Fictions from an Orphan State: Literary Reflections of Austria between Habsburg and Hitler (Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture, 119) (Volume 119) [1 ed.] 1571135316, 9781571135315

Table of contents :
Frontcover
Contents
Acknowledgments
Preamble: A Cold Sun
1: Soldiers’ Tales: Andreas Latzko, Ernst Weiss
2: The Habsburg Legacy: Arthur Schnitzler, Franz Werfel, Joseph Roth
3: “Hakenkreuz” and “Davidstern”: Bruno Brehm, Soma Morgenstern
4: Charting February 1934: Karl Kraus, Anna Seghers, Friedrich Wolf, Alois Vogel
5: Finis Austriae?: Joseph Roth, Ernst Weiss, Heimito von Doderer
Postscript
Bibliography
Backcover

Citation preview

Fictions from an Orphan state Literary Reflections of Austria between Habsburg and Hitler

Andrew Barker

Fictions from an Orphan State

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Studies in German Literature, Linguistics, and Culture

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Fictions from an Orphan State Literary Reflections of Austria between Habsburg and Hitler Andrew Barker

Rochester, New York

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Copyright © 2012 by Andrew Barker All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation, no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded, or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. First published 2012 by Camden House Camden House is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Inc. 668 Mt. Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620, USA www.camden-house.com and of Boydell & Brewer Limited PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK www.boydellandbrewer.com ISBN-13: 978-1-57113-531-5 ISBN-10: 1-57113-531-6 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Barker, Andrew, 1947– Fictions from an orphan state : literary reflections of Austria between Habsburg and Hitler / Andrew Barker. p. cm. — (Studies in German literature, linguistics, and culture) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-57113-531-5 (hardcover : alk. paper) — ISBN 1-57113-531-6 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Austrian literature — 20th century — History and criticism. I. Title. PT3818.B37 2012 830.9'9436—dc23 2012008039 A catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library. This publication is printed on acid-free paper. Printed in the United States of America.

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Contents Acknowledgments Preamble: A Cold Sun

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1: Soldiers’ Tales: Andreas Latzko, Ernst Weiss

21

2: The Habsburg Legacy: Arthur Schnitzler, Franz Werfel, Joseph Roth

49

3: “Hakenkreuz” and “Davidstern”: Bruno Brehm, Soma Morgenstern

85

4: Charting February 1934: Karl Kraus, Anna Seghers, Friedrich Wolf, Alois Vogel

113

5: “Finis Austriae”?: Joseph Roth, Ernst Weiss, Heimito von Doderer

146

Postscript

175

Bibliography

181

Index

195

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Acknowledgments

A

LTHOUGH THIS BOOK was many years in the making, for much of that time I did not know it was being written. While chiefly working on the culture of the Viennese fin de siècle, I had always kept an interest in subsequent Austrian prose writing, but only as a parallel body of work accrued did I realize that I had, unwittingly, created the torso of a book about the literature of the ill-fated First Austrian Republic. This study is not, then, the fruit of agonized applications to grant awarding bodies and research councils, with “outcomes” demanded and then seemingly predicted before the research has even begun. It is often the product of serendipity, having grown more-or-less spontaneously over the past three decades or so. Early versions of some chapters first appeared in scholarly journals, other sections were inspired by texts taught to the gifted students of German at the University of Edinburgh, for whose stimulation and insights I have been constantly grateful. Over these many years I have received enormous help, both intellectual and financial, from a range of sources far too numerous to list here, so to single out one person for my particular thanks may seem both invidious and graceless. However, for the past thirty years I have been unfailingly inspired and encouraged by the wise counsel and generosity of my friend, mentor and collaborator Leo Lensing, and it is to him that I dedicate this book.

Andrew Barker Edinburgh, October 2011

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Preamble: A Cold Sun “L’Autriche, c’est ce qui reste”

T

HIS STUDY FOCUSES ON LITERATURE from and about Austria between the war-torn end of the Dual Monarchy and the jubilant annexation of the First Republic by the Nazis. Its aim is to show how writers across the spectrum of race, politics, and religion responded to the burden of the past, the demands of the present, and the prospect of what was for many a terrifying future. Mining the wealth of relatively unfamiliar material still available to scholars from two of the most widely debated decades in European history, I try to redress the critical imbalance that has arisen thanks to a Germany-centered emphasis in the cultural chronicling of German-speaking Central Europe between the wars.1 In short, I want to show how much literary life there was beyond the bounds of Weimar and Berlin.2 What is missing from the volume will soon become obvious. Lyric poetry is almost completely absent, while drama and writing by women feature only on the margins.3 Similarly, some of the leading authors of the era, universally claimed for both German and Austrian literature, are mentioned either not at all, or merely in passing. My contention is that Hermann Broch, Elias Canetti, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Ödön von Horváth, Franz Kafka, Robert Musil, and Rainer Maria Rilke, to name merely some of the more obvious absentees, are already well served by the critical acclaim they enjoy. Whether or not there exists a specifically “Austrian” literature to which these major figures primarily belong is a contentious question, but one with which this volume will not attempt to engage. Nevertheless, on the evidence of the material I present below, it should be manifestly clear that there does indeed exist a very distinctive body of writing that is specifically about Austria and its particular concerns in the period 1918–38.4 As the French premier Georges Clemenceau wryly remarked after the Habsburg Empire had collapsed, “L’Autriche, c’est ce qui reste” (Austria is what is left).5 In the context of a radically reshaped Europe, Austria’s capital city Vienna was widely perceived as the hydrocephalic head on a body shrunk almost beyond recognition.6 It has become almost a truism to note that after the dismemberment of Austria-Hungary in November 1918 what had once been the vibrant center of an empire quickly became a republican backwater. Nevertheless, it is too readily forgotten how rich

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the intellectual life of the First Austrian Republic actually was. As Edmund de Waal has noted, this was an exhilarating time to study in Austria, given the profound scholarship and deep rivalries in the various schools of economics, physics, philosophy, law, psychoanalysis and history associated in particular with the University of Vienna.7 Similarly, it is often overlooked, or simply ignored, that notions and concepts relating to Weimar culture and its Nazi aftermath do not always apply in a republic dominated by the tensions between the Social Democratic experiment of “Red Vienna” and the conservative inclinations of a montane Catholic population that Joseph Roth memorably dismissed as “Alpentrottel” (Alpine idiots).8 Just how divergent Austria sometimes was from Germany may be illustrated by an example from its musical life. In the clerical-fascist state established after parliamentary democracy was overthrown by Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss in March 1933, music by the Jewish composer Gustav Mahler was officially promoted, “in part to consolidate an independent cultural identity but also to foster the image that Austria (unlike Germany) was an open-minded, tolerant, and liberal country.”9 As Alexander Waugh rightly notes, inter-war Vienna remained a “quick, cosmopolitan, cultural hub.”10 Major artistic figures still lived and worked there after 1918, the city remaining culturally vital thanks in large measure to the enlightened efforts of its Socialist administration. A fine example of this enterprise was the 1924 “Musik- und Theater Fest,” an aesthetic extravaganza organized by David Josef Bach, “the cultural ‘supremo’ of the city of Vienna,”11 whose function mirrored on a smaller stage that of Anatol Lunacharsky, leader of the Commissariat of Enlightenment in Moscow, and Leo Kerstenberg, musical adviser to the Ministry of Science, Culture, and Education in Berlin.12 For the British historian Tony Judt, Red Vienna represented one of the two great advertisements for Social Democracy after the First World War. The other was the British welfare state after 1945.13 In the visual arts, despite the presence of Oskar Kokoschka — until he fled to Prague following the civil war of February 1934 — Republican Austria proved unable to emulate the achievements of Klimt, Schiele, and indeed Kokoschka himself during the dying decades of the Empire. Musically, on the other hand, interwar Austria remained a center of the highest significance. Heinrich Schenker developed a theory of music that, though deaf to anything post-Brahms, is now regarded as the twentieth century’s most influential,14 while the New York Times correspondent Herbert F. Peyser noted on 25 January 1934: “In the course of two weeks I have heard in Vienna more distinguished concerts than during all of the previous six months in Berlin.”15 Arnold Schoenberg may have left Vienna for Berlin in 1926, but Alban Berg and Anton Webern, the other leading members of the “Zweite Wiener Schule” (Second Viennese School), stayed on to play crucial roles in the city’s musical life,16 while the more

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conservative Franz Schmidt continued to develop the symphonic legacy of Brahms and Bruckner. Although Schmidt’s good name was later sullied by the unfinished cantata Deutsche Auferstehung (German Resurrection, 1938) commissioned by the Nazis, he nevertheless created two of the handful of works of enduring artistic greatness to emerge from Austria during the dying years of the First Republic: the lyrically mournful Fourth Symphony (1933), and the apocalyptic oratorio Das Buch mit sieben Siegeln (The Book with Seven Seals, 1935–37), a work vividly anticipating the horrors about to be unleashed in the Second World War. In philosophy, Ludwig Wittgenstein believed that with the publication of the Logisch-philosophische Abhandlung (1921), known in English as the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922), he had solved every philosophical issue, and he therefore turned his attention to educating the primary school children of Puchberg am Schneeberg, a village in deepest Lower Austria. Refusing to accept that Wittgenstein had indeed uttered the last word in philosophy, but fired by his example, the logical positivists of the “Wiener Kreis” (Vienna Circle), led by Rudolf Carnap, Moritz Schlick, and Otto Neurath, helped keep Austria at the forefront of modern European thought.17 Wittgenstein eventually left Austria for Cambridge in 1929. In economics, the work of Friedrich von Hayek was to prove pivotal, if often misunderstood, in the development of free market economies of the later twentieth century, while Kurt Gödel was the dominant figure in world mathematics. Sigmund Freud, the most commanding figure of all in his impact upon modern thought, remained in Vienna until hounded out after the “Anschluss” in March 1938. By that time, however, as Peter Gay has observed, Freud was living far less in Austria than in his own mind.18 Beyond the bounds of Vienna, the inauguration of the Salzburg Festival in 1921 by Max Reinhardt, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and Richard Strauss set an example of the cultural commemoration of tradition that (with the exception of the 1944 festival) has lasted until today.19 The founders perceived high art as the aptest way to heal the wounds and ruptures of a World War unleashed in Europe and chose Salzburg both as an outstanding example of the European Baroque architectural tradition that transcended national frontiers and as the birthplace of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, considered by many to be the most universal of all musical spirits.20 Sadly, for all its intellectual and artistic accomplishment, over the two decades of its fraught existence the First Austrian Republic, the “state that nobody wanted,”21 proved consistently unable to command the loyalty of a majority of its citizens. This was never better illustrated than on the eve of its demise in March 1938, when Kurt von Schuschnigg pleaded in parliament for his fellow Austrians to defend the republican colors that had replaced the imperial black and yellow. As the chancellor’s final cry of “Rot-Weiss-Rot bis in den Tod!” (Red-White-Red until we’re dead!)

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faded away, the national anthem struck up, and the crowd that was milling outside began to sing the famous tune Haydn had composed for the Habsburgs in 1797. However, they did not sing with one voice. In fact, no fewer than three different sets of words could be discerned: the imperial hymn “Gott erhalte,” the republican anthem “Sei gesegnet ohne Ende, Heimaterde wunderhold!,” and the poem appropriated by the Nazis, “Deutschland, Deutschland, über alles.”22 Soon afterwards Hitler’s troops marched in and Austria ceased to exist. Initially at least, the great majority of Austrians appeared to welcome the demise of their state, a reaction not dissimilar to that of twenty years previously when the Habsburg Empire collapsed. Compared with the incredulity and outrage attending the demise of the Wilhelminian Reich, whose “place in the sun” had lasted under fifty years, there seemed to be little regret at the dismantling of an edifice whose history stretched back to medieval times. As Steven Beller explains, the Habsburgs had been unwilling or unable to transmute their patriarchal dynasticism into a true patriotism, where the country, and not the dynasty, came first. Since loyalty was focused on the emperor, no strong, independent Austrian focus of loyalty had developed.23 Only among Jews, appreciative of Emperor Franz Joseph’s philosemitism and supportive of the dynasty because it guaranteed their status as merely one minority among many, had there been widespread mourning for the loss of empire. Writing on Armistice Day, 11 November 1918, Sigmund Freud did not contain his dismay: “Österreich-Ungarn ist nicht mehr. Anderswo möchte ich nicht leben. Emigration kommt für mich nicht in Frage. Ich werde mit dem Torso weiterleben und mir einbilden, daß er das Ganze ist” (Austria-Hungary is no more. I would not wish to live elsewhere. There is no question of emigration for me. I shall continue to live with the torso and imagine it is the entirety).24 In 1928, having been initially attracted like many Jews to the egalitarian idealism of the Soviet Union, Joseph Roth already looked back wistfully on the vanished empire, declaring: “Die kalte Sonne der Habsburger erlosch, aber es war eine Sonne gewesen” (The cold sun of the Habsburgs was extinguished, but at least there had been a sun).25 Ten years later, in a despairing response to Hitler and the Third Reich, Roth even returned incognito to Vienna on a quixotic venture to persuade the embattled Schuschnigg government to restore the exiled pretender Otto von Habsburg to power. This predictably came to naught, but led the patrician Viennese Stefan Zweig to remark how often the empire’s defenders, like the Galician Roth, hailed not from the German-speaking capital but from its eastern periphery where people could compare “die mild-nachlässige Herrschaft der Habsburger” (mild and lax regime of the Habsburgs) with the harsher conditions on the other side of the border in Czarist Russia.26 Another Viennese Jew, the controversial psychoanalyst Fritz Wittels, noted how a

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profound ambivalence towards the Habsburgs had often been the order of the day: During the First World War, just after a decisive victory over the Russians by the Central Powers, I ran across the playwright Arthur Schnitzler [. . .] He said to me: “You know how much I hate everything in Austria, yet when I heard that the danger of a Russian invasion was over, I felt like kneeling down and kissing this soil of ours.”27

No such ambivalence colored the memory of Arnold Schoenberg, also born in Vienna. Writing in California not long before his death in 1951, the composer noted how the experience of war had served only to strengthen his allegiance to the monarchy: “When the First World War began, I was proud to be called to arms and as a soldier I did my whole duty enthusiastically as a true believer in the House of Habsburg.”28 For a majority of its non-German Gentile subjects, however, the ending of the Habsburg hegemony meant the breaking of a new dawn and the realization of long-held dreams of autonomous nationhood. Today some regard the Habsburgs’ attempt to fashion a state that transcended competing ethnic identities as idealistic and far-sighted, but this was not a view held by Czechs, Slovaks, Poles, Croats, and most of the empire’s other constituent nationalities in 1918.29 German speakers had not actively willed the demise of the Habsburg state. In fact, support for it was strong both among the conservative bourgeois supporters of the Christian Social Party, who had prospered there, and the Social Democrats, who to the very end remained loyal to its multinational aspirations. For most of the German-speaking majority in the new First Republic, however, political union with Weimar Germany was the preferred option once the empire was no more. Yet where the “Republik Deutschösterreich” was concerned, Wilsonian notions of national selfdetermination counted for nothing, as Austrians were denied the right to call the state by the name they had given it when they proclaimed the republic on 12 November 1918. This was altered by the Treaty of St Germain to the simple “Republik Österreich.” The “German” identity of post1918 Austria was, however, an issue over which few of its reluctant citizens had many doubts. Their cultural and civic identity may have been Austrian, but ethnically they knew themselves simply as “Deutsche.” Germanophones living in Germany itself were known as “Reichsdeutsche.”

Writers and the First Republic For the Jewish Viennese satirist Karl Kraus the collapse of the Habsburg Empire prompted comparisons with the apocalypse. At the end of his vast drama Die letzten Tage der Menschheit (The Last Days of Mankind, 1919–22)

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the final word is left to God. Echoing the last German emperor’s pathetic disclaimer, the divine voice exclaims: “Ich habe es nicht gewollt” (I didn’t intend this).30 Yet as Kraus knew full well, this was really a very secular ending, wrought through incompetence and corruption; and manifested in politics, economics, and above all, he felt, in language. With tight economy he expressed his damning verdict on the Habsburgs in a parody of J. G. Seidl’s imperial Habsburg anthem, “Gott erhalte, Gott beschütze” (God save, God protect), first heard in 1854. Kraus’s version appeared in 1920 as a part of an extended response to the new, albeit unofficial, republican anthem “Deutsch-Österreich, du herrliches Land, wir lieben dich!” (German-Austria, you splendid land, we love you!), the work of its first Chancellor, Karl Renner.31 Kraus noted in his usual laconic way: “Renner und Johann Gabriel Seidl [haben] doch wenigstens das Gemeinsame, daß sie beide keine Dichter sind” (Renner and Johann Gabriel Seidl (have) at least one thing in common: neither is a poet).32 Kraus then reworked Seidl’s verses to impart a meaning diametrically opposed to the original, retaining not just the rhymes of the originals, but nearly all the rhyming words as well. What had been a “Kaiserhymne” now becomes truly one for the people, a “Volkshymne”: Gott erhalte, Gott beschütze vor dem Kaiser unser Land! Mächtig ohne seine Stütze, sicher ohne seine Hand! Ungeschirmt von seiner Krone, stehn wir gegen diesen Feind: Nimmer sei mit Habsburgs Throne Österreichs Geschick vereint!33 [God save, God protect our land from the emperor! Powerful without his support, safe without his hand! Unprotected by his crown we stand against the foe: Nevermore let Austria’s fate united be with Habsburg’s throne!]

An equally damning verdict on the empire was passed in what, with Die letzten Tage der Menschheit, was the other monumental work of literature to emerge from the imperial rubble: Jaroslav Hašek’s unfinished novel Osudy dobrého vojáka Švejka za světové války (The Adventures of the Good Soldier Schweyk and His Fortunes in the World War, 1921–22). Writing in Czech, Hašek, like Kraus, found the only fitting way to even begin to understand the fall of the House of Habsburg was through

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humor, sometimes knockabout, but more usually black. The tone of the novel is irreverent throughout, set by the opening sentence referring to the assassination of the Crown Prince in Sarajevo in June 1914: “And so they’ve killed our Ferdinand.”34 From the point of view of the author, an alcoholic Bolshevik commissar from Prague, the ending of imperial rule was simply a cause for unfettered celebration. As we have seen, Vienna remained a city of real cultural stature after 1918. Nevertheless, an inevitable upshot of Austria’s dramatic change in political status was the leaching of some artistic talent from the former Habsburg capital, lured often by the counter-attractions of Berlin, a city that “shook off its imperial past and reinvented itself as the prototype of media-saturated urban cultures to come — the first all-night city, the city without shame.”35 Thanks to the ravages of the war, Vienna’s social fabric was now in an appalling state too. Wolfgang Maderthaner has observed how the omnipresent sense of Vienna as a “dying city” was reinforced by the collapse of its sanitation system, the ravages of Spanish Flu, hunger, and malnutrition, and a large rise in cases of tuberculosis and sexually transmitted diseases. These were matched by a dramatic growth in the number of homeless and destitute people.36 However, a positive and enduring outcome of this malaise, with a resonance far beyond Austria, was the decision of the Social Democratic city fathers to embark on one of Europe’s greatest projects in urban regeneration.37 This saw the building of more than 60,000 new homes between 1923 and 1933, an achievement that also continued the great avant-garde architectural tradition of Otto Wagner, Josef Olbrich, and Adolf Loos that had been so marked a feature of pre-war Viennese culture.38 Indeed, Loos himself participated in the project as the director of the municipal building authority (Gemeindebauamt) from 1921 to 1924. The savage shelling by right-wing government forces of one of these great urban settlements, the Karl-Marx-Hof, in the civil war of February 1934, marked a low point in the history of the First Republic. Understandably enough, praise for the Socialist achievements of Red Vienna was rare in the right-wing and clerical circles that dominated so many federal governments in the First Republic. The Social Democrats had in fact become the strongest party after the first federal elections of February 1919, but they left the coalition early in 1920, swayed by their Marxist conviction that the state was an instrument of bourgeois oppression. By going willingly into opposition, they committed an error that would prove fatal in the history of social democracy and for the democratic character of the First Republic.39 In Vienna, however, they remained in power, and tensions between the Left-ruled capital and the deeply conservative provinces were to dog the First Republic from the very outset. The view from beyond Austria was often, but not always, more nuanced: Fallen Bastions (1938), the British journalist G. E. R. Gedye’s eagle-eyed

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account of the stresses and machinations that eventually tore the state apart, remains a classic of its kind. A German translation was issued in Vienna shortly after the foundation of the Second Republic in 1945, in an attempt to re-educate a population brainwashed during the Third Reich.40 A tendentious account of the early days of the First Republic by the Catholic American travel writer and novelist Edith O’Shaughnessy provides an altogether different perspective from that offered by the wise and questioning Gedye.41 In the novel Viennese Medley (1924) O’Shaughnessy bewails both the loss of empire and the plight of the Viennese bourgeoisie.42 Hailed by the Sunday Times in London as a “book that sets its writer definitely in the first rank of living English novelists,”43 it is now justifiably forgotten. Nevertheless, Viennese Medley remains of interest as a rare fictional examination of the early days of the new state from the outside,44 its narrative tone and stance marking it out as the work of an author swayed by the Christian Social and antisemitic discourses of the day. Dedicated to the two Countesses Széchenýi, the novel’s opening motto, “Sorrow’s crown of sorrow is remembering happier days” (11), openly reflects the view of large swathes of the German-Austrian bourgeoisie whose public and private worlds had collapsed along with the empire. As Norbert Leser remarks, this had been a world that offered them great scope for action and surrounded them with splendor. Its disappearance left behind a deep well of nostalgia.45 Thereafter, the novel repeatedly disparages the peace “that had leveled the ranks of the Viennese with the same efficiency as death” (213), and quotes approvingly, in Viennese German, the stock phrase of popular discontent about life in the post-Habsburg world — “Dos hamma von da Republik” (62) (That’s what we’ve got from the republic). For one of the novel’s more sympathetically-drawn characters, the war-wounded civil servant Otto Steiner, the new republic was “a source of evils, that he [. . .] could not be expected to purify. What, indeed, could he do about the Republic, about the Jews, about the Freemasons, about the exchange?” (63). For nationally-minded Germans and Austrians in the 1920s, the very notion of a republic, epitomized above all by the United States, represented everything that was foreign and un-German. The narrator’s dim view of Red Vienna, the corollary of the text’s pervasive longing for the Habsburg past, is obvious. The novel grotesquely claims that while intellectuals and their families starved in the new republic, “it was the working classes, fortunate possessors of muscle, that frequented butcher and delicatessen shops” (161). The novel nevertheless reveals both a generalized sympathy for the plight of the lower classes in what was indeed an era of hunger and inflation, and a relentless hostility towards Jews. They are depicted as “the new feudal lords of Vienna (which inevitably has lords of some kind)”; Jews walk “with

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ringing tread in the triumph of their plenty. That mushroom aristocracy come out of Israel and the war had pushed into some shadowy, scrawny underbrush of life that once great, powerful ‘First Society’” (97). These are the people who make the Gentile Frau Stacher feel “both stranger and outcast daughter” in her own familiar streets (98). Viennese Medley thus betrays an ideological position indistinguishable from the one that triggered violent antisemitic protests in both Berlin and Vienna when attempts were made in 1921 to stage Arthur Schnitzler’s great sociosexual drama Reigen (La Ronde, 1897), a play described by one Viennese agitator as “the vilest bordello piece” ever written, calculated “to arouse the lascivious prurience of Asiatic invaders.”46 For the wily priest-politician Monsignore Ignaz Seipel, the Christian Social Chancellor of Austria between 1922–24 and 1926–29, Reigen was “a filthy piece from the pen of a Jewish author.”47 There had earlier been mayhem when the play was performed in Berlin, with both actors and the director appearing in court, but in Vienna the situation was more intense by far. Egon Schwarz recalls how even leading politicians of the day became embroiled in a tug of war that developed between Red Vienna’s municipal administration and an Austrian government in which clerical conservative voices predominated. The constitutional court intervened, there were noisy scenes in parliament, and demonstrations were held in both the city hall and on the streets. The theater became a battlefield as stinkbombs were thrown and furniture destroyed; police and spectators were injured, and the upshot was that the play was officially banned, only to be reinstated later under massive police protection.48 Sadly, there was still worse to follow in a society now grown so fractious that artistic expression could be literally a matter of life and death. In 1925 a more than usually unhinged Nazi felt impelled to murder the Jewish writer Hugo Bettauer, author of a satire on antisemitism entitled Stadt ohne Juden: Ein Roman von Übermorgen (City without Jews: A Novel about the Day after Tomorrow, 1922). The work describes the fictional expulsion of Vienna’s Jews, an act initially welcomed by the city’s Gentile population. However, this early evocation of ethnic cleansing ushers in a collapse of such magnitude, both economic and cultural, that there is a clamor for the Jews to return. With no Jews to scapegoat, the Nazi party collapses, the law is repealed, and the Jews come back. Bettauer’s fantasy found no parallel in the real life of the First Republic, where violent protests against art that the Right disapproved of became increasingly commonplace. Typical of this was the storm of protests at the Vienna State Opera during the 1927–28 season when Ernst K÷enek’s jazz opera Jonny spielt auf (Jonny strikes up) premiered, a work featuring a black American violinist. That the new Austria faced huge difficulties adjusting to post-imperial realities hardly needs restating. Edward Timms puts it well when he

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writes that the tragedy of the First Austrian Republic lay in irreparable polarizations: the patriots were not democrats and the democrats were not patriots.49 A literary reflection of this unhappy truth is found in the novel Österreich in Ewigkeit (Austria Forever, 1929) by Hermann Bahr, a writer who in the 1890s had done more than anyone to encourage and to define the development of a consciously Austrian literary culture. In the 1920s, despite the ever-growing clamor for union with Germany from across the political spectrum, Bahr’s devotion to the cause of Austrian independence remained unswerving. There can also be no doubt that the message of Österreich in Ewigkeit is relentlessly anti-democratic, playing upon some very old phobias to justify the existence of Austria. In a variation on the “Reichsidee” (concept of empire) widespread amongst many right-inclined writers in the First Republic, the novel claims that Austria exists to provide a bulwark, protecting German and wider European culture against the threat from the East: “Wenn der Balkan erst bis an den Rhein dringt, dann hält ihn auch der Rhein nicht mehr auf, dann ist das Werk von Jahrhunderten bedroht” (If the Balkans reach the Rhine, then the Rhine will not stop them, then the work of centuries will be threatened).50 By now an old man nearing end of a long career, Bahr, once memorably lampooned by Karl Kraus as “ein Herr aus Linz” (a gentleman from Linz),51 was one of many writers in the First Republic whose roots were in what Robert Musil punningly called “Kakanien,” the vanished world of the “k.u.k” Habsburg Empire.52 These figures, who were often Jewish — although Bahr and Musil were not — tended to be skeptical, increasingly nostalgic, but nevertheless open to the world. Many of these writers would today be considered to represent the “true” Austrian literary canon: Hermann Broch, Egon Friedell, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Karl Kraus, Alfred Polgar, Arthur Schnitzler, Franz Werfel, Stefan Zweig. On the other side there was a swarm of rabidly anti-Communist and antisemitic authors, nowadays justly ignored, hell-bent on reflecting and encouraging the rise of pan-Germanism through literature, trying to bring about what in 1934 the Austrian Nazi scholar Heinz Kindermann termed “volkhafte Erneuerung” (renewal through the “Volk”).53 Hence in the same year that the ailing and aging Freud was driven into his English exile, writers of the stature of Bruno Brehm, Robert Hohlbaum, Mirko Jelusich, Erwin Guido Kolbenheyer, Hermann Stuppäck, Karl Heinz Waggerl, and Josef Weinheber signed the Bekenntnisbuch österreichischer Dichter (Austrian Writers’ Book of Allegiance, 1938), pledging loyalty to Hitler and National Socialism in an act that surely marks “the nadir of twentieth-century Austrian literature.”54 With the Anschluss these “Austrian” writers were so noisily toasting, the name of Austria disappeared from the map of Europe. From then until the rebirth of Austrian statehood in 1945, Austrian literature could only exist

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beyond the boundaries of the Third Reich. It was, by definition, exile literature. Yet as can sometimes prove the case, the experience of exile for some was a time not just of loss, but also of cultural empowerment. There was indeed a striking “communal destiny” (“Schicksalsgemeinschaft” is the term used by Otto Bauer, leader of the Austrian Social Democrats at the time of the 1934 civil war) in the road taken by most of the authors featuring in this study.55 Most were Jews, and unless death had mercifully spared them, as it did Schnitzler (d. 1931) and Kraus (d. 1936), exile was to be their lot. The routes they took into exile were many and varied, and only a handful survived to celebrate the demise of the Thousand Year Reich. Of the writers examined in the following chapters, Joseph Roth was dead by 1939, a victim of alcohol and despair even before the Nazi invasion of France. Ernst Weiss, the friend of Kafka with whom Roth maintained a distant and tetchy relationship in their shared Parisian exile, took his own life as Hitler’s troops marched into the French capital in June 1940. As much a victim of his insatiable appetite for tobacco as Roth was for alcohol, Franz Werfel died in Hollywood in 1945. He was buried together with the “Verdienstkreuz für Kunst und Wissenschaft” (Meritorious Cross for Art and Science) that had been bestowed on him in 1937 in reward for his close relationship with the government of the “Ständestaat” (Corporate State) inaugurated in 1934 after Dollfuss had done away with democracy in 1933.56 Andreas Latzko died forgotten in Amsterdam in 1941, and forgotten he remains to this day. Soma Morgenstern, the friend of Roth, Weiss, and the composer Alban Berg, found refuge in the United States, and there he was able to complete his great trilogy Funken im Abgrund (Sparks in the Abyss). However, recognition for his achievements never came during his lifetime, and it is only now, more than three decades after his death, that his work is beginning to attract critical attention. Anna Seghers, Friedrich Wolf, and Marie Frischauf, all Communists, fled further afield and survived. Wolf sought refuge in Moscow, Seghers and Frischauf in Mexico. The Germans Seghers and Wolf returned to the Soviet-occupied zone and quickly found fame and fortune in the newlyfounded German Democratic Republic: Seghers became the “grande dame” of East German letters, Wolf found himself appointed ambassador to Poland. Marie Frischauf, a survivor of fin-de-siècle Vienna, where under her maiden name Pappenheim she had provided the libretto for Arnold Schoenberg’s monodrama Erwartung (Expectation, 1909), returned to Austria. In a country where Cold War values were quickly established and Communism marginalized, her work sank without trace, her lot hardly helped by the tenacity with which ex-Nazis and supporters of Austro-Fascism retained their influence in the reborn Austria’s literary and cultural life. The contrast between Frischauf’s lot and that of the ex-Nazis Bruno

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Brehm and Heimito von Doderer could hardly be starker: their allegiance to Hitler was quietly ignored as both men prospered amid the selective amnesia of the new Second Republic. Alois Vogel, the youngest of the writers considered here, led most of his life in democratic postwar Austria. However, when electing to write about the February Uprising of 1934, he quickly found his literary progress impeded by the same cultural and political forces that colluded in the rehabilitation of Doderer and Brehm. For some writers, exile from Austria had begun long before it was forced on them by political events. Joseph Roth provides an obvious example of a major figure failing to root himself in the First Republic. As a professional journalist, Roth moved to Berlin in June 1920 after the collapse of the Viennese newspaper Der neue Tag, and Germany remained the essential center of his life, both journalistic and literary, until Hitler came to power in 1933. At the time of his first emigration, in language that would soon appear cruelly ironic, he remarked to his friend Soma Morgenstern: “Österreich hat keine Zukunft. Wie können wir Flüchtlinge hier eine Zukunft haben? Wenn schon Flüchtlinge, dann in einem Land, das eine Zukunft hat” (Austria has no future. How can we refugees have a future here? If we have to be refugees, then let it be in a country with a future).57 Although Roth was often physically absent from Austria, his work reveals one of the most consistent features of Austrian writing between the wars — the way he and other Jewish authors such as Morgenstern, Schnitzler, Weiss, and Werfel, men whose lives and outlook had been conditioned by the Habsburg Empire, memorialized it in their works. The Second German Empire inspired no remotely similar elegies in remembrance of its recent past. In fact, one of the more notable is by a Viennese Jewish writer, Hermann Broch, in the first novel of his “Schlafwandler” (Sleepwalkers) trilogy Pasenow oder Die Romantik (Pasenow or Romanticism, 1931), a work more normally regarded as a work of pastiche in the style of Theodor Fontane.58 Roth is today regarded as the elegist par excellence of the dog days of the Habsburg world, yet all his novels were produced after the empire had ceased to exist as a political entity. Austria would always mean for him the “World of Yesterday,” memorably evoked not only by Roth himself, but also by his long-suffering friend and financial backer, Stefan Zweig.59 When Roth went once more into exile after the Nazis took power in Germany, it was to France rather than Austria that he fled. The same goes for Roth’s fellow-Galician Morgenstern and the Prague-born Weiss, who similarly felt unable to take up residence in a Corporate State that, for all that its leaders tried to distance it from Germany, shared too many of that country’s worst features for most Jewish artists to feel comfortable there. The arch-enemies Kraus and Werfel, also Jewish but, unlike Morgenstern and Roth, long-time residents of Vienna, stayed on in Austria after the

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abolition of democracy in 1933 because they felt that the only feasible antidote to Hitlerian fascism was its milder Austrian variety. Masking his sorrow through drink, Roth spent much of his Parisian exile striving to evoke an alternative reality through the fictional recreation of a lost Austrian world. Nevertheless, it should not be overlooked that in his debut Das Spinnennetz (The Spider’s Web, 1923) Roth addresses the most burning political issue of the day: the rise of fascism in the Weimar Republic. He sets his novel in Berlin, and at its center he places the hate-filled antisemitic German war veteran Leutnant Lohse. The initial publication of Das Spinnennetz took place, however, in the columns of the Vienna Arbeiter-Zeitung, which brought out the first installment on 7 October 1923. The final installment appeared on 6 November, and on 8–9 November came the Munich beer-hall putsch of Ludendorff and Hitler, both of whom had appeared as marginal characters in Roth’s novel. Giving real people cameo roles was to become a feature of Roth’s fiction, most notably in the figure of the Emperor Franz Joseph in Radetzkymarsch (Radetzky March, 1932).60 In terms of its literary history, the First Austrian Republic most clearly diverges from Weimar (and later Nazi) Germany in matters of periodisation. Some key dates in Austrian writing, reflecting major social or political history events, are obviously different from those in Germany. The year 1927, for example, has no special resonance in Weimar history or literature. In Austria, however, it is marked by the riots of 15 July, when Viennese crowds protested the acquittal of rightwing paramilitaries who had killed a small boy and a war veteran during a stramash with the Socialist “Schutzbund” at Schattendorf in the Burgenland. The police opened fire on the demonstrators, many were killed, and in the melee the Palace of Justice went up in flames. The poet Erich Fried later dubbed 15 July “Bloody Friday.”61 For the novelist Heimito von Doderer, in a reference to the defeat of the Romans by Hannibal at the battle of Cannae in 216 BC, it represented the “Cannae of Austrian freedom.”62 The violence of that dark day initiated a chain of events leading to the suspension of parliamentary democracy in 1933, the Civil War of 1934, and the Anschluss of 1938. Besides spurring Karl Kraus to his memorable satirical campaign against Vienna’s chief of police Johann Schober, 15 July also inspired Doderer’s greatest novel, Die Dämonen (The Demons, 1956) as well as Elias Canetti’s Nobel Prize-winning novel Die Blendung (Auto da Fé, 1935).63 Clashes between Right and Left and the violence of political paramilitaries were, of course, features not just of the First Austrian Republic, but also of Weimar Germany in the 1920s. The most notable divergence between Austrian and German political history in the earlier 1930s — and with consequential effects upon the literary representation of this time — was the brief, bloody Austrian

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civil war of February 1934. Alone in the German-speaking world, the Austrian Social Democrats, with only marginal support from the Communists, took active steps to try and stem the fascist tide. Their failure ushered in the four years of quasi-fascist rule in the Corporate State of Dollfuss and Schuschnigg. As Mark Allinson points out, even in twentyfirst-century Austria, this period remains too sensitive to allow a wholly non-partisan, unemotional view — quite different from the historiography of, for example, Weimar Germany.64 Reviewing the period 1918–38 as a whole, it is nevertheless clear that despite the distinctiveness of many aspects of Austrian writing, above all the constant interplay between the psychological and the social, there are also many shared features across all writing in German at this time. From the outset, Austrian literary life was joined umbilically to that of Germany because of the reliance of Austrian authors upon German publishing houses. By the early 1930s, ninety percent of Austrian writers used German publishers to bring out their works. The German market accounted for two-thirds of the books produced by Austrian publishers,65 while the advent of the Third Reich meant that even for Austrian authors it was Germany that determined the conditions of literary production. In 1935 the Wiener Zeitung noted wearily: “Der österreichische Schriftsteller, der kein Nazi ist, hat’s heute nicht leicht. Er muß nämlich so tun, als ob er einer wäre. Sein Schaffen muß von Kopf bis Fuß auf ‘Blubo’ eingestellt sein. Sonst findet er nämlich keinen Verleger” (It’s not easy these days for an Austrian writer who isn’t a Nazi. He must therefore act as though he were one. From top to bottom his works must be geared to “Blood and Soil.” Otherwise he won’t get published).66 Even dead authors became embroiled in the relentless politicization of Austrian letters, sometimes with lasting implications for the scholarly assessment of the culture. The edition of Peter Altenberg’s letters, planned to appear with the Anton Schroll Verlag in Vienna, was dropped in the aftermath of February 1934, while associated readings from Altenberg’s works were cancelled for fear they would be disrupted by antisemitic protestors. When the edition was then offered to the exiled Bermann-Fischer Verlag in Vienna in 1936, the cowed publisher was adamant that the times were no longer right for such a work.67 The volume still awaits publication today.68 Until the Nazi take-over in Germany, commonalities in Austrian and German writing included depictions of the political tensions between Left and Right, the rise of fascism, the growth of antisemitism, the plight of soldiers returning from war, and the war itself. As the 1930s progressed, however, in both Austrian and German writing there was a general shift away from socially-inspired themes towards “Innerlichkeit” (inwardness).69 Even the satirists lost heart. United in despair over, and ultimately

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contempt for, the Social Democrats’ failure to counter Hitler, both Karl Kraus and Kurt Tucholsky lapsed into virtual silence. The Austro-German literary symbiosis of the pre-Hitler years was, however, to enjoy a final flourish when, just prior to the Nazis taking power, Joseph Roth and Robert Musil found themselves living and working not in Vienna but in Berlin. The two men were even based on the same street — the Kurfürstendamm — and it was there, in the very heart of the Prussian capital, that they composed novels that perhaps more than any others erect the finest literary memorials to the quintessentially Austrian spirit of the dying Habsburg Empire: Roth’s Radetzkymarsch and Musil’s Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (The Man without Qualities, 1932).70

Notes 1

A revealing example of this tendency is the location of Wendelin Schmidt-Dengler’s magisterial survey of writing in Austria between 1918 and 1938. See Wendelin Schmidt-Dengler, “Abschied von Habsburg,” in Hansers Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur, vol. 8, Literatur der Weimarer Republik 1918–1933, edited by Bernhard Weyergraf (Munich: Carl Hanser, 1995), 483–548. 2

For a general overview of Austrian culture during this period see Franz Kadrnoska, Aufbruch und Untergang österreichischer Kultur zwischen 1918 und 1938 (Vienna: Europa Verlag, 1981). The volume contains over thirty contributions from a variety of scholars and is the first, and hitherto sole, attempt to examine the overall cultural significance of the First Republic. Similarly comprising collections of individual essays are: Walter Weiss and Eduard Beutner, eds., Literatur und Sprache im Österreich der Zwischenkriegszeit (Stuttgart: Hans-Dieter Heinz Akademischer Verlag, 1985); Donald G. Daviau, ed., Major Figures of Austrian Literature: The Interwar Years 1918–1938 (Riverside: Ariadne, 1995); and Wendelin Schmidt-Dengler, Ohne Nostalgie: Zur österreichischen Literatur der Zwischenkriegszeit (Vienna: Böhlau, 2002).There is no comprehensive survey in English. See, however, Katrin Kohl and Ritchie Robertson, eds., A History of Austrian Literature 1918–2000 (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2006); and Deborah Holmes and Lisa Silverman, eds., Interwar Vienna: Culture between Tradition and Modernity (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2009). It will be noted that there is virtually no overlap between the material presented here and that contained in the volumes by Daviau and Schmidt-Dengler. 3

For the most comprehensive examinations to date see Robert Pyrah, The Burgtheater and Austrian Identity: Theatre and Cultural Politics in Vienna 1918–1938 (Leeds: Maney & Sons, 2007); Judith Beniston, “Drama in Austria 1918–1945,” in A History of Austrian Literature 1918–2000, ed. Kohl and Robertson, 21–52.

4

For a measured debate on the question of Austrian literary history see Wendelin Schmidt-Dengler, Johann Sonnleitner, and Klaus Zeyringer, eds., Literaturgeschichte: Österreich: Prolegomena und Fallstudien (Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag, 1995).

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5

Clemenceau had good knowledge of Austria thanks to his brother’s marriage to Sophie Szeps, daughter of Moriz Szeps, editor of the Neues Wiener Tagblatt. See Berta Szeps-Zuckerkandl, My Life and History (London: Cassel, 1938). 6

See Dieter A. Binder, “12. Februar 1934 — Ort des Erinnerns,” in Österreich 1934: Vorgeschichte — Ereignisse — Wirkungen, ed. Günther Schefbeck (Vienna: Verlag für Geschichte und Politik, 2004), 99. 7

Edmund de Waal, The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance (London: Vintage Books, 2011), 212. 8

Joseph Roth, Die Kapuzinergruft (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1999), 141.

9

Carl Niekerk, Reading Mahler: German Culture and Jewish Identity in Fin-deSiècle Vienna (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2010), 217. 10

Alexander Waugh, The House of Wittgenstein: A Family at War (London: Bloomsbury, 2008), 287. 11

John Warren, “David Josef Bach and the ‘Musik- und Theaterfest’ of 1924,” Austrian Studies 14, Culture and Politics in “Red Vienna,” ed. Judith Beniston and Robert Vilain (Leeds: Maney Publishing, 2006): 119–42, here 119. 12

See Alex Ross, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century (London: Fourth Estate, 2008), 180–81, 218–20. 13

Quoted in Peter Kellner’s obituary of Judt in The Guardian, 9 August 2010, 29. 14

See Nicholas Cook, The Schenker Project: Culture, Race and Music Theory in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007). 15

Quoted in Margaret Notley, “1934, Alban Berg, and the Shadow of Politics,” in Christopher Hailey, ed., Alban Berg and His World (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2010), 229. 16

See Julian Johnson, “Anton Webern, the Social Democratic Kunststelle and Musical Modernism,” Austrian Studies 14: 197–213. 17

Carnap had moved from his native Germany to Vienna in 1925.

18

Peter Gay, Freud, Jews, and Other Germans: Masters and Victims in Modernist Culture (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1978), 33. 19

See Andreas Novak, “Salzburg hört Hitler atmen”: Die Salzburger Festspiele 1933–1944 (Munich: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 2005). Hitler favored the Bayreuth Festival over Salzburg, whose festival failed to materialize in 1944. 20

See Michael P. Steinberg, Austria as Theater and Ideology: The Meaning of the Salzburg Festival (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 2000). It has been imitated and emulated across the globe, perhaps most notably in the Edinburgh International Festival, founded in 1947. In an act of profound cultural symbolism, the opening Edinburgh concert brought together again the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra and the exiled Jewish conductor Bruno Walter to play Gustav Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde (The Song of the Earth, 1909). The soloists were the English contralto Kathleen Ferrier and the Viennese tenor Julius Patzak. 21

Hellmut Andics, Der Staat, den keiner wollte: Österreich von der Gründung der Republik bis zur Moskauer Deklaration (Vienna: Molden Taschenbuch-Verlag, 1976).

