year-old Hitler Youth is told backwards in sixty-two chapters: it starts
with the end of World War II on 1 April 1945 and inches its way back to April 1939 step by
step, episode by episode.
In this way, the book exposes the honest and non-moralising picture of a childhood against
the political backdrop of Nazi propaganda and embedded in an authoritarian society – from
the disillusioned boy who becomes aware of the true character of the Nazi regime to the
enthusiastic Nazi kid. The author’s interest focuses on the nature of the ‘Child Nazi’ rather
than on psychological motivation. For this reversed coming-of-age novel, the author relied on
such personal documents as diaries and school essays.
Subchapter 3:
Hans Lebert: ‘The Wolf’s Fell’
‘Let’s dig up a body.’ In Hans Lebert’s novel Die Wolfshaut (The Wolf’s Fell) of 1960, this
momentous decision is made by a former sailor called Johannes Unfreund. In his village,
tellingly named ‘Schweigen’ (German for ‘silence’), he intends to bring to light the truth of a
dreadful crime, but meets with considerable resistance. In the last days of World War II, some
villagers killed a group of foreign workers. The inhabitants know about the crime, but keep
silent.
The village is plagued by steady rainfall lasting ninety-nine days, so that the cesspits overflow
and dark-brown mud accumulates in the depressions. Thick, red veins appear in the sky. The
landscape betrays signs of a guilt that has not yet been atoned for.
Lebert, who was accused of ‘undermining military strength’, was originally an opera singer
and preferred roles in the operas of Richard Wagner – an experience that is reflected in
Lebert’s novels.
Subchapter 4:
Peter Henisch: ‘The Small Figure of My Father’
Peter Henisch’s novel Die kleine Figur meines Vaters (The Small Figure of My Father) of
1975 deals with the past of the author’s father in the Third Reich. Walter Henisch worked as a
war photographer who was held in high esteem by the National Socialists. For the author, the
interviews he conducted with his father and recorded between 1973 and the latter’s death in
1975 constituted a vital source. In the book, Peter Henisch reflects upon his work process,
which is simultaneously a process of recognition. One of his methods is to revise texts for
new editions. A second and extended version appeared in 1987. ‘I never really finish my
books, let alone this one,’ Henisch writes in the novel’s third edition, which was published in
2003 and to which a photographic essay was added.
The book is the first in a series of ‘books about fathers’. Henisch explores the possibilities of
how an understanding can be reached between the members of a generation for whom the
atrocities and crimes of the war were part of their daily work and their descendants, who seek
for an explanation.
Subchapter 5:
Martin Pollack: ‘The Dead Man in the Bunker’
In his literary search Der Tote im Bunker (The Dead Man in the Bunker) of 2004, Martin
Pollack traces the biography of his father. Gerhard Bast’s body was found in a bunker near the
Austro-Italian border on 6 April 1947, when Martin Pollack was three years old. The subject
of Pollack’s in-depth investigation is the story of a person unknown to him who was born as a
member of the German-speaking minority in the region of Kočevje (Gottschee) in today’s
Slovenia in 1911 and climbed the ladder to become the Gestapo chief of Linz.
Investigating his father’s case, Pollack reconstructs the exemplary career of a child born to
German nationalist parents with the aid of archival materials: from the member of a patriotic
fraternity and law student in Graz to an illegal National Socialist under Austrofascism and
subsequently, after 1938, to a high-ranking Gestapo officer and member of the SS. Gerhard
Bast held various functions that involved him in the crimes of the National Socialist regime.
Subchapter 6:
Robert Schindel: ‘Born-Where’
‘Mauthausen is a pretty nice place,’ says a blonde Upper Austrian man to a Jewish woman
from Vienna in Robert Schindel’s novel Gebürtig (Born-Where) of 1992. Multiple plot lines
and narrative perspectives contribute to the book’s complex and polyphone character. The
novel deals with the difficult coexistence between people of Jewish and non-Jewish origin in
Austria during the 1980s. On the one hand, Born-Where examines the aftereffects of the
Holocaust on the children of victims, culprits, and fellow travellers. On the other hand, the
book is a disillusioning description of Austria’s attitude towards its past. The novel was made
into a film in 2001 under the direction of Lukas Stepanik and Robert Schindel. They wrote the
screenplay together with the author and screenwriter Georg Stefan Troller, who was forced to
leave Austria in 1938.