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22

Norbert Leser, “Austria between the Wars: An Essay,” Austrian History Yearbook, 17–18 (1982): 127–42, here 138. 23

See Beller’s review of Daniel L. Unowsky, The Pomp and Politics of Patriotism: Imperial Celebrations in Habsburg Austria, 1848–1916 (East Lafayette, IN: Purdue UP, 2005), Austrian Studies 14, 358. 24

Quoted in William Johnston, The Austrian Mind: An Intellectual and Social History 1848–1938 (Los Angeles: U of California P, 1983), 445. 25

Joseph Roth, “Seine k. und k. apostolische Majestät,” in Joseph Roth Werke, 2, Das journalistische Werk 1924–1928, ed. Klaus Westermann (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1990), 911. First published in Die Frankfurter Zeitung, 6 March 1928. 26

Stefan Zweig, “Joseph Roth,” in Stefan Zweig, Menschen und Schicksale: Aufsätze und Vorträge aus den Jahren 1902–1942 (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1990), 326. 27

Freud and the Child Woman: The Memoirs of Fritz Wittels, ed. Edward Timms (New Haven: Yale UP, 1995), 3.

28

Arnold Schoenberg, Style and Idea: Selected Writings of Arnold Schoenberg, ed. Leonard Stein, trans. Leo Black (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1975), 505. 29

Hungary was perhaps an exception. The 1867 settlement had allowed Hungary to flourish anew, while the postwar settlement saw it lose swathes of territory to other newly independent states. Nostalgia for the lost empire was soon expressed in Hungarian literature too. See István Gombocz, “‘My homeland was Poland, Vienna, [. . .] Galicia’: Introducing Sándor Márai and His Novel Embers,” Modern Austrian Literature 40, no. 1 (2007): 41–58. 30

Karl Kraus, Die letzten Tage der Menschheit, vol. 2 (Munich: dtv, 1975), 308.

31

See Andrew Barker, “Setting the Tone: Austrian Anthems from Haydn to Haider,” Austrian Studies 17 (2009): 12–28. 32

Karl Kraus, Die Fackel 554–56 (1920): 57.

33

Kark Kraus, Die Fackel 554–56, 59.

34

Jaroslav Hašek, The Adventures of the Good Soldier Schweyk and his Fortunes in the World War, trans. Cecil Parrott (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), 3. The German translation reads: “Also sie ham uns den Ferdinand erschlagen” (Jaroslav Hašek, Die Abenteuer des braven Soldaten Schwejk, trans. Grete Reiner [Berlin and Weimar: Aufbau, 1969], 9). 35

Ross, The Rest Is Noise, 179.

36

Wolfgang Maderthaner, “Austro-Marxism: Mass Culture and Anticipatory Socialism,” Austrian Studies 14: 30. 37

In England, for example, the City of Leeds virtually copied the example of the Karl-Marx-Hof in Vienna’s Nineteenth District in its now-demolished Quarry Hill Flats project. 38

Traum und Wirklichkeit — Wien 1870–1930: 93. Sonderausstellung des Historischen Museums der Stadt Wien (Vienna: Verlag der Museen der Stadt Wien, 1985), 639.

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Leser, “Austria between the Wars,” Austrian History Yearbook 17–18 (1982): 128.

40

G. E. R. Gedye, Fallen Bastions: The Central European Tragedy (London: Victor Gollancz, 1939). Translated as Die Bastionen fielen (Vienna: Danubia Verlag, 1947). 41

See Andrew Barker, “G.  E.  R. Gedye’s Fallen Bastions: A British Journalist’s View of Austria and the Austrians, 1927–1938,” in Austria and Austrians: Images in World Literature, ed. Wolfgang Görtschacher and Holger Klein (Tübingen: Stauffenburg Verlag, 2003), 119–26. 42

All quotations are from Edith O’Shaughnessy, Viennese Medley (London: Jonathan Cape, 1930). The novel also appeared in the very popular Traveller’s Library series (1927), where it rubbed shoulders with works by John Dos Passos, D. H. Lawrence, Eugene O’Neill, and James Joyce. In 1926 Viennese Medley was filmed in Hollywood as Greater Glory (directed by Curt Rehfeld) and was reviewed by Mordaunt Hall in the New York Times, 4 May 1926. This film version may have been an attempt to cash in on the success of Georg Pabst’s 1925 film, starring Greta Garbo, of Hugo Bettauer’s novel Die freudlose Gasse (The Joyless Street, 1924). As a left-wing Jewish writer, Bettauer’s take on the privations of life in republican Vienna contrasts sharply with that of O’Shaughnessy. 43

This review appears at the rear of the edition cited here. For details about the author see Molly Marie Wood, “An American Diplomat’s Wife in Mexico: Gender, Politics and Foreign Affairs Activism, 1907–1927” (PhD diss., University of South Carolina, 1998). 44

The entire history of the First Republic became the subject of a novel trilogy by the exiled Viennese actor/writer Otto Roland that appeared during the latter days of the German Democratic Republic: Zwielicht über der Donau (Berlin: Verlag der Nation, 1975); Blick aus dem Riesenrad: Historischer Roman (Berlin: Verlag der Nation, 1981); Nacht über Österreich (Berlin: Verlag der Nation, 1982). 45

Leser, “Austria between the Wars,” 129.

46

See Egon Schwarz, “1921: The Staging of Arthur Schnitzler’s Play Reigen in Vienna Creates a Public Uproar that Draws Involvement by the Press, the Police, the Viennese City Administration, and the Austrian Parliament,” in The Yale Companion to Jewish Writing and Thought in German Culture 1096–1996, ed. Sander L. Gilman and Jack Zipes (New Haven: Yale UP, 1997), 415. 47

Schwarz, “1921,” 415.

48

Schwarz, “1921,” 414.

49

Edward Timms, Karl Kraus, Apocalyptic Satirist: The Post-War Crisis and the Rise of the Swastika (New Haven: Yale UP, 2005), 543. 50

Hermann Bahr, Österreich in Ewigkeit (Hildesheim: Franz Borgmeyer, 1929), 106. 51 52

Karl Kraus, Die demolierte Literatur (Steinbach: Anabas, 1972), 8. “K.u.K” is an abbreviation of “kaiserlich und königlich” (imperial and royal).

53

See Klaus Amann, Der Anschluß österreichischer Schriftsteller an das Dritte Reich: Institutionelle und bewußtseinsgeschichtliche Aspekte (Frankfurt am Main: Athanäum, 1988), 64.

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54

Daviau, ed., Major Figures of Austrian Literature, 74. See Andrew Barker, “The Politics of Austrian Literature, 1927–56,” in A History of Austrian Literature 1918–2000, ed. Kohl and Robertson, 107–25. 55

See Timms, Karl Kraus, Apocalyptic Satirist, 456.

56

Dollfuss was himself murdered in July 1934 during the course of a failed Nazi putsch. Werfel had enjoyed a warm relationship with Dollfuss’s successor as Chancellor, Kurt von Schuschnigg. See Lothar Huber, Franz Werfel: An Austrian Writer Reassessed (Oxford: Oswald Wolff, 1989), 8. Werfel’s move to the Right should not obscure his earlier support for the cultural policies of the Viennese Social Democrats in the 1920s. See Maderthaner, “Austro-Marxism: Mass Culture and Anticipatory Socialism,” Austrian Studies 14: 21–22. 57

Soma Morgenstern, Joseph Roths Flucht und Ende (Lünbeburg: zu Klampen, 1994), 39–40. 58

An apt memorialization of the Zweites Kaiserreich can, however, be found in the autobiography of Walter Benjamin, Berliner Kindheit um Neunzehnhundert. 59

Stefan Zweig, Die Welt von gestern: Die Erinnerungen eines Europäers (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1999). 60

See Kati Tonkin, Joseph Roth’s March into History: From the Early Novels to “Radetzkymarsch” and “Die Kapuzinergruft” (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2008), 49–70. 61

Februar 1934: Schriftsteller erzählen, ed. Ulrich Weinzierl (Vienna and Munich: Jugend & Volk, 1984), 130. 62

Heimito von Doderer, Die Dämonen (Munich: Biederstein, 1956), 1328.

63

Kristie A. Foell, “July 15, 1927: The Vienna Palace of Justice is Burned in a Mass Uprising of Viennese Workers, a Central Experience in the Life and Work of Elias Canetti,” in The Yale Companion to Jewish Writing and Thought, ed. Gilman and Zipes, 464–70. See also Justizpalast in Flammen: Ein brennender Dornbusch: Das Werk von Manès Sperber, Heimito von Doderer und Elias Canetti angesichts des 15. Juli 1927, ed. Thomas Köhler and Christian Mertens (Munich: Oldenbourg Wissenschaftsverlag, 2006). 64

Mark Allinson, “Reading the Dollfuss Years,” Austrian Studies 14: 337–48, here 337. 65

Klaus Amann, “Aspekte einer Darstellung der österreichischen Literatur der dreißiger Jahre,” in Literatur und Sprache im Österreich der Zwischenkriegszeit, ed. Weiss and Beutner, 18. See further Murray G. Hall, “Publishers and Institutions in Austria,” in A History of Austrian Literature 1918–2000, ed. Kohl and Robertson 83–85. 66

Amann, “Aspekte einer Darstellung,” 19.

67

See Andrew Barker, Telegrams from the Soul: Peter Altenberg and the Culture of Fin-de-Siècle Vienna (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1996), 235–36. 68

See, however, Peter Altenberg: Die Selbsterfindung eines Dichters: Briefe und Dokumente 1892–1896, ed. Leo A. Lensing (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2009). 69

Frank Trommler, “Emigration und Nachkriegsliteratur: Zum Problem der geschichtlichen Kontinuität,” in Exil und innere Emigration: Third Wisconsin

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Workshop, ed. Reinhold Grimm and Jost Hermand (Frankfurt am Main: Athenäum, 1972), 173–97. Most recently, see Stephen Parker, Peter Davies, and Matthew Philpotts, The Modern Restoration: Rethinking German Literary History 1930–1960 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2004). 70

See Joseph Roth in Berlin: Ein Lesebuch für Spaziergänger, ed. Michael Bienert (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1999), 32–33.

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1: Soldiers’ Tales: Andreas Latzko, Ernst Weiss Disquiet on the Home Front

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ROM TRAKL’S BATTLE-POEM “Grodek” (1914) to Kraus’s gargantuan drama Die letzten Tage der Menschheit (The Last Days of Mankind, 1919–22), some of the finest works in the Austrian canon were inspired by the trauma of the Great War. For many readers today, however, war fiction in German usually begins and ends with two novels belonging to the Weimar tradition rather than the Austrian tradition — Arnold Zweig’s Der Streit um den Sergeanten Grischa (The Argument over Sergeant Grischa, 1927) and E.  M. Remarque’s Im Westen nichts Neues (All Quiet on the Western Front, 1929). Since both novels appeared some while after the war’s end, their authors were at pains to declare them authentic records stemming directly from lived experience of the conflict itself.1 The two works presented here to illustrate war writing by front-line soldiers in the Austro-Hungarian army required no such retrospective justification. Unlike Zweig and Remarque, Andreas Latzko and Ernst Weiss felt no need for their experiences to be distilled by the passage of time. Latzko’s Menschen im Krieg (Men in War, 1917) appeared while the battles still raged; Weiss’s Franta Zlin came out shortly after the ceasefire in 1919.2 The first created a now-forgotten literary sensation across Europe, but has long been out of print.3 The other was recently included by Marcel Reich-Ranicki in Robert Musil bis Franz Werfel, the seventh volume of his extended collection provocatively entitled Der Kanon: Die deutsche Literatur (the editor’s notion of what constitutes a “German” author may not be shared by all commentators).4 Austrian writers more prominent than Latzko and Weiss — Joseph Roth, Robert Musil, Heimito von Doderer — also served at the front, but their battlefield experiences are rarely, if ever, reflected directly in their writing. When the twenty-year old cavalry officer Doderer started writing after his capture at the battle of Olesza in July 1916, it was not the horrors of war he chose to depict, rather aspects of life as a prisoner of war in far-flung Siberia.5 Similarly, when Roth described the inglorious death in battle of the youngest Trotta in Radetzkymarsch (1932), he was writing from a postwar perspective to an agenda that was not primarily a response to the war but rather the literary rehabilitation of the defunct Habsburg Empire.

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In the weighty and provocative treatise Sittengeschichte des Weltkriegs (The Sexual History of the World War, 1930), Berlin sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld notes how belles lettres had proved far readier than clinical medicine to examine the impact of wartime injuries on the sexual and psychological life of the victims.6 It is precisely this readiness, based on the author’s own experiences, to challenge the squeamishness of the armchair reader, which marks out the works discussed here. Weiss, a doctor-writer in the tradition of Arthur Schnitzler, Alfred Döblin, and Gottfried Benn, served as a medical officer on the Eastern Front and was decorated for his efforts.7 Latzko was haunted by bouts of mental illness, triggered by his service on the Isonzo front. Such direct exposure to life and death on the frontline immediately distinguishes Latzko and Weiss from other Austrian writers critical of the war like Kraus and his troublesome friend Peter Altenberg, “the Dr Johnson of Vienna’s cafés.”8 As older non-combatants, both had published trenchant antiwar literature in Vienna while the battles still raged, the very appearance of which was testimony to the relative tolerance of the Habsburg state in its death-throes. Indeed, by far the best-known and most influential of all Austrian anti-war writing is found in Karl Kraus’s journal Die Fackel (The Torch, 1899–1936) where the satirist campaigned tirelessly against the idiocies and cruelties of a war prosecuted by fools and knaves, supported by complicit journalists and gullible writers. Chief among them were Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Hermann Bahr, old foes of Kraus who exemplified the astonishing wartime “conversion of poets into patriots”9 that so incensed the satirist. Their often mendacious patriotic posturing inspired some of his most vitriolic satire.10 Other pre-war literary targets of Krausian polemic such as Arthur Schnitzler at least maintained an “honorable silence” during hostilities,11 while writers associated with the Kraus camp weighed in with their own expressions of fierce disquiet.12 Altenberg was constitutionally incapable of the remorseless campaigns Kraus fought with grim relish, and to Kraus’s dismay he could sometimes match Bahr and Hofmannsthal in spouting jingoistic nonsense.13 More to Kraus’s taste, and more representative of the writer he admired, was the mordant poem “Kriegshymnen” (War Hymns, 1915). This reflects with great poignancy the demotic voice of an ironically resigned civilian population that has quickly seen through the clichés of official war reporting: Kriegshymnen san net schlecht. Gar net schlecht! So Worttrompeten, Wortetrommeln, Wortgeratter: Auf in den Kampf, auf in den Tod! Zum Siege! Doch schmerzlicher dient man dem Vaterlande Mit einem Leberschuß, einem Schuß in die Niere, In die Nabelgegend! . . . [. . .]14

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[War hymns ain’t bad at all. Not bad at all! Like, bugles of words, batteries of words, chatter of words: To battle, to death, to victory! But it’s more painful to serve the fatherland With a bullet in the liver, a bullet in the kidneys, In the umbilical! . . .]

“A scream that silences aesthetic doubts” — Andreas Latzko: Menschen im Krieg (1917) Of the two writers chiefly discussed in this chapter, only Ernst Weiss retains a toehold in the consciousness of critics dealing with Austrian writing in the earlier twentieth century. Indeed, many who have never read his work will know Weiss’s name because he helped dissuade Franz Kafka from marrying Felice Bauer, a decision with colossal literary consequences. Andreas Latzko, having enjoyed his day of fame, has seemingly disappeared forever.15 The reasons for Latzko’s eclipse may be explained at least in part by his failure to fit into any neat literary or ethnic category. Like Ödön von Horváth, Latzko was a “typical Old-Austrian mixture,”16 a baptized Catholic of Jewish descent with a Magyar father and Viennese mother. Unlike Roth and Werfel, probably the most obvious examples of non-Viennese Jewish-born Austrian writers who flirted with Catholicism, there is nothing in Latzko’s writing of the “Habsburg Myth,” the much-cited term devised by the Italian writer and critic Claudio Magris in 1966 to denote the romanticized literary longing for a Habsburg Golden Age that had never existed.17 On the contrary: although the six disparate stories that make up Menschen im Krieg are set in the Dual Monarchy and reflect their author’s experiences as a front-line officer, it is clear that the Habsburg state and its institutions appalled Latzko. Indeed, it may be that the resulting perception of Latzko as the sort of socially-critical writer who “fouls his own nest” has had a lasting negative impact upon his standing in the eyes of the literary-critical and academic establishment.18 After being called up for military service in 1914, Latzko went initially to the Isonzo front before a bout of malaria, succeeded by various nervous disorders, led to his temporary discharge from the army in 1916. Latzko’s friend, the French pacifist Romain Rolland, recorded in his diaries how Latzko provided him with copious and detailed accounts of his military experiences in what Austrian troops commonly referred to as the “Hell on the Isonzo.” Rolland recalls how, though never physically wounded, Latzko watched in horror as a group of men and cattle was blown to smithereens by a grenade. Initially he had felt nothing, but a few days later, when rare steak was served at dinner, he began to howl and vomit. Six months later he was still quivering and refusing all food.19 After his discharge, Latzko was allowed to travel to Davos in neutral

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Switzerland, writing Menschen im Krieg there while undergoing psychiatric treatment. The book appeared in October 1917 as the first volume in Europäische Bücher, an expressly pacifist series published by Max Rascher in Zürich. Officially, books like Menschen im Krieg and Leonhard Frank’s Der Mensch ist gut (Man is Good, 1918) — also published by Rascher — were banned in Germany and Austria, but in practice little could be done to stop their illegal circulation. With its dedication to “Freund und Feind” (Friend and Foe), Menschen im Krieg formed a graphic riposte to the Austrian journalist Alice Schalek’s infamous book Am Isonzo: März bis Juli 1916 (On the Isonzo: March to July 1916). Schalek was the war’s only female war correspondent, and the reward for her jingoism was a medal for conspicuous gallantry. Her “illustrierte Kriegsberichte” (illustrated war reports) from one of the war’s goriest fronts clearly delighted the Habsburg Establishment but they incensed Karl Kraus, who accused her of glorifying the war and subsequently painted a particularly unflattering portrait of her in Die letzten Tage der Menschheit. Menschen im Krieg was rapidly translated into several languages, enjoying an instant and enormous success. By the beginning of 1918, twenty thousand copies had been sold in Switzerland alone,20 but Latzko’s literary success did not go down well back home in the empire, and he was stripped of his rank. This can have come as little surprise to him, for as Carl Seelig remarked in a letter to the French pacifist Henri Barbusse in 1919: J’ai lu et relu l’oeuvre de Latzko. C’est admirable et cet homme a un talent de tout premier ordre [. . .] il doît être maudit dans toutes les sphères militaristes allemands et autrichiens, pour avoir bâti un tel livre de vérité poignante et vivante.21 [I have read and re-read Latzko’s work. It’s admirable, and the man has a talent of the first order [. . .] They must be cursing him in all the militaristic circles in Germany and Austria for having constructed a book of such poignant truth and vivacity.]

Disobeying orders in December 1917 to return to duty with the Boroevic Corps in Northern Hungary, Latzko simply stayed on in Switzerland. From the correspondence between Stefan Zweig and Romain Rolland a picture emerges of Latzko as a man both sympathetic and neurotic. Writing to Rolland from St Moritz in January 1918, Zweig declares of Latzko: “Er ist sehr leidend, Morphinist im höchsten Grade, sehr nervös und überreizt. Aber ein menschlicher Mann. Wir haben uns gut verstanden.” (He is suffering greatly, a complete morphine addict, very nervous and overwrought. But a humane man. We got on well.)22 According to Zweig, Latzko was incapable of finding contentment.

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Being unhappy made him creative: “Er liebt alles, was gegen etwas ist, und wäre unzufrieden, wenn Harmonie sich verwirklichte.” (He loves everything that is contrary, and would be dissatisfied, were harmony to be achieved.)23 The stories constituting Menschen im Krieg, whose strikingly authentic ambience is the Austro-Hungarian Empire at war, first appeared anonymously in 1916–17 in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, in Felix Moeschlin’s Schweizerland, and in René Schickele’s Die Weissen Blätter. Latzko’s authorship was eventually revealed in the third edition of Menschen im Krieg. Writing in Die Fackel, Karl Kraus felt the author’s identity should have been made known earlier, but he nevertheless greeted the work most warmly. Urging readers of the Fackel to persuade their booksellers to hop over the border and get hold of a copy, Kraus declared Menschen im Krieg “ein Schrei, vor dem kunstrichterliche Einwendungen gern verstummen” (a scream that silences aesthetic doubts)24 and proof positive that work of a European standard was being achieved in German-language war literature. In Kraus’s (erroneous) view, the day was not far off when Austria would be officially proud of having produced such a book. Despite his friendship with Latzko, Stefan Zweig was less than enthusiastic about the collection. On the day Kraus’s encomium appeared in Die Fackel, Zweig noted in his diary: “Mittwoch 9 October Vormittags. Aufsatz über das (ganz schlechte) Buch von Latzko. Mich ekeln diese Kriegsschreibereien schon” (Wednesday 9 October Morning. Essay on the (very bad) book by Latzko. I’m already sick of these war scribblings).25 Perhaps the fastidious Zweig was upset not only by the disturbing contents of the stories, but also by their style. Although generally realistic, even naturalistic at times, this style frequently betrays the influence of literary expressionism. For the Hungarian critic János Szábó, who is largely responsible for introducing Latzko’s writing to a modern audience, these stories resemble, as they did for Kraus, above all a single, long, drawn-out scream.26 The opening story “Der Abmarsch” (Off to War) is set in autumn 1915 in a small, unnamed provincial Austrian town. The title is initially misleading, for the troops have long since marched off, and only later will its significance be revealed. Using expressionistic prose to personify both the sleepy old town and the conflict, Latzko underlines the contrast between the peaceful surroundings and “der großen Wut” (great rage) of the “anspruchsvollen, lärmenden Gesellen” (demanding, noisy fellow) that is war (11).27 For just thirty miles away a battle is raging high up on the Doberdo plateau, and in the town there is a military hospital to receive the victims. The story’s main figure, an unnamed lieutenant in the reserve and well-known opera composer in civilian life, has lost his mind at the front. The grotesque, almost surreal cause of the composer’s insanity, the “unerhörte Begebenheit” (incredible event) of the novella, is presented in

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minute and unsparing detail. One of the composer’s comrades had been killed when, in the act of showing the composer the latest photo of his wife, he was struck by a disembodied, booted leg whose spur lodged in his skull. All this is related by the suddenly eloquent composer himself, who until then had communicated neither with his fellow officers at the hospital, nor with the pretty young wife who had come to be at his side. The “spur” for the retelling of this gruesome incident — Latzko is aware of the pun on “Sporn,” which works both in English and German — is a middle-class military nurse who pruriently asks the assembled officers what had been their “most horrible experience” (“das Gräßlichste”) at the front. At that point the mute composer suddenly finds his voice: — Gräßlich? Gräßlich ist nur der Abmarsch — rief er — Man geht, —— und daß man gelassen wird, das ist gräßlich! — (23)28 [Horrible? Only marching off is horrible, he cried. You go —— it’s being made to go that is horrible! —]

Initially unbalanced by the almost surreal death of a comrade, the composer in his madness unleashes criticism not of the war itself, but against those who made it happen in the first place. Here Latzko springs a surprise, for blame is not laid at the door of the politicians, industrialists or generals, but the cheering women who applaud their men into battle, throwing roses into the crowded carriages as the trains steam away. At this point, readers may recall Wilfred Owen’s poem “The Send-Off,” which depicts a train filled with soldiers destined for the front and a more than likely death. Owen, like Latzko, served directly at the front, and like him suffered physical and mental turmoil that was transmuted into literature. Their faces “grimly gray,” Owen’s troops too display the flowers given them by their womenfolk: “their breasts were stuck all white with wreath and spray.” Yet whereas the departure of the Austrian soldiers takes the form of a public spectacle, in Britain the departure is furtive, as if the country were disowning them. Like Latzko, Owen too ponders the significance of the flowers the men had been given once they are confronted with the realities of battle: So secretly, like wrongs hushed-up, they went. They were not ours: We never heard to which front these were sent; Nor there if they yet mock what women meant Who gave them flowers.29

Whereas Owen merely hints at the men’s disillusionment, Latzko goes further and has his mad composer blame women directly for the carnage. War itself is not the most terrible thing; rather it is the realization that

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women are cruel. In a variation of Aristophanes’s satire in Lysistrata, the musician points out women’s potential sexual role in ensuring peace: Die Frauen haben uns geschickt! Kein General hätt’ was machen können, wenn die Frauen uns nicht hätten in die Züge propfen lassen, wenn sie geschrien hätten, daß sie uns nicht mehr anschaun, wenn wir zu Mördern werden. Nicht Einer wär hinaus, wenn sie geschworen hätten, daß keine von ihnen ins Bett steigt mit einem Mann, der Schädel gespalten, Menschen erschossen, Menschen erstochen hat. (30–31) [The women sent us! No general could have done a thing if the women hadn’t had us stuffed into the trains, if they had screamed that they wouldn’t look at us again if we became murderers. Nobody would have gone off if they had sworn that not one of them would get into bed with a man who had split skulls, shot people, bayoneted people.]

That women are prepared to assault politicians and commit arson to obtain the vote, but do nothing to protect their men folk, is for the officer/composer ultimate proof of their inferiority. As often in Austrian literature of the earlier twentieth century, the echoes of Otto Weininger’s tendentious tract Geschlecht und Charakter (Sex and Character, 1903) can be heard in the dismissal of women as vain, sexually-motivated creatures of fashion who are devoid of ethical fiber. This voice will be heard again in Weiss’s Franta Zlin. In “Heimkehr” (Homecoming), the final story in Menschen im Krieg, a treacherous woman again plays a decisive role when the once-handsome Hungarian Johann Bogdán returns home from the Russian front disfigured and embittered, only to find his lover Marcsa has cuckolded him with the lord of the manor. This further sharpens Bogdán’s resentment both of his disfigurement and the war, leading him to a quasi-Marxist prophecy about the future of society as a whole. Servile both by temperament and social conditioning, Bogdán had been proud to be his master’s servant. He was especially contemptuous of the Socialist views of the hunchbacked village outcast Mihály, who had tried to organize workers’ protests in the local brickworks that now turns out shell cases. In the “erlebte Rede” typical of this story, Mihály ponders: Dieser Bogdan war immer schon eine elende Lakaiennatur gewesen, stolz darauf, den hohen Herren dienen zu dürfen. Fühlte sich solidarisch mit seinen Unterdrückern, weil er in verschnürten Joppen mit silbernen Knöpfen zu ihrem Glanz beitragen durfte. (184) [This Bogdán was always a miserable lackey, proud of being permitted to serve his lords and masters. Felt solidarity with his oppressors because he could add to their luster in his laced jackets and buttons.]

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Provoked by his lover’s faithlessness, Bogdán revises his opinion of Mihály, who had suggested that people like Bogdán were mere cannon-fodder for a ruling class that had used the war to enrich itself. Realizing Mihály might not be so daft after all, he now confronts the feudal overlord: “So maßlos war seine Wut, daß er wie der bucklige Sozi sprach, ohne sich zu schämen” (199; So extreme was his rage that he spoke like the hunchbacked lefty and felt no shame). Having become an efficient and ruthless killer in combat, and with his class-consciousness newly raised, Bogdán stabs the nobleman to death. This climax, echoing at an individual level the role of the peasantry in the Russian October Revolution, is not, however, the end of the story. The “old order” may be dead, but the peasant’s revolt is not permitted to prevail. Mindless of his military training, Bogdán fails to guard his back. Deprived by war of her once-handsome lover and then robbed of her protector by the vengeful returnee, the axewielding Marcsa exacts her own revenge by splitting open Bogdán’s skull. At the end of the book, master and servant, the old feudal order, lie dead, both victims of the femme fatale. This is a familiar enough figure in the literature and art of fin-de-siècle Vienna, but here it is given a new, political twist at the death of the Habsburg Empire. In “Der Sieger” (The Victor) moral deficit accrues neither to mindless women fired up by war nor to a frustrated lover seeking revenge, but to an ageing military commander, hatching his plans in luxurious safety miles behind the carnage he unleashes on the front line. For him war has turned out to be an unexpected blessing, upon which painful reality must not be allowed to intrude: Der ganze Krieg präsentierte sich, von hier aus gesehen, wie ein lebensspendender Strom, der Musikkappellen heranschwemmt, Geld und Frohsinn unter die Leute bringt und von promenierenden Offizieren betrieben, von gemächlich verdauenden Generalstäblern dirigiert wird. Von seiner blutigen Seite war nichts zu sehen! Kein Geschützdonner schlug an’s Ohr, kein Verwundeter trug sein persönliches Elend als störende Note in die allgemeine Lebenslust hinein. (103) [Seen from here, the whole war presented itself as a life-giving stream, washing up military bands, bringing money and merriment to people, promoted by promenading officers and directed by leisurely digesting types from the General Staff. No artillery thunder assaulted the ear, no casualty disturbed the general joie de vivre with his personal misery.]

In this portrait of a choleric commander suddenly finding fulfillment at the end of a long career spent in peacetime, Latzko’s satire is at its most mordant. Glowing with contentment, he asks the wife of the Chief of

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the General Staff to observe the young people returning from the front, tanned, healthy and contented: Glauben Sie mir, die Welt ist noch nie so gesund gewesen, wie heute. Nehmen Sie aber eine Zeitung in die Hand, dann lesen Sie von einer Weltkatastrophe; vom Verbluten Europas, und was die Herren sonst noch zusammenschmieren. — (105) [Believe me, the world has never been as healthy as it is today. But pick up a paper and you’ll read about global catastrophe; about Europe bleeding to death, and anything else these gentlemen can scrape together.–]

This story probably held a particular appeal for Karl Kraus since it reflects his views both on the turpitude of the High Command and the journalists who wrote about their exploits. Thus when interviewing the “allmächtige Märchenkönig” (50) (almighty fairy-tale king), a credulous, supine reporter, fails to challenge his hypocritical lament that modern generals are no longer permitted to lead their troops from the front. The story concludes with a brusque dismissal of the journalist’s timid enquiry as to when hostilities might cease. Listening to the barrage from a safe distance, the general is transfigured: Das Trommelfeuer! Die Augen der Exzellenz leuchteten auf. Über das eben noch verärgerte Gesicht huschte ein Schein innerer Befriedigung. Gott sei Dank! Noch gab es Krieg. (123) [The barrage! His Excellency’s eyes lit up. Across the face still betraying annoyance flitted a gleam of inner contentment. Thank God! The war was still on.]

The contrast between Latzko’s satire and the affectionate sketch “Der General” that Joseph Roth published in 1919 is striking.30 In Radetzkymarsch (1932) Roth continued his attempt to rehabilitate the regime and the army Latzko so clearly despised. There are, nevertheless, certain parallels between “Der Sieger” and Roth’s magnum opus; for example, in the parallel descriptions of the afternoon concerts in small provincial towns, when military bands entertained both the local populace and the Habsburg establishment. In Roth’s novel the strains of the Radetzkymarsch are heard; here it is another musical symbol of Old Austria, the younger Strauss’s Blue Danube waltz that fills the air (102). Indeed, just as the erstwhile Communist sympathizer Roth himself did when composing his epic of yearning for a Golden Age that never was, there are passages where even Latzko seems on the brink of succumbing to the spell of the “Habsburg Myth”:

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Unter den hundertjährigen Platanen, die mit ihren riesigen, ineinander greifenden Kronen den ganzen Platz wie ein Kirchenschiff überwölbten, saß es sich sehr angenehm. Die Herbstsonne lag mit mattem Glanz auf den Mauern ringsum, streute, wie durch Butzenscheiben, goldene Ringe durch das dichte Laub, auf die kleinen, runden Tische, die in langen Reihen vor dem Kaffeehaus standen. (100) [It was most pleasant sitting under the hundred-year-old plane trees whose giant interweaving crowns arched over the square like the nave of a church. The autumn sun shone weakly on the surrounding walls, spreading as if through bull’s eye windows rings of golden light through the dense foliage onto the little circular tables standing in long rows before the cafés.]

In the figure of Joseph Trotta, Roth’s incorruptible “Hero of Solferino” from Radetzkymarsch, it is tempting to see a counter-figure to Latzko’s anonymous “Sieger von ***,” who here personifies the mendacious military hubris of the dying Empire from which Trotta struggles to dissociate himself. Whereas Trotta insists all the schoolbooks that mythologize his saving of the emperor’s life are withdrawn, Latzko’s self-serving coffeehouse commander basks in the knowledge that every child in the land now recognizes him thanks to the patriotic postcards bearing his portrait. In “Der Sieger” the strains of The Blue Danube make a small provincial town seem as happy and carefree as Vienna’s Graben in springtime. In “Heldentod” (A Hero’s Death) it is Franz (Ferencz) Liszt’s Rácóczy March that rings out, music as redolent of Magyar patriotism as Strauss’s waltz is of Viennese Gemütlichkeit. This bitter and intense narrative, whose hyperrealism teeters on the edge of surrealism, traces the last hours of Otto Kádár, a kindly Hungarian lieutenant in the reserve. Kádár had been sitting in a dugout, listening to a scratchy gramophone recording of the Rácóczy March, when the dugout suffered a direct hit. He now lies in a field hospital with what remains of his head swathed in cotton wool. At his life’s close, a single image dominates what is left of his brain: how, with grotesque precision, the undamaged record flew through the air to land precisely on the spot where, until seconds earlier, the head of his comrade Cadet Metzlar had been: Man hatte ihm den Kopf vertauscht! Den hübschen, blonden, achtzehnjährigen Kopf abgeschraubt und mit einer zerkritzelten schwarzen Scheibe ersetzt, die nichts konnte als den Rakoczymarsch krächzen. (161–62) [They had swapped his head! The handsome, blond, eighteen-yearold head had been screwed off and replaced by a scratched black disc that could only croak out the Rácóczy March.]

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Metzlar had been a stereotypical young officer, conditioned by propaganda and the values of the military caste he identified with. In life he had spoken like a gramophone record. Obsessed by the single image of the headless torso, the hallucinatory screams of the dying Kádár drive the other casualties to distraction. Yet when death finally comes to Kádár, it is hopelessly misunderstood by his comrades, whose responses are themselves as predictable as a recording. His final demented utterance is a rendition of the Rácóczy March, but they construe this not as evidence of a shattered mind, but as additional proof of unswerving patriotism: “— Der arme Teufel dort unten hat endlich ausgelitten. Als echter Ungar! Mit dem Rakoczymarsch auf den Lippen” (168; The poor devil down there has finally suffered his last. As a real Magyar! With the Rácóczy March on his lips.) For Latzko, born in Budapest, Hungarian nationalism was clearly just as unnerving as any other manifestation of nationalism. Omitted from Szábó’s 1993 Latzko anthology because Szábó considered them unoriginal are “Feuertaufe” (Baptism of Fire) and “Der Kamerad” (The Comrade). This is a shame, because they most consistently reflect the author’s own experience of the fighting, and the mental breakdown he subsequently endured. It is no coincidence that characters who have lost their sense of reason are found repeatedly in both Menschen im Krieg and its sequel, the derivative and relatively unsuccessful Friedensgericht (The Judgment of Peace, 1919), dedicated to Romain Rolland, “meinem großen Landsmann in Menschenliebe” (My great compatriot in the love of man).31 In the sympathetic but unheroic Captain Heinrich Marschner, the main figure in “Feuertaufe” (at fifty-seven pages the longest in the entire collection), Latzko underlines a necessary truth of war: that scrupulous, decent, caring officers are not always best-suited either to lead their men into battle or to shield them from harm. Today’s readers will pity Marschner, just as they pity the middle-aged Viennese conscripts condemned to die as they march into battle under his hesitant command. For here indeed is the “pity of war” spoken of by Wilfred Owen.32 Marschner’s twenty-year-old deputy, the fearless and fanatical Lieutenant Weixler, is doubtless the “better” officer, but as a human being he is much inferior, treating Marschner with a contempt tantamount to subordination. Both perish after a direct hit on their trench. Marschner, however, dies with a certain satisfaction, for he survives long enough to see the disemboweled Weixler realize the meaning of the suffering he has hitherto refused to acknowledge all around him: Er leidet! — [. . .] durchflammte es Marschner. — Er leidet! [. . .] jauchzte es in ihm. Und ein Leuchten ergoß sich über seine Blässe [. . .] Die ersten Soldaten, die durch den hochgetürmten Erdwall endlich bis zu ihm vordrangen, fanden ihn schon entseelt; um seinen Mund schwebte, trotz der gräßlichen Verwundung, ein zufriedenes, fast glückliches Lächeln. (95–96)

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[“He’s suffering!” [. . .] the thought burnt within Marschner. “He’s suffering!” [. . .] he felt exultantly. And a glow spread over his pallor [. . .]. The first soldiers who finally penetrated through the piled-up bank of earth found him already dead; despite the horrific wound a contented, almost happy smile hovered around his mouth.]

It is no coincidence that “Feuertaufe,” the story of an inadequate field-officer, dragged back into uniform from a successful career as a civil engineer, is followed by the satire of “Der Sieger” and its non-combatant general. Nor is it coincidental that “Der Sieger” precedes the howl of anguish that is “Der Kamerad,” the portrait of a personality destroyed by the same events that have rejuvenated the armchair “Victor of ***.” “Der Kamerad,” set in the Görz/Gorizia region, where Latzko himself had been hospitalized in 1916, takes the form of a quasi-demented confession delivered by an officer whose sanity has collapsed under the weight of his experiences on the Isonzo front. Often presented as interior monologue, this first-person narration presents an imagined report to the stolid doctors who believe their patient can be cured of his memories, as if these were themselves an illness (133). Although ostensibly mad, and endlessly haunted by the death of a comrade witnessed fourteen months previously, the nameless narrator is truly sane. Not to be driven insane by the violence, disfigurement and death, encouraged by mindless propaganda: that is the real insanity of the “Great War.” Presumably acting as Latzko’s mouthpiece, the narrator’s language attains almost lyrical intensity as he castigates the truly sick: Krank sind die anderen. Krank sind jene, die mit strahlenden Augen Siegesnachrichten lesen und eroberte Quadratkilometer leuchtend über Leichenberge aufsteigen sehen [. . .] Krank sind alle, die das Stöhnen, Knirschen, Heulen, Krachen, Bersten, — das Jammern, Fluchen und Verrecken überhören können, weil rings um sie der Alltag murmelt, oder selige Nachtruhe liegt. Krank sind die Tauben und Blinden, nicht ich! (132–33) [The others are sick. Sick are those whose eyes gleam as they read reports of victories and see conquered square kilometers rise radiantly over mountains of corpses [. . .] Sick are all those who can fail to hear the groaning, gnashing, howling, crashing, bursting, — the wailing, cursing and dying, because around them everyday life murmurs on or nocturnal peace reigns. Sick are the deaf and the blind, not me.]

For Latzko’s narrator, cursed with a photographic memory, the imagination is the same as a camera. Because we are built up of our memories, he asks, and only live as long as we go through life like a loaded camera,

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must we then, in order to count as “mentally normal,” handle our brains like a slate and sponge? Must we be able, on command, to throw away images that deepest affliction has burnt into our souls, like tearing pages out of a photograph album? (133–34). Although today’s readers have been hardened by the relentless violence of the twentieth century and its successor, the directness of Latzko’s neglected narratives can still have a real impact. C. E. Williams notes that compared with Stefan Zweig’s anti-war protest Jeremias the impact of Menschen im Krieg is “more direct, more urgent and more compelling.”33 That he is an author whose name is barely remembered, if at all, would merely confirm Latzko’s conviction that the modern world has lost its senses. The age has still to dawn that would realize the prophecy contained in the second of the mottos to Menschen im Krieg: “Ich weiß gewiß, die Zeit wird einmal kommen, wo alles denkt wie ich” (I know for sure that the time will come when everybody thinks like me).