Subchapter 7:
Marie-Thérèse Kerschbaumer: ‘The Female Name of Resistance’
Der weibliche Name des Widerstands (The Female Name of Resistance) of 1980 is a literary
documentation of the rebellion and resistance of seven women against the NS regime. MarieThérèse Kerschbaumer relied on biographical documents and her own research when
approaching the fate of these women, who came from various social backgrounds, lived in
Vienna, and were murdered by the Nazis: the Jewish writer Alma Johanna Koenig; the Jewish
scientists Elise and Helene Richter; the nun Helene Kafka, called ‘Restituta’; an anonymous
‘gypsy’; and three members of the Communist and Socialist resistance movements – the
young seamstress Anna Gräf, the blue-collar worker Antonie Mück, called ‘Tonschi’, and the
teacher Steffi Kunke. Kerschbaumer’s poetic account numbers among the key texts of the
literature of remembrance written after 1945 and is an exemplary testimonial of NS terror.
Subchapter 8:
Käthe Recheis: ‘The Shadow Net’
When Käthe Recheis was awarded the Youth Literature Prize of the City of Vienna and the
National Youth Literature Award for her book Das Schattennetz (The Shadow Net) of 1964, a
controversy about the ‘appropriate literary treatment of the crimes committed by the NS
regime’ was unleashed. The novel is one of the first literary assessments of the NS period for
young readers. Recheis describes the experiences and feelings involved in the care of
seriously wounded survivors admitted to a barrack camp immediately after the war from the
perspective of Christine, a seventeen-year-old girl. The author was accused of anti-Semitism
and an ahistorical and overly generalising description. On the other hand, advocates like
Friedrich Heer praised the aesthetic quality of the text and its ethic dimension. In 1980 a new
edition appeared under the title Geh heim und vergiß alles (Go Home and Forget Everything),
for which Käthe Recheis modified some of the passages that had been so heavily criticised in
1964.
Subchapter 9:
Ceija Stojka and Erich Hackl
Two thirds of the approximately 11,000 members of the Roma and Sinti ethnicities living in
Austria in the 1930s fell victim to the NS regime. The literary treatment of their systematic
murder ranges from such documentary tales as Erich Hackl’s Abschied von Sidonie (Farewell
Sidonia) of 1989 to the autobiographical texts and pictures by Ceija Stojka. In Wir leben im
Verborgenen (We Live in Seclusion) of 1988, Stojka describes her struggle for survival in the
concentration camps of Auschwitz-Birkenau, Ravensbrück, and Bergen-Belsen.
In many of his texts, Erich Hackl devotes himself to the fate of the victims of political
violence. Farewell Sidonia relates the story of a girl who was taken in as a foster child by a
working-class family in Steyr in 1933 and was murdered in Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1943
when she was hardly ten years old. Hackl came across her story by chance. He researched in
archives, conducted interviews, and amassed a wealth of material so as to keep Sidonia’s
memory alive in a literary text.
Subchapter 10:
Heimrad Bäcker: ‘transcript’
During the National Socialist era, the Upper Austrian author Heimrad Bäcker worked as a
journalist and photographer in Linz. After 1945, his enthusiasm for the regime gave way to
the realisation of a big personal mistake. For Bäcker, the concentration camp of Mauthausen
and its subcamps became places of a life-long investigation. Within his comprehensive work
project nachschrift (transcript), he captured the National Socialist crimes in the form of texts,
photographs, and accumulations of real objects.
Bäcker’s literary method – put into practice in the books transcript of 1986 and transcript 2
of 1997 – relies on the techniques of concrete poetry. Documents related to National
Socialism are put into new contexts by such formal methods as sequentiality, omission, and
condensation, so that a new, enlightening quality is added to them. Documents about both
perpetrators and victims have become part of this artistic project. Frequently, columns of
figures on individual text panels turn into impressive images of extermination and its
bureaucratic implementation.
Subchapter 11:
Elisabeth Reichart: ‘February Shadows’ and ‘Come Across the Lake’
Februarschatten (February Shadows) of 1984 broaches the events of the so-called
‘Mühlviertel Hare Hunt’, which were long considered a taboo. In February 1945, some 500
prisoners – most of them Soviet officers – managed to flee from the Mauthausen
concentration camp. The escapees were chased for a period of three weeks and eventually
killed with the active support of the native population. Elisabeth Reichart’s novel relates the
story of a mother who witnessed the events as a child. Interviewed about the crime by her
daughter, she hesitantly revisits her memories.
The story Komm über den See (Come Across the Lake) of 1988 is about the resistance of
women against the National Socialist regime and the disregard of anti-Fascist resistance in
Austrian post-war society.
Subchapter 12:
Christoph Ransmayr: ‘The Dog King’
With the war having been lost, the ‘Peace of Oranienburg’ imposes acts of atonement on the
population of the destroyed village of Moor: under the supervision of Ambras, the former
inmate of a prison camp, the natives work in a quarry. Banners and memorial celebrations
organised by the victorious powers are meant to remind the villagers of their joint
responsibility for the crimes committed by the defeated regime. The novel Morbus Kitahara
(The Dog King) of 1995 takes place during a prolonged war that lasts until well into the 1960s
and in which violence and terror are omnipresent. The German title refers to a disease that
leads to a limitation of the field of vision.
The narrative’s time and space are based on pictures and documents. They only materialise
for Ransmayer when they reveal something of the energy inherent in them: such as the rock
formations of the Totes Gebirge, a mountain range in the Salzkammergut; photographs of the
Mauthausen concentration camp and its subcamp at Ebensee; an American road cruiser the
parts of which are used to build a fantastic vehicle called ‘Crow’; or the destructive force of a
gun.
35
Literature and Commitment
Austrian literature has a reputation for being apolitical. Adalbert Stifter’s novel Der
Nachsommer (Indian Summer) of 1857 can be interpreted as the flight into idyllic provincial
worlds. Franz Grillparzer’s ambivalent attitude towards the Revolution of 1848 and his
conservative stance when it comes to the multinational Habsburg state might also be cited as
evidence in this regard. The collapse of 1918 did not entail any revolutionary uprising in
Vienna that could be compared to the Munich Soviet Republic or the Spartacus uprising in
Germany. Austrian literature responded to major political changes aesthetically rather than by
proposing an activist political programme. In Austria, even the protests of 1968 usually only
manifested themselves as artistic actionism.
In the 1970s and 1980s, a decidedly political literature did develop, albeit with a certain delay
in comparison to other European countries. Its spectrum spans from documentary radio drama
to the fusion of political statement and experimentalism. More and more authors appeared in
the political arena, their performances and publicistic utterances leading to the emergence of a
critical counter-public. This development culminated in the Arena movement in the summer
of 1976, with squatters occupying Vienna’s old slaughterhouses, followed by the protests
against Kurt Waldheim’s running for Federal President in 1985 and the years thereafter, with
Waldheim becoming a symbolic figure of the Nazi past. In 1995 the murder of four members
of the Roma community visibly exposed xenophobia and the sidelining of minorities – topics
that were subsequently widely discussed. Josef Haslinger, Elfriede Jelinek, Robert Menasse,
Doron Rabinovici, Marlene Streeruwitz, and others, who frequently met with hostility and
were accused of denigration, became the vilified figureheads of an Austria aware of its
political responsibility.
36
The School in Literature: Pupils and Teachers
The innumerable stories about schools or boarding schools in Austrian literature reek of
discipline, coercion, and forced obedience. In Friedrich Torberg’s novel Der Schüler Gerber
(Young Gerber) of 1930, the power struggle between Gerber, the rebellious student, and
Kupfer, his teacher, ends in the adolescent’s suicide. Florjan Lipuš’s student in Zögling Tjaž
(The Errors of Young Tjaž) of 1981 also jumps to his death, having been expelled from a
boarding school against whose hostile attitude towards life and sexuality he had fought in vain.
Robert Musil’s novel Die Verwirrungen des Zöglings Törleß (The Confusions of Young
Törless) of 1906 deals with the emotional and social conflicts among adolescents, which in
such cloistered environments as boarding schools are often settled with brutal physical and
psychological violence. In his novel Der Musterschüler (The Model Pupil) of 1989, Michael
Köhlmeier explores an act of collective violence in a grim alternation of questions and
answers. His book illustrates the scars an authoritarian religious education may leave behind,
as do Barbara Frischmuth’s Die Klosterschule (The Convent School) of 1968 and Josef
Haslinger’s Der Konviktskaktus (Cactus of the Boarding School) of 1980.
In these books school is displayed as an institution that is wrongly understood as a place
where an individual’s will must be broken. They thus also examine the possibilities for
children and young people to grow and unfold their personalities. Boarding schools or schools
in general represent a social microcosm characterised by power struggles and authoritarian
structures, but also by friendship and solidarity.
Subchapter:
School as a Place of Emancipation
For the teacher and author Ernst Jandl, art was a ‘constant realisation of freedom’. He
considered the liberation from language conventions and social constraints a central
emancipatory concern. Jandl’s poems are invitations to experiment with language and go in
search of new possibilities of expression. Mira Lobe, Christine Nöstlinger, Käthe Recheis,
and other authors writing for children and young people similarly sought to encourage their
readership to be creative. Their texts reflect a programme of anti-authoritarian education that
also was to replace ‘black pedagogy’ in literature. The Sprachbastelbuch (The Do-It-Yourself
Language Book), which first appeared in 1975, is an expression of this collective effort to
promote individuality. Creativity and living out one’s talents were crucial for the pedagogic
programme of Eugenie Schwarzwald, whose name is synonymous with a gender-equitable
school system no longer based on patriarchal norms.