Before the Pleasure Principle — Ernst Weiss: Franta Zlin (1919) Ernst Weiss’s novella Franta Zlin,34 first published in the Munich periodical Genius in 1919,35 contains much in common with Latzko’s work: the pain and horror of battle, criticism of the way the Habsburg establishment pursued the war, and a good measure of Weiningerian contempt for women. Although like Menschen im Krieg it is only rarely the subject of scholarly investigation — and therefore typical also of Ernst Weiss’s output as a whole36 — Franta Zlin is a work of great and occasionally shocking power. In a radically compressed third-person narrative of fewer than twenty pages, Weiss confronts the reader with scenes of suicide, rape, pillage, murder, and the unmanning of Zlin, a thirty-year-old goldsmith and married man who, in the course of his military service between autumn 1914 and summer 1915 mutates from “sanfter Mensch” (gentle man) into monster. Although this metamorphosis may recall Nietzschean notions of the brute in man, it more likely reflects the author’s artistic and personal relationship to Franz Kafka.37 In October 1950, ten years after Weiss’s suicide in Paris before the invading Nazis, Thomas Mann wrote to the New York publisher Alfred A. Knopf declaring Weiss to be one of the few writers who may justly be compared to Kafka.38 Nearly thirty years earlier, in the Berliner Börsen-Courier in May 1921, Joseph Roth had reported on a public reading of Franta Zlin at the Rowohlt Verlag by Weiss’s lover, the actress, dancer, (and novelist) Rahel Sanzara. Impressed by the work’s unremitting emotional intensity, yet unable to spell its title correctly, Roth observed: “Vielleicht ist trotz Barbusse und Frank in keiner der vielen Antikriegsgeschichten die Bestialität der vaterländischen

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Mörderei eindringlicher in menschliches Bewußtsein gehämmert worden als in ‘Franta Slin’” (Despite Barbusse and Frank perhaps in none of the anti-war stories has the bestiality of patriotic murder been hammered home more insistently than in “Franta Slin”).39 Although it is already a notably compressed narrative, Franta Zlin is further divided into ten numbered chapters, lending it the superficial appearance of a highly condensed novel. Given the dramatic, episodic nature of the writing, a more fitting comparison may be with the “Stationendramen” favored by expressionist writers of the day. Weiss was often dubbed an expressionist during the early part of his career, but while the sensationalist subject matter clearly aligns Franta Zlin with the literature of expressionism, its generally detached, often naturalistic style does not. In its title at least, Franta Zlin recalls Arthur Schnitzler’s practice of using the names of the central characters of his psychological case studies as titles for his stories or novellas: for example, Leutnant Gustl, Frau Berta Garlan, Fräulein Else, Therese: Chronik eines Frauenlebens. Indeed, Albert Ehrenstein, writing in the Berliner Tageblatt in 1925,40 recognized not Kafka, but Schnitzler as Weiss’s “stylistic godfather.”41 Not only did Weiss share Schnitzler’s Jewish and medical background — he worked for a time with Schnitzler’s brother, Julius, a prominent Viennese surgeon — but his work is often grounded in a similar Habsburg milieu and displays abundant evidence of his interest in psychology in general and sexuality in particular. This latter aspect may well have been the source of Roth’s disdainful remark to Félix Bertaux in 1929 that Weiss was still mired in puberty.42 Published hard on the heels of the Habsburg collapse, although the actual date of composition is unknown, Franta Zlin, like Menschen im Krieg, is an evident indictment of the Dual Monarchy’s military establishment and, by extension, of the state itself. A similar critique is evident in Weiss’s novels Tiere in Ketten (Animals in Chains, 1918) and Mensch gegen Mensch (Man against Man, 1919). A sociopolitical assessment of Franta Zlin, such as Roth suggested in 1921 with his pointed reference to “patriotic murder,” is therefore amply justified by the evidence not just of this piece, but of other works by Weiss dating from this period. Both Roth and Weiss would have been aware of the widespread atrocities carried out by Austrian forces against the civilian population in Galicia in 1914. Unlike Roth, however, even when Weiss was critical of the Habsburg state, he was never a writer of the Left. Eventually, through later novels such as Der arme Verschwender (The Poor Spendthrift, 1936) and Der Verführer (The Seducer, 1938), written after his move to France in 1934, Weiss, like Roth, contributed to the retrospective romanticization of the Empire that Claudio Magris has dubbed the “Habsburg Myth.”43 In Franta Zlin, however, there can be no doubt that Weiss, a Moravian-born Jew with a freshly printed Czechoslovakian passport in his pocket, uses imaginative literature to comment negatively on the recently

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defunct Empire and in doing so to challenge some long-respected taboos, both personal and societal. Tellingly, the setting of Franta Zlin encompasses the entire range of the former empire, from the Carpathians in the east to Vorarlberg in the west. The central figure and anti-hero is a Viennese “Kleinbürger” (petit bourgeois) with a revealingly non-Germanic name (Zlin is a shoemaking town in today’s Czech Republic, Franta is the diminutive form of František). Other nationalities mentioned in passing are Croats, Hungarians, Romanians and Italians, and — repeatedly — Jews. Jews are always presented as victims, be they Galician peasants or middle-class Viennese, yet Weiss depicts a society composed of multiple victims: men as casualties of war and women as casualties of both war and men, recalling Nietzsche’s dictum: “Der Mann soll zum Krieger erzogen werden und das Weib zur Erholung des Kriegers; alles andere ist Torheit” (The man should be brought up as a warrior, and the woman for the warrior’s recuperation; everything else is madness).44 Weiss also reveals a probable debt to the thought of Otto Weininger in his stereotypical depiction of women as the incarnation of sexuality, be it Zlin’s wife Mascha, the Galician Jewish peasant he rapes, or the Viennese prostitute he tries to murder. A Weiningerian misogyny is evident in the scathing cameo Weiss paints of the nurse in the field hospital who tends to Zlin after the emasculating shrapnel wound. No Edith Cavell, to be sure, she gleefully passes on to the other wounded soldiers the nature of Zlin’s injury. Far from displaying solidarity or sympathy, they mock his truncated manhood, maliciously asking him for the tab-end of a cigarette, a “Tschik” (91). The nurse’s parting words to Zlin as he leaves the hospital are to inquire whether he has already written to inform his poor wife about what has befallen him (92). Given the evidence both here and in Menschen im Krieg, it becomes clear why, in his analysis of the First World War, Magnus Hirschfeld devoted an entire chapter to the nursing profession and its evil reputation.45 Zlin is invalided out of the army on 11 June 1915, a black day in the Austrian war effort, when sixteen thousand men were taken prisoner at Zurawno in Galicia. He comes home to a Vienna described by Weiss in spare yet telling detail as an uncaring and vindictive metropolis, where civil society is on the point of collapse.46 That Zlin meets his own violent death at the hands of an escaped Russian prisoner of war in Vorarlberg in July 1916 can be seen as Weiss’s less than oblique reference to the perceived threat from the East, an old fear turned real with the westward spread of Bolshevism after the October Revolution of 1917.47 Indeed, when Franta Zlin was published there in 1919, Munich was the capital of the short-lived Bavarian Soviet Republic. However obvious the sociohistorical aspects of Franta Zlin may be, the full measure of the novella can only be gauged by including

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psychomedical factors. This is not merely because of the nature and consequences of Zlin’s mutilation, but because Weiss belonged to the group of medically-trained writers prominent in early twentieth-century Austrian and German writing. Like the autobiographical novel Mensch gegen Mensch, also dating from 1919, Franta Zlin may well have relied directly on the professional experiences of the author himself on the Eastern Front. It is quite feasible that Weiss would have encountered the sort of injury portrayed in the novella and known the medical literature dealing with the effects of war-time castration.48 Although Zlin’s injuries make sexual intercourse impossible, Weiss makes it clear that he is not castrated in the strict sense of the term. Zlin’s libido remains defiantly intact. Although there is no evidence Weiss ever studied under Freud during his medical training in Vienna, in Franta Zlin he reveals a more than passing knowledge of psychoanalysis, “die junge jüdische Wiener Psychiaterschule” (the modern Jewish Viennese school of psychiatry), as he calls it in his last novel, Der Augenzeuge (The Eyewitness, 1938).49 At the time that Weiss published Franta Zlin (the spring of 1919), Freud was working on his lengthy essay Jenseits des Lustprinzips (Beyond the Pleasure Principle), eventually published in 1920. This is Freud’s response to his encounters with patients suffering from war-related trauma. In this essay, Freud examines the relationship between sexuality and violence that is patently at the heart of Weiss’s narrative. Indeed, aspects of Franta Zlin seem to parallel, if not anticipate, the major developments in Freud’s thought subsequent to the First World War, in which case the work provides further evidence for Freud’s famous lament to Schnitzler that works of art so often anticipate his hard-won scientific findings.50 In his review of Franta Zlin, Joseph Roth provides his readers with an obvious Freudian allusion in the course of a plot synopsis that is as significant for what it excludes as for what it includes. Roth begins by referring directly to Zlin’s wounding at the end of chapter 4: Wißt ihr, wer Franta Slin ist? Ein Soldat, der im Feld einen Unterleibsschuß erhält und das Geschlecht verliert. Invalid, am ivalidesten zurückgekehrt, seine junge Frau langsam in den Tod treibt, weil ihre Gegenwart ihm Bitternis, Qual, Vorwurf, täglichen Tod bedeutet. Der dann mit einem Mädchen von der Straße ins Hotel geht und seine verkrüppelte Geschlechtlickeit in ohnmächtiges Morden wandelt; Geschlechtsdrang in Tötungsdrang umsetzt. Er prügelt das Mädchen halbtot und entflieht, gemeinsam mit einem aus dem Gefangenenlager ausgebrochenen russischen Kriegsgefangenen. Im Wald wird Franta Slin, der Perlen und Geld (Kriegsbeute) bei sich führt, von dem Russen ermordet. In seinem letzten Traum erlebt er noch die ersehnte Befreiung. Er träumt von der polnischen Jüdin, die er im Feld vergewaltigt hatte. Das ist die Geschichte von Franta Slin.51

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[Do you know who Franta Slin is? A soldier who is wounded in the field in his lower torso and loses his sex organ. An invalid, back home a total invalid, slowly drives his wife to her death because her very presence means bitterness, torture, resentment, daily death. He then goes to a hotel with a street-walker and turns his crippled sexuality into blank murderous violence; turns his sex drive into a killing drive. He batters the girl half-dead and runs off, accompanied by an escaped Russian prisoner of war. In the forest Franta Slin, bearing pearls and money (war booty), is murdered by the Russian. In his last dream he experiences his longed-for liberation. He dreams of the young Polish Jewess he had raped in the field. That’s the story of Franta Slin.]

Significant here is the formulation “Geschlechtsdrang in Tötungsdrang umsetzt,” revealing Roth’s early assimilation of one of the main thrusts of Jenseits des Lustprinzips, where, in his response to the carnage of war, Freud grafted on to his previous notion of the libidinal pleasureprinciple (Eros) its dualistic counterpart, the destructive death-drive (Thanatos). The interaction of Eros and Thanatos was now perceived as the source of all human activity, with psychiatric symptoms being the result of misdirection or inadequate discharge of libido. In Franta Zlin, published before Freud’s study, Weiss provides a graphic example in literary form of the consequences of that misdirected or inadequately discharged libido. However, by starting almost half way through the novella, and only referring briefly to earlier sections at the very end, Roth’s review fails to reveal any of the narrative foregrounding that would make full sense of his passing but revealing acknowledgment of Freud’s study. In particular, the metamorphosis of Franta Zlin from “sanfter Mensch” to murderer by proxy is not ascribed by Weiss solely to the loss of Zlin’s ability to have sex. He is at pains to show how Zlin’s turn to violence has already begun well before he suffers his horrendous and humiliating yet not life-threatening amputation. As we shall see, Zlin’s initial resort to physical violence is also linked to genital trauma. The work opens in autumn 1914, following the Austrian defeat at the first battle of Rawaruska. Zlin, a batman like Hašek’s Good Soldier Schweyk, is forced to look on mutely as the despairing general shoots his brains out. It is feasible to argue that Franta is suffering traumatic stress from the outset, and that much of what ensues in the narrative stems from this initial psychological trauma. In the first of many interlinking motifs, the physical trauma caused by the catastrophic damage to Zlin’s genitalia is already foreshadowed in the opening chapter. Fleeing in horror from the dead general’s entourage, Zlin is almost castrated when, after finding refuge under a horse-drawn cart, his coat is caught up in the spokes as it moves off: “Ein furchtbarer Schmerz erweckte ihn [. . .] Später erst bemerkte er Blut und böse Schmerzen bei jedem Schritt”

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(85; A terrible pain woke him up [. . .] Only later did he notice blood and awful pain with every step he took). Later, directly before being hit by the shrapnel that destroys his genitalia, Zlin touches “den noch von früher her durch Blut versteiften Stoff” (90; the cloth stiff from the earlier loss of blood) when he puts his hand in his trouser pocket and rolls between his fingers a pearl he had “accidentally” acquired from a Jewish family fleeing the battlefield. Despite rudimentary efforts at restitution, Zlin had been unable to restore the Jews’ property to them, and this will ultimately lead to his death at the hands of the psychotic Russian, Wassily. It is typical of Weiss’s allusive and suggestive technique — in a work also notable for its graphic descriptions of the body and its functions — that the goldsmith Zlin’s essentially passive acquisition of the pearls is placed in direct juxtaposition to the loss of his manhood. Unlike the direct interaction of combatants in hand-to-hand fighting, shrapnel is not directed at any specific individual or area of the body; it is part of that randomness and depersonalization that accompany the increased use of technology in modern warfare. The contrast between the active infliction of pain and the passive suffering of it — as well as the interaction between the two — lies at the heart of this novella. Retreating to Cracow after the general’s death, Franta Zlin arrives there on 13 November 1914. Not only here but at several junctures in the novella, Weiss indicates a very specific calendar date, thereby heightening the impression that the text in front of us is as much a factual report as it is a work of the imagination. This specificity foreshadows the “Neue Sachlichkeit” (New Sobriety) movement of the later 1920s, when the novella was republished by the Ullstein Verlag in Berlin.52 Ten days prior to Zlin’s fictitious arrival in Cracow, in the aftermath of the same calamitous defeat, Georg Trakl had taken his own life on 3 November 1914 at the Cracow military barracks. Zlin’s futile attempt to restore the money and pearls to the Jewish refugees may even contain an allusion to Trakl’s last poem Grodek: the description of their horse-drawn cart disappearing in to the night “von roten Wölkchen im Hauch bestrahlt” (90; lit up by little red clouds in the breeze) may recall Trakl’s evocation of the “rotes Gewölk” (red ball of cloud) in which “ein zürnender Gott wohnt” (a raging god dwells).53 Franta Zlin is repeatedly — and in the light of events incongruously — described as “sanft” (gentle). Weiss is at pains to show how, once the sanctions of peace and civilization have been lifted, the potential demon can emerge in even the mildest of human beings. Given the apparent similarities with Freud’s work on the connection between impeded sexuality and violent behavior, it is especially significant that already in the first chapter Weiss should include such a careful reference to the power of Franta Zlin’s peacetime libido: “Nach zweitägiger Wanderung fühlte Franta sich in einem Zustand solcher Erschöpfung, wie wenn er mit

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seiner Frau sechsmal zusammengekommen wäre” (85; After wandering around for two days Franta felt in such a state of such exhaustion as if he had had sex with his wife six times in a row). As we have seen, Zlin’s brutalization begins with the dual trauma of the general’s suicide and his accidental near-castration by the cartwheel in the opening chapter, in which his powerful libido is also revealed. The extreme and apparently unpremeditated violence of Zlin’s sexual assault on a “junge dicke Judenfrau” (86; fat young Jewess) in chapter 2 must presumably be understood in this context. The atrocity against the young woman is committed as she stands wailing beside the cadaver of her family cow, crudely slaughtered to provide food for the troops: “Franta, der immer ein sanfter Mensch gewesen war, konnte von dem Fleisch nichts essen” (86; Franta, who’d always been a gentle man, could not touch the meat). However, such scruples soon count for nothing as he forces himself upon the woman, whose head falls onto the flanks of her dead beast. Should readers assume that Zlin’s near-castration has heightened his sexual awareness, given the absence of the marital comforts he patently revels in? Or is Zlin merely acting in a soldierly tradition going back millennia? The manner of the narration here certainly stresses the depersonalized nature of the experience from Zlin’s viewpoint. Afterwards, Weiss resorts to the most abject cliché when describing Zlin as having acted in a trance or dream-like state: “und als er nach kurzer Zeit erwachte [. . .]” (86; And when after a short while he awoke [. . .]). It is a prominent feature of the narration, at least initially, that Zlin is either a passive observer or acting in a way that suggests he is not morally responsible for his actions. There is no indication of shame or remorse as he commandeers the peasants’ bed for the night. Meanwhile the rape victim, her husband, and their young child are left cowering on the floor. Weiss could not make clearer that war, even when executed by one of the historic “civilized” nations of Europe, induces actions in human beings that (pace Joseph Roth’s reference to bestiality) would be inconceivable in animals. Given the often barbarous behavior of Austrian troops in Galicia, frequently overlooked by subsequent historical research, it is not hard to conclude that Weiss sees his character’s actions not just as a psycho-sexual reaction to trauma, but also as representative of the widespread misdeeds committed by the Habsburg army during its last campaign.54 Chapter 3 is set in an ancient snowbound forest in the Ruthenian Carpathians. There, far from the heat of battle, Zlin is charged with delivering a herd of cattle to the regimental kitchens. He delays his arrival to assist in the birth of a calf, and in lyrical prose unlike anything else in the novella, Weiss shows Zlin partaking in an act of humanity, not brutality or death. Motivically, however, he links the passage to the rape of the young Jewish woman beside the carcass of her butchered cow. The brutality of the rape, during which Zlin feels the “warme Feuchtigkeit” (86; warm

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moisture) of the nursing mother’s milk seep between his fingers, is here contrasted with the sensation of “süße Wärme, tropfende Feuchtigkeit” (88; sweet warmth, dripping moisture) oozing from the udder as he tries to make cow and calf comfortable. Further echoes of the rape are heard when Zlin, returning to his regiment with the cattle, comes across a smoldering village near the Eastern Galician shtetl of Turka. Here he encounters a Jewish family fleeing from the battle, their possessions piled high on a horse-drawn cart. The adjective “ausgemergelt” (89; emaciated), applied to the Jewish farmer whose wife and bed Zlin appropriated in chapter 2, is applied here to describe the Hassidic refugee in his bushy fur hat.55 Once again, Zlin takes for himself the Jews’ possessions — a bag containing money and pearls that, quite literally, has fallen off the back of their cart. One incident in particular will form the basis of a repeated motif in the work. As the pearls are strewn on the ground, one of them lodges in a cow’s cloven hoof, only then to be extracted by Zlin. When, belatedly, he reaches his regiment, he is at once packed off to the trenches as punishment. He arrives there exhausted, Weiss’s language paralleling almost exactly that used to describe Zlin’s satiated state after multiple acts of sexual intercourse: “Er kam in einem solchen Zustand der Erschöpfung in den Unterstand, daß er nichts mehr von sich wußte” (90; He arrived in the dugout in a state of such exhaustion that he was barely conscious). It is at this point that Zlin suffers the injury that will ensure that he himself will never be capable of procreation. By December 1914, Franta Zlin’s active involvement in the war may be over but his physical and psychological suffering have scarcely begun. With his own suffering begins also the further dispensation of pain to others. In the environment of the field hospital — an environment well known to Weiss — Zlin experiences sympathy from the male doctor treating his wound, but otherwise finds himself an object of contempt rather than pity. Bereft of intact male genitalia, he perceives himself as humiliatingly feminized: “Er schämte sich, [. . .] seine Notdurft wie eine Frau verrichten zu müssen” (91; He was ashamed [. . .] to have to relieve himself like a woman).56 Now incontinent, Zlin cannot help touching the dressing on his wounds, drenched in “warm hauchende Feuchtigkeit” (91; warm-smelling moisture). This formulation is familiar from similar locutions used during Zlin’s rape of the Jewish peasant and his care for the calving cow, and reflects the abdication of moral responsibility in the narrating discourse. In the summer of 1915, Zlin returns home to his wife Mascha and his former employer, saying not a word to either about his mutilation. Nor does he mention to Mascha the cache of money and pearls that could alleviate their material deprivation. The Austrian state, clearly, felt no further sense of duty towards either Zlin or his dependents. The radical change in the behavior of her once uxorious husband understandably reduces the

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blonde and buxom Mascha to despair. In one of the novella’s most obviously Freudian passages, Weiss shows Zlin now obtaining quasi-sexual pleasure from his booty rather than his wife: Perlen und Geld hatter er verborgen, trug sie in ein noch von der Schlacht bei Rawaruska her blutgetränktes Sacktuch eingehüllt. Die Perlen wurden etwas rötlich; als er sie aber zwischen Zunge und Gaumen rollte (unsagbares Zittern durchrann ihn wie einstige Entzückung), kamen sie weiß, wie neugeboren wieder heraus. (92–93) [He had hidden the pearls and money, carried them wrapped in a blood-soaked cloth bag from the battle of Rawaruska. The pearls grew slightly reddish; but when he rolled them between his tongue and palate (unspeakable tremors ran through him like former rapture) they came out white, as if newborn.]

Zlin’s depression, though never identified as such, leads him to further dissimulation towards his wife, whose self-abasement stands in stark contrast to the behavior of the nurse in the field hospital. With economical but telling detail Weiss sketches in the deprivations of life in wartime Vienna, its soup kitchens and long queues of hungry citizens. In order to make ends meet, Mascha lets herself be exploited by ruthless domestic employers before turning to petty crime. Her victims are yet another Jewish family, but Weiss makes no attempt to make pro-Semitic capital out of this. On the contrary, this Jewish family is mean, vindictive and exploitative. At her trial on the Day of the Epiphany, Mascha both defends herself in the face of her employers’ parsimony and betrays the casual, everyday antisemitism of the Viennese working class: “Am 6. Januar 1916 war die Verhandlung. Mascha sagte, sie hätte drei Monate Dienst bei der Herrschaft gemacht und ihr treu gedient, obwohl es Juden waren, aber im ganzen nicht mehr als siebzehn Kronen Lohn bekommen” (95; The trial was on 6 January 1916. Mascha said she’d been in service with them for three months and served them faithfully although they were Jews but had not earned more than seventeen Crowns in total). Weiss portrays a world in which Zlin, himself already a victim, creates yet more victims before himself becoming one again for the last time. His coldly moralistic and legalistic attitude towards Mascha’s “crime” drives her to a suicide he engineers, and that could just as easily be construed as murder. With the loss of Zlin’s powers of sexual expression — but not desire — every trace of conventional ethical responsibility has also disappeared. After Mascha’s selfless death (she uses the pistol her husband has provided), Zlin feels “errettet” (98; saved), especially as he escapes police prosecution. Weiss further underscores the relationship between Zlin’s murderous act, the damage to his sexual organ and the compensatory libidinous role of the looted Jewish treasure:

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Franta ging aus zu seiner Arbeit, voll Freude auf die Nacht. Endlich keine Angst mehr um das zerstörte Geschlecht. Keine Scham wegen der Verstümmelung. Das Goldgeld, die dicken Münzen, die herrlichen Perlen, endlich alles ihm allein! Noch wußte er nicht, was damit beginnen, aber bloß die Perlen ansehen, sie auf der bloßen Hand rollen lassen, wie kleine Schrotkörner so schwer, in den Mund nehmen, zum Zittern in seiner Wollust. (98) [Franta left for work looking forward to the night. Finally no more fear about his destroyed member. No shame on account of the mutilation. The gold sovereigns, the thick coins, the wonderful pearls — finally all his, his alone. He still didn’t know what to do with them except just look at the pearls, roll them in his bare hands, like heavy little pellets, put them in his mouth, quivering with ecstasy.]

Having given up his job as a goldsmith for unskilled work in the gasworks, Zlin even achieves a measure of solipsistic happiness: “Bis zum Sommer fühlte Franta sich gut und glücklich. Perlen und Geld behielt er” (99; Until the summer Franta felt well and happy. He kept the pearls and money). He dreams of a postwar world where he will buy a small house in Vienna, or beside the Turka Pass, the source of his ill-gotten gain. In a work full of scenes of sexual aggression, Weiss reserves one of the most disturbing incidents for the end. In it he again examines the relationship between impeded libido and violence that was occupying Freud during this same period. In a scene with echoes of Jack the Ripper’s attack on Lulu in Frank Wedekind’s play Die Büchse der Pandora (Pandora’s Box, 1904), an alcohol-inflamed Zlin, egged on by Wassily, vents all his anger and frustration on a hapless Viennese prostitute.57 Hurling her to the ground, he rips off his clothes and looks down at his mutilated but excited member: “Sein verstümmelter Leib erstand zum ersten Mal vor seinen Augen” (101; His mutilated body arose for the first time before his eyes). He then talks to the unconscious prostitute about himself, using the second rather than the first person. Nothing illustrates better the schizoid alienation of Zlin from what he sees as his “real” self than this self-conscious switch of personal pronouns. The identification of the male self with his genitalia is here made conclusively clear: “‘Da, sieh her. So war ich nie! So war ich nie! Da, sieh her, Vicky! Alles hat es herausgehaut aus mir. Franta! Alles hat es herausgehaut aus dir!’” (101; Look here. I was never like that! Never! There, look here, Vicky! It’s drummed it all out of me. Franta! It’s drummed it all out of you!). Bending over the whore’s prostrate body, Zlin continues in the second person as he rediscovers his moral identity, admitting guilt over his wife’s death and accepting that he is beyond redemption: “So hast du deine Frau erschlagen [. . .] so hast du sie langsam zu Tode erwürgt! Franta! Nicht zu

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retten mehr!” (101; That’s how you killed your wife [. . .] that how you slowly strangled her to death! Franta! Can’t be saved!). His sexual needs unassuaged either by the assault or his confession — “Ungesättigt das wütende Geschlecht” (101; The raging sex drive unsatiated) — Zlin goes off almost passively to his death at the hands of Wassily, “den Mörder, sein Ebenbild” (102; The murderer, his spitting image). Untypically for this work, the bludgeoned reader is spared details of the murder. Instead, Weiss presents Zlin’s departing dream, which echoes the emasculated aesthete’s dying dream at the end of Hofmannsthal’s “Das Märchen der 672. Nacht” (The Tale of the 672nd Night, 1895). Trauma has now been transmuted into “Traum” (dream). However, whereas Hofmannsthal’s jewel-loving merchant’s son reflects on his life with bitter regret, Zlin’s self-exculpating dream is full of sexual activity. This is probably the most unpalatable of all the many disturbing scenes, with Zlin reliving not his marital bliss, but the rape of the “junge dicke Judenfrau” who — in the dream — is transformed into the Jewish woman whose pearls he appropriated. Just as thoughts of the pearl lodged in the hoof had flashed through Zlin’s mind before he assaulted the prostitute (the vaginal associations seem particularly clear at this juncture), in Zlin’s last dream the Jewish woman “suchte auf dem Boden zwischen den gespaltenen Hufen der wandernden Tiere” (102) (searched on the ground between the cloven hooves of the wandering beasts) before initiating a sexual encounter with the inert Zlin who lies “gelähmt in rosarotem Licht” (102) (paralyzed in the pink light). In this grotesque reverie, the rapist has become the passive figure. The victim of Zlin’s sexual assault now becomes the instigator of his last, orgasmic fantasy, where he is made whole again: und mit einem Male war Franta ganz hoch beseligt, ganz steil getürmtes Geschlecht, ganz kreisend geballter Mann, hineingewühlt in die weiche Fülle des Fleisches [. . .] Starr gefesselt, glücklich unbewegt, in Ewigkeit gebadet, war er umgeben rings von der letzten befreienden Erfüllung bis zu tiefst gesättigter Lust. Mit seiner Hand, wie unter das liegende Muttertier einst, fühlte er vor, sein eigenes ausströmendes Blut empfand er als ausblühende Glut, als Befreiung ohne Schrei, und in stärkeren Kreisen löste er sich ganz in der niederfließenden Überwältigung. (103) [and suddenly Franta was all bliss and happiness, all steeply towering member, all tight circling man, wallowing in the soft fullness of flesh [. . .] Bound tight, happily still, bathed in eternity, he was ringed around by one last liberating fulfillment, deepest satiated desire. As once under the recumbent mother beast, he reached forward with his hand, sensed his own spurting blood as dying heat, as silent liberation, and in ever widening circles gave himself up to the forces pouring down over him.]

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This appalling parody of a Wagnerian “Liebestod” posits the supreme amorality of the male sex drive. Only in the very final paragraph does cold reality intrude, the narrative baldly concluding with the burial of a now anonymous Franta Zlin “am 30. Juli 1916, zwei Jahre nach Beginn des Weltkrieges, in Sankt Anton in Vorarlberg als Unbekannter, von Unbekannten ermordet” (103; Unknown, murdered by unknown perpetrators, on 30 July 1916, two years after the outbreak of the World War, in St Anton in Vorarlberg). In its final pages Franta Zlin has moved far from its starting point as an indictment of the Austro-Hungarian war effort in the lineage of Menschen im Krieg. In the course of a narrative revolving around a proletarian Viennese Everyman, the author has revealed the rottenness of the Empire at war, an ancient social and cultural edifice from which all behavioral and moral cohesion has seemingly disappeared. Indeed, in many ways Franta Zlin is a literary realization of Karl Kraus’s grim prediction that the behavior of the returning soldiers would make the war itself seem like “ein Kinderspiel” (child’s play).58 As in so many of Ernst Weiss’s later works, culminating in his celebrated portrait of the demented Adolf Hitler in Der Augenzeuge, the sociopolitical aspects of the narrative, though important and revealing, ultimately only function as a backdrop to the author’s consuming interest in the psychopathology of the individual that both parallels and even prefigures the work of Freud in the immediate aftermath of the First World War.

Notes Material in this chapter previously appeared in “The First World War Fiction of Andreas Latzko,” Austrian Studies 7, Gender and Politics in Austrian Fiction, ed. Ritchie Robertson and Edward Timms (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1996), 100– 117; and “Anticipating Freud’s Pleasure Principle? A Reading of Ernst Weiss’s War Story ‘Franta Zlin,’” in Interwar Vienna: Culture between Tradition and Modernity, ed. Deborah Holmes and Lisa Silverman (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2009), 301–21. 1

Thomas F. Schneider, “Endlich die ‘Wahrheit’ über den Krieg,” in Literaten und Krieg, ed. H. L. Arnold (Munich: Text + Kritik, 1994), 43. 2

Both Latzko’s Menschen im Krieg and Friedensgericht appeared almost immediately in English translation in the USA: Andreas Latzko, Men in War (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1918); Andreas Latzko, The Judgment of Peace, trans. Ludwig Lewison (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1919). Translations here from Menschen im Krieg are, however, my own. 3

Only a selection of the original stories was republished in Andreas Latzko: Der Doppelpatriot; Texte 1900–1932, ed. János Szabó (Munich and Budapest: Süddeutsches Kulturwerk, 1993).

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4

Marcel Reich-Ranicki, ed., Der Kanon: Die deutsche Literatur; Erzählungen, vol. 7, Robert Musil bis Franz Werfel (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 2003). 5

Heimito von Doderer, Die sibirische Klarheit: Texte aus der Gefangenschaft, ed. Wendelin Schmidt-Dengler and Martin Loew-Cadonna (Munich: Biederstein, 1991). 6

Magnus Hirschfeld, Sittengeschichte des 1. Weltkriegs (Hanau: Karl Schustek, 1964), 341. For the general significance of literature as a means of understanding the First World War see Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1975). 7

Doubts have, however, been cast on the nature of Weiss’s military experience. According to the war archive in Vienna, the only record of his war service is as a “Sanitätshilfe der Marodenabteilung” (orderly in the ward for the ailing). See Frithjof Trapp, Der Augenzeuge — ein Psychogramm der deutschen Intellektuellen zwischen 1914 und 1936 (Frankfurt am Main: Büchergilde Gutenberg, 1986), 11. 8

Arthur Koestler, Arrow in the Blue (London: William Collins and Hamish Hamilton, 1954), 73. 9

See Edward Timms, Karl Kraus, Apocalyptic Satirist: Culture and Catastrophe in Vienna (New Haven: Yale UP, 1986), 285–303, here 292. 10

For an example of Kraus’s satire, see “Gruß an Bahr und Hofmannsthal,” Die Fackel 423–25 (1916): 41–52. 11

Timms, Karl Kraus, Apocalyptic Satirist, 295.

12

Kraus’s former friend Fritz Wittels, who like Ernst Weiss saw active service as a military doctor, reflected his wartime service in Galicia in the satirical novel Zacharias Pamperl (1923). Like Weiss, Wittels records atrocities carried out by Austrian troops on the local peasantry. He also plagiarizes Kraus’s Die letzten Tage der Menschheit. See Leo A. Lensing, “‘Freud and the Child Woman’ or ‘The Kraus Affair’? A Textual ‘Reconstruction’ of Fritz Wittels’s Psychoanalytic Autobiography,” German Quarterly 69, vol. 3 (1996): 322–32. 13

See Peter Altenberg, “Romantik der Namen! — U9,” in Fechsung (Berlin: S. Fischer, 1915), 201. See further Andrew Barker, Telegrams from the Soul: Peter Altenberg and the Culture of Fin-de-Siècle Vienna (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1996), 190–96. 14

Altenberg, Fechsung, 207–8.

15

See, however, Andreas Latzko: Der Doppelpatriot, ed. Szabó.

16

“Ich wurde in Fiume geboren, bin in Belgrad, Budapest, Preßburg, Wien und München aufgewachsen und habe einen ungarischen Paß — aber: »Heimat«? Kenn ich nicht. Ich bin eine typisch alt österreichisch-ungarische Mischung: magyarisch, kroatisch, deutsch, tschechisch” (I was born in Fiume, grew up in Belgrade, Budapest, Vienna and Bratislava and have a Hungarian passport — but “homeland”? Don’t have one. I am a typically Old Austro-Hungarian mixture: Magyar, Croatian, German, Czech). See Klaus Kastberger, “Was ist eine altösterreichisch-ungarische Mischung? Anhand Ödön von Horváths nationalen Stilisierungen,” in Germanistik im Kontrast, ed. Svjetlan Lacko Viduliè, Doris Moser, Slaðan Turkoviè (Zagreb: Zagreber Germanistische Beiträge, 2006), 183–94.

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17

Claudio Magris, Der habsburgische Mythos in der österreichischen Literatur (Vienna: Zsolnay, 2000). 18

Szabó, Andreas Latzko, 219.

19

Romain Rolland, Das Gewissen Europas: Tagebücher der Kriegsjahre 1914–1919, vol. 3 (Berlin: Rütten & Loening, 1983), 543.

20

Gustav Huonker, Literaturszene Zürich: Menschen, Geschichten und Bilder 1914–1945 (Zürich: Unionsverlag, 1986), 41. 21

Huonker, Literaturszene Zürich, 41.

22

Huonker, Literaturszene Zürich, 296.

23

Romain Rolland /Stefan Zweig: Briefwechsel 1910–1940, vol. 2, ed. Eva and Gerhard Schewe, Christel Gersch, and Waltraud Schwarze (Berlin: Rütten & Loening, 1987), 251. 24

Karl Kraus, Die Fackel 462–71 (1917): 175.

25

Stefan Zweig, Tagebücher, ed. Knut Beck (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1993), 326. 26 Szabó, Andreas Latzko, 226. See also Martin Stern, Expressionismus in der Schweiz, vol. 1 (Bern: Haupt, 1981), 244; Wilhelm Krull, Politische Prosa des Expressionismus (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1982), 127–41; Wilhelm Krull, Prosa der Expressionismus (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1984), 76–79. 27 All page references are to Andreas Latzko, Menschen im Krieg (Zurich: Max Rascher, 1918). 28 Latzko retains the Hungarian convention of using dashes instead of quotation marks to indicate direct speech. 29

Wilfred Owen, “The Send-Off,” in The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen, ed. C. Day Lewis (London: Chatto & Windus, 1963), 46. 30

Joseph Roth, Werke, vol. 1, Das journalistische Werk 1913–1923, ed. Klaus Westermann and Fritz Hackert (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1989), 38. 31

Latzko, The Judgment of Peace, trans. Lewison.

32

Wilfred Owen, “Strange Meeting,” in The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen, 35.

33

C.  E. Williams, The Broken Eagle: The Politics of Austrian Literature from Empire to Anschluss (London: Elek, 1974), 123. 34

All quotations will refer to Ernst Weiss, Gesammelte Werke, ed. Peter Engel and Volker Michels, vol. 15, Die Erzählungen (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1982), 84–103. Earlier, the novella appeared in Gesichtete Zeit: Deutsche Geschichten 1918–1933, ed. Marcel Reich-Ranicki (Munich: Piper, 1969). A French translation appeared in Ernst Weiss, Cortège de démons: Nouvelles choisies, trans. Brigitte Vergne-Cain and Gerard Rudent (Amiot, France: Lenganey, 1992). In 1989 the story was adapted for West German TV under the title Franta. 35

Genius: Zeitschrift für alte und werdende Kunst, 1, ed. C. G. Heise, H. Mardersteig and K. Pinthus (Munich: Kurt Wolff Verlag, 1919). 36

See however: Janusz Golec, “Einige Anmerkungen zu Ernst Weiss’ Erzählung Franta Zlin,” Lubelskie Materialy Neofilologiczne 17 (1993): 35.

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37

Kafka helped Weiss through the final stages of his first novel Die Galeere (The Galley, 1913). 38

Quoted in M. A. Osthofer, “Ernst Weiß: A Preliminary Survey,” accessed 30 December 2011, http://www.complete-review.com/quarterly/vol2/issue4/ eweiss.htm#tmann. 39

Joseph Roth, review of “Franta Slin,” by Ernest Weiss, Berliner Börsen-Courier, 12 May 1921. Reprinted in Roth, Werke, vol. 1, ed. Westemann, 558. Writing to the noted French scholar Félix Bertaux in 1929, Roth betrays an intense personal dislike of Weiss, describing him as “ein Mensch aus dem Ghetto” (a person from the ghetto), “gelähmt und kindisch, aus der Pubertät nicht heraus und mit Wonne darin verharrend” (crippled and childish, still in puberty and remaining there blissfully). Quoted in Peter Engel, ed., Ernst Weiss (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1982), 321–22. 40

Quoted in Klaus Peter Hinze, “Ernst Weiss,” in Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 81, Austrian Fiction Writers 1875–1913, ed. James Hardin and Donald G. Daviau (Chicago: Gale, 1989), 294. 41

Albert Ehrenstein, “Ernst Weiß,” Berliner Tageblatt, 11 July 1925, 2–3. Reprinted in Engel, Ernst Weiss, 68. 42

This remark is mentioned in Hinze, “Ernst Weiss,” 294. By this time Roth himself had acquired a good grounding in the literature of psychiatry thanks to his wife’s long-term mental illness. 43

Magris, Der habsburgische Mythos.

44

Friedrich Nietzsche, Also sprach Zarathustra (Stuttgart: Kröner, 1964), 70.

45

Hirschfeld, Sittengeschichte des 1. Weltkriegs, 121–38.

46

See Maureen Healey, Vienna and the Fall of the Habsburg Empire: Total War and Everyday Life in World War I (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004). 47 See Klaus-Peter Hinze, “‘Und das mir, dem Antikommunisten’: Die politische Haltung des Romanciers Ernst Weiß,’” Text + Kritik 76 (1982): 46–58. 48

See Hirschfeld, “Die Verwundeten und Kranken,” in Sittengeschichte des 1. Weltkrieges, 341–65. 49

Ernst Weiss, Der Augenzeuge (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1982), 94. See Norman Ächtler, “Hitler’s Hysteria: War Neurosis and Mass Psychology in Ernst Weiss’s Der Augenzeuge,” German Quarterly 80, no. 3 (2007): 325–49. 50

Sigmund Freud, “Briefe an Arthur Schnitzler,” ed. Heinrich Schnitzler, Neue Rundschau 66 (1955): 95. 51

Roth, review of “Franta Slin,” by Ernst Weiss, 558.

52

Ernst Weiss, Dämonenzug: Fünf Erzählungen. (Berlin: Ullstein Verlag, 1928).

53

Georg Trakl, Gedichte, ed. Hans Szkelnar (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1964), 120. 54 See Hans Hautmann, “Die Verbrechen der österreichisch-ungarischen Armee im Ersten Weltkrieg und ihre Nicht-Bewältigung nach 1918,” accessed 30 December 2011, http://www.doew.at/thema/thema_alt/justiz/kriegsverbr/ hautmann.html.

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55

See Chaim Pelech, “Turka during the First World War,” trans. Jerrold Landau, Memorial Book of the Community of Turka on the Stryj and Vicinity (Turka, Ukraine), 49°09’ / 23°02’, 45, accessed 30 December 2011, http://www.jewishgen.org/Yizkor/Turka/tur025.html#Page45. 56

Hirschfeld, Sittengeschichte des 1. Weltkriegs, 343–44, describes a similar case dated July 1915. 57

Similar scenes are presented in visual form in Otto Dix’s portraits of murdered prostitutes, see, e.g. various works entitled Lustmord dating from 1922. 58

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2: The Habsburg Legacy: Arthur Schnitzler, Franz Werfel, Joseph Roth Race, Sex, and Character — Arthur Schnitzler: Fräulein Else (1924)

A

of Vienna at the turn of the twentieth century, Arthur Schnitzler unwrapped the social and psychological realities of the society that nurtured both Freud and Hitler. It is also often noted that Schnitzler’s works written after 1918 rarely reflect life in the postimperial era. Instead, despite their diminishing relevance to the troubled new realities of the First Republic, Schnitzler continued to evoke the pre-war days until the end of his working life. The monologue novella Fräulein Else, published in 1924 but set in 1896,1 therefore seems typical of an author apparently working in a time warp. As W. E. Yates notes, true to his lifelong apolitical habits, Schnitzler did not react to external crisis by publicly confronting it; rather he reworked old material or turned inward.2 Although Schnitzler resisted suggestions that his work was autobiographical and “resented all written references to his personal life,”3 the publication of his diaries and letters has revealed evidence of the reallife impetus for many of his works, including Fräulein Else. In 1917, for instance, he wrote at some length about Stephi Bachrach, a Jewish military nurse whose suicide by morphine and veronal is reminiscent of the fate of the fictional Else.4 Bachrach’s father had already committed suicide in 1912 after suffering financial ruin, a fate that threatens Else’s father in the novella. On 20 May, 1917, Schnitzler recorded going to Stephi’s funeral, where attention was drawn to her prowess as a “Dolomiten-Kletterin” (Dolomite climber), an aptitude she notably shared with Else. On 10 August, 1921, two days after first mentioning “eine Novelle ‘Else,’” Schnitzler recalled a car journey he had made with Stephi Bachrach some ten years previously.5 Given such evidence, Schnitzler’s assertion in a letter to Jakob Wassermann in 1924 that there had been no real-life models for Fräulein Else may seem disingenuous.6 Although Fräulein Else was not published until 1924, the germ of the work can be traced back to 8 August 1921, when Schnitzler was holidaying in the resort of Bad Aussee in the Salzkammergut.7 This vacation punctuated a most stressful period in his life, following the antisemitic CKNOWLEDGED AS A PEERLESS CHRONICLER

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uproar at the Viennese premiere of the drama Reigen (La Ronde, 1897) in February, but prior to the November court case in Berlin arising from the performances of the play in that city. The genesis of Fräulein Else is therefore closely linked with the Reigen affair, which culminated in Schnitzler forbidding all further performances of the play after 1922. This embargo was to last until 1981. Although Steven Beller has pointed out that Schnitzler had little connection with the formal aspects of Judaism, and did not consider himself a “Jewish writer,” but rather a German one,8 his work in the 1920s was often received on racial rather than artistic grounds. This being so, it is surprising that Fräulein Else, a work regarded by some as the author’s most impressive fictional achievement,9 has not been examined more closely in what might be called its “Jewish context.”10 Astrid Lange-Kirchheim has drawn attention to Else’s Jewish background;11 however most research continues to concentrate, like so much earlier criticism, on the psychological state of the main character.12 The purpose of this section is not so much to shift discussion away from the psychological realm as to locate Else’s characterization more precisely within the late Habsburg sociopolitical context Schnitzler delineates so deftly and openly. Given the powerful and immediate psychological impact Schnitzler’s presentation of his heroine achieves, the reluctance of critics to discuss her characterization in its wider historical setting is at first glance understandable. As a girl in her late teens, Else is still experiencing major problems with her self-image, her family and social relationships, her sexuality and its practical expression. Hence her quandary, and the tortured selfassessment it leads to, can effortlessly be construed as one in which societal or racial considerations are of scant importance. A closer reading of the novella will, however, demonstrate how an awareness of the historical and sociological aspects of the text reveals dimensions to Else’s character not always appreciated when psychological factors are uppermost in the minds of readers and critics. Although it is hard not to conclude that Schnitzler was concerned primarily with presenting the minutiae of Else’s responses to her specific predicament —effectively having to prostitute herself to save her father from jail — it warrants more than a passing comment that the novella is set not just in pre-war days, but as early as 1896. Indeed, by the time Schnitzler wrote Fräulein Else, the resort of San Martino di Castrozza in the Dolomites, where the plot unfolds, had itself passed from imperial Austrian into Italian republican hands. Nevertheless, although the setting of Fräulein Else is exactly contemporary with that of Reigen, the story of a respectable young middle-class woman being reduced to selling herself so as to service her father’s mounting debts would appear to be one tailor-made for the inflation-ridden chaos of the early 1920s.13 Given Schnitzler’s sensitivity to racial issues,14 as well as the provenance

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of Fräulein Else amidst the furor of the Reigen scandal, the novella’s many implicit and indeed explicit references to Jews and Jewishness at a time of ever-growing racial hatred in both republican Austria and Weimar Germany surely deserve further investigation.15 Perhaps more than in any other single work of Schnitzler’s, the milieu of Fräulein Else is a Jewish one. Though the events of the novella are played out in the Dolomites, the characters peopling the hotel where Else’s fate unfolds are preponderantly Jewish. From Else’s reactions it is also clear that, in the hot-house world of bourgeois Viennese Jewry to which she quintessentially belongs, the question of Jewish antisemitism was a burning issue. At least some of Else’s distaste for Dorsday, the man who wishes to exploit her, is directed against him not as a pervert or voyeur, but as a Jew. She displays all the snootiness of the assimilated Viennese towards the Eastern provinces, from which so many Austrian Jews had originally, and indeed very recently, hailed. For Else, her nemesis Dorsday is not just “Herr von Dorsday,” the Jew who has acquired a minor noble’s title, but, far more tellingly, “Herr Dorsday aus Eperies” (61; Herr Dorsday from Eperies).16 Eperies, known then also as Preschau, is a small town in Eastern Slovakia (formerly Hungary) that today goes by the name of Prešov. On two occasions Else refers witheringly to him as the “Vicomte von Eperies” (104, 122), revealing again a metropolitan contempt for a man whose all-too visible roots are not in cultivated Vienna, and certainly not in France, but in a shtetl. Writing to his Danish translator, Schnitzler noted that by bestowing an aristocratic handle on a character from Eperies he was consciously pouring scorn on the mismatch “zwischen der etwas unechten Noblesse und der Abstammung Dorsdays” (between Dorsday’s somewhat false nobility and his place of birth).17 Else’s disdain may well reflect Schnitzler’s own reactions to that world, situated on Vienna’s doorstep, from which his own family had come relatively recently, but which had rapidly grown utterly foreign to him. In his autobiography Schnitzler writes that his roots in Nagy-Kanizsa in Hungary are so alien to him that he would have felt like a stranger — or even an exile — had he been forced to live there for any length of time.18 Antisemitic stereotyping by Jews themselves was as common in the 1890s, when the novella was set, as it was in the 1920s, when it was written, and there are several passages in Fräulein Else where Schnitzler reflects this. In response to Dorsday’s demands that she undress in front of him, Else’s thoughts reveal the extent to which her own Jewishness is interlaced with the antisemitism of the majority culture in which she lives. In a vivid example of this, Else contemptuously links Dorsday’s dealings in the art world with the activities of less-assimilated Jews in the second-hand goods trade, telling him: “Sie könnten ebensogut mit alten Kleidern handeln wie mit alten Bildern” (59; You might just as well be a dealer in old clothes as in old pictures). She immediately

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excuses this patronizingly racial reaction with an even more revealing comment. Her initial shock at catching herself having such thoughts is replaced by something much more complex and disturbing, especially when we locate it in the context of what would happen to so many unwitting members of Viennese Jewry in the decade after Fräulein Else was written: “Aber Else! Else, was fällt dir denn ein. — Oh, ich kann mir das erlauben. Mir sieht’s niemand an. Ich bin sogar blond, rötlich blond” (59) (But Else! Else, what are you thinking of? — Oh, I can get away with it. No one would suspect me. I’ve even got blond, reddish blond hair).19 In other words, she thinks she can be permitted such thoughts because, thanks to her looks, she would never be taken for a Jew. Her reactions are obviously those of someone for whom Jewishness has more to do with appearance and manner than with biology and race. She then goes on to consider the varying degrees to which the other members of her family either reveal or conceal their Jewishness: und Rudi sieht absolut aus wie ein Aristokrat. Bei der Mama merkt man es freilich gleich, wenigstens im Reden. Beim Papa wieder gar nicht. Übrigens sollen sie es merken. Ich verleugne es durchaus nicht und Rudi erst recht nicht. Im Gegenteil. (60) [and Rudi looks the perfect aristocrat. With Mama admittedly one can tell at once, when she speaks at least. But not with Papa. Anyway, let them notice for themselves. I’m not in the least disposed to deny it, and Rudi even less so.]20

From this we may infer that Else’s own Jewishness is a matter to which she has given considerable prior thought. Such a confident, almost truculent assertion of her racial identity, especially following the admission of her own antisemitism, betokens a young person of some inner strength who is not afraid to challenge the prejudices of the society she lives in. Indeed, the attitude she strikes here may well remind us of someone who has been touched by the freshly-minted rhetoric of Zionism, with its insistence on being true to the Jewish self (Theodor Herzl’s Der Judenstaat [The Jewish State, 1896] was first published in Vienna). We might even find in some of her attitudes echoes of Max Nordau’s call for a “muscular Jewry,” in opposition to perceived Gentile stereotypes:21 “Keine klettert so gut wie ich, keine hat so viel Schneid, — sporting girl, in England hätte ich auf die Welt kommen sollen” (62; No one climbs as well as I can, no one has my nerve — I’m a sporting girl, I should have been born in England.)22 Else’s athleticism and love of outdoor activities such as mountaineering indicate a level of cultural assimilation into the sort of physical pursuits perhaps not traditionally associated with Central European Jews, but in which they actually participated as heartily as their Gentile neighbors. With more than 5,000 members, the exclusively

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Jewish social-athletic club Hakoah Wien was amongst the largest sporting organizations in the world, and in 1924–25, shortly after Fräulein Else appeared, the Hakoah football team won the Austrian League, having previously finished as runners-up in the 1921–22 season. However, the very existence of such an organization demonstrates graphically how racial and/or political affiliations affected all walks of Austrian life in the inter-war period (there were also Communist and German Nationalist sporting associations in Austria at this time.)23 While Else is unabashed about her Jewishness, not least because she neither looks not acts “Jewish,” it is also clear that, for all her attraction to her cousin Paul, she is more sexually interested in non-Jews than Jews. Hypersensitive to her still virginal state and presumably aware of the problems of “marrying out” of the Jewish community, Else usually finds her fantasies directed away from the men of her own narrow world. Early on in the novella we read how she would like to get married and then go to America, or perhaps marry an American and then live in Europe (42). A few pages later we read: “Ein Italiener könnte mir gefährlich werden. Schade, daß der schöne Schwarze mit dem Römerkopf schon wieder fort ist” (49; With an Italian I could well find myself in danger. Pity the dark handsome one with the Roman head has gone off again.)24 Another ideal is the quintessentially Gentile “Apoll vom Belvedere” (49; Belvedere Apollo), while other frequently-evoked objects of sexual desire (e.g. the matador and the “Filou”) are not obviously Jewish males. As Brigitte Prutti has pointed out, in reality Else’s chances of making a good match within her own community are not strong, since it is common knowledge that her father is in a parlous financial state.25 In his autobiography, written after the end of the Empire, Schnitzler jokes that antisemitism lacked both respectability and success until Jews themselves took it over.26 From a post-Holocaust perspective, such levity may make a modern readership uneasy. It is certainly possible, however, to perceive antisemitic aspects in the characterization of both Else’s father and Herr von Dorsday. Else’s father is objectively despicable in exploiting his own child in an attempt to make good the criminal fecklessness that has led him to misappropriate “Mündelgelder” (55; securities). That this character is not only Jewish but also a dishonest lawyer might be thought to reflect all too readily prejudices still current today. Dorsday is a virtual caricature who would not have seemed out of place in the Völkischer Beobachter: he is the epitome of the lascivious Jewish business man, obsessed with material possessions and money, devoid of ethical values, and with a perverse, voyeuristic sexuality to boot.27 Although Schnitzler puts some self-confident and positive statements into Else’s mouth about her own Jewishness, these have to be offset against aspects of her characterization that seem to reflect perennial prejudices leveled against Jews. A frequent criticism, typified in Richard Wagner’s

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attacks on Jews in German music in the middle of the nineteenth century, was that they were rootless,28 merely playing roles, taking on the coloration of the “host” society in much the same way as a chameleon does. The assimilated Jew thus becomes a typical manifestation of that problematic relationship between appearances and reality, between “Sein” and “Schein,” “reality” and “appearances,” that so characterized the world of the Austrian fin de siècle. Hence on the very first page of the novella Schnitzler emphasizes the self-awareness, indeed overt theatricality, of Else’s role-playing. Employing the language of the stage,29 Else self-consciously lauds her own exit, and the impression it must have made, as she leaves the covert lovers Paul and Cissy to finish their game of tennis: “Das war ein ganz guter Abgang” (41; That wasn’t a bad exit.)30 One of the most consistent strands in antisemitic stereotyping in the earlier part of the twentieth century was the projection of Jews as abnormally sexualized. It has become a critical commonplace to point out the relationship between Else’s narcissistic personality and Freud’s “Narcissus” essay of 1914 (which Schnitzler had certainly read) — at one point Else directly addresses her own “heißgeliebtes Spiegelbild” (132; passionately beloved mirror-image).31 However, it may be equally pertinent to place Else’s obsession with both her own image and with sexuality into the context of Otto Weininger’s Geschlecht und Charakter (Sex and Character, 1903), first published in Vienna. Without doubt this was a defining text of Austrian culture in the earlier part of the twentieth century, and indeed beyond: Heimito von Doderer continued to cite it approvingly until his death in 1966.32 In this now notorious tract, Weininger contends that “das Weibliche” (the feminine) is characterized by a biologicallybased obsession with sex that precludes both ethical action and artistic or intellectual creativity. When Else questions the point of her magnificent shoulders and lovely slender legs, before concluding “Und wozu bin ich denn überhaupt auf der Welt?” (106; And what am I here on earth for anyway?),33 we still seem close to the warped world of Otto Weininger. In one of his most contentious formulations, Weininger links antifeminism with Jewish antisemitism by concluding that the woman and the Jew are coterminous: “Unsere Zeit [ist] nicht nur die jüdischeste, sondern auch die weibischeste aller Zeiten” (Our age is not only the most Jewish, but also the most feminized of all times.)34 In the character of Else, Schnitzler has produced a figure who is indubitably feminine, Jewish, and sex mad. It could, nevertheless, be objected that for a nineteen-year-old girl to be obsessed with her body and her sexuality is something that transcends racial affiliations. However, Else’s ultimate willingness to reveal her nakedness to Dorsday could be easily construed as a form of prostitution, and as such would form yet another link with Weininger, who stresses the links between Judaism, femininity and prostitution. Initially Else resists the idea of stripping for Dorsday, equating it with selling herself — “Da

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wäre ich ja wie ein Frauenzimmer von der Kärntnerstraße” (94; Then I’d be like some common harlot from the Kärntnerstraße). (The still very fashionable Kärntnerstrasse in the center of Vienna was long associated with the appearance of prostitutes once darkness had fallen.)35 Eventually, however, she concludes: “Und es geschähe ihnen ganz recht, ihnen allen, sie haben mich ja doch nur daraufhin erzogen, daß ich mich verkaufe, so oder so” (106; And it would serve them right, all of them, since after all they did bring me up to sell myself, one way or another).36 Faced with the knowledge she must acquire 30,000 Gulden from Dorsday in order to save her father from imprisonment, Else comments that he would have even lent them 50,000 and then they would have been able to spend it on all sorts of things (81). Such a cavalier response to questions of finance is probably no more than an indication of Else’s immaturity and inexperience, and should not be linked with the antisemitic stereotyping of the Jewish regard for money. That Schnitzler himself thought along lines uncomfortably close to such stereotyping has, however, been revealed by Astrid Kirchheim-Lange’s access to earlier, unpublished drafts of the novella. There she discovered an earlier version in which Schnitzler has Else define herself on a descending scale as “die Aristokratin, die Marchesa, die Hochgemute, die Bettlerin, das Judenmädel” (the aristocrat, the countess, the cheerful girl, the beggar, the Jewish lass), only to replace “das Judenmädel” with “die Tochter des Defraudanten” (the swindler’s daughter).37 Else has equally scant confidence in the financial rectitude of her brother, and in the context of Weiningerian idées fixes it is worth noting Else’s conviction that it is a sexual motive that will hasten his predicted descent into criminality: “Der wird sich in Schulden stürzen für eine holländische Chansonette und bei Vanderhulst defraudieren. Das ist schon so in unserer Familie” (113; He’ll probably plunge into debt for some Dutch chorus girl and embezzle money at Vanderhulst’s. That’s the way things are in our family).38 Whereas certain aspects of Else’s characterization seemingly play into the hands of antisemites, others reveal her in a light more favorable to Viennese Jewry of the day. An example of this would be in the many literary and artistic references that pepper her monologue, indicative of the culturally engaged social circles in which a character like Else would have moved. She is, for instance, aware of small textual details in Massenet’s opera Manon; she attends performances of Coriolanus, and reads French authors such as Alexandre Dumas and Guy de Maupassant. There are also several allusions to German opera: the leitmotiv of “Die Luft ist wie Champagner” (The air is like champagne) echoes similar formulations in Johann Strauss’s Die Fledermaus (The Bat), a work written to divert the Viennese bourgeoisie after their ruination in the stock-market crash of 1874.39 Other references bring to mind Richard Wagner’s Der fliegende Holländer (140; The Flying Dutchman) and especially Richard Strauss’s

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Salome. The work was initially banned in Vienna, but Schnitzler saw it as early as 1906 in Dresden and then several times again over the next fifteen years in Vienna, including the period when working on Fräulein Else.40 The allusions to Salome in Fräulein Else are, of course, particularly apt since both works feature prominently the public unveiling of main female (Jewish) characters to assuage lascivious male (Jewish) voyeurs. As Else looks at herself in the mirror, the words she imagines in Dorsday’s mind recall those of the operatic Salome herself as she lusts after the imprisoned John the Baptist: “Ich will Ihre blutroten Lippen küssen. Ich will Ihre Brüste an meine Brüste pressen” (127; I want to kiss your blood-red lips. I want to press your breasts against my own).41 The references to Manon are also of considerable significance for the wider appreciation of Fräulein Else: in the figure of Prevost’s heroine, Else finds a model for a life of sexual gratification in defiance of societal expectations, which eventually leads to an early death.42 In Else’s final visionary moments, before she slips away, there is even a partial quotation from the German version of Massenet’s libretto.43 The appreciation especially of Austro-German music, which was such a feature of the “German-Jewish” symbiosis at the end of the nineteenth century, finds expression in Else’s references to visits to the opera to see Mozart’s Figaro (58), and in her secure knowledge of the pianistic canon: “Spielt da nicht wer? Eine Beethoven-Sonate! Wie kann man hier eine Beethovensonate spielen! Ich vernachlässige mein Klavierspiel. In Wien werde ich wieder regelmäßig üben” (69; Isn’t that someone playing? A Beethoven sonata! How can anyone play Beethoven sonatas in a place like this! I’ve been neglecting my piano exercises. In Vienna I shall do regular practice again).44 Or: “Chopin? Nein, Schumann” (135). Or again: “Schumann? Ja, Karneval . . . Hab’ ich auch einmal studiert” (140; Schumann? Yes, Carnaval . . . I once studied that piece too).45 Writing to Schnitzler in 1929, Hugo von Hofmannsthal placed Fräulein Else even higher in his estimation than the earlier monologue novella Leutnant Gustl (1900).46 Although it is fair to see Fräulein Else, as did the author himself, as a continuation and refinement of the methods first employed in Leutnant Gustl, by the time Fräulein Else appeared, it was obvious to a much wider audience how great the similarities were between Schnitzler’s writing technique and certain aspects of the works of Sigmund Freud. Though Schnitzler had a famously wary relationship with Freud (they did not even meet until Freud sent a letter to Schnitzler on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday in 1922), it is not hard to see Fräulein Else as revealing an intuitive literary awareness of the work of his Viennese colleague. Indeed, it was during the time when Schnitzler was writing Fräulein Else, 14 May 1922, that he received the famous letter, the contents of which seem quite peculiarly apposite to the novella. In the letter Freud confesses how he had agonized over his longstanding failure to make contact with Schnitzler, concluding that he had

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perhaps been frightened of meeting his “Doppelgänger.” For everything about Schnitzler seemed to chime uncannily with Freud himself: his determinism; his skepticism, which others wrote off as pessimism; his obsession with the unconscious; his dissection of cultural conventions; the way his thought revolved around the polarities of love and death.47 It has been plausibly mooted that Schnitzler and Freud failed to become close because “they reminded each other of abandoned alternatives — Freud of his literary aspirations, Schnitzler of his failed medical career.”48 What the precise relationship may have been between the composition of the novella and certain aspects of Freud’s work is something we cannot know. Nevertheless, Lange-Kirchheim interestingly notes how the fit that Else suffers in 1896 may be interpreted as a protest against society’s mendacity. In 1895 there had appeared the Studien über Hysterie (Studies on Hysteria) by Breuer and Freud, which Schnitzler’s diary suggests he read. In 1896 Freud published the controversial essay “Zur Ätiologie der Hysterie” (On the Etiology of Hysteria), where he develops the so-called seduction theory. The fourth edition of this work appeared in 1922 whilst Schnitzler was composing Fräulein Else.49 What does seem clear is that, while writing Fräulein Else in an age of increasing turmoil and uncertainty, Schnitzler was looking back at a period (already receding into history) that could be seen to have provided the seeds for both the financial and racial woes of the present age. Moreover — and unlike Freud, who tended to suppress such things in his case histories — Schnitzler was quite open about the Jewish component in Fräulein Else.50 As Egon Schwarz has pointed out, the author lived through momentous transformations in society. The Jews were identified with the speculative capitalism and the rapid industrialization that took place in Austria and Hungary. Out of this a modern antisemitism was born that differed from the old Judeophobia in several ways. It mixed the customary religious and economic accusations with racial ones, giving rise to a new hatred so dynamic and infectious that it mobilized large populations, infiltrated entire institutions such as the Catholic Church, and basically left no one unaffected — not even the victims themselves.51 It is in this context, then, Fräulein Else must now be viewed as one of the great modernist achievements of Austro-German narrative fiction, a profound examination of a young soul in torment, but also as a work in which the historical and social dimensions play a far greater role than has hitherto been recognized.

In Memoriam? — Franz Werfel: Der Tod des Kleinbürgers (1927) Writing soon after the Anschluss, the Prague-born historian Hans Kohn stressed the unique character of the Habsburg Empire as both a territorial

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state and a universal empire, fusing into its service the two great universal ideas of western Christianity — the succession of the Roman Empire and the guardianship of the Catholic Church. Although the product of German expansionism and colonization, it was at the same time multilingual and multi-racial from the beginning. Wide open to external influences, the Empire’s “cultural universalism radiated as a civilizing influence in all directions.”52 Although some of Austria’s defining cultural features are the enduring outcome of cultural interchange — the Spanish Riding School is a reminder of the Habsburg hegemony in Madrid as well as Vienna, the “Kaffeehaus” a legacy of the retreating Turks in 1683 — the emergent Austrian republic was so eager to stress its perceived Germanness that it designated itself as “Deutschösterreich.”53 This nomenclature was, however, instantly forbidden by the victorious powers, national selfdetermination not being permitted to the losers. In reality, the veto only strengthened the desire of a majority living in the First Republic to cast their lot with Germany precisely when a proper awareness of that country’s own cultural debt to external influences was at risk of inundation by the flood-tide of nationalism. As we saw, Schnitzler’s response to developments after 1918 was to imbue evocations of the recent past with elements of post-imperial reality. In effect, Schnitzler was claiming that to understand the complex uncertainties of republican Austria it was necessary to look back to the days of empire. Thus in Fräulein Else he superimposed onto a pre-war setting a list of characters who mirror the mentality not of 1896, when the novella is set, but of the crisis-ridden 1920s.54 Franz Werfel’s strategy in the masterly novella Der Tod des Kleinbürgers (The Death of a Poor Man, 1927) was to portray the fate of Franz Fiala, a “little man” living in a republican present equally unimaginable without the legacy of the imperial past. Unlike Schnitzler, however, Werfel did not resurrect former times as if post-Habsburg history had never occurred.55 Like much Jewish-Austrian writing of the day, Werfel’s work in the 1920s was often dominated by a general sense of loss in the wake of the First World War. Der Tod des Kleinbürgers, however, unfolds in a republican present whose defining feature is a stubborn recognition of the wider cultural heritage still to be found everywhere in the new German-Austrian republic. One of the best-selling authors of the day, Werfel exemplified the cultural fluidity in early twentieth century Austro-German letters as a whole. Born in Prague in 1890, he took Czech citizenship after 1919, and in 1927 was awarded the Czechoslovak State Prize. Nominally Jewish, under the influence of his Catholic wife Alma, widow of Gustav Mahler, Werfel subsequently became a staunch supporter of the clerical-fascist Corporate State that in 1937 honored him with the “Österreichisches Verdienstkreuz für Kunst und Wissenschaft 1. Klasse” (Austrian Cross of

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Merit for Art and Science, First Class). Nowadays, Werfel is considered deeply unfashionable. According to Erhard Bahr, Werfel’s posthumous reputation has slumped not because he dallied with dictators but because, like many Prague-born writers (with the exception of Kafka), he was too facile in his storytelling (“Geschichtlerzählen”).56 Snooty critical disdain for Werfel’s populism clearly did not wash with Uwe Johnson, who, when still living in the German Democratic Republic, acclaimed Der Tod des Kleinbürgers as one of the great stories in all German literature.57 In the introduction to Twilight of a World (1937), a selection of Werfel’s work translated by Helen Lowe-Porter, Werfel notes that by the time he came to write Der Tod des Kleinbürgers Vienna had survived the fall of the monarchy, starvation, and inflation — “Die Stadt des Weines und der Lieder hat sich eben mit proletarisch hohlen Wangen vom Krankenlager erhoben” (The city of wine and song has just arisen from its sick bed, albeit proletarian and hollow-cheeked).58 These retrospectively optimistic words do little to mask the fact that Der Tod des Kleinbürgers was composed in an era painfully aware of the political and cultural borders newly erected in a world that had not previously known them. Werfel also elects to ignore that his work, thematizing the relationship between Jew and Gentile, was originally written against a backdrop of burgeoning German nationalism and antisemitism — both within the young Austrian republic and the adjoining Sudetenland, the former crown lands of Bohemia and Moravia in the equally new Republic of Czechoslovakia. In the 1920s, before shifting to the political Right, Werfel saw his work as an opportunity to remind his very widespread readership of the broad cultural heritage that he now saw imperiled by the spread of German nationalism. Accordingly, in Verdi: Roman der Oper (Verdi: A Novel of the Opera, 1924) he addresses the cult status of Richard Wagner, totemic hero of the German nationalist Right, playing him off against Giuseppe Verdi, the Italian nationalist icon who had happened to be in Venice when Wagner died there in 1883.59 By breaking a lance for Verdi, Werfel implicitly challenges the Wagnerism that was as much a marker of Prague and Viennese Jewry as it was of German fascism. The strength of this cult is reflected in a wonderful passage by the Viennese Socialist journalist and political scientist Julius Braunthal, who recalls his pious father’s love of Wagner’s music and his seeming loathing of Wagner’s antisemitism: He could never forgive Wagner for having written the pamphlet Das Judentum in der Musik; but he missed hardly any performance of his operas, however difficult it was to spare the 40 Kreuzer [. . .]. I think he attended the Ring, Die Meistersinger and Lohengrin at least two hundred times. He knew Wagner’s operas by heart, and after supper [. . .] he often sang lengthy passages from them [. . .] Then, suddenly, remembering that he ought to hate Wagner, he would

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stop singing and with the utmost disdain exclaim: “And such a noise Wagner calls music!”60

The way the Wagner cult permeated the everyday life of Viennese Jews aspiring to assimilation into German culture is also recollected by the novelist and psychiatrist Fritz Wittels (like Werfel, Wittels had also been a friend of Karl Kraus only then to become his implacable enemy). Wittels recalls how his parents, “full of the Wagnerian enthusiasms of those days, named me Siegfried. I was always ashamed of that name, that was too glorious to be used on weekdays, so they called me Fritz.”61 In Der Tod des Kleinbürgers Werfel puts the operatic world of Wagner and Verdi behind him to enter the mundane domain of the “Kleinbürger,” the “little man” beloved of German and Austrian authors of the interwar period, immortalized in such novels as Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz (Berlin Alexanderplatz, 1929) and Hans Fallada’s Kleiner Mann, was nun? (Little Man, what now?, 1932). Probably completed in 1925,62 Werfel’s examination of the common man’s search for security in an uncertain world was first published in 1927, immediately followed by an English translation under the title The Death of a Poor Man.63 Set in “Red Vienna” in 1924, Der Tod des Kleinbürgers, like Fräulein Else, is indelibly colored by the financial traumas of the early 1920s. With an often satirical edge, it tells of the sixty-four year old petit bourgeois Karl Fiala, who takes out an insurance policy that will ostensibly secure his family’s financial future should he manage to reach his sixty-fifth birthday on 5 January 1925. He quickly falls desperately sick, but through an effort of almost superhuman will defies medical opinion and succeeds in staving off death until a few days after his birthday.64 In the context of a novella that already strains the credulity of the reader, it has not gone unnoticed that there is no mention in it of the Austrian currency reform on 1 January 1925, a move that would have rendered it most unlikely Fiala’s family ever saw much of the promised money.65 That Fiala’s triumph was in all probability a pyrrhic one would, however, have been so obvious to Werfel’s contemporary readership that it could remain unstated. Given the similarities in their social milieu, it is revealing to compare Werfel’s novella with Ödön von Horváth’s more acerbic evocation of the Viennese “Kleinbürgertum” in his drama Geschichten aus dem Wienerwald (Tales from the Vienna Woods, 1931). Appearing only three years after Werfel’s novella, Horváth’s “Volksstück” delivers a far harsher verdict on the Viennese petit bourgeoisie. Although Horváth was an outsider in Vienna, like Werfel he was also very much a product of the now-defunct empire. Like the Fialas in Der Tod des Kleinbürgers, Horvath’s “Kleinbürger,” who similarly bear Slavic names like Havlitschek, are deracinated, historically and culturally confused. Unlike the Fialas, they belong to a caste that has signed on to the prevalent mood of German

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cultural chauvinism, reflecting the lurch to the Right that gathered pace in the years following the appearance of Werfel’s novella. As Hans Wagener points out, Werfel’s interpretation of his own novella also changed over the decade following the original publication of Der Tod des Kleinbürgers.66 This is reflected in the title of the new translation that appeared in Twilight of a World, where the relatively accurate The Death of a Poor Man becomes the altogether more heroic The Man who Conquered Death. Der Tod des Kleinbürgers had been intended as a satire on the materialism and philistinism of the petit bourgeois Karl Fiala, but by 1937, endangered by the rise of National Socialism, and with an increasingly conservative outlook on life, “Werfel now wants to see him as a miniemperor who defends his declining realm with a heroic, symbolic death.”67 An increasing nostalgia for the imperial past had thus led Werfel to a reappraisal of his work corresponding to his changed view of the world. Further evidence of this softening attitude towards the “Kleinbürger” is reflected in Lowe-Porter’s translation. For example, the “bourgeois philistines” (151) of Fadiman and Drake’s translation of 1927 become the anodyne “middle class” in Lowe-Porter’s version ten years later.68 If Der Tod des Kleinbürgers were judged solely by the author’s appraisal of it in 1937, we might conclude that, compared with the non-Jewish Horváth, Werfel had been tempted into a world of wish-fulfillment through literature.69 In this we might recognize Werfel’s affinity to Joseph Roth, another Jewish writer with deep roots in the old empire. As the fascist threat grew, both produced works that increasingly focused on the cultural legacy of the Habsburgs when it was becoming all too tempting to romanticize the recent past in light of an increasingly threatening present. In fact, until the late 1920s, Roth’s response, like that of many Jews, had been to espouse the ideals of international Socialism. His first move towards the idealization of the recent past came in 1928, very shortly after the publication of Der Tod des Kleinbürgers, when he composed “Seine k. und k. Apostolische Majestät” (His Imperial and Royal Apostolic Majesty), the first of Roth’s works to eulogize the empire and its dynasty. Looking at Der Tod des Kleinbürgers from today’s perspective, it is clear that Werfel paints a picture of the Fiala family that both anticipates the critical vision of Horváth and at the same time delivers a nostalgic reminiscence of recent times past. The Fialas’ roots lie not in Vienna but Kralowitz, a town near Pilsen in Bohemia. Kralowitz was not geographically far from Vienna, but with the fall of the empire it had become culturally and politically a world away from the once imperial capital. Yet, as Werfel knew well, the Bohemian/Moravian hinterland was the source of a large segment of the Viennese working class as well as of artists and intellectuals synonymous with Viennese high culture of the early twentieth century. Sigmund Freud, Karl Kraus and Gustav Mahler, to name three, were all born in what had become Czechoslovakia, and all were Jewish.

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The Fialas are not Jewish, but neither is their name obviously Germanic-sounding.70 In their recollection, provincial Kralowitz, renamed Kralowice by the Czechs, represents everything that metropolitan Vienna could never be. It is a lost “Heimat,” at least as Slavic and Jewish as it is Germanic. Like Roth (most famously in his last novel Die Kapuzinergruft [The Emperor’s Tomb, 1938]), Werfel therefore points out how, in the new would-be “Deutschösterreich,” the ethnic underlay is actually non-Germanic. For the Fialas, memorializing the multi-ethnic past offers them anchorage in a present they often prefer to block out. Quite simply, the present offers only a déclassé life — hence the enormous significance that the family invests in the ornate sideboard, one of the few artifacts remaining from the enforced sale of their former home. The “Kredenz” comes from Frau Fiala’s wealthy family home in Kralowitz; as Herr Fiala remarks: “Wer diese Kredenz sein nennt, ist nicht verloren” (5; A man who can claim such a sideboard as this as his own is not wholly lost).71 A person of relentlessly regular habits, Fiala never misses a day without surveying his remaining possessions, religiously caressing a collection of unsmoked porcelain pipes. An omniscient narrator remarks: “Man greift bessere und langvergessene Zeiten mit der streichelnden Hand” (4; Your hand strokes the pipes — and you seem to be reaching out after long-forgotten times, better days).72 The present may be hard, but others have fared far worse. Indeed, as Fiala surveys his humble rented rooms in Vienna’s eighth district, the “Josefstadt,” he is not entirely dissatisfied. As he concludes: Andern geht es schlechter. Wie viele liegen auf der Straße! Und Herrschaften, die unendlich höher gestanden haben als er: Offiziale und Majore! Was da geschehen ist in diesen Jahren, wer kann das verstehen?! Stillhalten muß man, das ist das einzige. (3) [There are plenty of others more badly off — how many are lying out on the streets! And people who had once stood far higher up the scale than he — officials and majors! How can one begin to comprehend the shifts of these last few years? Hold fast and be quiet, that’s all one can do.]73

Revealingly, the narration suggests that the pre-war world to which the Fialas remain devoted through their relentless reification of the past was, in reality, deeply problematic. Karl Fiala, who shares his first name with the last emperor, reminisces obsessively about the “good old days”; through subtle use of “erlebte Rede,” however, the text reveals how flawed the consciously projected, idealized past actually was. Part of Fiala’s daily ritual is to look proudly at a photograph of himself wearing the extravagant uniform of a minor functionary in the Habsburg machine. Yet the world Fiala yearns for and fetishizes is also the world that in 1910

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saw him abruptly lose his job at the age of fifty to a “Protektionskind” (6; favorite of the Establishment). With this one word Werfel thematises, and implicitly criticizes, a society where what mattered most was not what you did, but whom you knew. As we shall find in Roth’s Zipper und sein Vater, such “Beziehungen” (connections) were a potent reality of everyday Austrian life. Their importance survived the fall of Empire and went on to flourish in the new republic. Although Fiala’s job had been relatively humble, arrayed in his flamboyant outfit he had stood guard outside the “Finanzlandesprokuratur” (Treasury Office) in Vienna, the very image of Kaiser Franz Joseph himself: “Im ganzen wirkt die Person wie ein staatlicheres Ebenbild einer anderen und allerhöchsten Person, die in jenen streng geregelten Zeiten das Reich regiert hatte” (7; All in all, the figure suggested a more stately likeness of another and very exalted personage who in the stern and wellregulated days long ago governed the realm).74 In the afterword to Der Tod des Kleinbürgers, Werfel’s friend Willy Haas points out that, in the figure of Fiala the doorkeeper, Werfel has simply transferred to a Viennese setting a figure from Werfel’s own childhood in Prague, the doorkeeper of the “k.k. Finanzlandesdirektion” (Royal and Imperial Treasury), “one of the deeply admired Gods of our Prague childhood — and one admired not without fear” (64). According to Haas, this figure from childhood memories had played an instrumental role in awakening the artist in Werfel, amongst whose poetic recollections of childhood we find a poem entitled “Der göttliche Portier” (65; The Divine Doorman). Moreover, this figure of the doorkeeper served as an inspiration not only for Werfel, but also for the “Türhüter” (doorkeeper) in Franz Kafka’s “Vor dem Gesetz” (Before the Law). This story, which Werfel knew, first appeared in Prague in 1915 before reappearing in the collection Ein Landarzt (A Country Doctor, 1919). Kafka’s intransigent doorkeeper famously stands guard in his fur coat, just as Herr Fiala had once done: “Diese Person trägt ferner einen dicken und verschnürten Pelz am Leib, der ihr Ansehen verdoppelt und verdreifacht” (7; This personage is wearing a heavy braided fur coat that doubles — nay triples — his bulk).75 Kafka, who had died in the sanatorium at Kierling near Vienna in 1924, was known to Werfel from their time in Prague, so by writing his own version of the doorkeeper so soon after Kafka’s death it is possible that Werfel was paying tribute to a recently dead writer who also shared his own complex feelings in respect of his Jewish heritage.76 More mundanely, the figure of the doorkeeper may simply reflect an early childhood memory shared by both men, which Werfel then imported from imperial Prague to republican Vienna.77 Whatever the extent of external literary influences on Werfel may have been, Der Tod des Kleinbürgers is a work in which the spirit of the recently

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defunct, multi-ethnic Habsburg Empire looms large. Apart from a rightwing medical doctor, who is portrayed satirically, the novella reveals not a single ethnic German character with roots in Vienna.78 Nevertheless, a direct inspiration for the work can be found in the indubitably Germanic setting of the Semmering, the mountain holiday resort on the borders of Lower Austria and Styria to the south of Vienna. In her autobiography Alma Mahler-Werfel recalled how in 1925, a few days after she had lost the couple who looked after her house on the Semmering, an elderly pair had presented themselves after negotiating with some difficulty the steep hill leading up to the house. Before long they were joined by “ein furchtbares Wesen” (a terrible creature) to help them with the housework.79 She was the sister of the female housekeeper, her name was Klara, and, according to Mahler-Werfel, this “richtiger Höllenbraten” (diabolical piece of work) was the inspiration for the tyrannical Klara Wewerka in Der Tod des Kleinbürgers.80 The sister of Fiala’s long-suffering wife, Wewerka is probably the most memorable figure in the novella. In contrast to the essentially realistic portraits of Fiala and his wife, Klara is a surreal creation — the literary equivalent of a Georg Grosz portrait — who makes life hell for her family. Her strategy for coping with the uncertainties of the postimperial world also involves reification: it is to hoard rubbish scavenged from the street. She in turn became the inspiration for another memorable character in Viennese fiction, but from the 1960s. Just as Kafka’s “Türhüter” may have provided Werfel with a literary prototype for Herr Fiala, perhaps even more obviously, Werfel’s Klara Wewerka — a “speaking name” to be sure — appears to have been the direct inspiration for one of Heimito von Doderer’s typically exuberant exercises in grotesquerie. This is the “Knollengewächs”81 (lumpy growth) Leopoldine Wewerka in his last completed novel Die Wasserfälle von Slunj (The Waterfalls of Slunj, 1963). What is implicit in the name of Werfel’s character becomes clearer still in Doderer’s work, which itself erects a memorial to the Habsburg world around 1900. Doderer’s Wewerka is a particularly bad-tempered concierge, living in “troglodytischer Enge” (troglodyte constriction),82 a prime specimen of a profession for which this author reserved an especial loathing. Her ethnicity is made explicit in Doderer’s novel when it is revealed how Wewerka cannot help slipping back into her native Czech when overcome by one of the frequent temper tantrums she has in common with Werfel’s character. Moreover, as the narrator explains, her name mirrors her activities: “‘Wewerka’ heißt auf deutsch ‘das Eichhörnchen’” (“Wewerka” means “squirrel” in German).83 In the absence of unequivocally ethnic German characters in Werfel’s Der Tod des Kleinbürgers, we can recognize similarities with Joseph Roth’s strategy a decade later when exploring the theme of Austrian identity in

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Die Kapuzinergruft. Roth similarly peoples his novel with characters from across the length and breadth of the former empire while excluding the “Alpentrottel” (Alpine idiots)84 who people the new republic. Although they may not be native to Vienna, the Fialas’ cultural associations and habits are profoundly Viennese, and never more so than when participating in the annual ritual of ancestor worship in the Central Cemetery on All Saints Day. In this scene, which is presented with virtuoso skill, it is easy to discern intimations of Werfel’s subsequent attraction to Roman Catholicism as a means of self-identification with the Habsburg past. More widely, other “Old Austrian” Jewish writers like Joseph Roth (who also dabbled with Catholicism), Ernst Weiss, and Stefan Zweig increasingly identified with — and indeed idealized — the Habsburg past both in their life and in their work when faced with rising antisemitism across the German-speaking lands. So, when Werfel focuses upon the close interaction between the Bohemian Catholic Fialas and the Bohemian Jewish Schlesingers in Der Tod des Kleinbürgers, it is clear that a writer of popular renown, with a well-known Jewish background, is using literature as a tool in the larger political battle being waged in the fraught First Republic.85 At the core of the novella Werfel places the virtually symbiotic relationship between Jew and Catholic. It is Schlesinger who persuades Fiala to buy his insurance policy, and it is Schlesinger who occupies the hospital bed next to Fiala’s as both men fight for their lives. In Werfel’s literary world, Jew and Gentile are bound in life, and ultimately death, by their shared roots in, and ever-present memories of, the old empire: “Auch für ihn [i.e. Fiala] wäre es vielleicht besser gewesen, niemals den Heimatort zu verlassen” (13; Perhaps it would have been better for him, too, never to have left his native town).86 It can only be construed as a provocation to German Nationalists that Werfel uses the term “Landsmann” (44; fellow countryman) when referring to the ties binding Fiala and Schlesinger. Given their shared geographical roots in Kralowitz, this might seem innocuous and barely worthy of comment today, but in the rapidly heating atmosphere of the 1920s it would have been considered an oxymoron by German Nationalists, for whom a Jew could never be a “Landsmann.”87 If for German right-wingers the notion of Jew and Christian as “Landsleute” was anathema, then equally to their distaste was the figure of Heinrich Heine, at least as a Jew, if not as a poet. It may be recalled how difficult the Nazis later found it to expunge Heine’s verse from the “Volksgedächtnis” (popular memory), leading to the grotesque irony of a poem like “Die Lorelei” remaining in print, but with the author’s name expunged, only to be replaced by the label “Volkslied” (folksong). When Werfel was composing Der Tod des Kleinbürgers in the mid-1920s, Heine was still widely admired by the educated liberal bourgeoisie, both as

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a poet and for his perceived role in the events leading up to the March 1848 Revolution, the so-called “Vormärz.” Heine was, however, also widely disparaged by other Jews as well as by the antisemitic Right. The essay “Heine und die Folgen” (Heine and the Consequences, 1910), for example, is one of Karl Kraus’s most problematic and potentially, if not intrinsically, antisemitic texts. By the 1920s the fall-out between the former friends Werfel and Kraus was irrevocable, crowned by Werfel’s wounding caricature of the satirist in the drama Spiegelmensch (Mirror Man, 1920). In portraying Schlesinger’s ancient and haggard mother’s grotesque rendition of “Ich bin die Prinzessin Ilse / Und wohne im Ilsenstein” (I am the princess Ilse / and dwell in Ilsenstein),88 in a volume handed to her by her dying son (42), Werfel points not just to the embedded importance of Heine’s work within the wider Jewish community. He also indicates the role of even humble Jews as guardians of an inclusive German literary tradition that was threatened intellectually by Jewish writers like Kraus, and politically by the rise of the antisemitic Right.89 Writing for a Central European audience whose memories of a recently lost social order are juxtaposed with their contemporary experience of financial and political instability, Werfel portrays a world where the factors binding people, both historical and cultural, are revealed as more significant than those dividing them. However, this idealistic vision where positive aspects of the past are seen to have survived the caesura of war and the collapse of empire is repeatedly deconstructed and relativized by the awareness that the past was itself deeply problematic. This emerges poignantly in Schlesinger’s strained relationship with his own Jewish ethnicity, of which the traditionally Catholic Fialas seem strangely — and most unconvincingly — unaware. On a visit to the Fialas’ home, Schlesinger, whose speech patterns and vocabulary are shot through with Yiddishisms, declares: “Wir Juden rauchen zuviel.” Sofort aber korrigiert er: “Pardon! Ich bin gar kein Jud, wenn Sie das zur Kenntnis nehmen wollen. Ich habe für die heilige Jungfrau optiert.” Schlesinger erschrickt sichtlich über seine Worte. Er wird sehr ernst und duckt sich zusammen. Aber die Fialas haben seinen gefährlichen Zynismus gar nicht verstanden. Sie blinzeln ihn an. So murmelt er mit plötzlicher Demut zum Abschluß: “Ja! Es ist besser fürs Fortkommen!” (14–15) [“We smoke too much, we Jews” But he corrects himself swiftly: “Pardon me! I’m not a Jew — you’ll please note that. I’ve opted for the Holy Virgin, you know.”