37
Working Worlds
From the early 1970s onwards, the description of the working environments of rural worlds
became an important subject in Austrian literature. Dreams of happiness and a meaningful life
fail due to circumstances dominated by patriarchal and Roman-Catholic structures, violence
towards women, and the impenetrability of social milieus even years after the war.
In Franz Innerhofer’s autobiographically informed novel Schöne Tage (Beautiful Days) of
1974, psychological and physical violence towards farm labourers and maidservants prevails.
Josef Haslinger’s Der Tod des Kleinhäuslers Ignaz Hajek (The Death of Small-Holder Ignaz
Hajek) of 1985 also recounts his humiliating work as a farmhand. Peter Handke’s story
Wunschloses Unglück (A Sorrow Beyond Dreams) of 1972 is an attempt to find a language for
the biography of his mother, who had committed suicide. Neither Handke’s mother nor
Elfriede Jelinek’s female protagonists in her novel Liebhaberinnen (Women as Lovers) of
1975 nor the apprentice carpenter Melzer in Gernot Wolfgruber’s novel Herrenjahre (Master
Years) of 1976 are in control of their own lives or languages. The housewife in Margit
Schreiner’s Haus, Frauen, Sex (House, Wives, Sex) of 2001 is the subject of a never-ending
monologue spoken by her former husband.
What chances did women have to lead an autonomous intellectual life not adhering to the
social mainstream in the 1960s and 1970s? Marlene Streeruwitz addresses this question in her
video essay produced in 2010 on the occasion of the 35th anniversary of the women’s
magazine AUF – eine Frauenzeitschrift. Kathrin Röggla’s documentary novel wir schlafen
nicht (We Never Sleep) of 2004 offers glimpses of the seemingly appealing and sanitised
working world of trainees, IT supporters, and key account managers.
38
Theatre and Its Impact
On 22 August 1920, the newly established Salzburg Festival opened with Hugo von
Hofmannsthal’s play Jedermann (Everyman) directed by Max Reinhardt. The festival should
reflect Austria’s cultural traditions and the scenery of the Baroque city of Salzburg – spanning
its medieval mystery and Passion plays, its Baroque court celebrations, and its culture of
bourgeois theatre. For Hofmannsthal, the festival bore his hopes for an intellectual and
cultural reorientation of Austrian identity after the fall of the Danubian monarchy.
In April 1945, the Burgtheater in Vienna was destroyed in an air raid. The theatre on Vienna’s
Ringstraße was re-opened on 15 October 1955 with Franz Grillparzer’s historical drama
König Ottokars Glück und Ende (King Ottokar, His Rise and Fall). The play deals with the
beginnings of Habsburg rule and contains a legendary praise of Austria. Only a few months
after the signing of the Austrian State Treaty, this theatrical production dealing with one of
the founding myths of Austria took on an extraordinary symbolic significance.
The Burgtheater was also the scene of one of the country’s greatest theatre scandals. Thomas
Bernhard’s play Heldenplatz, written in 1988 on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the
‘Anschluss’, caused outrage throughout Austria. Passages published before the performance
sparked a public hate campaign against the author, his text, and the theatre’s director, Claus
Peymann. That theatre is capable of polarisation like hardly any other art form is attested to
by plays by Wolfgang Bauer, Ulrich Becher, Peter Handke, and Elfriede Jelinek.
Subchapter 1:
The Impresario Herbert Wochinz
In 1958, the actor, theatrical producer, and impresario Herbert Wochinz opened the ‘Theater
am Fleischmarkt’, whose repertoire comprised works of the contemporary avant-garde – from
Samuel Beckett to Eugène Ionesco. Rediscoveries and world premiers of such authors as Jean
Genet, Michel de Ghelderode, and Georges Feydeau attest to the international significance of
this theatre, whose ensemble included Klaus Kinski. However, the theatre only survived for a
single season, which seems to have not least been due to a lack of comprehension among
Viennese critics.
In 1961, Wochinz founded the ‘Komödienspiele Porcia’ in a Renaissance palace in Spittal an
der Drau. Its productions, the stunning stage designs, and the congenial translations by H. C.
Artmann – such as of plays by Eugène Labiche, Tirso de Molina, Molière, and Lope de Vega
– contributed to the success of this summer comedy festival.
Subchapter 2:
‘Tonhof’ and Brecht Boycott
During the 1960s an avant-gardist cultural circle for new literature, music, and art established
itself at the ‘Tonhof’, a country estate in Maria Saal in Carinthia owned by the artists Gerhard
and Maja Lampersberg. The estate’s barn was used to present exhibitions and stage theatre
performances. The ambitious programme comprised three early one-act plays by Thomas
Bernhard – Die Erfundene (The Invented Woman), Rosa, and Frühling (Spring) – as well as
Gerhard Lampersberg’s opera Köpfe (Heads).