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Schlesinger is plainly alarmed at his own words. He becomes very serious, and bows his head. But the Fialas are not in the least conscious of his daring cynicism. They look at him, blinking. Then he murmurs with sudden humility, closing the subject: “Yes, it’s better for business.”].90

Such clear recognition that the cold Habsburg sun had not shone equally on all the empire’s children should suffice to qualify the extent to which — as came to be Werfel’s own view — Der Tod des Kleinbürgers can be regarded as a purely positive reckoning with the past. The fact that it is a stereotypical Jewish salesman who cuts the implausible insurance deal for the Gentile Fialas has implications that are left undeveloped. To a contemporary audience this may also have been so obvious as to require no comment. Interestingly, both in Der Tod des Kleinbürgers and in Joseph Roth’s Zipper und sein Vater, the author chooses the figure of a handicapped and dysfunctional son to indicate his pessimistic view of the future. In Roth’s novel we will encounter the grotesquely misnamed Cäsar, the younger of Herr Zipper’s two sons. Here, in the Fialas’ handicapped son Franzl, the future appears to be just as unambiguously grim. The imperial name of Franz, borne by generations of Habsburg rulers, is reduced to the demotic diminutive. Its bearer is an embittered epileptic with no future in Vienna, whose best prospect may be the mental hospital at Steinhof where, under the aegis of “die roten Stadtväter” (17; the red city fathers), the food is now excellent, and certainly better than the boy can get at home. Frau Fiala’s loveless conclusion that perceived inadequates like her son Franzl are best shunted off into mental institutions reflects the spirit of an age that the Nazis were only too ready to exploit: “Derartiger Geschöpfe entledigt man sich zu allgemeinem Vorteil, indem man sie den dazu bestimmten, gemeinnützigen Anstalten anvertraut” (17; People rid themselves of such creatures for the general benefit of the community by entrusting them to the public institutions founded exactly for this purpose.)91 Franzl is with his father at the end of Fiala’s heroic grapple with death, and it is Franzl who discovers under the dead man’s pillow two objects that symbolize equally the irrevocable demise of the past and the awful emptiness of the future: Franzl hob stumm das Kissen auf und steckte die beiden wertlosen Gegenstände in seine Tasche. Es war ein leerer Kalenderblock und die schmutzige Borte irgendeiner verschollenen Uniform. (63) [Franzl raised the pillow in silence and thrust two worthless objects into his pocket. One was a blank calendar pad; the other, a dirty piece of braid from some old, forgotten uniform.]92

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Tales from Two Cities — Joseph Roth: Zipper und sein Vater (1928) It is often noted that the development of modern European fiction is so closely associated with the growth of the urban metropolis that a writer’s name is then attached to it. Tags like “Dickensean London,” “Proust’s Paris,” “Joyce’s Dublin,” and, in the field of Austrian letters, “Schnitzler’s Vienna,” are all examples of this conflation of art with social reality. It is a cliché of German literary history that only after Berlin became the capital of the Second German Empire in 1871 were the conditions right for Theodor Fontane to engrave the city’s name onto the map of the European novel. The year before Fontane published Effi Briest (1895), Joseph Roth was born far away from any great city. In fact, it is hard to imagine anywhere less metropolitan than the small Galician town of Brody on the border of Austria and Russia where Roth first saw the light of day. Like Fontane’s, Roth’s career as a novelist was short — fifteen years at most — yet in one respect his achievement was unique. There is no writer of comparable stature whose work so vividly evokes not one, but three of the great European capitals. Roth’s first novel, Das Spinnennetz (The Spider’s Web, 1923), originally published in a Viennese newspaper, is set in contemporary Berlin. With strange prescience it anticipates not just the Ludendorff putsch, but even includes Adolf Hitler as a character. Roth’s final novel, Die Kapuzinergruft (The Emperor’s Tomb, 1938), published in Amsterdam, is very much a Viennese novel that concludes with events of March 1938 and the swastika fluttering from the flagpole of the Hofburg. Die Legende vom Heiligen Trinker (The Legend of the Holy Drinker, 1939), Roth’s very last work, and one of his best, is set in Paris, the city where he died in 1939. Roth first moved to Paris in May 1925, but, having failed to secure the job of Paris correspondent for the Frankfurter Zeitung, he then traveled extensively throughout Europe. On 1 October 1926, when Roth was in the Soviet city of Odessa, he wrote to Benno Reifenberg, his editor at the Frankfurter Zeitung, declaring his endless longing for Paris: “ich bin ein Franzose aus dem Osten, ein Humanist, ein Rationalist mit Religion, ein Katholik mit jüdischem Gehirn, ein wirklicher Revolutionär” (I’m a Frenchman from the East, a humanist, a religious rationalist, a Catholic with a Jewish brain, a real revolutionary).93 In Zipper und sein Vater (Zipper and his Father, 1928),94 published by the Kurt Wolff Verlag in Berlin, the setting is not the city of the author’s dreams, but the rival metropolises on the Danube and the Spree. This is fitting, for, as Wendelin Schmidt-Dengler has pointed out, Roth’s development as a writer is inextricably bound up not merely with the fate of the Habsburg Monarchy but also with the literary landscape

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of the Weimar Republic.95 In 1921 the budding journalist and author left Vienna for Berlin, as did many other Austrian artists in the course of the decade, but he never grew fond of the Prussian capital, remarking in Juden auf Wanderschaft (The Wandering Jews, 1927): “Wer in aller Welt kommt freiwillig nach Berlin?” (Who in the world comes voluntarily to Berlin?).96 Roth felt it was hard to have fun in Berlin, unlike Paris: “In Berlin freut man sich nicht. In Paris herrscht die Freude” (You cannot enjoy yourself in Berlin. In Paris, pleasure rules).97 As a prelude to his thoughts on the recent upturn in life in republican Austria entitled “Cheerfulness breaking in,” the British journalist and commentator Sisley Huddleston remarked in 1929 that: From Paris to Vienna is a good day’s journey, and from Vienna to Berlin, or Berlin to Paris, is a much shorter journey; yet the difference between Vienna and Paris is nothing like so great as the difference between Vienna and Berlin [. . .] There is, indeed, no stronger contrast than is furnished by Berlin and Vienna, and the historic contrast can be appreciated as clearly as ever today.98

Similarly, in the novel Der Sohn des verlorenen Sohnes (The Son of the Prodigal Son, 1935), Roth’s friend Soma Morgenstern describes Berlin quite simply as “der polare Gegensatz zu Wien” (Vienna’s polar opposite).99 Despite his distate for the city, Berlin was to be Roth’s base for over a decade. It certainly inspired some of his most effective work, including the wonderful series of feuilletons evoking life in Germany’s greatest city before the Nazis came to power.100 Although frequently absent on reporting missions across the length and breadth of Europe, Roth remained a Berlin-based writer until 1933, when his longed-for move to France became a matter of life-preserving necessity.101 Although its shifting narrative perspectives mark out Zipper und sein Vater as one of Roth’s more technically innovative novels, it also remains one of his less highly regarded works, possibly because it lacks the consistent verve and energy of either its predecessor, Flucht ohne Ende (Flight without End, 1927), or its successor Rechts und Links (Right and Left, 1929).102 Nevertheless, a contemporary reviewer noted that Roth succeeds here in achieving what Werfel had merely envisioned in Der Tod des Kleinbürgers: the portrayal of people from the past, the portrayal of people at a time of transition and in the postwar period, and the portrayal of the bourgeois world before and during the war. According to this reviewer, Roth knows what he wants to achieve. He is not garrulous, if anything he tends towards silence.103 With Zipper und sein Vater Roth inaugurated a line of works examining the last days of the Habsburg empire, whose best-known examples today are the novels Radetzkymarsch and Die Kapuzinergruft. Published in a year when Roth made extended trips to Poland and Italy, Zipper und

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sein Vater was dedicated to Benno Reifenberg, the recipient of the letter in which Roth had earlier declared allegiance to France. As the title suggests,104 the novel revolves around two main characters, both made to represent the age itself. Arnold Zipper, a typical “Heimkehrer” (returnee from the war), is quite simply “der junge Mann der Kriegsgeneration” (129; the young man of the wartime generation).105 His father, whose first name we never learn, becomes the figurehead for Roth’s analysis of the decline and fall of the Old Order. Along with all the other fathers of the wartime generation, he is deemed responsible for Arnold’s misery: “Alle unsere Väter sind an unserem Unglück schuld. Das sind die Väter der Generation, die den Krieg gemacht hat” (128; All our fathers are responsible for our bad luck. Our fathers belong to the generation that made the war).106 In the “Brief des Autors an Arnold Zipper” (Letter from the author to Arnold Zipper) with which he personally signs off the novel, Joseph Roth declares that his book is: der Versuch, an zwei Menschen die Verschiedenheiten und Ähnlichkeiten zweier Generationen so darzustellen, daß diese Darstellung nicht mehr als der private Bericht über zwei private Leben gelten kann. Denn so stark und, man kann sagen, so sonderbar auch die Individualität Deines Vaters war, seine Erscheinung war noch mehr typisch für die Generation unserer Väter, und ich habe die Hoffnung, daß mancher meiner Leser von unserem Alter in Herrn Zipper, zumindest in vielen Eigentümlichkeiten Zippers, seinen eignen Vater erkennen wird, ebenso wie er sich selbst in Dir erkennen muß, wie ich mich selber in Dir zu erkennen glaube (132).107 [the attempt to present through two men the differences and similarities of two generations, in such a way that the presentation cannot be considered a mere reporting of two private lives. For, although your father’s individuality was marked and, one might say, unusual, his characteristics were still more typical of our fathers’ generation, and I cherish the hope that many readers of our age will recognize in Herr Zipper, or at least in many of his peculiarities, those of their own fathers, just as they must recognize themselves in you, just as I believe I recognize myself in you.]108

The very personal way Roth wished to link not just the differences but equally the similarities between the old and the new worlds will become clearer still by referring again briefly to Roth’s letter to Benno Reifenberg in 1926. Although in generational terms Roth clearly identifies himself with the younger Zipper, the description of Arnold’s eccentric and feckless father echoes quite closely the vocabulary earlier employed to describe himself when writing to his editor. It will be recalled how Roth perceived himself as being “ein Rationalist mit Religion” (rationalist

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with religion) and “ein wirklicher Revolutionär” (a real revolutionary).109 Here the elder Zipper, representing the guilty generation of the fathers, is similarly described as being “ein Rebell und ein Rationalist” (9; a rebel and a free-thinker).110 From this we observe how Roth’s often quixotic identification with the lost world of the Habsburgs, which stemmed not least from his disillusionment with what he had seen in the Soviet Union, was already taking artistic shape by 1928.111 Like Herr Fiala in Der Tod des Kleinbürgers, Herr Zipper is typical of the generation that had used a great deal of its energy, “um aus einem Proletarier ein Bürger zu werden” (23; making a bourgeois out of his proletarian self).112 Old Herr Zipper’s rationalism only goes so far, however, for, as the narrator ironically notes: “Er aß Zwiebeln, wenn er Kopfweh hatte, legte Spinngewebe auf offene Wunden und heilte Gicht durch Wassertreten” (10; He ate onions when he had a headache, put spiders’ webs on open wounds and trod water to cure gout).113 Upon the outbreak of hostilities in 1914, this same character, hitherto marked by a virulent dislike of the Habsburgs, suddenly turns into “einer der glühendsten Patrioten” (36; one of the fiercest patriots).114 The elder Zipper thus emerges as a composite pre-war Viennese “Kleinbürger”-figure, embodying many of the features of a profoundly contradictory age that all too readily confused appearances with reality and saddled the younger generation with its own unfulfilled aspirations. What is to become of Arnold Zipper is a question his father constantly poses, but only one thing is clear: “Alles konnte Arnold werden; alles, was der alte Zipper nicht geworden war” (22; Arnold could become anything; anything that old Zipper had not become).115 Arnold’s misfortune is that he becomes a modern version of his father. The wars costs the life of Zipper’s other son, the violently alienated, sociopathic Cäsar, and as it draws to a close, Old Zipper increasingly becomes a cipher for the times themselves. The narrator/author comments: “Ich sah, wie es zu Ende ging mit ihm, den wir gekannt hatten. Er verwandelte sich in einen ganz unbekannten, neuen. War das noch der Zipper?” (42; I saw how the man we had known was coming to an end. He was changing into someone new, and quite unknown. Was this still our Zipper?)116 After the war it is Arnold Zipper,117 with symbolic initials stretching from A to Z, who comes to typify the new age. He is weak and passive at a time when strength is needed to survive: “Mit seinem Vater verglichen, erschien er nicht merkwürdig, sondern eher gewöhnlich” (45–46; By comparison with his father, he seemed to me unremarkable, in fact rather ordinary).118 Arnold drifts through the confusion of the postwar world. Vegetating in a humble job in the Civil Service, he feels drawn increasingly to the worlds of the coffee shop, music, literature and theater. Even his job has been procured thanks to his father’s undiminished ability to call on his “Beziehungen,” the legendary Viennese connections that managed to survive unscathed in a less than brave new world. Unable

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to escape the ennui of postwar Vienna, Arnold grows increasingly resentful of his father’s generation, which sent him off to a war whose bitter fruits he now tastes. The narrator remarks — and we know he can be identified at least in part with Joseph Roth himself: “Ich glaube, der Krieg hat uns verdorben. Gestehen wir, daß wir zu Unrecht zurückgekommen sind. Wir wissen soviel wie die Toten, wir müssen uns aber dumm stellen, weil wir zufällig am Leben geblieben sind” (61; I think the war has corrupted us. Let’s admit that we were wrong to return. We know as much as the dead, but we have to pretend to be stupid because by chance we stayed alive).119 In language prefiguring both Radetzkymarsch and Die Kapuzinergruft, the first-person narrator remarks of Arnold Zipper how: dieser Mensch wie jeder andere bestimmten Gesetzen gehorchte, wenn er etwas unternahm oder etwas unterließ. In dieser Nacht fühlte ich das Gesetz der Welt. Ich hörte den geschwinden, genauen, unerbittlichen, reibungslosen Gang der Räder, die den Mechanismus des Schicksals ausmachen. (56) [like everybody else, he was obeying specific rules when he decided to take an opportunity or to let it go. On that night I was aware of the law of the world. I could hear the swift, precise, inexorable and smooth movement of the wheels that sets in motion the mechanism of Fate.]120

Wallowing in despair at failing to emigrate and emulate his outlandish uncle (a surreal, larger-than-life figure who has become a successful farmer in Brazil), Arnold is eventually persuaded by the narrator that it is time to fall in love. By now his will is so debilitated that he merely falls back on Erna Wilder, a woman he had known and loved a dozen years earlier. She is an ambitious actress trying to escape the world of the petit bourgeoisie and carve out a role for herself in the new age. A typical 1920s gamin, gregarious and promiscuous, Erna’s attempts at selfdefinition are constantly ironized by the hostile narrator, anticipating the way that Roth will later treat the similarly liberated character of Jolanth Szatmary in Die Kapuzinergruft. With supine Arnold firmly in tow, Erna quickly makes her way through the provincial theaters before ending up in the film world of Berlin. The need to get out of Vienna was widely felt in the 1920s, with Berlin an obvious destination for many artists. As Roth remarked in 1927: “Paris ist eine wirkliche Weltstadt. Wien ist einmal eine gewesen. Berlin wird erst einmal eine sein” (Paris is a proper world-class city. Vienna used to be one. Berlin has yet to become one).121 With the shift of the narrative center from Vienna to Berlin, we grow aware of a contrast in the depiction of the two cities. The account of Arnold Zipper’s life in postwar Vienna is notable for concentrating

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on the psychology of the “Heimkehrer” generation, but often lacks the specifically Viennese sense of place that distinguishes later novels like Radetzkymarsch and Die Kapuzinergruft. Although Arnold could be any “Heimkehrer” in virtually any part of the German-speaking world, his father, like Herr Fiala in Der Tod des Kleinbürgers, emerges as a more recognizably Viennese type. In Roth’s fiction throughout the 1920s, however, the physical presence of Berlin looms far larger than Vienna. This is not so surprising, given that Berlin was now far more central to his day-to-day life than Vienna. Nevertheless, in Zipper und sein Vater the intoxicating complexity of Berlin in the 1920s, so well caught in Roth’s journalism, is mostly reduced to a single arena of activity — the world of cinema. Roth’s ironical and overwhelmingly negative portrayal of the Berlin film world can, however, be set against the much more differentiated portrait of wider Berlin life in his next novel, Rechts und Links, which emerged in the same year as Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz (Berlin Alexanderplatz, 1929). Like Roth’s debut novel Das Spinnennetz, Rechts und Links is a Berlin novel through and through, which again reflects how in the 1920s Berlin constituted part of Roth’s everyday life in a way Vienna did not. Whereas in Rechts und Links Berlin’s political life — especially the rise of National Socialism — is never far removed from events, the complex issues of Austrian political life in the 1920s — such as the burning of the Justizpalast in Vienna in July 1927 — are absent from Zipper und sein Vater. The world of film production in Berlin during the 1920s has nowadays assumed almost mythical proportions, but Roth saw things very differently. He makes no attempt to conceal his dislike of the medium, not the least of his reasons being that any success in the world of film only reinforces the monolithic dominance of modern American culture over Europe. Erna Wilder, whose surname may remind us of the great Austro-American director Billy Wilder, but who in reality was inspired by Elisabeth Bergner,122 gravitates towards film because the world of the theater is simply too sedate: “Es mußte im Film schneller gehen. Denn das Theater hatte viele Zentren, der Film nur ein einziges: Hollywood. Dort hinzukommen, Geld zu haben, Ruhm und Macht!” (85; Films must move faster. For the theater had many centers, the film only one: Hollywood. One must get there to earn money, fame and power!)123 Roth’s inability to appreciate the greatness of German cinema during the era of the silent movies is merely one of many prejudices reflecting his fixation on what Heinz and Victoria Lunzer call anti-modernist, backward-looking utopias.124 This tendency had first become apparent in the essay Juden auf Wanderschaft (1927). However, as a polemical corrective to the current glorification of UFA, Zipper und sein Vater is unsurpassed. Comparing Berlin to the great American Gold Rush of the nineteenth

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century, Roth declares that the film industry was a California, where former stockbrokers from Czernowitz sat down with German industrialists and invented patriotic films,125 where assistants in furniture depositories became scenic artists and photographers were called camera directors; where currency speculators became producers, police spies became crime consultants, roof repairers set designers, and anyone with myopia a secretary. The rant continues: Mancher schlaue Wechselstubenbesitzer machte sich selbständig, mietete ein Büro in der Friedrichstraße und nannte es “Direktion,” einen Winkel am Tempelhofer Feld und nannte es “Atelier,” verfaßte selbst seine Filme und war ein Autor, befahl einer Dilettantin zu weinen und ihrem Partner zu poltern und war ein Regisseur (86). [Many a sly owner of a bureau de change made himself independent, rented an office in the Friedrichstrasse and called it “Direction,” or a corner on the Tempelhof and called it “Atelier,” wrote a script and became an author, told a dilettante actress to weep and her partner to rage and became a director].126

Although Roth does not specifically draw the parallel, the Berlin film world, where appearances take preference over reality, now mirrors the deceptive world of Vienna in the final days of the Habsburg hegemony. It is one for “schlaue Menschen, es war eine Welt für Erna” (87; for the shrewd, it was a world for Erna).127 Just like Trotta’s wife Elisabeth in Die Kapzinergruft, written a decade later, Zipper’s wife Erna shows her flexibility and modernity by having lesbian affairs. Worse still, having moved from Vienna to Berlin, she begins to put out feelers to Hollywood (90). As the Lunzers have made clear, Hollywood is an example of all Roth deemed bad in modern culture. Although he himself published numerous film reviews, these are not written from the standpoint of a film specialist. Rather, they are unconventional thoughts on the medium seen from a sociological, political and aesthetic point of view. Roth observes the cinema and its audience with a critical and ironic eye whilst also recognizing film’s pedagogic task. The defining quality of cinema is, however, its projection of a pseudo-reality: the more perfect the illusion, the greater the demonic hold of the medium over its viewers becomes. In short, Hollywood is an example of the “Antichrist.”128 It has already been noted how, in the “Brief des Autors an Arnold Zipper” with which the novel concludes, Roth points to similarities between himself and the two characters central to what he pointedly calls “den Bericht” (123; the report). Now, it is perfectly possible that the “Joseph Roth” who signs this chapter is just as much a fiction as everything else in the novel. If he is not, then there is at least one aspect of Arnold Zipper’s life that parallels that of his creator: Arnold writes film

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reviews in his capacity as “Filmredakteur an einer Mittagszeitung” (film editor of a midday paper). The narrator/editor observes, not without cynicism: “Es schien mir, daß er endlich den Beruf gefunden hatte, der ihm paßte. Er besaß gerade jene konziliante Art, in der allein man etwas kritisieren kann, an dem man finanziell beteiligt ist” (94; It seemed to me that he had at last discovered the profession that suited him. He possessed just that conciliatory skill without which it is impossible to criticize something in which one has a financial interest). At the time Roth was composing Zipper und sein Vater, his wife Friedl was growing incurably insane and their married life in any conventional sense was drawing to an end. With the knowledge of biographical hindsight it is tempting to see in the portrayal of Arnold’s collapsing marriage to the capricious and unpredictable Erna a literary refraction of the problems then facing Roth himself. In the novel, Erna is severely injured after falling from a horse and brought to a sanatorium in Berlin (116). By 1929 Friedl’s condition was so serious that she too had to be placed in a sanatorium, Roth’s choice being Dr. Weiler’s Kuranstalten in Westend bei Berlin. The strands in the narration that had earlier examined Arnold and his father in tandem in Vienna are drawn together once more towards the end of the novel, when the elder Zipper arrives in Berlin on a typically ill-considered legal venture that is doomed to failure. Zipper’s reasons for bringing his case to Berlin are simple. He has been searching for a pretext to visit his son and daughter-in-law, but he is also convinced that the case would be dealt with there more swiftly than in Austria, where “die Richter ihre Nägel kauten” (106; the judges sat about biting their nails). Observing the pair of them united again allows the narrator (who is also the novelist Joseph Roth) to come to one final, damning assessment of the role of the father’s generation, which reveals the resurgence of authorial attitudes more typical of “der rote Joseph” before his trip to the Soviet Union than the subsequent apologist for the Habsburg past: Alles war falsch gewesen, was er unternommen hatte. [. . .] Seine Witze waren nicht heiter, sein Ernst war lächerlich, sein Ehrgeiz rannte schief zum Ziel, er war ein Redner mit einem schlechten Gedächtnis, ein Tischler, der nichts herzustellen wußte, ein Geigenmacher, der nur ein Lied spielte — und dieses Lied war traurig, und bei diesem Lied war er munter (122). [Everything he had undertaken had been wrong. (. . .) His jokes weren’t funny, his earnestness was laughable, his ambition missed its target, he was a speaker with a poor memory, a joiner who couldn’t make anything, a violin maker with only one tune — a sad tune, but one that made him happy].129

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In one respect at least, the import of the novel is quite similar to that propounded by many German expressionists, for whom father-son relationships were a lasting source of inspiration: the problematic present, whether in Austria or Germany, is a direct outcome of generational conflict. Vienna is now the city of the older generation. Its great days lie behind it, its young people have to migrate to Berlin to make their way. Berlin’s complex modernity, however, is reduced to the cipher of the cinema and the destructive pseudo-reality it both creates and encourages. Arnold Zipper, the still weaker son of an already weak father, is an inevitable victim of that society, just as Herr Zipper had himself been a victim of an earlier stage in the development of modernity. As Fritz Hackert points out, old Herr Zipper had already fallen prey to “the Moloch of civilization” when he uprooted from his craftsman’s job as a provincial joiner to go work on the factory floor in Vienna. That he should have been engaged there in the mass-production of coffins hardly requires comment.130 Written at a time of comparative consolidation and economic stability in the history of the Weimar Republic, but one of considerable turbulence in Austria, Zipper und sein Vater is a good example of the way Roth’s creative imagination vacillated between the two main Germanspeaking capitals in the later 1920s. After his flirtation with Communism had ended, the Habsburg past started to appear more attractive; however, it was a past from which he was removed not merely in time, but also in place. Berlin, originally a destination of economic refuge, could not help but stimulate a writer as observant as Roth, yet he always remained a stranger there, remarking in the feuilleton “Abschied vom Hotel” (Leaving the Hotel): “Ich bin fremd in dieser Stadt, deshalb war ich hier so heimisch.” (I’m a stranger in this town, that’s why I was so at home here).131 Zipper und sein Vater is a “Generationsroman” (generational novel)132 that bemoans the inability of the young to communicate with the same facility as their elders. In a passage conflating literature and reality at the end of the novel, “Joseph Roth” remarks: “Wir werden uns nie verständlich machen, mein lieber Arnold, wie Dein Vater es noch konnte” (132; We shall never be able to make ourselves understood, my dear Arnold, in the way that your father still could).133 The novel as a whole, however, shows just how unreliable a narrator/author this Joseph Roth actually is, and not least when we measure his proclaimed inability to communicate against the terrible precision of his final prophecy: “Wir wissen, daß noch einmal eine Generation kommen wird, die so sein wird, wie unsere Väter waren. Noch einmal wird Krieg sein” (130; We know that another generation will come that will be just like our fathers’. Yet again there will be war).134

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Notes Material in this chapter previously appeared in “Sex, Race and Character in Schnitzler’s Fräulein Else,” German Life and Letters, 54, no. 1 (2001): 1–9; and in “Tales of Two Cities: Joseph Roth’s Novel Zipper und sein Vater,” in Vienna Meets Berlin, ed. Ulrike Zitzelsperger and John Warren (Bern: Peter Lang 2005), 157–68. 1

The novella Fräulein Else takes place on 3 September, 1896. See Astrid LangeKirchheim, “Adoleszenz, Hysterie und Autorschaft in Arthur Schnitzlers Novelle ‘Fräulein Else,’” Jahrbuch der deutschen Schillergesellschaft 42 (1998): 265–300, here 266.

2

W.  E. Yates, Schnitzler, Hofmannsthal and the Austrian Theatre (New Haven: Yale UP, 1992), 179. See also Wendelin Schmidt-Dengler, “Inflation der Werte und Gefuehle. Zu Arthur Schnitzlers ‘Fräulein Else,’” in Ohne Nostalgie: Zur österreichischen Literatur der Zwischenkriegszeit (Vienna, Cologne, Weimar: Böhlau, 2002), 53–64. Recent research argues that Schnitzler’s writing during the First Republic was, in fact, far more engaged with contemporary reality than is conventionally assumed. See Hillary Hope Herzog, “Vienna Is Different”: Jewish Writers in Austria from the Fin de Siècle to the Present (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2011), 109–11. 3

Federic J. Beharriell, “Schnitzler’s Fräulein Else: ‘Reality’ and Invention,” Modern Austrian Literature 10, nos. 3–4 (1977): 249. 4

For details about Stephi Bachrach, see Arthur Schnitzler, Das Tagebuch 1917– 1919 (Vienna: Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1985), 399. Schnitzler’s relationship with Bachrach is discussed in Ulrich Weinzierl, Arthur Schnitzler (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1996). 5

Arthur Schnitzler, Das Tagebuch 1920–1922 (Vienna: Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1993), 214. 6

Cited in Beharriell, Modern Austrian Literature 10, nos. 3–4 (1977): 262. There may, however, have been a fictional antecedent in Schnitzler’s own writing: the figure of Fräulein Else Ehrenberg in the novel Der Weg ins Freie (1908) shows certain similarities with the later Fräulein Else. 7

Schnitzler, Tagebuch 1920–1922, 214.

8

Steven Beller, “Arthur Schnitzler,” in The Blackwell Companion to Jewish Culture, ed. Glenda Abramson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 677. 9

Beharriell, “Schnitzler’s Fräulein Else,” 250.

10

See, however: Achim Aurnhammer, “Selig, wer in Träumen stirbt: Das literarische Leben und Sterben von Fräulein Else,” Euphorion 77 (1983): 504. Aurnhammer also comments on critics’ failure to examine Else’s Jewish identity. 11

Lange-Kirchheim, “Adoleszenz, Hysterie und Autorschaft,” 279–81. LangeKirchheim strikes out into new territory with her view of Else as a victim of paternal sexual abuse (271–72). For more general material on Schnitzler’s relationship with Judaism see Martin Swales, Arthur Schnitzler: A Critical Study (Oxford: Oxford U P, 1971); Bruce Thompson, Schnitzler’s Vienna: Image of a Society (London & New York: Routledge, 1990).

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12

See, for example: B. Lersch Schumacher, “‘I am not maternal’ — Psychopoetics of Hysteria in Schnitzler’s ‘Fraulein Else,’” Text+ Kritik 138–39 (1998), 76–88. Astrid Lange-Kirchheim, “Weiblichkeit und Tod: Arthur Schnitzlers Fräulein Else,” Deutschunterricht 54, no. 1 (2002): 36–47; Brigitte Prutti, “Weibliche Subjektivität und das Versagen des sanften Patriarchen in Schnitzlers ‘Fräulein Else,’” Orbis Litterarum 59, no. 3 (2004): 159–87; Martina Elisabeth Caspari, “Durchkreuzungen des zeitgenössischen Hysterie-Diskurses: Fräulein Else von Arthur Schnitzler und Freuds Dora — nicht nur zwischen den Zeilen gelesen,” Germanic Notes and Reviews 37, no. 1 (2006): 5–28. 13

See Schmidt-Dengler, “Inflation der Werte und Gefühle,” 53–64.

14

In his diary for 13 December 1917 (Tagebuch 1917–19, 97), Schnitzler concluded that, thanks to the endless yapping of the antisemitic rabble, he was without doubt the most abused writer in the German language since the invention of the printer’s art (“Doch daß ich — schon durch das ewige Gekläff des Antisemitengesindels — seit der Erfindung der Buchdruckerkunst, der am meisten beschimpfte Dichter deutscher Sprache bin, halt ich für zweifellos”).

15

See Gerd K. Schneider, Die Rezeption von Arthur Schnitzlers Reigen 1897–1994 (Riverside, CA: Ariadne Press, 1995), 188–93. See also Ernst Gombrich’s magisterial dismissal of the relevance of the “Jewish Question” to the study of Austrian culture circa 1900: Ernst Gombrich, The Visual Arts in Vienna Circa 1900 and Reflections on the Jewish Catastrophe, Occasions 1 (London: Austrian Cultural Institute, 1997). 16

All references are to Arthur Schnitzler, Fräulein Else und andere Erzählungen (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1988). Given the character’s Slovakian origins, Lange-Kirchheim’s observation that the name Dorsday is that of a noble English family seems far-fetched (Lange-Kirchheim, “Adoleszenz, Hysterie und Autorschaft,” 275). 17 Arthur Schnitzler, Briefe 1913–1931, ed. Peter Michael Braunwarth et al (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1984), 610. See Prutti, “Weibliche Subjektivität,” 184. 18

Egon Schwarz, “1921: The Staging of Arthur Schnitzler’s Play Reigen in Vienna Creates a Public Uproar that Draws Involvement by the Press, the Police, the Viennese City Administration, and the Austrian Parliament,” in The Yale Companion to Jewish Writing and Thought in German Culture 1096–1996, ed. Sander L. Gilman and Jack Zipes (New Haven: Yale UP, 1997), 412. 19

Arthur Schnitzler, Selected Short Fiction, trans. J. M. Q. Davies (London: Angel 1999), 149. This formulation is strikingly similar to one in Leutnant Gustl: “. . . die Mannheimer selber sollen auch Juden sein [. . .] . . . denen merkt man’s aber gar nicht an — besonders die Frau . . . so blond, bildhübsch die Figur . . .” (. . . the Mannheimers themselves are supposed to be Jews too [. . .] but in their case one would never notice — especially with the wife . . . so fair, and a stunning figure too . . .). Quoted from Schnitzler, Selected Short Fiction, 61. 20

Schnitzler, Selected Short Fiction, 149.

21

See Marc A. Weiner, “1903: Gustav Mahler Launches a New Production of Tristan und Isolde, Otto Weininger Commits Suicide Shortly after His Geschlecht und Charakter is Published, and Max Nordau Advocates the Development of a

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‘Muscular Jewry,’” in The Yale Companion to Jewish Writing and Thought in German Culture 1096–1996, 259. 22

Schnitzler, Selected Short Fiction, 150.

23

Hakoah-Wien was the first foreign football club to defeat an English team in England, beating West Ham United 5–0 in London in 1923. 24

Schnitzler, Selected Short Fiction, 144.

25

Prutti, “Weibliche Subjektivität,” 4.

26

Arthur Schnitzler, Jugend in Wien (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1968), 154.

27

That Schnitzler himself was not free from antisemitic feelings is revealed, for example, in his dislike of the Jewish “literati” in Vienna whom he lampoons both in Der Weg ins Freie and in the novella “Der tote Gabriel,” where he caricatures Peter Altenberg, Stefan Großmann, and Alfred Polgar. 28

Note how it is assumed that Else’s brother will go to live and work in Holland. Economic emigration is clearly taken for granted. 29

See Brian Tucker, “‘In augenblicklicher Verlegenheit’: Else on the Stage,” Modern Austrian Literature 38, nos. 1–2 (2005): 51–60. 30

Schnitzler, Selected Short Fiction, 141.

31

Beharriell, “Schnitzler’s Fräulein Else,” 256.

32

See Wolfgang Fleischer, Das verleugnete Leben: Die Biographie des Heimito von Doderer (Vienna: Kremayr & Scheriau, 1996). 33

Schnitzler, Selected Short Fiction, 168.

34

Otto Weininger, Geschlecht und Charakter (Vienna: Braumüller, 1903), 452.

35

Schnitzler, Selected Short Fiction, 163.

36

Schnitzler, Selected Short Fiction, 168.

37

Lange-Kirchheim, “Adoleszenz, Hysterie und Autorschaft,” 279.

38

Schnitzler, Selected Short Fiction, 171.

39

This echo of Strauss appears first on p. 47, then pp. 60/61/67/74 passim. This is not initially one of Else’s own formulations. 40

For the significance of Richard Strauss’s Salome in early twentieth century Austro-German and European culture see Alex Ross, The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century (London: Fourth Estate, 2008), esp. 3–11. There is a likelihood that both Ludwig Wittgenstein and Adolf Hitler were in the same audience when the opera received its Austrian premiere in Graz in May 1906. Schnitzler’s diaries record that after attending a performance of Salome in Dresden on 17 February 1906 (the first performance took place there in January 1906) he saw it again at the Deutsches Volkstheater in Vienna on 18 June 1907 and attended further performances on 30 January 1914, 18 September 1917, and 3 October 1922, by which time he was writing Fräulein Else. On 21 May 1922 he noted that his son Heinrich was playing Salome, and on 29 May 1922 he noted again that his son played Salome for him.

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41

Schnitzler, Selected Short Fiction, 177.

42

Aurnhammer, “Selig, wer in Träumen stirbt,” 502.

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43

Aurnhammer, “Selig, wer in Träumen stirbt,” 502.

44

Schnitzler, Selected Short Fiction, 153.

45

Schnitzler, Selected Short Fiction, 182. See Lange-Kirchheim, “Adoleszenz, Hysterie und Autorschaft,” 294–95; Cathy Raymond, “Masked in Music: Hidden Meaning in Schnitzler’s Fräulein Else,” Monatshefte 85, no. 2 (1993): 170–88; J.  D. Green, “Music in Literature — Arthur Schnitzler’s ‘Fräulein Else,’” New York Literary Forum 10, no.1 (1983): 141–52; G.  K. Schneider, “Ton- und Schriftsprache in Arthur Schnitzlers Fräulein Else und Schumanns Carnaval,” Modern Austrian Literature 2, no. 3 (1969): 17–20. 46

Aurnhammer, “Selig, wer in Träumen stirbt,” 500.

47

See Wolfgang Nehring, “Schnitzler, Freud’s Alter Ego?” Modern Austrian Literature 10, nos. 3–4 (1977): 181. 48 Petra Rau, “Arthur Schnitzler,” in The Literary Encyclopedia (2003), accessed 30 December 2011, http://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=5412. 49

Lange-Kirchheim, “Adoleszenz, Hysterie und Autorschaft,” 286.

50

Interestingly, there are no references to Jewishness whatsoever in Reigen, which is in some ways a companion piece to Fräulein Else. 51

Egon Schwarz, “1921: The Staging of Arthur Schnitzler’s Play Reigen,” 413.

52

Hans Kohn, “AEIOU: Some Reflections on the Meaning and Mission of Austria,” Journal of Modern History 11, no. 4 (1939): 513–27, here 513. 53

The term was already current in the pre-war monarchy. See, for example, the series Quellen und Forschungen zur Geschichte der Juden in Deutschösterreich, published in Vienna. 54

Schmidt-Dengler, “Inflation der Werte und Gefühle,” 55–64.

55

Werfel’s assimilation of Schnitzler’s novella may be reflected in the choice of the name Fiala, as this name also crops up in Fräulein Else. 56

Erhard Bahr, “Geld und Liebe in Werfels Der Tod des Kleinbürgers,” Modern Austrian Literature 24. 2 (1991): 33–49, here 33. 57

Uwe Johnson, “Wo ist der Erzähler auffindbar?”: Gutachten für Verlage 1956– 1958, ed. Bernd Neumann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1992), 42. 58 Franz Werfel, Der Tod des Kleinbürgers und andere Erzählungen (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1981), 242. 59 Raymond S. Furness, Wagner and Literature (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1982), 50, 54–55. 60

Julius Braunthal, In Search of the Millennium (London: Victor Gollancz, 1945), 21–22. 61

Freud and the Child Woman: The Memoirs of Fritz Wittels, ed. Edward Timms (New Haven: Yale UP, 1995), 9.

62

Franz Werfel, Der Tod des Kleinbürgers: Erzählung (Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam Jun., 1967), 66. All subsequent page references refer to this edition. 63

Franz Werfel, The Death of a Poor Man, trans. Clifton P. Fadiman and William A. Drake (London: E. Benn, 1927).

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64

See Martin Dolch, “Vom ‘Kleinbürger’ zum ‘Über Menschen’: Zur Interpretation von Franz Werfels Der Tod des Kleinbürgers,” Literatur in Wissenschaft und Unterricht, 5 (1972): 127–43. 65

Hans Wagener, Understanding Franz Werfel (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1993), 85. 66

See Wagener, Understanding Franz Werfel, 84–90.

67

Wagener, Understanding Franz Werfel, 90.

68

Franz Werfel, Twilight of a World, trans. Helen Lowe-Porter (New York: Viking Press, 1937), 484. 69

Both Werfel and Horváth were tempted to seek some form of accommodation with fascism. Werfel cozied up to the authorities of the Corporate State; Horváth sought membership of the official Nazi literary organization the “Reichsschrifttumskammer.” 70

The Czech composer Joseph Fiala (1748–1816) worked in Munich, where he met and impressed Mozart. 71

This is the translation by Fadiman and Drake, trans., The Death of a Poor Man, 29.

72

Fadiman and Drake, trans., The Death of a Poor Man, 27–28.

73

Translation adapted from Fadiman and Drake, trans., The Death of a Poor Man, 27. 74

Translation by H. Lowe-Porter, Twilight of a World, 446.

75

Fadiman and Drake, trans., The Death of a Poor Man, 34. See also Hartmut Binder Kafka: Kommentar zu sämtlichen Erzählungen (Munich: Winkler, 1975), 188. 76

There are clear textual echoes of further Kafka stories in Der Tod des Kleinbürgers, in particular “Das Urteil” and “Die Verwandlung.”

77

In the afterword to Der Tod des Kleinbürgers, Willy Haas points out that the novella bears the strong imprint of Werfel’s reading of Edgar Allan Poe’s story “The Facts in the Case of M. Waldemar” in that a dying man hangs on to life through will-power alone (68–70). The impact of Murnau’s seminal film Der letzte Mann (The Last Laugh, 1924) may also be discerned here. Murnau traces the life of a “little man,” in this case a hotel porter, after the loss of the uniform that defines his identity. See also Sarah Fraiman-Morris, “Franz Werfels ‘Der Tod des Kleinbürgers’ als Variation von Tolstojs ‘Der Tod des Iwan Iljitsch,’” Sprachkunst: Beiträge zur Literaturwissenschaft 35, no. 2 (2004): 225–38. 78

The parallel with Ernst Weiss’s Franta Zlin is obvious.

79

Alma Mahler-Werfel, Mein Leben (Frankfurt an Main: Fischer, 1960), 84.

80

Haas, “Nachwort,” in Der Tod des Kleinbürgers, 67.

81

Heimito von Doderer, Die Wasserfälle von Slunj (Munich: Biederstein, 1963), 28. 82

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Doderer, Die Wasserfälle von Slunj, 30.

83

Doderer, Die Wasserfälle von Slunj, 68.

84

Joseph Roth, Die Kapuzinergruft (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1999), 141.

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85

In 1925, the same year as Werfel’s novella was written, the Viennese Jewish author Hugo Bettauer, author of the novel Stadt ohne Juden (City without Jews, 1922), was assassinated by a nationalist extremist. 86

Fadiman and Drake, trans., Death of a Poor Man, 52.

87

Ironically, in American Yiddish usage “He is a landsman” often means “He is our kind of person” or “He is Jewish.” See Leo Rosten, The Joys of Yiddish (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), 209. 88

Heinrich Heine, “Die Ilse,” in Werke und Briefe in zehn Bänden, vol. 1, Buch der Lieder (Berlin, Weimar: Aufbau, 1972), 175–77. 89

See also Sarah Fraiman-Morris, “Ein Heine-Subtext in Franz Werfels ‘Der Tod des Kleinbürgers,’” Sprachkunst: Beiträge zur Literaturwissenschaft 38, no. 1 (2007): 15–26. 90

Fadiman and Drake, trans., Death of a Poor Man, 56.

91

Fadiman and Drake, trans., Death of a Poor Man, 61–62.

92

This translation is adapted from Fadiman and Drake, trans., Death of a Poor Man, 186. Readers of this translation will gain a false impression of the novella’s ending thanks to a piece of inadequate proofreading resulting in “ein leerer Kalendarblock” being rendered as “a black calendar pad.” 93

Joseph Roth, Briefe 1911–1939, ed. Hermann Kesten (Cologne, Berlin: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1970), 98. 94

The English translations provided here are mostly taken from Joseph Roth, Zipper and His Father, trans. John Hoare (London: Granta, 2005). 95

Wendelin Schmidt-Dengler, “Borderlines: Von der Schwierigkeit, über die österreichische Identität einiger Autoren zu reden,” Literaturgeschichte: Österreich: Prolegomina und Fallstudien, ed. Wendelin Schmidt-Dengler, Johann Sonnleitner, and Klaus Zeyringer (Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag, 1995), 80. 96

Joseph Roth, Juden auf Wanderschaft (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2000), 47. 97

Roth, Juden auf Wanderschaft, 54.

98

Sisley Huddleston, Europe in Zigzags (London, Bombay, Sydney: George G. Harrap, 1929), 129. 99

Soma Morgenstern, Der Sohn des verlorenen Sohnes, ed. Ingolf Schulte (Lüneburg: zu Klampen, 1996), 79. 100

See Joseph Roth, Berliner Saisonbericht: Unbekannte Reportagen und journalistische Arbeiten 1920–1939, ed. Klaus Westermann (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1984). 101 See Heinz Lunzer, ed., Joseph Roth im Exil in Paris 1933 bis 1939 (Vienna: Dokumentationsstelle für neuere österreichische Literatur, 2008). 102

Zipper und sein Vater holds a special appeal for the South African writer Nadine Gordimer, who describes it as Roth’s “most tender book.” Nadine Gordimer, “The Empire of Joseph Roth,” New York Review of Books, 5 December 1991. 103

See Helmuth Nürnberger, ed., Joseph Roth in Selbstzeugnissen (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1981), 74–75.

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104

This novel is one of only two novels that Roth named after a character in it; the other is Tarabas: Ein Gast auf dieser Erde (Tarabas: A Guest on this Earth, 1934), Roth’s first exile novel. Page references relate to Joseph Roth, Zipper und sein Vater (Munich: dtv, 1980). 105

Roth, Zipper and His Father, 129. See Thomas Mueller, “Joseph Roths Zipper und sein Vater: Roman der Väter und Söhne,” in Hinter dem schwarzen Vorhang: Die Katastrophe und die epische Tradition, ed. Friedrich Gaede, Patrick O’Neill, and Ulrich Scheck (Tübingen: Francke, 1994), 147–55. 106

Roth, Zipper and His Father, 127.

107

For an essentially negative assessment of Roth’s self-characterization see David Bronsen, Joseph Roth: Eine Biographie (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1974), 318. 108

Roth, Zipper and his Father, 132.

109

The self-identification of Roth with the older generation would become ever more marked, culminating in his activities in France on behalf of the movement to restore Habsburg dynasty. See Soma Morgenstern, Joseph Roths Flucht ohne Ende: Erinnerungen (Lüneburg: zu Klampen, 1994). 110

Roth, Zipper and His Father, 5.

111

Roth published “Seine k. und k. apostolische Majestät” in the Frankfurter Zeitung on 6 March 1928. 112

Roth, Zipper and His Father, 19. Like Fiala, Zipper has also moved to Vienna from a provincial town in Bohemia or Moravia. 113

Roth, Zipper and His Father, 6.

114

Roth, Zipper and His Father, 33.

115

Roth, Zipper and His Father, 19.

116

Roth, Zipper and His Father, 39.

117

The name Zipper would have been familiar to concert-going Austrians because of the composer and conductor Herbert Zipper (1904–97), who set to music the words of Jura Soyfer’s famous Dachaulied. 118

Roth, Zipper and His Father, 43.

119

Roth, Zipper and His Father, 58.

120

Roth, Zipper and His Father, 53.

121

Roth, Juden auf Wanderschaft, 54.

122

Bergner married one of Roth’s comrades from the war who served as a model not only for Arnold Zipper, but also for Franz Tunda in Flucht ohne Ende and Leutnant von Trotta in Radetzkymarsch. See Bronsen, Joseph Roth, 318. See further S. S. Prawer, Between Two Worlds: The Jewish Presence in German and Austrian Film, 1910–1933 (New York & Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2007), 186–88. Prawer quotes Fritz Kortner’s description of Bergner, “the little Jewish girl from Vienna” whose “boyish body became merry and playful, turned somersaults and revealed, in a sudden flash, how perfectly she knew a man’s character and used such knowledge to fool and sportively enslave him” (186). 123

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124

Heinz Lunzer and Victoria Lunzer-Talos, Joseph Roth: Leben und Werk in Bildern (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1994), 158. 125

Cernauti in modern Romania, formerly in the southeastern corner of the Habsburg Empire. 126

The translation is adapted from Roth, Zipper and His Father, 84.

127

Roth, Zipper and His Father, 85.

128

Heinz Lunzer and Victoria Lunzer-Talos, Joseph Roth: Leben und Werk in Bildern, 85. 129

Adapted from Roth, Zipper and His Father, 122.

130

Joseph Roth, Werke, vol. 4, Romane und Erzählungen 1916–1929, ed. Fritz Hackert (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1989), 1083.

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131

Quoted in Bronsen, Joseph Roth, 315.

132

Bronsen, Joseph Roth, 317 .

133

Roth, Zipper and His Father, 133.

134

Roth, Zipper and His Father, 130.