The anti-Communist campaign against Bertolt Brecht and his work has to be blamed on the
climate of the Cold War. Repeated attacks in the periodical FORVM, which was edited by
Friedrich Torberg, were supported by Ernst Haeusserman, the then-director of the Burgtheater,
and the writer Hans Weigel and in 1953 led to a boycott of Brecht’s plays in Vienna. An
exception was the ‘Neues Theater in der Scala’, which had been founded by former emigrants,
anti-Fascists, and Communists. The theatre was forced to close its doors in 1956.
39
Cold War and Apocalypse
The Cold War lasted more than forty-five years. The dissolution of the Warsaw Pact and the
Soviet Union in 1991 saw the world no longer divided into two ideological camps: the
Western democracies, led by the USA, on the one hand and the Communist states, led by the
Soviet Union, on the other.
In the post-war era, Austria was one of the bloc powers’ first bones of contention. This had a
lasting impact on Austria’s politics, culture, and society. A number of books represent sharp
snapshots of the period’s social atmosphere, above all such joint novel projects by Milo Dor
and Reinhard Federmann as their Internationale Zone (International Zone) of 1953.
Federmann’s Das Himmelreich der Lügner (The Heavenly Kingdom of Liars) of 1959 and
Robert Neumann’s Die Puppen von Poshansk (Insurrection in Poshansk) of 1952 number
among the most outstanding novels about the Cold War. In her novel Die Wand (The Wall) of
1963, Marlen Haushofer deals with the danger of a nuclear conflict by exhibiting apocalyptic
visions.
The conflict between East and West permeated the world of literature. Both Friedrich
Torberg’s periodical FORVM and the ‘Austrian Literature Society’ were funded by the
American intelligence agency, the CIA, via the ‘Congress for Cultural Freedom’. The
‘Austrian Literature Society’ participated in a programme that sent some ten million books
and magazines behind the Iron Curtain between 1956 and 1991, with the aim of enabling
intellectuals in Eastern Europe to connect with their counterparts in the West. The Kafka
Conference in Liblice near Prague in 1963, which introduced a process of democratisation,
must also be seen in this light. Kafka became a vehicle for coming to terms with the Stalinist
past.
40
Ways of Death
Todesarten (Ways of Death): thus christened Ingeborg Bachmann the project she began in
1962 and pursued until her death in Rome in 1973. The novel Malina of 1971 is the only
completed text of her ‘Study of all the possible ways of death’. Its title should be taken
literally, as the book is about (everyday) crimes and (daily) violence. A novel about the
private life of an individual cannot be separated from global catastrophes. The near-finished
novel Der Fall Franza (The Book of Franza) deals with immediate physical and
psychological threats while observing social conventions at the same time. The fragmentary
texts for Requiem für Fanny Goldmann (Requiem for Fanny Goldmann) and the
‘Goldmann/Rottwitz novel’, as well as the stories contained in the volume Simultan
(Simultaneous) of 1972 can likewise be assigned to this literary analysis of a world order
dominated by the male sex. The starting point for Thomas Bernhard’s last novel Auslöschung
(Extinction) of 1986 is an accident in which Franz Josef Murau’s parents and brother are
killed. Murau, who lives in Rome, now feels forced to confront his ‘birthplace complex’,
which is inextricably linked to the family estate of Wolfsegg in Upper Austria. The story and
the film Der Italiener (The Italian) both anticipate this novel, so that its history can be traced
to the late 1960s. One of the novel’s characters is meant as a homage to Ingeborg Bachmann:
Maria, who ‘wants to be Roman yet at the same time Viennese’, generates ‘her superb poems
from this dangerous mental and emotional condition’.
Elfriede Jelinek’s novel Gier (Greed) of 2000, the focus of which is on one of the seven
mortal sins and whose title recalls a story from Simultaneous, constitutes a link. Jelinek wrote
the screenplay for Werner Schroeter’s film version of Malina. Choosing a different approach,
she continued Bernhard’s radical criticism of the contemporary (Austrian) situation and
Bachmann’s struggle for recognition as a woman writer.
41
Formations of the Avant-garde
In the 1950s, a new literary youth preferring more concise forms of expression than the novel
emerged on the fringes of the national literature scene in Vienna. Hertha Kräftner, René
Altmann, and Andreas Okopenko attracted attention with their poems, and Ernst Jandl was
particularly open to formal innovation. With his sound poetry he would become the first
literary pop star.
The Wiener Gruppe (Vienna Group) was an avant-garde movement in the true sense of the
word. Towards the end of the 1950s, Friedrich Achleitner, Konrad Bayer, Gerhard Rühm, and
Oswald Wiener rallied around H. C. Artmann, their senior by several years. Their ‘poetic acts’
and other happenings attracted attention, and they performed their texts in ‘literary cabarets’
on the stage as a stunning anti-theatre.
In the works of the Wiener Gruppe, literature is bound up with an alternative lifestyle. The
individual members of the group presented themselves as dandy-like and extremely cool, thus
thrusting themselves in the limelight as artists. These authors experimented with alternative
methods of text production in joint projects and found new reference points in international
tendencies as well as in the forgotten traditions of German literature.
The Wiener Gruppe disbanded after Konrad Bayer’s suicide in 1964. Viennese Actionism,
which came on its heels, developed more radical forms of artistic expression. After an ‘action’
on the subject of ‘Art and Revolution’ at the University of Vienna in 1968 (referred to as
‘University Scurrility’ by the yellow press), Oswald Wiener emigrated to Berlin, where the
Austrian avant-garde reconstituted itself in a new environment.
Subchapter 1:
Literary Youth
In 1955 young authors signed a manifesto drafted by H. C. Artmann that was directed against
the reinstallation of the Austrian army. Representatives of diverse movements performed their
texts in varying constellations. Andreas Okopenko attracted attention with explicitly
analytical poems. His periodical publikationen einer wiener gruppe junger autoren
(publications of a viennese group of young authors), which appeared in an extremely limited
edition, offered first publishing opportunities for the literary youth. The poet Hertha Kräftner,
who died prematurely, explored new emotional worlds. René Altmann wrote short texts of
prose, which he meticulously marked with consecutive numbers. A first Austrian youth
culture gradually established itself on the fringes of the official literature scene.
Subchapter 2:
Books and Bestsellers
H. C. Artmann’s book med ana schwoazzn dintn (in black ink) of 1958, containing poems
written in the dialect of Breitensee, a Viennese neighbourhood, met with overwhelming
success. The following year, Artmann, Friedrich Achleitner, and Gerhard Rühm co-authored
the volume hosn rosn baa (trousers roses bones) with more radical dialect poems. Konrad
Bayer’s text der stein der weisen (the philosopher’s stone) appeared with a small publishing
house in Berlin in 1963. That same year, the author performed in a reading for the Gruppe 47
and was awarded a contract with Rowohlt, a renowned publishing company, for his novel der
sechste sinn (the sixth sense). The title fenster (window), with texts by Rühm, appeared with
the same publisher in 1968, followed one year later by Oswald Wiener’s cult book die
verbesserung von mitteleuropa, roman (the improvement of central europe, a novel).
Achleitner’s quadratroman (square novel) was published by Luchterhand in 1973.
Subchapter 3:
Texts and Voices
The interplay of text, image, and musical structures is characteristic of many works conceived
by experimental artists and holds especially true for Ernst Jandl and Gerhard Rühm. Rühm’s
text abhandlung über das weltall (treatise on the universe) is the result of strict calculation.
Self-defined rules for text production transforming a pseudo-scientific text intended to be read
into an experimental text intended to be spoken are aimed at the artistic realisation of freedom.
This also applies to Ernst Jandl’s spoken text Teufelsfalle (Devil’s Trap). Through the
handling of the source material – borrowed from the English artist John Furnival – the text
evolves into music in the sense of rhythm and sound. Content dissolves in favour of phonetic
associations; the words are thinned out until they result in a ‘vocal concert’ (Ernst Jandl).
New contexts arise during listening.
Subchapter 4:
Art and Revolution
On 7 June 1968, a panel discussion on the subject of ‘Art and Revolution’ was scheduled to
take place in Lecture Room 1 at the University of Vienna’s New Department Building. The
invited artists (including such exponents of Viennese Actionism as Günter Brus, Otto Mühl,
Oswald Wiener, and Peter Weibel) distributed pamphlets and shocked the audience by
breaking a number of taboos. After several participants had been convicted by Austrian courts,
a new Austrian avant-garde reconstituted in Berlin. Its members held ‘workshops for poets’
and published the periodical Die Schastrommel (literally translating as ‘fart drum’) as an
‘Organ of the Austrian Government in Exile’. Oswald Wiener established the bar ‘Exil’,
which in the years to come would develop into an international meeting place for artists.
Subchapter 5:
The Vienna Group
The authors of the so-called ‘Wiener Gruppe’ (Friedrich Achleitner, Konrad Bayer, Gerhard
Rühm, and Oswald Wiener) tried out new forms of expression in two literary cabarets. The
first took place in a small bar in Vienna’s Windmühlgasse on 6 December 1958, followed by
the second in a larger hall at Porrhaus in Vienna’s third district on 15 April 1959. Resorting to
the pattern of traditional cabaret, the two programmes, each of which was performed only
once, consisted of individual acts. Chansons alternated with small scenes, including some
sketches that seemed extremely absurd and frequently simply presented ordinary occurrences.