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3: “Hakenkreuz” and “Davidstern”: Bruno Brehm, Soma Morgenstern Between Two Empires — Bruno Brehm: Die Throne stürzen (1931–33/1951)

T

HE YEAR 1932 SAW THE PUBLICATION of two novels that today enjoy iconic status across modern Austrian and German literature: Joseph Roth’s elegaic Radeztkymarsch, and the second installment of Robert Musil’s majestic fragment Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (The Man without Qualities). Sadly, neither man rated the other’s work very highly. Musil dismissed Radetzkymarsch as a typical “Kasernenroman” (novel of military life); Roth was exasperated by Musil’s repeated use of the word “Kakanien” to designate the Habsburg Empire whose death throes had inspired them both.1 Insofar as each instrumentalizes aspects of recent history, rather than dealing directly with the immediate present, the novels exemplify a widespread trend in the German-language novel of the day.2 It is less well remembered that 1932 also marked the publication of Das war das Ende (That was the End), the second of three ambitious historical novels charting the decline of the Habsburgs by the Slovenianborn Nazi Bruno Brehm, a writer who had found fame through the very “Kasernenromane” that Musil disparaged. Not quite forgotten today,3 Brehm’s trilogy opens with Apis und Este: Ein Franz Ferdinand-Roman (Apis and Este: A Franz Ferdinand Novel, 1931), a work beginning with the assassination of the King and Queen of Serbia in 1903 and climaxing in the murder of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand at Sarajevo in June 1914.4 The second novel Das war das Ende examines the political machinations starting in Brest-Litowsk in December 1917 and ending with the signing of the Treaty of Versailles on 28 June 1919, the fifth anniversary of the assassination of Franz Ferdinand. The final novel, Weder Kaiser noch König: Der Untergang der habsburgischen Monarchie (Neither Emperor nor King: The End of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1933), follows Emperor Karl’s two abortive attempts to regain his throne in 1921, and concludes with his death in exile in Madeira on 1 April 1922. As Hubert Orlowski reminds us, these three novels, published by the Piper Verlag in Munich, enjoyed exceptionally high status in the Third Reich, where they were acclaimed by the party high-command and the literary-critical establishment alike.5 No

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less a Nazi luminary than the critic Josef Nadler subsequently turned the title of Brehm’s third novel into a literary slogan when he proclaimed: “Weder Kaiser noch König — sondern der Führer!” (Neither Emperor nor King, but the Führer!).6 By 1944, as the end loomed for the Nazis, Brehm’s stock was so high that his name appeared on the so-called “Gottbegnadeten-Liste” (List of the divinely blessed) compiled by Hitler and the “Reichsministerium für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda.” The list singled out the regime’s most important artists, who were to be spared all war duties, no matter how dire the situation grew. Like Musil and Roth, Brehm had served with the Austrian armed forces during the First World War, and like Heimito von Doderer he was taken as a prisoner of war by the Russians. Unlike these writers, however, Brehm had opted for a military career, turning to literature only when his job disappeared with the collapse of the monarchy. Like Doderer, Brehm was an antisemitic German Nationalist, but it was at the instigation of a Viennese Jew, Robert Freund, that he joined the Piper Verlag, with which he maintained a life-long affiliation, and to whose prestige he contributed considerably as one of the most popular and feted writers in the Third Reich. By 1939 the trilogy alone had sold 320,000 copies.7 Brehm was fully aware of his importance to Piper, and from 1934 onwards repeatedly threatened to leave the “halbjüdischen Verlag” (half-Jewish publisher) unless it met his financial demands.8 Further evidence of Brehm’s support for a National Socialist aesthetic is provided by his editorship of the “völkisch” literary journal Der getreue Eckart from 1938–42, and by the leading articles he wrote for the Völkischer Beobachter, the Nazi party’s daily newspaper. The crowning accolade for Brehm and his “Imperial Trilogy” came in 1939 when he won the “Nationalpreis für Buch und Film” (National Book and Film Prize), awarded to the author of the “best” book or film produced in Germany in the previous year. Worth 100,000 RM, the prize had been introduced in 1937 as a Nazi counter to the Nobel Prize for literature.9 What makes Brehm’s award noteworthy is that the trilogy had already been on the market for six years when it won the prize. The reason for the apparently anachronistic award must lie in the recent Anschluss and the desire to integrate publicly into the body of “German” literature an ideologically acceptable “volksdeutsch” writer who had long devoted himself to specifically “Austrian” themes. Given Brehm’s longestablished links with Piper, he was in no sense, however, a newcomer to the German literary scene. Yet more recognition of Brehm’s work came when the author was publicly praised by the Reichspropaganda minister himself, Josef Goebbels. Unsurprisingly, the grounds for the award adduced by Goebbels were entirely political and fully in line with Hitler’s hostility towards his Austrian homeland. In Mein Kampf (My Struggle, 1926), Hitler writes

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of his “innere Abneigung” (inner aversion) to the Habsburg state:10 For the Führer “die Sicherung des Deutschtums” (the securing of German identity) was predicated on “die Vernichtung Österreichs” (the destruction of Austria).11 Goebbels was therefore on safe ground when declaring: “Die nationalpolitische Bedeutung dieses Werks beruht vor allem in seiner scharfen Kritik an der Donaumonarchie” (the national and political significance of this work rests primarily in its pointed criticism of the Danube Monarchy).12 In reality, Brehm’s work is often appreciative of the Habsburg state in its dying days, especially Apis und Este. Equally, however, Brehm stresses that the monarchy’s time had passed because its existence compromised the notion of German unity promised by National Socialism.13 Despite dealing with broadly similar subject matter to the work of Roth and Musil, Brehm’s trilogy, which in various guises remained in print for over sixty years, cannot stand comparison with either in terms of imaginative scope or literary merit. Nevertheless, Brehm is a slick and often entertaining storyteller. The novels are composed as linear narratives, yet they show the impact of cinema, especially in Das war das Ende with its kaleidoscopic shifts of focus from political debate to vivid depictions of trench warfare. Generally episodic in construction, the novel reveals the author’s expertise in creating memorable cameos, ranging from the murder of the Romanovs in Ekaterinburg to the scuttling of the German fleet at Scapa Flow. It is a sign of their residual appeal to a certain readership — and of the postwar tolerance afforded ex-Nazi writers in both Austria and West Germany — that after some revision and rewriting the three novels were republished in 1951 in an omnibus volume entitled Die Throne stürzen (The Thrones Tumble).14 The titles of the previously free-standing novels were retained, and despite the alterations their contents remained recognizably the same as before. The brazen opening sentence of Brehm’s short and egocentric afterword to the 1951 edition reveals an author of historical novels devoid of insight into the horrors of recent history: “Zwanzig Jahre! Sie sind vergangen wie eine Nachtwache, auf der uns im Halbschlaf Fürchterliches geträumt hat” (TS 843) (Twenty years! They have passed like a night watch on which, half-asleep, we dreamed terrible things).15 Strangely, neither the callousness of Brehm’s words nor his antisemitism cost him his long-standing friendship with the Prague-born Jewish author Leo Perutz. According to Klaus Piper it was Perutz who had first introduced Brehm to the Piper Verlag in the 1920s, thanks to his friendship with Robert Freund,16 and it was Perutz who helped negotiate Brehm’s release from American captivity after the war.17 As to the revisions themselves, Brehm is unabashed about depoliticizing the texts: “ich habe parteinehmende und belehrende Stellen gestrichen” (TS 843;

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I have excised passages that are partisan and didactic). He has the grace to concede that since his novels’ first appearance “Größeres Leid” (TS 843; greater suffering) has overtaken the world, making the pain of earlier historical events seem less intense. There is, however, a jarring discrepancy between Goebbel’s encomium of 1939 and Brehm’s postwar view of his work’s import. For according to the author: “Ich wollte nach dem ersten Weltkrieg den großen Trauermarsch der Habsburgermonarchie schreiben, denn ich ahnte, daß mit ihr mehr dahingegangen war als nur dieses Kaiserreich” (TS 843; After the First World War I wished to write the great funeral march for the Habsburg Monarchy, for I suspected that with it had passed more than just this empire). If we took this passage at face value, there would be a remarkable congruence between Brehm’s intentions in his trilogy and those of Joseph Roth in Radetzkymarsch. As we shall see, even after revisions that are more radical than those Brehm admits to in the afterword, much remains in the novels to remind readers with even a shred of historical awareness of their racially-biased provenance. A typical example occurs in the original description of some “übereleganten rumänischen Offizieren” (over-elegant Romanian officers) in Das war das Ende,18 who in the eyes of the narrator appear to be: “eine seltsame Kreuzung aus Russen und Franzosen [. . .] bei der sie von beiden Völkern gerade die auffallendsten Nachteile geerbt zu haben schienen, die ihnen allen etwas Zigeunerisches gaben (DE 82; a strange Franco-Russian hybrid [. . .] in which they appear to have inherited the most strikingly negative features of both peoples, which made them all rather gypsy-like.) All in all, the Romanians are “ein wenig unausgeglichen” (DE 82; a little unbalanced). The Nazi animus against homosexuals is also paraded here — Brehm cannot resist referring to a particularly effeminate officer who stands out because of his “gefärbten Lippen” (DE 82; painted lips) and liberal use of perfume. In the novel’s revised form only the reference to the “ubereleganten rumänischen Offizieren” (TS 394) remains. Yet even before the novels had been reworked to make them more compliant with postwar sensitivities, their contents had been deemed acceptable (or at least less compromised than might have been expected from an author with such immaculate Nazi credentials) by the Austrian authorities — an assessment that runs contrary to the evidence of the texts themselves. At the postwar “Zentralkommission zur Bekämpfung der NS-Literatur” (Central Commission for countering Nazi literature), which functioned in 1948–49 to examine authors and works suspected of Nazi influence, and which decided whether or not to proscribe them, Brehm’s still unrevised trilogy escaped with a clean bill of health. According to the assessor, a Dr. Obermayer, the novels displayed:

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Durchaus großdeutsche Gedanken, zumeist alles vom “Auslandsdeutschen” hergesehen. Daher auch subjektive Schau der Geschichte, z.B. die Weltkriegstrilogie. Kühn der 2. Band (Weder Kaiser noch König) in dem eine große Anzahl noch heute lebender Menschen agieren, wie z.B. Kaiserin Zita, Dr Renner, Seitz usw. Meines Erachtens ist die Trilogie nicht N.S. gefärbt.19 [Thoroughly “großdeutsch” thoughts, mostly all from the perspective of an “Auslandsdeutscher.” Therefore also subjective view of history, e.g. the World War trilogy. Volume 2 (Weder Kaiser noch König) in which a large number of people living today appear, e.g. Empress Zita, Dr. Renner, Seitz etc., is bold. In my view the trilogy is not Nazi-tinted.]

Looking at Brehm’s work in any detail, however, reveals Dr. Obermayer’s clean bill of health to be merely another instance of the immediate postwar Austrian failure to confront the reality of its Nazi heritage. Contrast this with the American Time magazine report on 17 December 1945: Last week, Berlin’s new anti-Nazi municipal government decreed a “literary cleanup.” It proposed to ban from the city’s libraries and bookshelves three categories of Nazi propaganda: 1) the entire output of 63 publishers; 2) all the works of certain authors (Historical Novelist Bruno Brehm, Historian Werner Beumelburg); 3) specific books (like Hans Fallada’s Iron Gustav, Hans Grimm’s People Without Room).

For Brehm to be singled out alone amongst all other Nazi writers for a blanket ban on his oeuvre is the clearest possible indicator of the extent to which, pace the “Zentralkommission zur Bekämpfung der NS-Literatur,” Brehm had come to be identified as a quintessentially Nazi author. In 1992, when the expurgated trilogy was rolled out for what has transpired to be the last time, the aim was to celebrate Brehm’s centenary and the republication of the trilogy sixty years after its first appearance with Piper. In this final version, however, Brehm’s self-exculpatory afterword is replaced by an egregious essay from the publisher Klaus Piper himself, extolling the trilogy as one of the most celebrated and widely-read works ever produced by the firm.20 The changes to the novels to facilitate their postwar republication are excused as merely the author’s desire to “moderately compress” his work.21 Of its prominent role in the literary historiography of the Third Reich there is no mention. Writing in the aftermath of the Waldheim scandal (not to mention the collapse of the German Democratic Republic), Piper’s words indicate that Austrians were not the only ones who had problems coming to terms with the past.

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The reappearance of the trilogy with its glibly insouciant postscript triggered a furious response from Karl-Markus Gauss in Die Zeit where he railed against the “heiliger Unsinn” (holy nonsense) of what he terms “eine beschämende Wiederentdeckung” (a shameful rediscovery).22 For some it would have been no rediscovery at all. As Christina Zoppel remarks, the enduring popularity of Brehm’s novels amongst the broader Austrian reading public after 1945 was typical of this public’s propensity in the face of any aesthetic challenge to always settle for kitsch.23 By kitsh Zoppel means the literature produced by a string of writers with strong National Socialist affiliations such as Richard Billinger, Karl Heinz Waggerl, Gertrud Fussenegger, as well as Brehm himself — writers who had successfully and easily rehabilitated themselves during the first decade of the Second Republic. Although not awarded the “Grosser Staatspreis” like other erstwhile Nazis such as Franz Nabl, Felix Braun and Franz Karl Ginzkey, Bruno Brehm nevertheless won the Peter Rosegger prize in 1961. Less surprisingly perhaps for a writer who had grown up in military garrisons around Bohemia where his father was also an army officer, Brehm won the “Sudetendeutscher Kulturpreis” in 1963. It is beyond the scope of my study to undertake a structural and linguistic analysis of the entire trilogy, especially in the light of its dual existence in pre-war and postwar guises. However, comparing examples from the central volume Das war das Ende in both its manifestations makes it possible to test the extent to which Brehm’s postwar claim to have written an elegaic funeral march for the passing of the Habsburg Empire is anything more than pious window-dressing. Of the three novels, the quasi-documentary Das war das Ende is in fact the least concerned with specifically Austrian issues, for here Brehm examines the end of the imperial system in Europe as a whole, charting the collapse of the Russian, German and Austrian imperia. The novel is, however, a very clear example of the extent to which “the annexation of Austrian writers to the Third Reich” had taken place not just before the Anschluss, but before Hitler had even come to power.24 The most obvious difference between the two versions of Das war das Ende lies in the very shape of the novel, especially the opening and closing chapters. The 1932 version opens with the meeting at Brest-Litovsk on 20 December 1917 between representatives of the victorious Bolsheviks and emissaries of the Austrian and German Empires — which would eventually lead to the end of hostilities with Russia. In a novel obsessed with the threat of Communism, it is clear that for Brehm this meeting did indeed represent the beginning of the end. Brehm’s original novel lays the main blame for what he regards as an unholy accommodation with Jewish Bolshevism at the door of the Habsburg state. In a conversation with the Austrian foreign minister Count Ottokar Czernin, Richard von Kühlmann (Czernin’s German counterpart) expresses outrage at any

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settlement that would allow the Bolsheviks to maintain Russian control of areas with a large ethnic German population: “‘Aber wir können doch nicht den deutschen Adel und die alten deutschen Städte dieser Länder den Bolschewiken zum Abschlachten ausliefern!’ rief Kühlmann” (DE 24; “But we cannot hand over the German aristocracy and the old German towns in these countries for slaughter by the Bolsheviks!” exclaimed Kühlmann). To which an agitated Czernin replies: “‘An dieser Frage darf der Frieden nicht scheitern, [. . .] ich darf ohne Frieden nicht nach Wien zurückkehren, die Lage Österreichs verträgt es einfach nicht’” (DE 24–25; “The peace talks mustn’t fail on account of this, [. . .] I cannot return to Vienna without peace, Austria’s position cannot withstand it”). In the rewritten novel, where the quite lively conversations of the original are often replaced by leaden reported speech, a condensed and rewritten version of this opening chapter has become the seventh chapter, and the conversation between Czernin and Kühlmann has been excised. In a novel ostensibly cleansed of its Nazi hue, Das war das Ende now opens with the death of Franz Joseph in November 1916, an event presumably reckoned more befitting a novel claiming to be an affectionate account of the end of the Habsburg Empire. This was material previously located in Weder Kaiser noch König. As the author reminds us in a sentimental afterword, writing as if Emperor Karl had never existed: “Ich hatte noch den alten Kaiser gesehen, den letzten Monarchen, ich hatte das Portepee mit seinem Namenszug getragen” (TS 843; I had seen the old emperor, the last monarch, I had borne the sword with his name on it). Whereas the sequence of opening chapters centering on Franz Joseph’s death is new to the 1951 version, the novel’s former motto, quoting from Hölderlin’s stridently patriotic poem “Der Tod für’s Vaterland” (Death for the Fatherland, 1799) has, unsurprisingly, been removed: “Lebe droben, o Vaterland, / Und zähle nicht die Toten! Dir ist, / Liebes! nicht einer zuviel gefallen.” (Live on high, o fatherland, / And do not count the dead! For you / Beloved one! Not one too many has fallen.) In many respects, the original opening of Das war das Ende is a copybook example of National Socialist literature. Here we find a loathing of Communism, described as “eine geistige Krankheit” (DE 21; a mental illness), and a detestation of “die schmächtigen kleinen Juden” (DE 20; weedy little Jews) who are behind it all. Then there is an underlying contempt for the Habsburg state and its office bearers, an overweening German nationalism, a derogatory view of Slavs, and to cap it all, a disdain for Viennese psychoanalysis. In a sentence that parades many of the Nazis’ prejudices, the Jewish Bolshevik leader Adolph Abramovitch Joffe speaks “mit jener Ruhe in der Stimme, die einem in Wien psychoanalytisch behandelten und von allen Minderwertigkeitsgefühlen gereinigten Mann zukommt” (DE 18; with that quiet voice befitting a man psychoanalyzed in Vienna and cleansed of all feelings

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of inferiority). To the catalogue of Nazi literary characteristics paraded here could also be added a contemptuous view of women who stray away from their allotted roles in the nursery, kitchen and church. A comparison of this original opening chapter with the revised version in Die Throne stürzen is revealing, as is a comparison of Brehm’s accounts of the 20 December meeting with that of Leon Trotsky in his autobiography, written in his Turkish exile in 1929. This had appeared in a German translation in 1930, and could well have been a source consulted by Brehm.25 Trotsky writes: At Brest-Litovsk, the first Soviet delegation, headed by Joffe, was treated in a most ingratiating way by the Germans. Prince Leopold of Bavaria received them as his “guests.” All the delegation had dinner and supper together. General Hoffmann must have observed with considerable interest the woman delegate Vitzenko, who had assassinated General Sakharov. The Germans took their seats between our men, and tried to worm out of them whatever information they wanted. The first delegation included a worker, a peasant and a soldier. They were delegates by mere accident, and they were little prepared for that sort of trickery. The peasant, an old man, was even encouraged to drink more wine than was good for him.26

In both versions of Brehm’s chapter, the wording of the first paragraph is more or less the same. Both start identically with a reference to Vitzenko, whom Brehm always designates “Madame Bizenko,” and the setting is the communal dinner to which Trotsky also refers. However, whereas Trotsky simply states that Vitzenko had assassinated a high-ranking officer, Brehm draws attention to her being the sole female presence at the talks and denigrates her as “die Primadonna der gegenwärtigen Weltpolitik” (DE 9; the primadonna of contemporary world politics), a formulation repeated in the 1951 version. There Brehm refers to her “keineswegs schönes Gesicht” (TS 361; her by no means beautiful face), which is marginally less uncomplimentary than “das häßliche Gesicht” (DE 9; the ugly face) of the first version. Both versions refer to her grim demeanor, the result of twelve years of captivity in Siberia, noting that she only smiles when hearing the word revolution. In Die Throne stürzen, the Austrian delegate Merey (Kajetan Mérey von Kapos-Mére) remarks that when this smile appears, it is “ein Lächeln, das mir eiskalt macht” (TS 361; a smile that chills me to ice). In 1932, that same smile, which also chills him to the marrow, was produced by “ein slawisches Gorgonenhaupt” (DE 10; a Slavic Gorgon’s head). From these examples it is clear that misogyny remains common to both versions, but that the tenor is somewhat milder in the 1951 version, and the overtly racial comments have been removed. By 1951 Brehm and his publisher knew that the common linguistic currency of 1932 had become unprintable, and nowhere more

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than in depictions of Jews. This must have presented considerable difficulties when revising a novel whose first version abounds in negative racial stereotyping, encouraged by the high proportion of Jews amongst the leaders of the Bolshevik revolution. In fact, the 1951 novel is often painfully unable to camouflage what had been integral to its original anti-Bolshevik, antisemitic conception. The anti-Bolshevik animus remains — this being perfectly acceptable in the postwar climate — but in attempting to eliminate the novel’s antisemitic references Brehm merely resorts to euphemisms, many of which were already current in fascist days. On these occasions, the changes are as laughable as they are offensive. As often as not, negative references to Jews are simply removed. Already on the first page of the 1932 edition, Czernin’s gaze wanders over the assembled delegates — German, Austrian, Turkish, Bulgarian and Russian officers (the Germans of course first, and the Russians last) — and sitting between them “die blassen bebrillten Juden wie kleine Fenster in einer großen Mauer, durch die eine fremde Welt hineinblickt” (DE 9; the pale bespectacled Jews, like little windows in a great wall, through which an alien world peers in). Two decades later, the order of listing the officers remains the same, but between them now “saßen die Abgesandten der russischen Revolution. Und zwischen diesen bebrillten Intellektuellen war Madame Bizenko” (TS 361; sat the delegates of the Russian revolution. And between these bespectacled intellectuals was Madame Bizenko). Can there have been any readers in 1951 unaware of what Brehm meant by “bespectacled intellectuals”? In his succinct account of this first, exploratory meeting prior to the signing of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk on 3 March 1918, Trotsky notes how the original delegation accidentally included a worker, a peasant and a soldier. This Brehm embroiders upon in a particularly offensive way in the 1932 version of the novel: “Und wer ist das dort, links von Hohenlohe?” fragte Czernin, “dieser Struwwelpeter aus dem Urwald mit dem verfilzten Bart?” “Der gehört zur Statisterie,” erwiderte Merey, “den haben sie auf der Fahrt von Petersburg hierher irgendwo aufgegabelt, vom Feld weg mitgenommen — als Vertretrer des Ackergeruches und des Schweißes der Bauern. Sie können doch nicht nur lauter Juden schicken.” (DE 10–11) [“And who is that on Hohenlohe’s left?” asked Czernin, “that Struwwelpeter from the primeval forest with the matted beard?” “He’s got a walk-on part,” replied Merey, “they forked him up from the fields somewhere along the journey from Petersburg — to represent the smell of the soil and the sweat of the peasants. They can’t send nothing but Jews.”]

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The revised version of this egregious passage reveals much about what was acceptable in Cold War Western Europe in the early 1950s: Der Gesandte deutete mit einem Blick auf einen russischen Arbeiter, der beim Essen vorsichtig nach seinen Nachbarn schielte, um nichts falsch zu machen. “Der gehört zur Statisterie, ebenso wie der Muschik dort links von Hohenlohe. Die haben sie im letzten Augenblick irgendwo aufgegabelt und mitgenommen, damit die Abordnung nicht nur nach Kaffeehaus und Emigration aussieht” (TS 361). [The envoy’s gaze pointed to a Russian worker who as he ate squinted cautiously at his neighbors so as not to do anything wrong. “He’s got a walk-on part, just like the Muschik there on Hohenlohe’s left. At the last minute they forked them up from somewhere and brought them along so that the delegation wouldn’t just look like coffee-shop and emigration.”].

As with the reference to “bespectacled intellectuals,” it takes little effort to perceive what is meant by “coffee shop and emigration.” In literature aimed at the West German and Austrian markets, it was acceptable to make openly offensive comments about the Russian peasantry and workers; critical references to Jews were still tolerated provided they were in code (and crude code at that). However, even Brehm must have blanched at some parts of his original text, for gone entirely is a reference to the Russian worker using his fork as a toothpick (DE, 10). What remains is Brehm’s spitefully gleeful account of the drunken peasant Trotsky also refers to. Now at least, readers are spared the description of him stroking his stomach and belching loudly (DE 11). A comparison of the first chapter of the 1932 version of Das war das Ende with the 1951 revisions reveals much about Austrian Nazi writers and their accommodation with, and reintegration into, the postwar publishing world. In neither case do Brehm or his publisher emerge with credit. Political and commercial opportunism seem to have been key factors throughout. A comparison of the last chapters of the novel in its two versions is not possible, because the final chapter of the original version was beyond the cynical cosmetic treatment applied in the above examples. Writing to Reinhard Piper in August 1932, Brehm exclaims how in the novel’s last chapter he is going to deliver “einen ganz großen Schluss [. . .] daß man aufschreien muß. Da lasse ich dann alle Objektivität zum Teufel fahren — heraustreten will ich aus dem Verstand.27 (A really grand conclusion [. . .] to make you shout out aloud — I want to take leave of my senses.) To be fair to Brehm, he sticks to his word. Das war das Ende originally concludes with a bombastic, sentimental and truculent appeal to the German people from South Tyrol to the Baltic, Protestant and Catholic

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alike, and a lachrymose lament for the lost war, bemoaning the lot of “ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Leid” (one people, one Reich, one suffering) and expressing “eine einzige Sehnsucht, wieder auferstehen zu wollen aus der Nacht und der Schmach” (DE 502; a single longing to rise again from the night and the ignominy). It continues by looking forward to the “Reich, das kommen wird, ohne das wir nicht sein können und ohne das Europa verfallen muß” (DE 504; empire that will come, without which we cannot exist, and without which Europe must collapse). Far from being a lament for the Habsburgs, this finale is a demented love-song to National Socialism on the eve of its accession to power. Of course it could find no place in Die Throne stürzen, which now concludes with what had been the penultimate chapter of the original novel, the signing of the Treaty of Versailles. Yet even here we find that, despite rewriting, what remains is still “deutschnational” in its tenor. Astonishingly, it has gone virtually unremarked that a set of novels from 1931–33 — which in 1939 won the highest possible accolade from the Nazi state — could, with some cosmetic changes, remain in the catalogue of a leading German literary publisher until 1992. Standard accounts of the literary history of the postwar period by, for example, Wilfried Barner or Klaus Zeyringer make no mention of the work.28 This raises fundamental questions not just about the de-Nazification process, but also about the historiography of Austrian and West German literature and the role of Nazi writers post-1945.29 If nothing else, the postwar presence (and enduring popularity) of Bruno Brehm sheds light on the challenges facing younger writers, such as those in the “Gruppe 47” — who, while trying to renew German literature from within, still had to compete with compromised writers of the earlier generation. Above all, Brehm’s seamless transition into the post-1945 literary world casts into greater relief the plight of the many exiled writers who could never reestablish themselves in the world and culture from which they had been forcibly evicted.

The End of Assimilation — Soma Morgenstern: Der Sohn des verlorenen Sohnes (1935) While Bruno Brehm extolled Nazi Germany’s new dawn in Das war das Ende, a very different trilogy was emerging from the pen of another “Old Austrian” author, the Galician-born Soma Morgenstern. Begun in 1930, the year after the author regained the Austrian citizenship he lost in 1918,30 Der Sohn des verlorenen Sohnes (Son of the Prodigal Son) is the first of three novels collectively entitled Funken im Abgrund (Sparks in the Abyss) evoking the world of the “Ostjuden” in a style and form reminiscent of the realistic novel of the later nineteenth century.31

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Work on the novel was severely disrupted by the psychological trauma of Hitler’s accession to power and only completed during the three months Morgenstern spent in Paris in 1934. He had fled there after the civil war in Vienna in February 1934, fearing for his safety because of his pro-republican articles in the Frankfurter Zeitung,32 for which he reported from the Austrian capital.33 He returned to Vienna in May 1934, but only after Joseph Roth, a fellow Galician in Paris, had taken soundings amongst his Viennese contacts and could assure him it was safe to go back. Morgenstern’s ultimate escape from Austria came on the day of the Anschluss in March 1938. Going first to France and then Portugal, he ultimately found sanctuary in the USA, where he spent the rest of his life. Bruno Brehm went on to enjoy success over several more decades; in contrast, Soma Morgenstern died in exile without ever witnessing the publication of his trilogy in its original German. Making the case for a return to traditional Jewish values and religious practices (“Umkehr”), Funken im Abgrund was eventually completed in New York in 1943/44 and by 1950 was available in its entirety in English translation. Only in 1996, two decades after the author’s death, did a complete edition appear in German.34 Much praised by American critics,35 Morgenstern’s work, although eminently approachable, is only slowly being acknowledged in Austria and Germany.36 Indeed, he is still probably best known for his biographical memoirs of two eminent friends, Joseph Roths Flucht und Ende (Joseph Roth’s Flight and Demise, 1994) and the equally penetrating reminiscences about Alban Berg, Berg und seine Idole (Berg and his Idols, 1996). Both written chiefly in the 1960s, they are works of stature in the cultural memorialization of Austria between the wars, deserving to stand alongside those of Elias Canetti, another Jewish outsider settled temporarily in Vienna who similarly opted for German as his language of literary expression. Although Morgenstern never belonged to any Viennese clique, he and Canetti moved in the same circles, where one man in particular made a great impression on them both — the Hebrew scholar and poet Abraham Sonne. Morgenstern met Sonne on an almost daily basis; Canetti devoted a chapter of his memoirs Das Augenspiel (The Play of the Eyes, 1985) to Sonne without ever mentioning Morgenstern’s name (just as Morgenstern never mentions Canetti’s). Alongside Walter Benjamin, to whom he was close in Paris in 1940, Morgenstern felt Sonne was the only person with whom he could really talk about literature: “Einzig und allein diese zwei Männer verstanden von Literatur was zu verstehen ist” (These two men alone understood what could be understood about literature).37 The lives and careers of Morgenstern and Canetti took very different paths after 1945, Canetti’s cause being shrewdly marketed and promoted in Western Europe in a campaign that culminated in the award of the Nobel prize for literature in 1981.

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In Berg und seine Idole Morgenstern takes stock of what he has lost to Hitler: “Verlorene Briefe, verlorene Freunde, verlorene Welt. Bruder verloren in Dachau, Schwester verloren in Birkenau, Mutter verloren in Theresienstadt. Sechs Millionen verloren” (Lost letters, lost friends, lost world. Brother lost in Dachau, sister lost in Birkenau, mother lost in Theresienstadt. Six million lost).38 In these desolate sentences Morgenstern encapsulates a life spent on the brink of suicide.39 In 1949 he records that since 1945 scarcely a day had passed when he did not contemplate taking his own life.40 Ten years later, in plans for an unrealized novel about a Jewish writer who survived Dachau, Morgenstern noted in English how: “By disgust with anything German even with the German language he becomes unarticulate and plans to end his frustrated life by poison.”41 One can only speculate how Morgenstern kept writing in a foreign language that evoked such profound disquiet in him and in which he enjoyed neither esteem nor professional success. On the recommendation of Robert Musil and Stefan Zweig, Der Sohn des verlorenen Sohnes was eventually published in a well-received edition of four thousand by the Erich Reiss Verlag in Berlin in December 1935. Finding a publisher had been hard. Morgenstern initially hoped his book would appear with Roth’s publisher, Kiepenheuer, but the advent of the Nazis put paid to that. The S. Fischer Verlag considered it, as did exiled publishers in Amsterdam such as Querido, but in each case the novel was felt to be too Jewish.42 The Austrian Paul Zsolnay Verlag was a further option, but Alban Berg, to whom Morgenstern was very close, advised against this, fearing the novel would be rejected because of what the composer recognized as its satirical attack on Zsolnay’s star author Franz Werfel, an author whose relationship with his Jewish heritage was increasingly colored by his attraction to Christianity and the Corporate State.43 By the time the novel appeared, only Jews were permitted to buy Reiss’s books, and in Germany it could be reviewed only in the Jewish press.44 In Switzerland, however, Hermann Hesse praised it in a review for the Neue Zürcher Zeitung on 24 March 1936,45 while prior to publication Der Sohn des verlorenen Sohnes had already been privately acclaimed by eminent non-Jewish readers such as Alban Berg and Robert Musil. After reading the opening section in manuscript, Musil remarked in a lost letter to Morgenstern that should he die now, these hundred pages alone would ensure his place in world literature.46 Three weeks after the novel’s publication, Alban Berg died in Vienna on Christmas Eve 1935, the victim of blood poisoning, and with him died also the one man who, through his generous friendship, had permitted Morgenstern to entertain the possibility of a German-Jewish symbiosis, at least on a personal level. Morgenstern delivered a eulogy at Berg’s funeral.47 When published in 1935, Der Sohn des verlorenen Sohnes must have already seemed an almost impossibly optimistic novel. At its core is the

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rejection by a highly assimilated Viennese Jew (nineteen-year-old Alfred Mohylewski) of Western civilization and assimilation as well as a return to pre-industrial Galicia and his ancestral faith.48 Alfred is the son of the lost son, Josef (Jossele), who had not only gone West, but also followed another well-worn path by abandoning Judaism for Christianity. As a result of his apostasy, Jossele became a non-person in the eyes of his observant younger brother Wolf (Welwel), a well-off Galician landowner. Jossele lost his life in the opening salvoes of the First World War while Welwel, a wartime refugee in Vienna, lost his wife and only child in the Spanish Flu outbreak of 1918. The plot revolves around the long journey from Galicia to Vienna undertaken by Welwel and his trusty factor Jankel Christjampoler in 1928 to attend a congress of “Gesetzestreuen Juden” (11; observant Jews), an imaginary event Morgenstern based on the actual “Agudas Jisroel” conference held there the following year.49 Partly through coincidence, partly through the machinations of Jankel, contact is made with Alfred who, fired by the realization of his own Jewishness and the shallowness of his assimilation, returns with them to start a new life in the Galician countryside. As the novel makes clear, however, Alfred’s interest in Judaism was awakening even before meeting his pious uncle, much to the dismay of his mother Fritzi and her antisemitic mother in Berlin, “eine rationalisierte Jüdin” (85; free-thinking Jewess). They had long dreaded the day when “jemand von der galizischen Sippschaft ins Haus hineingeplatzt kommen und sie vor ihrer Familie, vor ihren Bekannten, vor ihren Freunden, vor ihrem Hauspersonal blamieren” (167; one of the Galician relatives comes crashing into the house and shows them up in front of their friends and acquaintances and servants). A passage like this reveals how closely Morgenstern’s novel mirrors Joseph Roth’s tart observation in Juden auf Wanderschaft that half the assimilated German Jews who rail against Jews from the East themselves had a grandfather from Tarnopol.50 In the foreword for a revised edition of the work to be published in Amsterdam in 1937, Roth in turn comes close to paraphrasing Morgenstern when he writes: Es ist eine — oft übersehene — Tatsache, daß auch Juden antisemitische Instinkte haben können. Man will nicht durch einen Fremden, der eben aus Lodz angekommen ist, an den eigenen Großvater erinnert werden, der aus Posen oder Kattowitz stammt.51 [It is an — often overlooked — fact that even Jews can have antisemitic instincts. They don’t want to be reminded of their own grandfather from Poznan or Kattowice by a stranger who has just arrived from Łodz].

In the aftermath of the newly promulgated Nuremberg race laws it is easy to imagine how the remaining German Jews who bought and read

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the novel might have digested its breezy message that assimilation into Germanic culture had been an illusion at best, and that salvation might have been found — and perhaps still could be found — by returning to traditional Jewish life in the East. It will be recalled how at one point the eastward resettlement of German Jews was also considered by the Nazis as an answer to the “Judenfrage.” In autumn 1939 plans were drawn up for a Jewish reservation near the Polish city of Lublin to hold around three million German, Austrian, Czech and Polish Jews. For most assimilated German Jews the world of the “Ostjuden” was a totally alien one, with which many — like Fritzi and her mother — found it hard to associate themselves in any positive way. As Roth reportedly said to Morgenstern, whom he had first met at a Zionist congress in the Galician capital Lemberg (Lviv) in 1909/10: Die Juden in deinem Roman [sind] so echt, daß der Leser von ihnen abrücken wird wie die Judenfeinde und auch die assimilierten Juden es in der Trambahn tun, wenn ein echter Jude einsteigt. In meinen Büchern übersetze ich die Juden für den Leser. Du gibst sie im Original.52 [The Jews in your novel [are] so real that the reader will recoil from them like the antisemites and the assimilated Jews do when a genuine Jew gets on the tram. In my books I translate Jews for the reader. You give them in the original.]

Like Morgenstern, Roth never forgot the land of his childhood. Indeed, the first novel he published after arriving in Paris in 1934 was Tarabas: Ein Gast auf dieser Erde, an odd work where a charismatic military leader finds God and renounces temporal power in an undefined Eastern European country strongly reminiscent of the homeland Roth shared with Morgenstern. A crucial role in Tarabas’s conversion is played by his interaction with the observant Jews, who suffer violence and degradation at the hands of an antisemitic Christian population inflamed by ignorance and religious prejudice. Der Sohn des verlorenen Sohnes is a work similarly dominated by the theme of religious conversion. Indeed, the two novels share major characters with virtually the same name — the innkeeper Nathan Kristianpoller in Tarabas and Jankel Christjampoler in Der Sohn des verlorenen Sohnes. Both are distinguished by their shrewdness, worldliness, and strength of character. Seen from today’s perspective, it is clear Tarabas and Der Sohn des verlorenen Sohnes are linked not only by the their subject matter and the authors’ shared heritage, but by deeper structural parallels too. By 1934 it would have been obvious to both writers, who were living through the heyday of antisemitic European dictatorships (although Stalin’s terror was yet to be fully unleashed in the Soviet Union), that the fate of traditional Eastern Jewry was in all probability sealed.

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Nevertheless, both Roth and Morgenstern privilege imagination over reality, finding refuge through their novels in some improbable flights of fantasy. In Tarabas, the Führer-figure repents and relinquishes his worldly power in favor of poverty and the search for holiness. The catalyst for this incongruous conversion is Schermaja, an abjectly poor and humble Jew, whose beard was ripped out by the enraged Tarabas. Subsequently haunted by what he did, Tarabas feels driven to seek his victim’s forgiveness. In Der Sohn des verlorenen Sohnes, Alfred Mohylewski rejects secular Viennese assimilation to return to an Eastern Jewish world governed by religious observance that in reality had effectively ceased to exist even before Morgenstern had begun writing about it. Morgenstern only came to read Tarabas on the train taking him back from Paris to Vienna in May 1934, and he immediately assumed that the similarities between the two novels were not coincidental. He had, after all, allowed Roth unfettered access to his unpublished manuscript when they lodged in the same hotel in Paris, the Hôtel Foyot, and some years earlier, after reading the novel’s first draft, Roth had commented openly on how taken he was with the figure of Kristjampoler.53 Appalled that Roth had apparently abused their friendship, Morgenstern felt impelled to loosen his ties to someone with whom he felt deep bonds of kinship. In fact, unknown to Morgenstern, Roth had already drafted a character named Kristianpoller in an unpublished work from the 1920s. Their relationship was only restored thanks to the intervention of Stefan Zweig. In 1938 history repeated itself when Morgenstern once more found himself sharing the same lodgings as Roth, the Hôtel de la Poste in Paris, where he worked on the second volume of his trilogy, entitled with some irony Idyll im Exil.54 Morgenstern’s final visit to his Galician homeland took place in 1921, his life and work thereafter being spent entirely in the West. As a result, the novels are quintessentially memory works, the world they evoke having little in common with the disturbing images of Jewish life in Galicia that Roth painted in Tarabas, or which Ernst Weiss depicts in Franta Zlin. Although both Tarabas and Der Sohn des verlorenen Sohnes share the central theme of religious conversion, the wider implications of the two novels are in many ways very different. Roth is often accused of privileging fantasy over reality, and perhaps nowhere more than in Tarabas; yet in one aspect at least, he was far more realistic than Morgenstern. For whereas Der Sohn des verlorenen Sohnes often evokes an almost Utopian image of a rural Galicia where Jews live on the whole in peaceful prosperity with their neighbors, Tarabas presents a picture that accords better with the facts. An underlying, latent antisemitism is nevertheless reflected in the Galicia of Der Sohn des verlorenen Sohnes. The Mohylewskis’ Gentile coachman Panjko is loyal to a fault to his Jewish employers, yet has no compunction

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in muttering racist imprecations when they annoy him. A favorite is “eine Cholera und kein Jud’!” (22, 23; Cholera and no Jews!). Just occasionally an openly discordant note is struck, as in Welwel’s observation about Christians who work on Sundays: “Mein Vater pflegte zu sagen: Ein Bauer, der am Sonntag ackert, kann einen am Montag ermorden” (34; My father used to say that a peasant who works his fields on a Sunday can murder you on Monday). Only Welwel’s factor and mentor Jankel Christjampoler, an elderly, hard-headed, and in some ways almost reluctant Jew, seems aware of how uncertain their world has become as he muses on “die Lebensarbeit von Generationen, deren Sinn nun in der ungewissen Zukunft sich verlor” (35–36; the life’s work of generations whose meaning was getting lost in the uncertain future). The novel also makes no mention of the concerted attempts by German Lutheran “missionaries” even in the twentieth century to convert Galician Jews to Christianity.55 Following the Habsburg collapse and the restoration of Polish statehood, the eager Polonisation of Galicia led to considerable tension between the hegemonic Poles and the large Ukrainian (Ruthenian) population, with Jews trapped in the middle.56 The terrifying pogrom graphically evoked in Tarabas is based on an actual event in the early 1920s.57 In 1923 the Polish-Yiddish newspaper Haynt (Today) quoted a report from the Polish House of Parliament, revealing that: the House received notifications from hundreds of locations across the country about thousands of Jews whose beards and side locks were forcibly shorn off. The report goes on to say that over the course of the four months July–October, 1919, accounts of lootings and assaults were received from 115 communities with an average of several tens to a hundred incidents per community [. . .] Between April, 1919 and December 1920, the military and the Polish civil populace promulgated 964 pogroms, assaults and looting incidents upon the Jewish population in hundreds of towns and villages [. . .] It is noted in the Parliament House report that in the first three months of 1923 the National Council registered 21 actions against Jews [. . .] and in the months April–May of the same year there were reports of another 25 incidents.58

Such events must have been known to Morgenstern, but he does not let them impinge upon his novel’s projection of Jewish life in Galicia. Though set in 1928 and written in the early 1930s, much of the novel seems peculiarly detached from political realities of the wider world. In fact, the novel’s evocation of rural life shows Morgenstern responding to a characteristic shift observable in German letters as a whole in the 1930s — the move away from the raw depiction of urban life so typical of the 1920s. Only in Idyll im Exil, completed in exile in 1939, does Morgenstern confront the reality of Slavic antisemitism. There Welwel states

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openly “Ich habe kein Vertrauen zu der Lage der Juden hier”59 (I’m not confident about the position of the Jews here), and the novel concludes with a small-scale pogrom in which a Jewish boy is murdered. Especially in Book One of Der Sohn des verlorenen Sohnes, however, Morgenstern paints a canvas showing Jews as an integral part of the Polish-Ukrainian East, living in an apparently successful symbiosis with other cultures and religions. Welwel Mohylewski seems at ease with his life and non-Jewish neighbors, they show him respect, and he communicates effortlessly with them. In this respect the novel is reminiscent of Roth’s short story Die Büste des Kaisers (The Emperor’s Bust, 1935) which he completed not long after the publication of Tarabas. This too depicts an intact social world in which mutual respect between Jew and Christian as well as between the classes is the order of the day. Morgenstern’s novel also does something rarely attempted in Yiddish literature, in which the chief focus is on life in the shtetl: it portrays the life of agrarian Jews.60 In its depiction of the Jewish East and the regard the “Ostjuden” have for the defunct Habsburg monarchy — especially the figure of the emperor Franz Josef — Morgenstern’s novel further reveals a number of affinities with Roth’s novel Radetzkymarsch (1932). Der Sohn des verlorenen Sohnes is similarly dominated by male characters, obsessed with father figures both present and absent, and the main players in the novel are without exception unmarried or widowed. None of the characters enjoys the stability of a traditional family structure. These observations similarly apply to much of the work of Franz Kafka, a writer greatly admired by Morgenstern not least for his openness towards the life and culture of East European Jewry. Reminiscent of Roth’s Radetzkymarsch, but of much of Kafka too,61 is the novel’s reliance on a host of strongly-drawn male figures contrasting with a very restricted range of female characters. In essence there are just three: Pesje, the caricature of a pious old maid, characterized by her linguistic tic “weh ist mir” (woe is me); Alfred’s apostate mother Fritzi, a foxy Viennese lady; and her virulently antisemitic mother, Frau Peschak, who represent the urban antithesis of Pesje’s narrow, ritual-dominated life in the Galician countryside.62 Only towards the end of the novel does a female character come to dominate the narration, as Fritzi is confronted by her dead husband’s brother and perceives in Welwel the repressed “other” that is nevertheless part of her own life and identity, whether she likes it or not. This meeting finally allows her to come to terms with the death of her beloved “Pepperl.” It falls to Alfred to reclaim for himself the legacy of a Josef/Jossele Mohylewski who through assimilation has been transformed into a Viennese “Feschak.”63 Alfred’s grandmother in Berlin — the most distant of all the novel’s characters from traditional Jewishness — is also confronted by the Jewish “other” when, reluctantly, she visits a performance given by

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a visiting Yiddish theater troupe in Berlin. Just as it had been for Kafka in real life, the novelistic encounter with the Eastern Jewish theater proves revelatory, and eventually even she comes to accept this part of herself and the linguistic heritage it entails. Her ensuing discussions with Alfred about Yiddish are clearly aimed at a Western Jewish audience, literati and laymen alike, that has had difficulty in coming to terms with its cousins in the East. Indeed, this entire sequence in the novel reads like a direct exemplification of Kafka’s “Rede über die jiddische Sprache” (Speech about the Yiddish language, 1912) in which he opens his address to the audience by telling them “wie viel mehr Jargon Sie verstehen als Sie glauben” (how much better you understand Yiddish than you suppose).64 The proximity of Der Sohn des verlorenen Sohnes to the world of Kafka’s fiction even goes to the point of quotation, when the enlightened and assimilated Viennese burocrat Dr. Frankl realizes with horror that the speaker at the Jewish Congress making such an impression on his ward Alfred is none other than the boy’s Galician uncle Welwel. Here the text quotes almost verbatim from the last lines of Kafka’s short story “Ein Landarzt” (A Country Doctor, 1917): “Betrogen! Betrogen! Einmal dem Fehlläuten der Nachtglocke gefolgt — es ist niemals gutzumachen” (Betrayed! Betrayed! Having once followed the false call of the night alarm bell, it can never be atoned for).65 . Morgenstern’s text reads: “Alle Vorsicht der stets besorgten Fritzi, alle Maßregeln zur Bewahrung des Kindes vor der galizischen Sippschaft zunichte gemacht! Einmal einer Fehleingebung gefolgt — es wäre nie mehr gutzumachen” (117; In vain all the caution of the ever anxious Fritzi, in vain all her measures to protect the child from the Galician relatives! Having once followed a false hunch — it could never be atoned for). It is as if Morgenstern is aligning the failed experiment of assimilation with the vain attempt of Kafka’s country doctor to save his patient, a failure that leads to his total demoralization and loss of hope. Intriguingly, this allusion to Kafka comes directly before the passage where the novel satirizes the Werfel-like figure whose address to the Vienna congress falls so flat (118).66 Through references and allusions (sometimes veiled, sometimes overt) to writers such as Kafka, Roth, and Werfel, we see that the novel is constantly positioning itself in the lineage of works by Austro-Jewish artists who, torn between their ethno-cultural inheritance and a deep allegiance to the Austro-German forms of artistic expression, struggle with the question of their Jewish identity. While it projects the merits of a return to the social and spiritual values of the Jewish East, the novel has perforce to acknowledge the power Western culture had long exercised over many Jews living in the East — a power that was leading to the fragmentation of that world long before it was destroyed in the 1940s. For today’s readers, there is terrible irony in the attitude of Lejb Kahane, a memorable minor

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character who is the most “Germanized” of the novel’s Galician Jews: “Für ihn war Deutsch und Technik, Deutsch und Fortschritt, Deutsch und Großstadt die gleiche Sache” (37; For him German and technology, German and progress, Germany and the big city were one and the same). The contrast between rural Galicia and metropolitan Vienna is of course striking, acting as a major structural element in the novel. The difference between town and country grows apparent the moment Welwel and his factor Jankel set foot on the streets of the Austrian capital, where they are instantly subjected to antisemitic catcalls. Virtually the sole direct reference in the entire narrative to the growth of National Socialism comes, however, in the comment made by the prodigal nephew Alfred, who is under no illusion about the biological turn that the once religiously directed “Jewish Question” has taken: “Man fragt heute längst nicht mehr nach der Konfession. Man prüft jetzt die Juden aufs Blut” (91; Nobody these days asks anymore about your religious denomination. Jews are nowadays checked for their blood). Direct references to the threat posed by Nazism may be lacking, but the great set-piece at the heart of Der Sohn des verlorenen Sohnes — the depiction of the Jewish congress — can easily be read as a literary reflection on (and perhaps even parody of) the mass political assemblies of the earlier twentieth century. Just as Roth’s Tarabas humanizes and ultimately disarms the furor of the dictator, so Morgenstern’s novel domesticates the Nuremberg rallies. The rapturous chanting of the name of the Czortkower rabbi after the “Totenfeier” (99; funeral rite) that forms the congress’s almost theatrically ceremonial opening is starkly reminiscent of the way dictators are greeted by their adoring followers (103–5). Yet in stark contrast to the militaristic and triumphalist gatherings that defined National Socialism — and which would have been in the mind of any German-Jewish reader in 1935 — Morgenstern depicts with amused affection a gathering defined above all by its piety and anxiety. The way the bumbling, inquisitive Alfred unwittingly triggers a bomb scare in the hall is both a masterpiece of comic writing and a telling reminder of the climate of fear Jews already lived in. Welwel’s reaction as he realizes the perpetrator of the panic is none other than his long-lost nephew and his ensuing nervous collapse are similarly depicted with a wry humor that never quite turns to mockery. In these scenes, which mix the high-minded and sententious with the overtly comic, the reader may be reminded of literature written in Yiddish by writers such as Mendele Mocher Sforim, Sholom Aleichen, and I. L. Peretz.67 On the other hand, the severe beating meted out to Alfred by the Jewish security guards serves at the very least as a reminder to Morgenstern’s readers that there was even then another, altogether more robust side to Jewish piety, and that Max Nordau’s call for a “muscular Jewry” had not gone unheeded.68 The unspoken inference might be that in an era of such politicized violence, German

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Jews could well have done more to protect themselves against the Nazi threat than they actually did. The congress of the real “Agudas Yisroel” took place in Vienna’s Sophiensäle in September 1929, a year after the celebration of the centenary of Franz Schubert’s death in 1928, when thousands of “deutsche Sangesbrüder” (German brothers in song) from across the world invaded the city in what became a boozy celebration of pan-Germanism.69 In the novel the two events are presented as simultaneous, indeed they are interwoven, but with reference only to a “großes Zentenarfest” (67; great centenary festival) and no specific mention of Schubert. Morgenstern’s linkage of the “Zentenarfest” with the Jewish congress of course draws attention to what was long regarded as one of the most significant achievements of assimilation — the profound (and usually sober) Jewish identification with the Austro-German musical tradition. Austrians and Germans had long made musicality a touchstone of participation in high culture and could be quick to denigrate other cultures solely on the basis of their musical achievements, the disparagement of Britain as “das Land ohne Musik” being perhaps the best-known example. One of the most pronounced features of National Socialist cultural policy was its instrumentalization of the “Germanic” musical tradition — its glorification of Wagner and Bruckner and its exclusion of “Jewish” composers such as Mendelssohn and Mahler. Morgenstern, himself highly literate musically, would have been a typical example of an aspect of assimilation that particularly irked the Nazis. He surreptitiously draws attention to this by republishing in the novel his feuilletonistic review, originally published in the Frankfurter Zeitung, of the closing concert of the Schubert celebrations performed by members of the Wiener Mozart-Gemeinde (92–94). Stylistically incompatible with the rest of the novel, this self-quotation can be seen as Morgenstern both paying homage to and taking leave of a culture he thought he had made his own, but one in which he knows he is no longer welcome. Morgenstern was present at the “Agudas Yisroel” congress, but found himself so overwhelmed that he was unable to provide the Frankfurter Zeitung with the expected report.70 In his depiction of the fictional Congress, which “begann mit einer Totenfeier” (99; opened with a funeral rite), Morgenstern alludes obliquely to Gustav Mahler, a Jew required to convert to Catholicism in order to become director of the Vienna Court Opera. Mahler’s second symphony, the so-called “Resurrection” symphony (1895), similarly opens with a “Totenfeier.” There is a further possible reference to Mahler when a conference speaker concludes his words “mit einem feierlichen Rondo-Finale” (114; with a solemn rondo finale). Mahler’s fifth symphony, which opens with a funeral march, concludes with just such a rondo finale. It is in this symphony that Mahler portrays his love for his Gentile wife Alma in the famous adagietto

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that directly precedes the rondo finale. As Morgenstern would well have known, Mahler’s marriage and career were text-book examples of a Jewish urge to assimilate that ended in rejection by both the host culture and his wife. Morgenstern had himself married the half-Jewish Inge von Klenau, daughter of the Bavarian-based Nazi-sympathizing German/Danish composer Paul von Klenau (1883–1946).71 In Der Sohn des verlorenen Sohnes, however, Morgenstern shows how musicality is a feature of Jewishness per se, something that by rights should have made Jews inherently attractive to Germans. For not only are the assimilated characters deeply musical, so too is Welwel, the epitome of a Jewish mentality that abhors assimilation. By the mid-1930s it had become abundantly clear that Jewish appreciation of and participation in German classical music would be of little avail. Hence, just as Brehm was heralding an era when Germany would reclaim its place in the sun after the ignominy of Versailles, Morgenstern set about projecting a fictionalized version of “der frommen, in sich ungebrochen beruhenden ostjüdischen Welt” (220; the pious, intact world of East European Jews) that by the late 1920s was already in terminal decline. However, using words apparently used by Joseph Roth to describe the Jewish predicament,72 even Welwel is forced to admit (in an apparent reference to the Soviet Union as well as Nazi Germany) that Jews were now living in the “Grenzland [. . .] zwischen Hammer und Amboß” (243; borderland [. . .] between the hammer and the anvil),73 and there can be no talk of an “idyllischen Leben in Wohlstand und Geborgenheit” (idyllic life of prosperity and safety) in the east. This disclaimer carries little weight within the overall economy of a novel whose apparent denial of modern sociopolitical realities is so engrained it still portrays Galicia as physically contiguous with republican Austria. Describing Welwel’s fourteen hour train ride from Lemberg to Vienna, there is no mention that not only is Poland left behind, but that the territory of another new sovereign nation, Czechoslovakia, has to be traversed before Austria can be reached. Once in Vienna, Jankel Christjampoler acts as though the Emperor Franz Joseph were still on the throne and the Habsburgs in control. As the Viennese composer Ernst K÷enek remarked in a review of the novel he sent Morgenstern in January 1936: “Wenn diese polnischen Juden zum Kongreß nach Wien reisen, ist dieses für sie nicht ein beliebiger Tagungsort, sondern es ist immer noch die Kaiserstadt” (when these Polish Jews travel to Vienna for the congress, this is not for them any old conference venue, it’s still the imperial city.)74 The extent to which Morgenstern’s Eastern Jews are trapped in a time warp is obvious, and may plausibly be ascribed to their profound political naivety. Alfred’s decision to return to Galicia is less credible. He was not, of course, alone in rejecting assimilation. Indeed, as Arthur Koestler’s autobiography Arrow in the Blue (1954) memorably recalls, by the mid-1920s many urbanized Austrian and German Jews like Alfred

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had already rejected the assimilationist route and were busily reinventing (or rediscovering) themselves as rural settlers.75 However, this was not in Poland but in Palestine. Whether any of them ever contemplated, much less took, the route outlined by Morgenstern for Alfred in Der Sohn des verlorenen Sohnes is open to question. Morgenstern himself certainly did not. However, the practical Zionist alternative to remaining in Austria and Germany is flatly rejected in the opening volume of the trilogy, because Morgenstern sees in Zionism a manifestation of the very ill from which it is trying to offer an escape. From Morgenstern’s perspective in the mid1930s — which once again reflects that of Roth in Juden auf Wanderschaft — Zionism is nothing but old-fashioned European nationalism in a different garb. Hence he offers his Jewish readers not the sweaty reality of a kibbutz in the desert, but the mirage of a Galician Utopia.

Notes 1

Soma Morgenstern, Joseph Roths Flucht und Ende: Erinnerungen, ed. Ingolf Schulte (Lüneburg: zu Klampen, 1996), 81–82. 2

Friedrich Achberger points out that from 1927 onwards Austrian writers increasingly thematised the Habsburg monarchy. However, this was not in an attempt to come to terms with the past but must be seen rather in the context of contemporary debates about Austrian identity. See Alexander von Bormann and Horst Albert Glaser, eds., Weimarer Republik — Drittes Reich, Avantgardismus, Parteilichkeit, Exil 1918–1945 (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1983), 329–30. 3

In the major exhibition “Die Republik 1918–2008,” held at the Austrian Parliament in 2008–9, a copy of Brehm’s novel Weder Kaiser noch König was exhibited as a representative example of “Schreiben in den letzten 50 Jahren” [sic] (Writing in the last 50 years) alongside works by Kraus, Broch, Hofmannsthal, Roth, Freud, Wildgans, Horváth, Canetti, Csokor, Freumbichler, Brecht (the “Koloman Wallisch Kantata”), Musil, Zweig, Aichinger, Doderer, and Marianne Fritz. 4

In Brehm’s Apis und Este, Apis was the name given to Colonel Dragutin Dimitrijevic (1877–1917), the pan-Slav leader of the secret terrorist group known as the Black Hand (which organized the murders of both the Serbian monarch and the heir-apparent to the Habsburg throne) and who was himself executed in 1917. Este refers to the adoption by Franz Ferdinand of Österreich-Este as his surname, although he was not, in fact, a descendent of the ancient House of Este, which had taken its title from Este Castle near Padua. 5

Hubert Orlowski, “Geschichtsdenken und Literatur: Zu Bruno Brehms ‘Kaiserreich-Trilogie,’” in Literatur und Sprache im Österreich der Zwischenkriegszeit, ed. Walter Weiss (Stuttgart: Hans-Dieter Heinz, 1985), 47–59. See further Gerd Schattner, Der Traum vom Reich in der Mitte: Bruno Brehm; Eine monographische Darstellung zum operationalen Charakter des historischen Romans nach den Weltkriegen (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1996); Leopold R.  G. Decloedt, “‘Weder Kaiser noch König — sondern der Führer’: Die Funktionalisierung der Geschichte bei Bruno Brehm,” in Dichtung im Dritten Reich? Zur Literatur in

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Deutschland 1933–1945, ed. Christiane Caemmerer and Walter Delabar (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1996), 205–13. 6

Josef Nadler, Literaturgeschichte des deutschen Volkes: Dichtung und Schrifttum der deutschen Stämme und Landschaften (1941). Quoted in Orlowski, “Geschichtsdenken und Literatur: Zu Bruno Brehms ‘Kaiserreich-Trilogie,’” 49. 7

Abdulkerim Uzagan, “Fiktionalität und Realität in der Romantrilogie Die Throne stürzen von Bruno Brehm” (PhD diss., Bielefeld University, 1999), 14. 8

See “100 Jahre Bücher, über die man spricht — der Piper Verlag,” accessed 30 December 2011, http://www.piper-verlag.de/piper/verlag.php. 9

See Klaus Amann, Der Anschluss österreichischer Schriftsteller and das Dritte Reich (Frankfurt am Main: Athenäum, 1988), 77. 10

Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf (Munich: Zentralverlag der NSDAP, 1938), 134.

11

Hitler, Mein Kampf, 14.

12

Quoted in Uzagan, “Fiktionalität und Realität,” 14. The name Austria may have been unacceptable after the annexation of 1938, but in an intellectual contradiction typical of National Socialism, the Habsburg Empire was also acknowledged as “der große Bau der Deutschen im Osten” (the great German edifice in the East), quoted from the publisher’s advertisement at the end of Bruno Brehm, Das war das Ende (Munich: Piper, 1933). 13

Catholic/Nationalist ideology appreciated the Empire’s historical role as a bulwark in protecting German culture against incursions from the non-Christian East. 14

Bruno Brehm, Die Throne stürzen (Munich: Piper, 1951). Subsequent page references will be found in the body of the text after the abbreviation TS. 15

The attitude expressed here is reminiscent of Heimito von Doderer’s postwar cognitive confusion regarding the Third Reich, of which he had once been a keen supporter. Trying to steer a passage through Doderer’s philosophical jargon, one critic concludes that it is not obvious whether Doderer believes the Nazi era to have been a “wirkliche Unwirklichkeit” (real unreality) or an “unwirkliche Wirklichkeit” (unreal reality). See Dietrich Weber, Heimito von Doderer: Studien zu seinem Romanwerk (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1963), 40. 16

Brehm, Die Throne stürzen, 844.

17

Many of Perutz’s friends who suffered exile and persecution found this friendship hard to fathom. See Hilde Spiel, Welche Welt ist meine Welt? Erinnerungen 1946–1989 (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1992), 206. 18

Bruno Brehm, Das war das Ende (Munich: Piper, 1932). Subsequent page references will be found in the body of the text after the abbreviation DE. 19

Quoted in Claudia Wagner, “Die Zentralkommission zur Bekämpfung der NSLiteratur: Literaturreinigung auf österreichisch” (Diplomarbeit, Vienna University, 2005), 38, accessed 11 November 2011, http://www.wienbibliothek.at/ dokumente/wagner-claudia.pdf. Weder Kaiser noch König is the third, not second volume of the trilogy. 20 Bruno Brehm, Die Throne stürzen: Romantrilogie; Mit einem Nachwort von Klaus Piper (Munich: Piper, 1992), 843–46.

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21

“Nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg entschloss sich der Autor, die Trilogie [. . .] maßvoll zu straffen” (Brehm, Die Throne stürzen [1992], 843). 22

Karl-Markus Gauss, “Heiliger Unsinn: Eine beschämende Wiederentdeckung; Bruno Brehms Balkan-Epos über die letzten Tage Kakaniens,” Die Zeit 50, 4 December 1992, 10. 23

Christina Zoppel, “Linientreu und Liberalität: Die Rezeption der zeitgenössischen österreichischen Literature im kommunistischen Tagebuch 1950–1960” (Diplomarbeit, University of Vienna, 1995), 15, accessed 16 November 2011, http://www.wienbibliothek.at/dokumente/zoppel-christina.pdf. 24

Amann, Der Anschluß österreichischer Schriftsteller.

25

Leon Trotsky, Mein Leben: Versuch einer Autobiographie (Berlin: S. Fischer, 1930). Brehm’s publisher Reinhard Piper claimed that Das war das Ende was a compilation of all the war memoirs that removed the public’s need to read anything else on the subject. See Uzagan, “Fiktionalität und Realität,” 58. 26

Leon Trotsky, My Life: An Attempt at an Autobiography (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1970), 363. 27

Uzagan, “Fiktionalität und Realität,” 58.

28

Wilfried Barner, ed., Geschichte der deutschen Literatur von 1945 bis zur Gegenwart (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1994) (= Geschichte der deutschen Literatur von den Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart, vol. 12); Klaus Zeyringer, Österreichische Literatur seit 1945: Überblicke, Einschnitte, Wegmarken (Innsbruck: Haymon, 2001). 29

Brehm’s lasting popularity must have gone far beyond Austria’s borders; the revised volume sold more than a half million copies. See Walter Killy, Literaturlexikon. Autoren und Werke deutscher Sprache (Gütersloh: BertelsmannLexikon-Verlag, 1988–91), vol. 2, 190. 30

Morgenstern’s hard-won Austrian citizenship would prove a grave disadvantage after the outbreak of Word War Two, when he was initially interned in France as an enemy alien. Morgenstern became a US citizen in 1946. 31

Morgenstern associated with Georg Lukács during the critic’s time in Vienna during the 1920s, introducing him to Theodor Adorno in 1925. It is possible that Morgenstern’s work was influenced by Lukács’s views on realism and the novel. 32

Morgenstern, Joseph Roths Flucht und Ende, 99.

33

Morgenstern owed his position with the Frankfurter Zeitung to his wife Inge, the niece of the editor Heinrich Simon. 34

The trilogy, edited by Ingolf Schulte, comprises: Der Sohn des verlorenen Sohnes (Lüneburg: zu Klampen, 1996); Idyll im Exil (Lüneburg: zu Klampen, 1996); and Das Vermächtnis des verlorenen Sohnes (Lüneburg: zu Klampen, 1996).

35

See “Nachwort des Herausgebers,” in Morgenstern, Das Vermächtnis des verlorenen Sohnes, 387–88. 36

See, however, Robert G. Weigel, ed., Soma Morgensterns verlorene Welt: Kritische Beiträge zu seinem Werk (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2002). See also Corinna Häger, “‘Die gräßliche Blume des Grinds’: Disfigurement, Disablement and Discrimination in Soma Morgenstern’s Jewish Trilogy Funken im Abgrund,” in Edinburgh German Yearbook 4: Disability in German Literature, Film and

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Theater, ed. Eleoma Joshua and Michael Schillmeier (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2010), 105–26. 37

Morgenstern, Joseph Roths Flucht und Ende, 312.

38

Soma Morgenstern, Alban Berg und seine Idole, ed. Ingolf Schulte (Lüneburg: zu Klampen 1995), 18. 39

Geret Luhr, “Flucht in die große Literatur: ‘Sechs zu null für Wien’ — über einige Bücher des zu Unrecht vergessenen Autors Soma Morgenstern,” accessed 30 December 2011, http://www.literaturkritik.de/public/rezension.php?rez_ id=807. 40

Morgenstern, Joseph Roths Flucht und Ende, 307.

41

Morgenstern, Joseph Roths Flucht und Ende, 307.

42

See Morgenstern, Das Vermächtnis des verlorenen Sohnes, 382.

43

Morgenstern, Alban Berg und seine Idole, 273–74. Morgenstern (like Berg an admirer of Werfel’s enemy, Karl Kraus) insisted there was no intention of ridiculing Werfel. However, it is hard not to recognize him in the faintly ludicrous speech “Kann der Jude ohne Gottesglauben existieren?” (Morgenstern, Der Sohn des verlorenen Sohnes, 117–18; Can Jews exist without faith in God?), delivered by an unnamed writer of “world repute” to the Jewish Congress in Vienna in 1928. Werfel had given a speech entitled “Können wir ohne Gottesglauben leben?” (Can we live without belief in God?) in Vienna on 5 March 1932. 44

Morgenstern, Das Vermächtnis, 382–83.

45

Morgenstern, Das Vermächtnis, 383.

46

See Robert Musil, Tagebücher, Kommentarband, ed. Adolf Frisé (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1976), 512. The contemporary reception of the novel is reviewed in Raphaela Kitzmantel, Eine Überfülle an Gegenwart: Soma Morgenstern; Biografie (Vienna: Czernin, 2005), 108–15. 47

See Erich Alban Berg, Der unverbesserliche Romantiker (Vienna: Österreichischer Bundesverlag, 1985), 186–88. For the text of the eulogy see Morgenstern, Alban Berg und seine Idole, 9. 48 In the final volume of the trilogy, completed in the USA, Alfred’s plan to study agriculture is projected as a preparation for Jews intending to leave antisemitic Poland and emigrate to Palestine. Irmgard Anglmayr speculates that this Zionist solution came as an afterthought to Morgenstern as he learned of the death camps and the fate of Galician Jewry (Irmgard Anglmayr, “Soma Morgenstern im Exil — eine Spurensuche” [Diplomarbeit, University of Vienna, 1997], 38). 49 References in bracket refer to the page number in Morgenstern, Der Sohn des verlorenen Sohnes. 50

Joseph Roth, Juden auf Wanderschaft (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2000), 20. 51

Roth, Juden auf Wanderschaft, 75.

52

Morgenstern, Joseph Roths Flucht und Ende, 112.

53

Morgenstern, Joseph Roths Flucht und Ende, 113–14. Morgenstern is not alone in suspecting Roth of plagiarism. Hellmuth Karasek accused Roth of unacknowledged

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borrowing from Bruno Brehm in his description of the Ascension Day procession in Vienna in Radetzkymarsch, which appeared a year after Brehm’s Apis und Este. See Hellmuth Karasek, “Der Ehrabschreiber,” Der Spiegel, 15 January (1990): 176. 54

Morgenstern got his revenge on Roth in Das Vermächtnis des verlorenen Sohnes by taking over the name of the peasant Onufryj from Radetzkymarsch for one of the characters in the novel. 55 Jonathan Steele, “Germany’s search for home truths continues 75 years on,” The Guardian, 7 February (2008): 37. 56

For a historical contextualization of Galician antisemitism see Kai Struve, Bauern und Nation in Galizien: Über Zugehörigkeit und soziale Emanzipation im 19. Jahrhundert (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2005). 57

Joachim Beug, “Pogroms in literary representation,” in Ghetto Writing: Traditional and Eastern Jewry in German-Jewish Literature from Heine to Hilsenrath, ed. Anne Fuchs and Florian Krobb (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1999), 94–95. 58

Chaim Finkelstein, “The Persecutions of Jews in Liberated Poland,” in Haynt: a Tsaytung bay Yidn, 1908–1939, 78, trans. Joseph Schuldenrein, accessed 30 December 2011, http://www.haynt.org/chap04.htm. 59

Morgenstern, Idyll im Exil, 327.

60

See Irving Howe and Eliezer Irving, ed., A Treasury of Yiddish Stories (New York: Schoken, 1977), 91. 61

Morgenstern suggests that Roth had no high opinion of Kafka’s writing. Morgenstern, Joseph Roths Flucht und Ende, 80. 62

Wynfrid Kriegleder notes how life in rural Dobropolje is determined by men, contrasting this with the female domination of Jewish life in Vienna and Berlin. Wynfrid Kriegleder, “Soma Morgensterns Funken im Abgrund: Aufbau und Struktur,” in Weigel, ed., Soma Morgensterns verlorene Welt, 17. 63

The significance of the name Josef and its variants are discussed in Armin A. Wallas, “Umkehr, Wegweisung, Messianismus: Das Motiv der Teschuwa als Grundelement von Soma Morgensterns Romantrilogie ‘Funken im Abgrund,’” in Weigel, ed., Soma Morgensterns velorene Welt, 32–36. 64

Franz Kafka, “Rede über die Jiddische Sprache,” in Das Kafka-Buch, ed. Heinz Politzer (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1977), 94. See Vivian Liska, “Neighbors, Foes and other communities: Kafka and Zionism,” Yale Journal of Criticism 13, no. 2 (2000): 343–60. Once again Morgenstern appears to be recasting material presented in discursive form in Roth’s Juden auf Wanderschaft. In the section on Berlin, Roth discusses at length the reception of Yiddish language and culture in a cabaret performance by a visiting troupe of Eastern Jewish performers (Roth, Juden auf Wanderschaft, 51–54). 65

Franz Kafka, Die Erzählungen (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1961), 131. In the essay on Kafka written in the USA, Morgenstern records how he treasured his collection of Kafka’s books — amongst them Ein Landarzt — which he lost after fleeing from Vienna in 1938. See Soma Morgenstern, Kritiken, Berichte, Tagebücher, ed. Ingolf Schulte (Lüneburg: zu Klampen, 2001), 449.

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112 66

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See note 43.

67

These stylistic discontinuities are perhaps a literary equivalent of the “Stilbrüche” in the symphonies of Gustav Mahler, an Austro-Jewish artist revered by Morgenstern. 68

See Marc A. Weiner, “1903: Gustav Mahler Launches a New Production of Tristan und Isolde, Otto Weininger Commits Suicide Shortly after His Geschlecht und Charakter is Published, and Max Nordau Advocates the Development of a ‘Muscular Jewry,’” in The Yale Companion to Jewish Writing and Thought in German Culture 1096–1996, ed. Sander L. Gilman and Jack Zipes (New Haven: Yale UP, 1997), 255–61. 69

Morgenstern, Joseph Roths Flucht und Ende, 53–56.

70

Morgenstern, Das Vermächtnis des verlorenen Sohnes, 380.

71

Morgenstern’s son Dan (b. Munich 1929) is a leading American Jazz historian and critic. He recalls his parents in Kitzmantel, Eine Überfülle an Gegenwart, 173–84. Morgenstern first met Inge through her father, who was also a friend of Alban Berg. All three were supporters of FC Rapid Vienna, whose games at the “Pfarrwiese” in Hütteldorf they would attend together. Morgenstern supported FC Admira Wien. 72

Morgenstern, Joseph Roths Flucht und Ende, 40.

73

In his diary, Kafka writes of this “Grenzland zwischen Einsamkeit und Gemeinschaft [. . .] in dem ich mich angesiedelt [. . .] habe” (borderland between isolation and community [. . .] in which I have [. . .] settled). See Franz Kafka, Tagebücher 1910–1923 (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1949), 341. For a detailed modern reflection on the lost world of Polish Jewry see Eva Hoffman, Shtetl: The History of a Small Town and a Vanished World (London: Vintage, 1999). 74

Quoted in Morgenstern, Das Vermächtnis des verlorenen Sohnes, 366. See Morgenstern, Der Sohn des verlorenen Sohnes, 163. 75

Arthur Koestler, Arrow in the Blue (London: William Collins and Hamish Hamilton, 1954). Alma Mahler-Werfel recounts a visit she and Franz Werfel made to Jewish settlements in Palestine in 1924–25, noting the way some of the more hot-headed colonists wrote contemptuously of the “stinking” Arabs. See Alma Mahler-Werfel, Mein Leben (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1960), 167.

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4: Charting February 1934: Karl Kraus, Anna Seghers, Friedrich Wolf, Alois Vogel The Silent Satirist — Karl Kraus and the Corporate State

T

FIRST AUSTRIAN REPUBLIC survived for just under twenty mostly miserable years. Beset by the financial, civic, and ethnic tensions ensuing from the collapse not just of the Habsburg Empire, but of the entire continental European polity in 1918, the republic inevitably presented some rich pickings for the greatest satirist of this era. Just as in imperial times, during the 1920s Kraus campaigned relentlessly and effectively against the frailties of literati and politicians, and the veniality of the press. Particularly memorable were the sustained onslaughts on the corrupt Hungarian newspaper magnate Imre Békessy and on the Vienna chief of police (and later Federal Chancellor) Johann Schober.1 After a campaign with the catchphrase “Hinaus aus Wien mit dem Schuft” (Get the crook out of Vienna!), Kraus succeeded in forcing Békessy to flee from Vienna in 1926. Kraus was so incensed by Schober’s role in policing the violent aftermath to the burning of the Justizpalast on 15 July 1927 that, alongside articles in Die Fackel of a ferocity notable even by Kraus’s standards, he also plastered Vienna with posters attacking the man he held personally responsible for the death of eighty-four protesters.2 In his last play Die Unüberwindlichen (The Unconquerable, 1928), Kraus memorialized his feud with both these foes. Kraus’s relish for a bare-knuckle fight with Viennese veniality could never be questioned. However, when faced with world events that transcended the environment he knew best, the immediate response of the normally voluble satirist was often to fall silent. What C.  E. Williams describes as Kraus’s deep-rooted social conservatism reached its apogee as he mourned the assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Die Fackel of 10 July 1914.3 Thereafter, despite the onset of the First World War, there came no further additions to the journal until December 1914. Then the silence was finally broken with the publication of the lecture “In dieser großen Zeit” (In these Great Times), one of Kraus’s finest essays, which excoriates the role of the print media in their eagerness to profit from the war whose fires they assiduously stoke.4 HE

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Even more controversial than Kraus’s silence after the outbreak of the First World War was his taciturn response to three momentous events in the 1930s: Hitler’s accession to power in January 1933; Dollfuss’s abolition of parliamentary government in March 1933; and finally the failed rebellion of the Austrian Social Democrats in February 1934 and the ensuing civil war. Following Die Fackel’s issue of December 1932, the journal did not reappear until October 1933, in an issue that was the shortest Fackel ever and was primarily a response to the death of Kraus’s friend, the architect and cultural critic Adolf Loos, whose obituary it printed.5 The only other contribution is the lapsed Social Democrat’s lyrical ten-line non-response to the Nazi seizure of power in Germany that begins: Man frage nicht, was all die Zeit ich machte. Ich bleibe stumm; und sage nicht, warum. [Don’t ask about the actions I’ve been taking. I’ll not speak out, Nor say what it’s about.]

It ends with one of Kraus’s most poignant formulations: Das Wort entschlief, als jene Welt erwachte. [The Word expired on Hitler’s world awakening.]6

The response from Kraus’s acolytes and supporters to this apparent abdication of the satirist’s responsibility in the face of momentous events was overwhelmingly negative and often despairing. His wordlessness continued unabated through some of the most tumultuous months in Austrian and German history, broken only on 23 July 1934 with the publication of the “Nachrufe auf Karl Kraus” (Epitaphs for Karl Kraus) where the satirist finally acknowledges the despair his extended silence had caused among so many of his supporters.7 This was followed just a few days later by the longest single issue of Die Fackel, entitled not without irony “Warum die Fackel nicht erscheint” (Why the Fackel has not appeared). In this, Kraus turns his verbal guns upon the powerless and proscribed Social Democrats, in whose doomed challenge to the government of the diminutive chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss (dubbed “Millimetternich” by Viennese wags) the satirist could see only a further attack upon the one legitimate institution that he felt was able to counter Hitlerism. Not unintentionally, the Corporate State in which all political parties were banned apart from the allembracing “Vaterländische Front” (Fatherland Front) had been officially proclaimed on International Workers Day, 1 May 1934, when Vienna’s proletariat traditionally left the suburbs to parade along the Ringstrasse.

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The move towards totalitarianism did not, however, unduly concern Kraus, who had little feeling either for the working class or for the niceties of parliamentary democracy. He was now even happy to admit “daß ich ganz mit Dollfuß darin übereinstimme, gegen die Auferstehung Wotans sei der Parlamentarismus unwirksam, gegen das Mysterium von Blut und Boden versage die Demokratie”8 (that I agree totally with Dollfuss, that parliament has no answer to Wotan’s resurrection, that democracy fails when faced with the mystery of blood and soil). Two days after the “Nachrufe” was published, Dollfuss was murdered during an abortive Nazi putsch. Far from falling silent, in November 1934 Kraus staged what Soma Morgenstern described as a memorial ceremony (“Trauerfeier”) to the dead dictator. Urged on by Alban Berg, Morgenstern reluctantly attended this event at which, prior to a reading of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, members of the audience were asked by Kraus to honor “den großen, kleinen, armen Schatten” (the great, small, poor shadow).9 At this point Morgenstern walked out of the hall.10 In a clear sign of how shaken the normally impervious satirist had been by the negative reactions of his readership, Kraus shortly afterward let it be known he would be happy to explain his strategy to Morgenstern in person. Morgenstern failed to respond to Kraus’s invitation.11 Kraus’s brief espousal of Social Democracy in the twenties surprised many, but his shift away from it had begun long before the 1930s, gathering pace during his jousts with Schober and Békessy. By October 1932, in the essay “Hüben und Drüben” (Both Sides of the Border), Kraus was even blaming Socialists for awakening the nostalgia for the Habsburg past observable in contemporary Austrian writers such as Roth and Werfel.12 Quite simply, Kraus felt the Social Democrats were the unrivalled masters of hypocrisy: they condemned capitalism, but happily took revenue from adverts; they simultaneously supported the Anschluss with Germany and preached Austrian independence.13 Even allowing for Kraus’s sincerelyheld view that the Christian Socials were at least consistent in their dislike of National Socialism and their support for an independent Austria, many were disturbed at the time — and many have been disturbed since — that Kraus of all people could not bring himself to comment upon the atrocities committed by the Austrian Government after the forcible suppression of the February 1934 rebellion. In “Warum die Fackel nicht erscheint,” the satirist prefers simply to hold the Socialists responsible for the troubles, or to poke fun at the Viennese press.14 In such dark times, this welltried ploy no longer wielded the power it once had. Revealingly, Kraus’s reaction to the role of the Social Democrats in the February uprising would later be echoed both by Dollfuss’s successor as chancellor, Kurt von Schuschnigg, and by the writer-politician Guido Zernatto in self-serving accounts published directly after the annexation of Austria in March 1938.15 A good friend of the Werfels,

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Zernatto (1903–43) had risen to the top of the political tree in the Corporate State. By becoming general secretary of the “Vaterländische Front” (Fatherland Front), he coldly placed politics before poetry, as his friend Alma Mahler-Werfel mournfully recalled in her memoirs, complaining: “Sein großes Schriftstellertalent hat er nicht genug gepflegt” (He did not do enough with his great literary talent).16 The author of lyric poetry and “Heimatromane” such as Sinnlose Stadt: Roman eines einfachen Menschen (Senseless City: Novel of a Simple Man, 1934),17 Zernatto fled to New York after the Anschluss. There he once more put pen to paper to deliver a poised but biased account of the events of 1934 in a manner of which Kraus himself might well have approved. In Die Wahrheit über Österreich (The Truth about Austria) Zernatto declares it is time to erase a “Geschichtslüge” (historical lie), for February 1934 was not about workers battling for their rights. Rather, it was the “tragische Geschichte der fundamentalen Verständnislosigkeit der Führung der österreichischen Sozialdemokratie” (tragic tale of the fundamental cluelessness of the Austrian Social Democrat leadership). Hence the tragedy cannot be laid at Dollfuss’s door, but at that of the Socialist party’s leadership.18 Yet even Zernatto did not try to conceal his admiration for the gallantry of Viennese workers in 1934, commending the idealism and courage with which they had manned the barricades. For Zernatto, the differences between the warring factions were far smaller than the gulf dividing them from the Nazis, who naturally looked on with glee as they tore into each other.19 Nevertheless, by discounting the differences between the two sides, Zernatto proves oblivious to the depth of the resentment the government forces had evoked in ordinary working people, the last defenders of constitutional government in Austria. The model homes that formed the pride of “Red Vienna” had been pounded by heavy government artillery, despite being full of women and children. Red Vienna’s leaders had been executed, its social and political organizations banned.20 (The rumor put about by Ilya Ehrenburg that Franz Werfel’s garden up on the Hohe Warte had been used as a gun emplacement in the bombardment of the Karl-Marx Hof has, however, to be discounted).21 In a sense, though, Zernatto was tragically correct, because it was indeed the case (in 1934 at least) that the leaders of both workers’ and government forces shared a common desire to protect the integrity of the Austrian state against the inroads of National Socialism. This became most apparent after the abject failure of the Nazi putsch in July 1934, during which Dollfuss was assassinated. This was a coup “armed, financed, and in every way supported by the vast power of Hitler Germany.”22 Despite this, Zernatto’s political boss Kurt von Schuschnigg remained petulant, intransigent and blind to political facts when, shortly before the Anschluss, he wrote about the “Februartage”:

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The government could not be held responsible for the February outbreak of 1934, that they neither caused nor, still less, desired, but which must rather be regarded as a natural calamity, brought about by a number of fanatics who, actuated by party spirit and obstinately determined to seize supreme power in a state that they were not otherwise prepared to serve, gave the signal for revolt.23

With such a divide between forces opposed to Hitler, was it is any surprise that Austria fell such easy prey to the Nazis? Opinion is still divided over Kraus’s response to Austro-Fascism. Some critics believe he was fundamentally apolitical,24 others contend he had a well-honed political sense and knew exactly what he was doing by staying silent and refusing to side with the anti-fascists.25 The passage of time has allowed a more measured critical reaction to emerge in response to Kraus’s puzzling silence, and it seems fair to conclude that we should underestimate neither his pragmatic awareness of what was possible in the real world of politics nor his aversion to ideologies and programs.26 Above all, it is now clear that Kraus’s antipathy to the notion of Anschluss with Germany, also shared with the Communists, was fundamental to his increasing alienation from a Social Democrat movement that had for long placed political union with Germany at the core of its program.27 This in turn meant Kraus attracted the admiration of an extreme right-wing writer like Richard von Schaukal, a survivor of “Vienna 1900,” whose views mirrored that of the National Socialists in virtually every respect except their desire to bring about the dissolution of the Austrian State.28 Kraus’s longstanding antipathy to pan-Germanism, equally shared by Dollfuss and Schuschnigg, can plausibly be adduced as one reason for the satirist’s less than condemnatory attitude towards the anti-democratic forces on the Right of Austrian politics. Looking at the wider Jewish population in Central Europe, it has been observed that the readiness of wealthy Jews (including Kraus) to support right-wing militias was not as irrational as it now seems, given that they felt more threatened by bolshevism than by fascism. The Russian Revolution had abolished capitalism and confiscated private property, closed the stock exchange and ruined foreign investors. The thought that the same thing might happen in Berlin or Vienna, Budapest or Rome filled businessmen with apprehension.29 However, even Edward Timms is forced to conclude that what Kraus published after Dollfuss began to bypass parliament in October 1932 scarcely constituted an adequate response.30 The tragedy — at least for Kraus’s reputation — is that Die Dritte Walpurgisnacht (The Third Walpurgis Night, 1952), his searing satire on National Socialism, was composed in 1933 but remained mostly unpublished until after the war.31 The candid but ambiguous admission with which Die Dritte Walpurgisnacht opens — “Mir fällt zu Hitler nichts ein”

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(I have nothing to say about Hitler) — has still further damaged Kraus’s standing, especially as the satirist included this easily misunderstood and misinterpreted introit in the selection from Die Dritte Walpurgisnacht that he did release for publication in “Warum die Fackel nicht erscheint” in 1934. This was the text where Kraus attempted to explain his silence, but succeeded only in further infuriating his supporters with his attacks on the vanquished Social Democrats. Kraus’s decision to withhold publication in order not to endanger German Jews even further may seem understandable today, but Elias Canetti was apparently so overcome with rage he shredded his copy in the presence of Kraus himself.32 Not every Austrian writer expressed opposition to fascism by rounding on the Social Democrats in the way Kraus did. Indeed, when Kraus fell silent, others found their voice. Writing from a Socialist perspective, Jura Soyfer (author of the famous “Dachaulied” [Dachau Song]), found himself in an infinitely harsher environment after the defeat of February 1934, but nevertheless embarked on a novel, So starb eine Partei (How a Party Died), that looks at the political history of the years 1932–34 from a perspective sympathetic to the Left.33 Sadly, he was unable to complete his work, the narrative breaking off shortly before the street fighting broke out. Incomplete though it is, this searching analysis of the tensions within the party renders Soyfer’s work unique in Austrian literary production of the 1930s.34 Writing in Der Spiegel, Rolf Schneider claimed that if the novel had been completed, it would have been the most important political novel written in German.35 Soyfer perished in Buchenwald in 1939. Kraus’s disdain for Austrian Social Democracy may have gone deep, but it is important to recognize that his support for Austro-Fascism was far from unconditional. As C. E. Williams notes, Kraus attacked Socialist leaders and ideologists rather than the rank and file. Like Zernatto, he too expressed admiration for the courage of the republican “Schutzbündler” and compassion for their suffering, claiming they had been misled and betrayed by the party leadership.36 What is striking about Kraus’s hostility to Social Democracy is the uncanny way his views anticipate not only those expressed by right-wing leaders of the Corporate State like Schuschnigg and Zernatto, but also those of creative writers who grappled with the artistic expression of the events of February 1934 from the opposite end of the political spectrum to Kraus himself. As we shall observe, in writings by German Communists such as Anna Seghers and Friedrich Wolf — authors who had only the most fleeting acquaintance with Austria37 — there emerges a disdain for the Social Democratic party similar to that expressed by Kraus in both “Warum die Fackel nicht erscheint” and in Die dritte Walpurgnisnacht. While Kraus clearly perceived Communism as a major threat and force, it hardly features in his writing in the early 1930s. In “Warum die Fackel nicht erscheint,” Kraus nevertheless articulates his conviction that, in comparison with Communism,

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Social Democracy is “verfallsreif und absurd” (decrepit and absurd).38 With some prescience he also concludes that, although sub specie aeternitatis Communism cannot be mentioned in the same breath as Social Democracy, writing by Communists is possibly more effective than that produced by Social Democrats.39 By the time of his death in 1936, Kraus was a mere shadow of his former self, his reputation irredeemably sullied by what readers perceived as the abdication of moral leadership when it was most required. Especially among the very considerable, generally Left-leaning, Jewish segment of his audience, Kraus’s long-standing obsession with the failings of the Social Democratic leadership, it was widely felt, had finally gotten the better of his sense of judgment. A typical example of the contempt in which Kraus eventually came to be held by Jewish Austrian Socialists emerges in Julius Braunthal’s memoir In Search of the Millennium (1945). There, the future secretary of the reformed Socialist International dismisses Kraus as “a Viennese writer with an abundance of bitter sarcasm and an utter dearth of human wisdom, who wooed now the aristocracy, now the workers, now Dollfuss’s Fascism.” At the same time, however, even Braunthal must acknowledge that it was Kraus’s “mighty pacifist appeal during the war that had awakened in so many middle-class intellectuals a sense of social responsibility.”40 The psychoanalyst-cum-novelist Fritz Wittels, once Kraus’s “best friend, and for a long time following [. . .] best enemy,”41 expressed very similar sentiments in the distasteful memoir written in his New York exile: When Hitler came to power in Germany, Kraus’s followers expected strong words from him against the man from Upper Austria. But he was no longer able to find them. He used to say sadly: “With regard to Hitler my mind is on strike” [. . .] This, from the lips of a critic of civilized society, is a tragedy. Kraus died in 1936, just before Hitler’s march on Vienna, a bachelor, sixty-three years old; he smoked too many cigarettes, which his arteries could not stand.42

Yet another ardent “Krausianer,” but an infinitely better writer than Wittels, was Elias Canetti. The depth of his debt to the satirist is revealed simply by the title Die Fackel im Ohr (The Torch in my Ear, 1980), given to the second volume of his autobiography, which traces his life in Vienna between 1921 and 1931. However, in the concluding volume Das Augenspiel (The Play of the Eyes, 1985) Canetti reveals that, even half a century after the event, he has failed to reconcile himself with the enormity of Kraus’s response to the tragedy of February 1934. It remains “eine Wunde [. . .] die man bis zum Tod mit sich herumträgt” (a wound [. . .] you bear with you until your death).43 Amidst the welter of liberal condemnation for the satirist’s silence, there was one great figure who did not rush to condemn Kraus’s attitude when

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Hitler took power in Germany. This was Bertolt Brecht. With excruciating timing, however, his generous poem “Über die Bedeutung des zehnzeiligen Gedichts in der 888. Nummer der ‘Fackel’” (On the Significance of the Tenline Poem in No. 888 of the Fackel) only appeared in the volume marking Kraus’s sixtieth birthday that came out in August 1934. By that time, thanks to “Warum die Fackel nicht erscheint,” everyone knew exactly how Kraus had responded to the events of February that year. Brecht writes: Als das Dritte Reich gegründet war Kam von dem Beredten nur eine kleine Botschaft. In einem zehnzeiligen Gedicht Erhob sich seine Stimme, einig um zu klagen Daß sie nicht ausreiche [. . .] Als der Beredte sich entschuldigte Daß seine Stimme versage Trat das Schweigen vor den Richtertisch Nahm das Tuch vom Antlitz und Gab sich zu erkennen als Zeuge.44 [When the Third Reich had been founded Only a short message came from the eloquent one. In a ten-line poem He raised his voice to complain That it was not adequate. [. . .] When the eloquent one excused himself That his voice failed him, Silence stepped forward to the seat of judgment, Removed her veil And revealed herself as a victim.]45