The actors drove into the auditorium on scooters and then eyed the audience from the stage,
where they subsequently demolished a piano.
43
Poetic Correspondences
The letter has a long historical pedigree in literature. From around the middle of the
eighteenth century, it progressively broke free from the shackles of stylistic convention.
Letters became a medium of personal communication for which their writers developed
individual forms of expression. The correspondence of authors played a very special role,
with Goethe being a prominent example.
In the twentieth century, a form of communication by letters evolved in which the letter
occasionally even became a work of art – from the illustrated letters sent by the ‘dual talent’
Alfred Kubin to his publisher Reinhard Piper to postcards, the limited size of which
influenced the style of handwriting.
The term ‘correspondence’ covers not only dispatches in the narrow sense of the word, but
also the diaries of lovers; jointly written texts, such as those by the poet couple Friederike
Mayröcker and Ernst Jandl; and the exchange of poems via letters between Ingeborg
Bachmann and Paul Celan, which illustrates the limitations of letters in terms of what can be
said. The writing of letters is always about maintaining autonomy in an exchange with the
other, as is impressively attested to by the correspondence between Hilde Spiel and Thomas
Bernhard.
The era of ‘poetic correspondence’ is largely over. Authors also communicate via e-mail and
mobile telephone, and the private and public spheres overlap in social networks. Fewer and
fewer letters make their way into archives, increasing thus the auratic value of surviving
correspondence.
44
Writing Processes
What lies at the beginning of a literary work? A detailed plan of action or a thought rapidly
jotted down? How does a text develop? Does it evolve in precisely envisaged steps or grow
freely? What techniques do authors resort to when they write? Where and how do they note
down what preoccupies them? Is writing outside the study different from working at a desk?
How and by whom are texts corrected? When and where does working on a piece end?
This chapter presents processes connected to writing: from the impressions Peter Handke
gains when walking through a landscape to Elfriede Czurda’s purely linguistic technique of
anagrams. The works by Heimito von Doderer, Ernst Jandl, and Robert Menasse are based on
carefully designed plans. Walter Kappacher accumulates research materials, not unlike
Andreas Okopenko. Gert Jonke’s handwriting resembles the continuous flow of a river, while
Friederike Mayröcker drowns in the chaos of memos in her apartment.
Reinhard Priessnitz made the highest formal demands on his poems and parted with them
only hesitantly. Arno Geiger entrusts a friend who is also a writer with editing his prose. In
Elias Canetti’s case we come across the techniques of scientific writing: the analysis of other
books in excerpts and notes.
Frequently the notebooks of writers look like elaborate creations in themselves. Sometimes
they give the impression that they have not merely served as a working tool, but have been
made with posterity in mind.
Subchapter 1:
Wandering
In Peter Handke’s novel Die Wiederholung (Repetition) of 1986, young Filip Kobal of
Rinkenberg (Carinthia) travels to Slovenia on foot in search of his brother, who went missing
in World War II. Like Handke’s Uncle Gregor, Kobal’s brother once attended the School of
Pomology in Maribor when he was a young man. Peter Handke invested several years of
research in the book. He studied the region’s geography and history and undertook many
excursions to the places mentioned in the story, making drawings and taking notes and
pictures of objects and places. The descriptions in the book frequently rely directly on the
photographs. For the author, Slovenia – Handke’s ‘Ninth Country’ – has become a place of
longing.
Subchapter 2:
Studying
Elias Canetti considered the book Masse und Macht (Crowds and Power) of 1960 as his
‘work of a lifetime’. It had taken the future Nobel laureate in literature more than twenty years
to finish this comprehensive essay. Combining diverse patterns of explanation, the author
explores the dynamics and manifestations of crowds and power. Inspired by such mass
phenomena as the fire of the Vienna Palace of Justice in 1927, Canetti sought to ‘go for the
throat’ of the twentieth century with his study. He deliberately detached himself from Gustave
Le Bon’s classic crowd psychology and Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytical approaches,
referring to ethnological accounts instead. Modern potentates and crowds are presented on the
basis of their archaic precursors.
Subchapter 3:
Researching
For his novel Silberpfeile (Silver Arrows) of 2000, the Salzburg-born author Walter
Kappacher amassed a huge file of newspaper clippings. Thematically, the book focuses on
National Socialism’s ideological appropriation of German automobile racing: the victorious
Silver Arrows of Mercedes-Benz and the speed records set by the German racing driver Bernd
Rosemeyer on a car of the rivalling Auto Union team were showcased on a grand scale. In
Silver Arrows, an eighty-five-year-old engineer remembers the propagandist mise-en-scène of
speed and heroism. Kappacher himself is a trained auto mechanic.
Subchapter 4:
Correcting
Reinhard Priessnitz corrected his typescripts time and again. He frequently produced special
versions for readings, adding pertinent remarks to his texts. During the author’s lifetime, the
only book by him that was actually published was vierundvierzig gedichte (forty-four poems)
of 1978.
Arno Geiger also relies on the opinions of others when it comes to his writing. He entrusted
one of his typescripts to his friend, the German writer Norbert Niemann. The family novel Es
geht uns gut (We Are Doing Fine) of 2005 thus underwent substantial stylistic correction and
also received a new title.
Subchapter 5:
Liquefying
Gert Jonke wrote extremely rhythmical and musical prose. The manuscripts for the volume
Stoffgewitter (Material Thunderstorm), a compilation of texts published in 1996, illustrate
that the form of his texts is already outlined in his handwriting. The script in blue ink spreads
across the paper like an endless wavy line, accumulating into ‘thunderstorms of language’ in
several places. The piece of prose Individuum and Metamorphosen (Individual and
Metamorphoses) also deals with the subject of water thematically: it describes the Lendkanal
in Klagenfurt and the Reichsbrücke in Vienna. The author defined himself as someone who
uses his pen as an observation tower and the observation tower as a ship’s mast for writing.
Subchapter 6:
Anagramming
Elfriede Czurda writes some of her texts down on long scrolls. For her volume of poetry
Fälschungen (Counterfeits) of 1987, she prepared several of such scrolls. In addition to
conventional poems and individual lines of poetry, the book also contains anagrams. The term
(from Greek ‘anagraphein’ for ‘rewrite’) refers to a linguistic technique employed to create a
new word or phrase by rearranging the letters of the original wording. For Elfriede Czurda the
process of anagramming is also interesting because through it any text one may come across
can produce innumerable new meanings out of itself.
Subchapter 7:
Memo-rising
Piles of materials several metres high are stacked in Friederike Mayröcker’s apartment in
Vienna’s fifth district. Incessantly writing, the poet puts her impressions down on thousands
and thousands of memos. Observations of herself and her environment, snippets of language,
remainders of dreams, and excerpts from texts constitute the material from which Mayröcker
constructs her poems and associative expanses of prose. After a text has been completed, the
piles of paper are deposited in her apartment, rising layer by layer and covering up what lies
underneath. During the writing process, the memos are visibly arranged: they are kept around
the cleared space next to the sewing machine, held by clothes-pegs. The author uses small
baskets, clotheslines, and Styrofoam panels in order to find her way through this apparent
chaos.
Subchapter 8:
Taking Notes
Often observations are directly committed to paper in notebooks that can be pocketed and
taken along. They contain various mixtures of diary-like entries, sketches of individual works,
and sometimes even entire passages of future books. Notebooks may be elaborate creations.
Josef Winkler’s travelling notebooks resemble small works of art; Gerhard Amanshauser
glues photographs into his journal, which he additionally decorates with watercolour paintings.
For Ludwig Wittgenstein and Oswald Wiener, the notebook is an ideal organ of reflection.
Ferdinand Schmatz, who collects his records and notes in a loose-leaf binder, attaches no
importance to the aesthetic appearance of notebooks.
Subchapter 9:
Planning
Work sometimes begins with a sketch in the form of a plan – a huge construction plan,
veritable text score, or storyboard. In novelist Heimito von Doderer’s case, such plans, with
their plotted curves and points marking dynamic developments and culminations, were
intended to set the rhythm for a still-unformulated text.
Robert Menasse’s striving for narrative totality eventually derives from Doderer’s example.
His novel Die Vertreibung aus der Hölle (Expulsion from Hell) of 2001 relates the
seventeenth-century biography of Rabbi Menasseh ben Israel to the Austrian reality of the
1960s and 1970s. Rabbi Menasseh, accompanied by his family, fled from the inquisition in
Portugal to Amsterdam, where he became a recognised scholar.
Ernst Jandl’s dramatic design of Sebastian combines experimental forms with effects
borrowed from low culture. This autobiographical drama, which is divided into twelve scenes,
was conceived as a comic strip set on a stage. It starts with the protagonist’s conception and
ends with his consulting a psychiatrist.
Subchapter 10:
Formalising
Lexikon einer sentimentalen Reise zum Exporteurtreffen in Druden: Roman (Encyclopaedia of
a Sentimental Journey to an Export Meeting in Druden: A Novel) is the full title of a book
written in 1970 by Andreas Okopenko, a trained chemist. Okopenko’s texts resemble the
pattern of an experimental set-up. He meticulously structured his working processes and
divided them into individual steps. In the Encyclopaedia novel, the material is ordered
according to the logic of the alphabet: from A to Z, from Z to A, and to and fro.