Despite their radically divergent political views, Kraus had long responded positively to Brecht. In his last-ever Berlin reading in 1932, he included the poem “Kranich und Wolke” (Crane and Cloud) from Brecht’s Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny (Rise and Fall of the Town of Mahagonny, 1930), the collaboration with Kurt Weill that had so incensed the Nazis in the audience at its Leipzig premiere. After leaving Germany in 1933, Brecht initially went to Vienna, where Kraus greeted him on the telephone with the quip “Die Ratten betreten das sinkende Schiff” (The rats are boarding the sinking ship).46 Upon reading “Warum die Fackel nicht erscheint,” however, Brecht could no longer defend the satirist’s silence, summing up his disappointment with a fiercely sad indictment of Kraus’s stance in a poem entitled “Über den schnellen Fall des guten Unwissenden” (The Rapid Fall of the Ignorant Man of Virtue).47

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Brecht cannot help but notice that Kraus now “praised the murderers and accused the murdered” (“Er rühmte die Mörder. Er beschuldigte die Ermordeten”). Not mincing his words, Brecht continues: “Wenn es zur Schlacht kommt, steht er / Auf der Seite der Unterdrücker” (When it comes to battle, he stands / on the side of the oppressors). Nevertheless, for all his harsh words (tellingly left unpublished in his own lifetime), Brecht concludes that Kraus’s stance derives more from ignorance than complicity: “So bewies er / Wie wenig die Güte hilft, die sich nicht auskennt” (So he proved / How little goodness without understanding helps)48 — and thereby provides a response broadly in keeping with today’s critical consensus, in which condemnation is finely balanced with understanding for the quandary in which the sick and ageing satirist found himself at the end of his life.49

The view from Moscow — Anna Seghers: Der Weg durch den Februar (1935) and Friedrich Wolf: Floridsdorf (1936) Unlike the Anschluss of March 1938, which moved many prominent writers to an almost immediate reaction, Dollfuss’s crushing of the short but bloody Socialist counter-revolution of February 1934 went virtually unrecorded in Austrian literature.50 One reason may be that the assassination of Dollfuss himself followed so soon afterwards. Equally, however, the rightwing political leanings of such authors as Heimito von Doderer, Joseph Roth, and Franz Werfel may also explain their silence at the savage end to constitutional government in Austria. As we have seen, even Karl Kraus, from whom much might have been expected, lent support to Dollfuss’s clerical-fascist regime, believing it the only hope of stopping the Nazis. Whereas Austrian writers had little to say about the events of February 1934, there was a notable response from exiled German Socialist authors, among them Johannes R. Becher, Oskar Maria Graf, Anna Seghers and Friedrich Wolf.51 In Britain too, Christopher Isherwood, John Lehmann and Stephen Spender all expressed their outrage at events in Austria.52 As the wider European reaction to the Austrian Civil War is beyond the scope of this work, I shall concentrate here on the depiction of events in February 1934 in contrasting works by Anna Seghers and Friedrich Wolf, two German Communists writing directly after the doctrine of Socialist Realism was proclaimed at the First All Union Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934. Both Seghers and Wolf were Jewish by origin, both hailed from the Rhineland, and both fled into exile (Mexican and Russian respectively) before returning after the war to become leading figures in the literary and political life of the newly-formed German Democratic Republic. Wolf was appointed the country’s first ambassador to

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Poland, while Seghers eventually assumed the mantle of the grande dame of East German literature. The significance of the failed Austrian rebellion for the European Left as a whole is hard to overstate, for it marked the first Socialist uprising against a Fascist dictatorship. It was also an unmitigated disaster. For Friedrich Wolf (whose drama Floridsdorf: Ein Schauspiel von den Februarkämpfen der Wiener Arbeiter [Floridsdorf: A Play about the February Uprising of the Viennese Workers] was written in Moscow in 193553), however, the task was not just to survey the collapse of the revolt, but also to draw from it possible lessons for the future. The requirement to put a positive gloss both on abject failure and on the prospects for further armed resistance to fascism cannot have been made easier to comply with by the mounting evidence from Germany and Austria of the widespread desertion by the disillusioned proletariat to the Nazis. In a section of his best-selling novel Opernball (Opera Ball, 1995), in which he reflects on the 1930s, Josef Haslinger reflects caustically on the “Sozialisten, die am Abend in einer heimlichen Parteiversammlung den Widerstand proben und am nächsten Tag, mit einem Hakenkreuz am Revers, Hitler entgegeneilen” (Socialists practicing their resistance at secret party meetings in the evening and the next day rushing up to Hitler with a swastika in their lapel).54 Yet as G. E. R. Gedye, the outstanding Central European Correspondent of The Times, noted in his compelling eyewitness account of Austria in the Thirties, there remained “a brightly glowing faith among the Communists. Among the Socialists there was a steady certainty of final victory — if not for themselves, then for their children — based on the sheer logic of where the interests of the great majority of the population lay, on a deep sense of rightness amidst a wrong-headed world.”55 Nowadays a rather forgotten figure, Friedrich Wolf was, after Brecht, Germany’s leading Socialist playwright in the first half of the twentieth century. Wolf was also a successful Social Realist writer in Berlin before the Nazis came to power; Wolfgang Emmerich describes him as the leading exponent of Agit-Prop theater in the Weimar Republic, noting his theatrically cogent and politically effective plays.56 Like his contemporaries Alfred Döblin, Gottfried Benn, and Ernst Weiss (and like Chekhov and Schnitzler before him), Wolf was both doctor and writer, but he was a man of action as well. Once famed as the “Red General of Remscheid,” he had led the resistance to the Freikorps in the Ruhr in 1920; hence when coming to write Floridsdorf he had first-hand knowledge of civilian participation in military-style action. Probably best known in his day as the author of a best-selling manual on personal health and fitness, Wolf was exiled in 1933, and, like Brecht, initially went to Austria. However, whereas the canny Brecht only sought refuge in non-Communist lands, Wolf soon settled in Moscow, where his two sons were educated. Markus

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Wolf later gained notoriety for his role as a spymaster during the Cold War,57 while Konrad Wolf became a well-known director in the GDR whose films include versions of Anna Seghers’s novel Die Toten bleiben jung (The Dead Stay Young, 1949) and Christa Wolf’s Der geteilte Himmel (Divided Heaven, 1963). According to Markus Wolf, in his first interview to the Western media, his father constantly quoted Lenin’s words on the occasion of the October Revolution of 1917: “Never play at revolution! But once it is underway, be aware that you have to carry it through to the very end.”58 Floridsdorf, first performed in a Russian translation by Wsewolod Wischnewskij to mark the fifteenth anniversary of Moscow’s Vakhtangov Theater in 1936,59 comprises eleven free-standing but interlinked tableaux (“Bilder”). The play opens not with the events of February 1934, but a week after the putsch on 7 March 1933 in which Dollfuss seized power and immediately suspended parliamentary government. Wolf’s drama is, of course, as “one-sided,” and the characters as simply and conventionally drawn as might be expected in the work of a Moscowbased “Agit-Prop” author writing in 1935. It is also, however, a work of some theatrical effectiveness, with a sure grasp of historical facts and local detail, probably gleaned not just from his short sojourn in Austria but also from the many Austrian exiles who by then had settled in Moscow. The language of the play is direct and clear, and even when it appears to be at its most tendentious, it would appear that Wolf is, in fact, recalling faithfully the words of real people in real settings. To that extent, the play reflects the Socialist Realist requirement to use the method of “revolutionary romanticism” while standing with “both feet on the ground of real life.”60 In the penultimate scene Wolf portrays the trial of the Socialist icon Georg Weissel (1899–1934), the commandant of the Floridsdorf fire brigade, who is led off to his execution uttering the words “Es lebe das kämpfende und siegende Proletariat” (111; Long live the struggling and victorious proletariat). The temptation is strong to write off this speech as an example of Socialist Realism at its crassest, yet the eminently reliable Gedye reports the scene in language very similar to Wolf’s: [Weissel’s] bearing before the court was remarkable. When he declined to incriminate others, the judge told him: “After your manly admissions concerning yourself, I shall not press you to involve others. Did you act in accordance with your inner convictions?” “Yes. And we surrendered because we were outnumbered, otherwise we should never have done so.” At midnight the same night, Weissel marched with upright step to the gallows and shouted as the noose was placed around his neck: “Long live Revolutionary Socialism.”61

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According to Gedye, the judge who had condemned Weissel afterwards visited his widow to tell her in a broken voice: “It is I who judged your husband, and I have come to tell you that he died like a man and a hero.”62 Courtroom scenes are a gift to any half-competent dramatist, so Wolf doesn’t miss the chance to play on the emotions of his audience. Weissel is, however, especially important to Wolf from an ideological perspective. As an avowed Communist, Weissel had left the Social Democrat Party after the demonstrations in Vienna on 15 July 1927, when the Justizpalast was torched by workers protesting at the acquittal of the right-wing paramilitaries who had caused the death of a child at a political rally in the Burgenland. The protest was dispersed with appalling use of force and resulted in major casualties. Even the right-wing Heimito von Doderer described the event later as the “Cannae der österreichischen Freiheit” (Cannae of Austrian freedom).63 By 1935, when Floridsdorf was written, the hostility between Social Democrats and Communists had been widely recognized as a major factor in allowing the triumph of fascism in Germany and Austria. Writing in Stalin’s Soviet Union, Wolf is at pains, however, to show many of his characters behaving and speaking like exemplary Communists, even though the majority of them, as would have been the case in real life, are members not of the Communist Party but of the Sozialistischer Schutzbund, the military wing of the Social Democrat Party. Part of Wolf’s political brief would, however, have been precisely to praise the Socialist workers while criticizing their non-Communist leaders such as Otto Bauer, a figure who is also represented directly on to the stage. Bauer led the Social Democrats after the death of Victor Adler in 1918, and was briefly Austria’s foreign minister. In January 1934, to the dismay of many in the Social Democrat as well as the Communist Party, Bauer and his colleague Karl Renner attempted to negotiate yet again with the Dollfuss regime. After February 1934, having first fled to Czechoslovakia, Bauer settled in Paris, where he died in July 1938, polemicizing to the end not just against Hitler, but also against Moscow. Wolf gleefully portrays the disaffection of the party’s rank and file with Bauer’s desire for an impossible compromise. Although Bauer is reviled by Wolf in this play, it is a token of his standing with the Left as a whole that at his funeral the Austrian Communist Party also sent a wreath and a deputation. After 1934 Bauer was a broken man, yet, as he properly pointed out in an interview he gave Gedye in Prague, although the Austrian Social Democrats responded too late to the challenge of fascism, at least they nailed their colors to the masthead, unlike the German Social Democrat and Communist parties who, despite having millions of members, capitulated to Hitler without a shot being fired.64 Writing after the failure of the February Revolution, Wolf is naturally empowered with great gifts of hindsight. And, of course — and most importantly for a writer living in Stalinist Moscow in 1935 — he is able

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to show that the Communists, who were numerically very weak in Austria before the February insurrection, were indeed involved at the heart of this piece of real revolution — and that the genuine “leader” was not even a Social Democrat man at all, but a Communist who paid for his leadership with his life. This is, indeed, the stuff of Socialist Realism, the theatrical counterpart to the statues of victorious workers greeting the future with clenched fists and cloth-capped heads held high. Following a touching scene where Socialists of all hues make common cause, Wolf introduces the figure of the young Schutzbündler Rudi. As Wolf would have known, after the exiled Schutzbund had regrouped in Czechoslovakia, it embraced both Socialist and Communist members;65 yet Wolf makes Rudi the Judas to Weissel’s Messiah. Disaffected by the failure of the Social Democrats to provide him and his girlfriend with a flat, he betrays Weissel, thereby reinforcing the perception that the greatest enemy of Soviet-style Socialism was not fascism, but Social Democracy. Rudi’s treachery is based on incriminating written evidence that he picked up in the “Cafe International,” where Weissel, in a not entirely convincing episode, had left behind some scribbled instructions for insurrection. In this scene Wolf nevertheless distills into the actions of a single, invented character the real treachery of the Social Democrat Eduard Korbel in the days directly prior to February 1934. The subsequent round-up of key members of the Schutzbund, with their secret knowledge of the whereabouts of hidden caches of arms, was to be a crucial factor in the collapse of the revolt — and evidence in itself, despite Schuschnigg’s later protestations, of the preparations for civil war being made by the Dollfuss government. Wolf’s use of linked dramatic tableaux and the strong narrative thrust of his play may recall aspects of Brechtian theater, but the sad irony of the drama — as with virtually all the antifascist exile literature of the 1930s — is that its performance in Moscow can at best have strengthened the determination of an audience already convinced of the correctness of its author’s approach to history and politics. It had no chance whatsoever of making an impression on the society where it was most needed. Nowadays, a play like Floridsdorf has chiefly period interest, demonstrating how a talented dramatist with strong ideological convictions could manufacture a piece of effective political theater in which the particular details of a specific event in contemporary history become virtually the instantaneous stuff of literature. A comparison of Anna Seghers’s novel Der Weg durch den Februar (The Path through February, 1935) with Wolf’s Floridsdorf will reveal many parallels at a thematic and ideological level, though Seghers’s novel is a more complex and altogether richer work of art. In both works, however, characters glow with a political fervor that takes on a quasi-religious quality: in the heat of battle, Seghers’s character Riedl thinks back to the days of October 1918, when he had returned from the Italian front “den

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Sozialismus aufzubauen, den unbefleckten, sündlosen, demokratischen” (334; to build immaculate, sin-free, democratic Socialism). Like Wolf, Seghers makes no attempt to hide her admiration for Social Democrats such as Riedl, whose lives and fate she portrays with both affection and knowledge. Indeed, for some her admiration went too far. Hans Mayer recalls how, after her novel appeared, she got a very rough ride from the party ideologues of the exiled German Communist Party, who took exception to her sympathetic portrayal of the Austrian Social Democrats. Seghers responded (in her broad Rhineland accent) with Goethe’s famously vulgar quip from Götz von Berlichingen, much to the admiration of her inquisitor.66 In 1937, however, the Socialist review Der Kampf (The Struggle) wrote off Der Weg durch den Februar as a piece of trash that distorted the truth, the work of a Communist writer who had perforce to write a novel attacking the Social Democrats.67 Even a superficial reading of the novel, first published in Paris in the Editions du Carrefour and subsequently in Moscow (1936), shows that Seghers’s sympathies go far beyond the Social Democrats to include searching and by no means negative portraits of working people whose sympathies are on the right (the fascinatingly complex Heimwehr man Nuss)68 or who are governed by deeply-held religious beliefs that rule out Marxism (the Christian Socialist Karlinger). It is the breadth of the ideological palette that further distinguishes Seghers from Wolf, as well as a wider range of characters both ideologically and sociologically. Like Wolf she also introduces real-life figures as direct participants in her work; indeed, it is scenes involving historical figures that provide some of the most powerful episodes in the entire novel. In a short author’s preface, however, Seghers tries to deflect attention from this aspect of her work, preferring to stress the novel’s status as (Marxist) literature rather than as documentation.69 Der Weg durch den Februar claims to be the fruit of a trip Seghers made illegally through Austria in the aftermath of February 1934, although doubts have been raised whether such a trip was indeed possible at that time,70 and not every contemporary reviewer was impressed by her command of local color. One complained that the novel was quite devoid of anything Austrian, revealing as much about the Austrian workers’ movement as a Hollywood film depicting the wine taverns of Grinzing.71 The novel forms an extended sequel to Seghers’s documentary story “Der letzte Weg des Koloman Wallisch” (The Last Path of Koloman Wallisch),72 devoted to the Social Democrat mayor of Bruck an der Mur, who in 1931 had been instrumental in forcing the unwilling Austrian government to suppress the Pfriemer Putsch of the Styrian Heimwehr and who in January 1933 had revealed the scandal of the arms trafficking between Austria, Hungary and Italy. Towards the end of Der Weg durch den Februar, in one of its most striking and powerful scenes, Wallisch is portrayed seeking shelter from suspicious and deeply conservative

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Alpine peasants while attempting to escape to safety in Yugoslavia. The peasants are far from being natural supporters of either Social Democracy or revolution; in fact, they believe people like Wallisch should be hanged. Yet despite their political incompatibility, Seghers shows the peasants’ caring and compassionate treatment of the wounded revolutionary who has taken shelter in an outhouse. In so doing, they could incur the wrath of the very authorities they support, yet Seghers is intent on showing the strength of an underlying humanity that transcends political and ideological divides (the peasants are, of course, Catholics). Not depicted in the novel is the subsequent capture of Wallisch before he could flee the country. He was executed in Styria (not Carinthia as Seghers claims in “Der letzte Weg des Koloman Wallisch”), Dollfuss having promised the British ambassador to Austria that there would be no further executions in Vienna.73 Whereas Wolf’s drama focuses specifically on events in Vienna during the period March 1933 to February 1934, Seghers’s novel, covering much the same time span, ranges over a far wider geographical area. A complex, polycentric novel with a bewilderingly large cast of characters, Der Weg durch den Februar owes much to the narrative experiments of the “decadent” American novelist John Dos Passos and would have made great demands on a proletarian readership. As Ulrich Weinzierl has pointed out, although the chaotic events of February 1934 are portrayed in a seemingly chaotic fashion, the chaos is only superficial, the novel being carefully constructed on quasi-cinematic lines, the narrative form fitting the dramatic events like a glove.74 The novel follows multiple narrative threads involving characters and actions not only in Vienna, but also in Styria, Steyr and Linz. Indeed, the work opens in deeply provincial Steyr, an ancient town of great beauty in Upper Austria but also a center of heavy engineering and hence, in the 1930s, of heavy unemployment too. Initially, however, the milieu is not that of the working proletariat, but of the Fischers, a family with a joinery business fallen on hard times. Illustrating the survival of ancient practices into modern times, the future of the firm is dependent upon an order from a local monastery church to repair the choir stalls. In this reliance upon the patronage of the church we see in microcosm a representation of that clerical influence that had dominated much of the life of the First Republic, most notoriously under the politician-priest Monsignor Ignaz Seipel. It would continue to wield great significance after the failure of the 1934 revolution, when clericalfascism had won the day and Cardinal Innitzer played a central role in the life of the nation. The link between this quasi-medieval world of family craftsmen reliant upon church support and that of the modern proletariat is formed by Bastian Nuss, a hard-working, versatile and conscientious supporter of the Heimwehr taken on by Fischer to help him complete his order.

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On his way home from his first day working with Fischer, Nuss falls into conversation with some members of the Socialist Schutzbund. Despite the shared economic and social interests of Nuss and the Social Democrats, the narrator immediately points out Nuss’s dislike of them, a dislike that is soon to end in the tragic fratricide of civil war: “er konnte sie allesamt nicht leiden” (190; he couldn’t abide any of them). One of these workers is Johst, who in the last chapter of the novel goes to his death for his role in the revolution. His executioner, a man reliable enough to do properly any job he is asked to undertake, is none other than Nuss, a character Seghers nevertheless has difficulty in turning into a true villain. For Nuss too is a product — indeed also a victim — of the times, and it is this breadth of sympathy in the novel that lifts it out of the sphere of propaganda literature. Seghers’s faith in the common decency of most people shines through her unflinching portrayal of the suffering that one segment of the population can inflict upon the other. Ever the humanist, she makes clear that it is the system that is inherently bad, and not the people who are corrupted by it. This forgiving view of confused humanity is well illustrated in the figure of the Christian Socialist Karlinger, introduced in the second section of the opening chapter when Seghers moves the action to Vienna. Here again the initial focus is not upon the activists in the Schutzbund, but upon a popular and committed teacher in a “Katholisches Lehrlingsheim,” an educational self-improvement center run by the organization for Catholic workers. The subject of Karlinger’s lesson is the papal encyclical Quadragesimo Anno, so named because in it the Pope had taken up for the first time in forty years the debate about workers’ rights. In this and subsequent sections Seghers charts the career of a caring man whose religious convictions are real and inform his life. Merging fiction with reality, Seghers has Karlinger offered a post as assistant to the real-life figure of Dr. Ernst Karl Winter. Appointed deputy burgomaster of Vienna by Dollfuss in the aftermath of the 1934 as “bait for the workers,”75 Winter was a Socialist, but of the non-Marxist kind, a man of deeply held religious beliefs, a monarchist who had the best of intentions for working people. He was dismissed by Dollfuss’s successor Schuschnigg in 1936 for recommending the formation of a Popular Front to counter National Socialism in Austria. Winter’s very powerful address at the meeting in Ottakring (observed by Karlinger) is based on a real-life incident at the Volkshochschule on the Ludo-Hartmann-Platz and reveals Seghers’s gift for dramatic confrontations where ideology confronts the realities of human nature and experience (415–21). In the novel as he had in reality, Winter delivers a speech attempting, unsuccessfully, to win over the defeated Socialist proletariat, and with great sensitivity Seghers portrays the chasm in Karlinger’s heart as he increasingly sides with the restive workers who finally, according

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to Seghers, erupt in a mass chanting of “Dik-ta-tur — des — Pro-le-tari-ats,” followed by the singing of the Internationale. At this point the meeting is disrupted by baton-charging police, an act of violence that profoundly unsettles Karlinger, who has to observe with his own eyes the forces of reaction with which he has aligned himself (421). Within the world of the novel this is undoubtedly a highly effective moment, but it may not cut much ice with a modern readership that knows what the “dictatorship of the proletariat” amounted to in Stalin’s Soviet Union. As Weinzierl has tellingly demonstrated, however, while the singing of the Internationale did indeed take place, the chanted demand for the dictatorship of the proletariat did not, nor did the police baton-charge the meeting. For this critic at least, the portrayal of the episode raises fundamental doubts about Seghers’s claim to represent the “Handlungen der Menschen, in denen sich ihr Wesen und das Gesetz der Ereignisse gezeigt hat” (actions of people demonstrating both their nature and the law of events).76 In a reprise of a scene in the opening chapter, Karlinger now seeks out an old “Kaffeehaus” acquaintance, the Social Democrat Dr. Bildt, who as a result of February 1934 has lost his most of his livelihood as a medical practitioner (422). Karlinger, as one of the “winners” of the civil war, seeks reassurance from one of its losers that a relationship between them is still possible, and that he, Karlinger, can still be counted an “honorable” man. Bildt excuses himself, leaving the broken Karlinger an seinem Marmortischchen, den Kopf in den Händen, mit Kaffee, Menschen, Zeitungen, Schlagsahne, Spiegeln, Radio, als sei er von seinem einzigen Gefährten in einer Wildnis ohne Wasser allein gelassen worden (425). [at his little marble table, head in hands, surrounded by coffee, people, newspapers, whipped cream, mirrors, radio, as if abandoned waterless in the desert by his sole companion.]

It is tempting to conclude that Seghers was actually more interested in the psychology of characters like Nuss and Karlinger than in the Socialist figures who form the bulk of the novel’s protagonists. One can certainly speculate whether these figures would have emerged in the form they do had the novel been produced in Moscow rather than Paris. Yet as the novel weaves its complex way through the events of February 1934 (and as befits Seghers’s role as a committed writer of the Left), it is with the members of the Socialist working class that the action most concerns itself. Moreover, although Seghers was criticized by German Communists for showing too much sympathy to Social Democrats, the book was positively reviewed in Moscow, where Karl Schmückle praised it as Seghers’s most mature work to date, and one that promised even more for the future.77 Writing in 1961, however, the GDR critic Heinz Neugebauer

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considered it an aesthetic and ideological weakness of the novel that leading Communist figures such as Mittelexer and Aigner are portrayed in such a wooden and lifeless fashion.78 Faced with the reality of history, Seghers like Wolf is concerned to show the ways in which the workers can draw strength and encouragement from the disaster of defeat. Like Wolf, she also stresses how committed to military-style action the Schutzbund had been on 15 March 1933 (196), and like him she also shows how fatally affected the workers’ cause had been by the multiple arrests of Social Democrats in the weeks before February 1934. So disrupted was their organization that many of the arms held in secret readiness for action could not be accessed because those now in custody had not passed on the knowledge of their whereabouts. Consonant with the ideological confines of Seghers’s work, future hope is nevertheless shown to be there: in the comradeship of men and women joined in common conviction, but more specifically in the development of a younger generation who move from Social Democracy to Communism. In the figures of the young Viennese activist Fritz, and especially in the figure of the semi-outcast Willaschek, sentenced at the end of the novel to twelve years imprisonment for the murder of a policeman, Seghers points a way forward to a revolutionary future.79 Unlike the cases of the real-life victims Wallisch and Weissel, Seghers is careful to have this imaginary figure face a civilian rather than a military court (“Standgericht”), and hence escape the death penalty. The tensions between the dictates of ideology and the needs of distressed humanity, illustrated by Wolf in the figure of Otto Bauer, are vividly illustrated in the episode in Der Weg durch den Februar (chapter 3, section 7) where the house-proud young mother Frau Kamptschik watches her flat taken over by men from the Schutzbund for use as a machine gun position, thereby inviting its eventual bombardment by government forces. Writing what amounts to a novella within the novel,80 Seghers shows how this young woman with a husband of doubtful ideological strength is initially cowed by the apparently brutal invasion of her territory by single-minded fanatics but ends up passing them the ammunition. This turn of events is perhaps predictable enough given the overall gist of the novel. What is not predictable is the way Seghers depicts the initial callousness of the “positive” workers who barge into her home, inviting its destruction in the defense of a greater cause. It is in such episodes that we witness a struggle not just of the workers against oppression, but a struggle within Anna Seghers herself. It is a sign of her stature as an artist, however, that the lasting impression the novel makes on a modern readership is not of its ideological idées fixes — though these are undoubtedly a major feature — but of her ability to depict the dignity of human beings in extremis with such conviction. This she shares with Friedrich Wolf who, like Seghers, was never

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a direct witness to the events depicted in his work, yet whose imagination at its best transcends ideological and historical bounds. What equally binds both these writers in dark times is what one can only call their quasi-religious faith in a better world. With Wolf this faith manifests itself in a touching belief in the maternal principle as the guarantee of better things to come. With Seghers, however, as Weinzierl has so illuminatingly shown, the faith echoes not just the general chiliasm of Marxist thought, but the very language of holy writ. For as Willatschek goes off to face his long spell in prison, he addresses his judges with the assertion that the condemned of today are the judges of tomorrow. His final words as he is led out of court — indeed the final words of the entire novel — are “Er kennt die Seinen, und die Seinen kennen ihn,” words that echo those in St. John’s Gospel, chapter 10, verse 14, “Ich bin der gute Hirte, und erkenne die Meinen, und ich bin bekannt den Meinen” (I am the good shepherd, and know my sheep, and am known of mine). Transcending even the quasi-biblical language of the novel’s close, however, is the impact it makes as the work of a great humanist, a constant feature of Seghers’s work as a whole, but recognized at the very outset of her career by Hans Henny Jahn when on the occasion of her winning the Kleist Prize in 1928 he declared that “alles, was als Tendenz erscheinen könnte, in einer leuchtenden Flamme der Menschlichkeit verbrennt” (everything that could appear as bias burns in a shining flame of humanity).81

February 1934 in Retrospect — Alois Vogel: Schlagschatten (1977) 2005 witnessed the fiftieth anniversary of the signing of the Austrian State Treaty in 1955, an event of crucial significance in the nation’s recovery from the traumas of civil war and incorporation into the Third Reich. It also saw the death of the Viennese poet and novelist Alois Vogel. Born in the proletarian Favoriten district in 1922, Vogel belongs to the relatively small band of authors who, prior to the generation of Elfriede Jelinek and Thomas Bernhard, elected to confront through imaginative literature Austria’s problematic relationship with its post-Habsburg past.82 For just as the political memory of Austria after 1918 was often characterized by evasiveness and expedient amnesia, so also was the imaginative literature that professed to address the country’s social and historical development. A salient example here is Heimito von Doderer’s novel Die Dämonen (The Demons, 1956). Published shortly after the signing of the State Treaty, it is a magisterial — but for some commentators all-toocoded — analysis of Austria’s descent into fascism, whose narrative breaks off not with the collapse of parliamentary government in the 1930s, but with the burning down of the Vienna “Justizpalast” in 1927.

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After 1945, rather than face up to the realities of the recent past, Austrian politicians and artists alike often preferred to ignore the years 1933–45, regarding them as an unfortunate caesura in what they considered to be the “real” culture of the country. In a comprehensive survey of Austrian writing after the restoration of literary life in 1945, Klaus Zeyringer notes how authors generally avoided the political sphere, because literature should emphasize “eternal values.”83 There were of course exceptions to the rule, such as the Jewish Communist writer Marie Frischauf.84 Alongside her political activities, Frischauf had been deeply concerned with women’s social, sexual, and reproductive rights during the First Republic, leading to her arrest after the incineration of the Vienna Justizpalast in July 1927. In December 1928, in a political climate now dominated by clerical and conservative forces, she and Wilhelm Reich founded the “Sozialistische Gesellschaft für Sexualberatung und Sexualforschung” (Socialist Society for Sexual Counseling and Research). Arrested yet again after the events of February 1934, it is small wonder she decided to emigrate. Leaving Austria in September 1934, she went first to France and then to Mexico, where she moved in the same circles as Anna Seghers. As early as 1949 Frischauf published Der graue Mann (The Grey Man), a novel set and published in Vienna that quite openly tackles the question of Austrian complicity in the Nazi take-over of the country.85 Set in 1937, the novel’s central figure is a young, déclassé “Kleinbürger,” the “grey man” of the title. Battered by the world around him but essentially apolitical, he becomes a willing convert to National Socialism. The supporting cast further reveals a range of Viennese men and women who embrace National Socialism with cavalier gusto, not least in ascribing all evil to the Jews. Overall, however, the novel adopts a generally neutral narrative stance that only slips occasionally, for example in a caustic reference to “dem munteren deutschen Heldenlied: ‘Wenn das Judenblut vom Messer spritzt’” (the merry German heroic lay “When Jewish blood sprays from the knife”).86 While Der graue Mann can be seen as a successor to Der Weg durch den Februar, it has a far less complex structure, and eschews the mordant satire of many later twentieth century Austrian writers when dealing with the National Socialist past. The greatest difference of all between the two novels, of course, is that Seghers’s writing strategy in Der Weg durch den Februar is impelled by fear of the future, whereas Frischauf is already looking back, trying to provide through imaginative literature both a portrait and an analysis of a tragic era that her more eminent colleague was merely anticipating. Overall, a traditionally omniscient third-person narrator rules the roost, but the most telling indicator of Frischauf’s compliance with the dictates of Socialist Realism is in her lack of Freudian coloration. The centrality of psychoanalysis may have been acknowledged by Frischauf in the statutes of the “Sozialistische

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Gesellschaft für Sexualberatung und Sexualforschung,” but there is scant evidence in the narration of Der graue Mann of her responding to the tortured theoretical attempts of the Frankfurt School to meld the insights of Freud with the dictates of Marx. Bearing in mind that the Cold War was already in full swing when Der graue Mann appeared, it is safe to say that its publication in the Austrian Communist Party’s own press, the Globus Verlag, was not propitiously timed. Just as Friedrich Wolf does in Floridsdorf, Der graue Mann gives a model Communist figure a disproportionately representative role in portraying the political opposition to Nazism in Austria. However, whereas Wolf takes every opportunity to lampoon Social Democracy in general, and Otto Bauer in particular, Marie Frischauf goes even further by virtually ignoring the Social Democrats in her depiction of the opposition to National Socialism. This she does presumably because of the longstanding pre-war ambition among so many Social Democrats for union with Germany. A political novel featuring an idealized Viennese Communist worker’s struggle against the Nazis would have stood no chance of publication other than in a politically controlled publishing house, and the outcome was entirely predictable: Der graue Mann received reviews in just two Austrian newspapers and was ignored entirely by the Social Democratic and right-wing press.87 Quite simply, the reading public of Western Europe — to which Second Republic Austria now indubitably belonged — was probably more attuned to Graham Greene’s The Third Man (1950) than to Marie Frischauf’s “Grey Man.” Being aware of this, many writers now sought to emphasize links with a more acceptable, generally pre-republican, version of Austrian history and art, and in so doing developed what Robert Knight has dubbed the “continuity narrative” in Austrian political and cultural self-understanding88 — continuity, that is, with a time before the repression of the Corporate State and the years 1938–45 when Austria had simply ceased to exist. In particular, it is evident that during the first three decades of the Second Republic (when a new Austrian identity was being forged, using the Moscow Declaration of 1943 as its creation myth89) the “Februartage” amounted virtually to a no-go area in both politics and literature. This capitulation in the face of historical reality may appear reprehensible today, but the reasons for it seemed cogent enough at the time: with the Cold War conflict at its height in Europe, but in an era dedicated to consensus politics within the new Second Republic, few wished to be reminded of the still relatively recent days when Austrians had taken up arms against their fellow countrymen in the name of ideology. So when Alois Vogel attempted an aesthetic evaluation of the Civil War in his historical novel Schlagschatten (Refractions), a work conceived and executed during the consensual 1960s, he was opening up what August Obermayer describes as one of the darkest chapters in recent

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Austrian history, one that was at the time still totally taboo.90 Yet as Obermayer has charted, the force of the taboo was only too clearly evident in the novel’s extraordinary and illuminating publication history. Completed during the often stultifying years of the Grand Coalition, the novel had to wait for some ten years before being finally published by Kremayr & Scheriau in Vienna in 1977. By this time, Bruno Kreisky’s SPÖ (Social Democrat) government had been in sole power for some six years. Quickly going out of print, Schlagschatten was subsequently republished in 1988, when public life in Austria was dominated by the fall-out from the Waldheim affair. The place of republication was not, however, Austria, but the University of Otago in New Zealand, where Obermayer, as Professor of German, brought it out in an edition with E. W. Herd.91 Only in 1999 did the novel again see the light of day in Austria, now in the context of the Werkausgabe edited by Wendelin Schmidt Dengler and August Obermayer, and published by Deuticke. By this time, there had already been an English translation of the novel under the title Refractions.92 Prior to its appearance in 1977, Schlagschatten had been rejected on a variety of grounds. For the Paul-Neff Verlag the novel was simply too “Austrian”; Rowohlt haughtily declared that as a matter of principle it did not publish “Heimatromane” (regional novels), while the reason given by the Styria Verlag was probably the most open and honest: their rejection was, quite simply, on political grounds.93 On closer inspection of the novel, however, such a rejection seems very odd. For although Schlagschatten is written by a writer who supported Social Democracy, there is no hint in it of the overt bias that a rejection on ideological grounds would appear to presuppose. Indeed, the Austrian Trade Union Federation’s own press, the Europa Verlag, gave as the reason for its own rejection of Schlagschatten precisely the novel’s failure to highlight the positive role of the Social Democratic Schutzbund in the turbulent events of February 1934. Although Schlagschatten is by a writer of the Left, today’s readership will be struck by the novel’s studied attempts at objectivity when portraying an event that, more than most, revealed the Left to be the victim of the Right. As noted previously, the exiled Socialist leader Otto Bauer was proud to point out that his party may have responded too late to the challenge of fascism, but they had at least acted.94 Given the historical facts, and the incumbency of an SPÖ government at the time of the novel’s first publication, there would have been ample enough reason for a writer of Vogel’s persuasion to play up the role of the nobly vanquished Left at one of the most crucial junctures in recent Austrian history. However, as Obermayer points out, Vogel’s notable even-handedness in Schlagschatten may well be traced back to the circumstances of his upbringing in a family headed by a father who was active on the Left, but with a mother from a Christian Social background.95

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Given the moral high-ground its active, albeit doomed, resistance to Fascism would appear to have secured for the Social Democratic Left, it may appear curious that the reborn SPÖ made so few attempts to capitalize on this ethical advantage in the immediate postwar era. However, it must not be forgotten that the primary aim of both the SPÖ and the conservative People’s Party, the ÖVP, in the new Second Republic was to foster a new and specifically Austrian identity, and that the pre-war Social Democrats, perhaps even more than the right-wing Christian Socials from whom the ÖVP were directly descended, had hankered long and loud after union with Germany. In its dogged determination to be fair to both sides when depicting the events of 1934, Schlagschatten contrasts sharply with work by some Austrian authors on the right of the political spectrum. Ulrich Weinzierl points out that one of the more bizarre features of the early postwar writing addressing the “Februarkämpfe” is the way such politically-compromised authors as Rudolf Henz and Hans Habe — men who had been open in support of the Corporate State — brazenly declared their dismay at the very events to which they had given their approval in February 1934. In his autobiography Ich stelle mich (I Surrender, 1954), Habe derides Schuschnigg as a “Faschist reinsten Wassers” (fascist of the purest water), having earlier deplored that on 12 February 1934 Dollfuss and the Heimwehr had organized a fascist putsch, bombarded workers’ houses with cannons, shut down the parliament and established a dictatorship.96 Such bare-faced opportunism was, however, a widespread feature of cultural life in the fledgling Second Republic, where Bert Brecht was banned but the sins of right-wing artists in the 1930s were readily absolved. Hence there was nothing exceptional about the rehabilitation of an erstwhile Nazi like Heimito von Doderer, which culminated in the award of the “Großer Österreichischer Staatspreis” in 1957.97 While amnesiac artists from the Right were feted by the state in the years immediately before and after the signing of the “Staatsvertrag,” there had also been moves to make recent history, and in particular the “Februartage,” the subject of art. In 1959 Reinhard Federmann published Das Himmelreich der Lügner (Liars’ Heaven), a novel that follows the fates of five friends who, having fought with the Socialist Schutzbund, are then forced to flee Austria. Unlike Schlagschatten, however, only the opening part of Federmann’s work deals specifically with the events of February 1934, the rest of the novel taking the reader up to the late 1950s. The work most closely related to Vogel’s novel is, again, Der Weg durch den Februar, which, of course, had appeared virtually contemporaneously with the events portrayed in it. As we saw, because Seghers was a hard-line Communist it would be easy to conclude that the integrity of her work must have been at least partially compromised by dictates of party policy, but closer examination of the text reveals this to not to be so. Seghers — like Frischauf in Der graue Mann — attempts to transcend

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her own narrower political allegiances in order to provide credible portraits of decent working people with right-wing views, and this may have provided a model for Vogel’s stance in his novel. Whereas Der Weg durch den Februar is only tangentially based on the writer’s own experiences of the events she portrays, however, Vogel would have been old enough, at the age of twelve, to be fully aware of the events unfolding around him in Vienna, and hence to write from a more direct personal experience. Moreover, in Schlagschatten, as in Der graue Mann, the language of the characters is authentically Austrian. They do not sound like Seghers’s transplanted Germans. One of the most striking aspects of Seghers’s novel is her ability to feel her way into the mindset of the fascist Heimwehr, and in Schlagschatten we find a similar attempt to provide a positive portrayal of the Dollfuss-supporter Richard Wohlleben. However, whereas Seghers’s ideological flexibility provides one of her novel’s more pleasurable and unexpected surprises, what Vogel attempts is much more in keeping with the ideological dictates of 1960s Austria, the decade during which the novel was composed. For at that time the entire development of the new state was predicated on the readiness of one-time enemies to bury the hatchet in order precisely that the events of February 1934 would never be repeated. The implications of the suppression of ideology and the consequential failure to face up to the realities of the recent past only began to be revealed to their full extent with the Waldheim affair of the 1980s — at which time it also became clear Schlagschatten would not find a new publisher in Austria. The novel opens in a farmyard, revealing the work’s indebtedness to the Austrian rural realist tradition. However, the pastoral setting is immediately relativized by its location on the Kahlenberg, directly outside of and overlooking Vienna, sprawling across the Danube plain far below it. A milieu of immense importance in the cultural self-understanding of the Viennese, the Kahlenberg is where the metropolis and nature, work and leisure, meet face to face. Readers may be reminded of Grillparzer’s famous remark of May 1844: “Hast du vom Kahlenberg das Land dir rings besehen / So wirst du was ich schreib und wer ich bin verstehn” (If you have surveyed the land around you from the Kahlenberg / You will understand what I write and who I am).98 For Hugo von Hofmannsthal, writing fifty years later on 3 May 1894, the view from the Kahlenberg proved rather more problematic: it was a place where “man ahnt etwas Orientalisches, Gefährliches, Tückisches” (you suspect something oriental, dangerous, malicious).99 For Alois Vogel, whose novel opens in June 1934, the Kahlenberg represents an ideally symbolic location for the confrontation of political opposites living in close confrontation, of the triumphant Heimwehr with its more rural base, and the defeated urban proletarian Schutzbund.

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The symbolism of the opening pages is loaded: Richard Wohlleben, the Heimwehr man from a family still yearning for the days of the Kaiser, is introduced as he carts barrow-loads of goat droppings from the farmyard to the dung heap. This is conveniently placed in a concrete-lined depression formerly occupied by one of the anti-aircraft guns with which the Habsburgs had intended to protect their capital city from aerial attack in the First World War. During the 1934 uprising, the same hills rising behind the city had been used by Government forces to rain down shells upon the workers’ bastion of the Karl Marx Hof situated directly below. Where previously the imperial Eagle had ruled over Austria, Vogel — who knows his birds — now shows its smaller and weaker relative, the scavenging Buzzard, wheeling endlessly over the woods. All the while it utters a feeble yet haunting and evocative call. Such subtle symbolism, often based on a lyrical appreciation of the natural world, is typical of a novel whose narrative technique has been succinctly defined by Helmuth Schönauer as “assoziative Retrospektive,” by which he means that the narrative is shaped not by the conventional passage of time and its associated logic but by the emotions that memory unleashes in the characters.100 Schlagschatten has, in fact, an uncomplicated plot through which Vogel examines the same events in 1934 from the perspective of three contrasting characters: the Heimwehr member Wohlleben; and his political opposites, the Social Democratic couple Leni and Hans Brünner. Through these partial repetitions and flashbacks there ensues a multiple perspective that is tantamount to an “objektive Subjektivität” (objective subjectivity) and ideal for the aesthetic presentation of the material.101 Richard and Leni meet after Leni’s son breaks a leg while on an outing near to Wohlleben’s farm and the Heimwehr man takes mother and son to hospital. Against his better judgment, Wohlleben even visits the family home in the shell-pocked Karl Marx Hof, which he now pointedly calls the Heiligenstädter Hof. Equally pointedly, Leni refuses to adopt the new official name, obstinately clinging to the old one, with all its political implications. Nevertheless, a mutual attraction between the political opposites is evident early on, which eventually turns into love. Overlaying the political dimensions of the plot is thus a very traditional triangular love relationship. Despite feeling a strong physical and indeed intellectual attraction to Wohlleben, the “Schutzbündlerin” does not betray her husband (and by implication her political allegiance) by sleeping with the enemy. In that respect at least, the consensus politics of the 1960s, when Red and Black enjoyed a long marriage of rather more than convenience, are very pointedly not reflected in the novel’s plot. Leni and Wohlleben are therefore confronted with one another in a situation demanding that they act as human beings, helping each other irrespective of their party-political views. They have to face a decision that stands in complete contradiction to their upbringing, their environment, and their inner beliefs.102

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Despite feeling genuine love for another man, Leni remains a loyal wife to her fugitive husband. Despite his position in — and loyalty to — the Heimwehr, Richard Wohlleben fails to denounce Hans Brünner to the authorities who are searching for him after his role in the February Uprising. While trying to make good their escape together to Czechoslovakia, Leni and her husband are shot and killed. In a novel of over 250 pages, virtually half are devoted to the memories and experiences of Wohlleben as he struggles with his feelings, not just for Leni but also for his nearer siblings, above all his brother, a member of the proscribed Austrian Nazi Party, and his flirtatiously seductive wife. The reason for the dominance in the novel of this perspective from the Right becomes quickly apparent. Despite an admirable attempt to see complex issues from multiple perspectives, Vogel was writing at a time in Austrian (cultural) history when, pace the Grand Coalition, the historically revisionist views of the Right were in the ascendancy. Hence Vogel’s highlighting of the family ties (in every sense of the word) between Austro-Fascism and National Socialism can be seen as a necessary prod to the collective memory and as a corrective to the prevailing mood of the day. As Schönauer recognizes, while the Heimwehr and the Schutzbund were busily squaring up, the real enemy had crept up illicitly on them both as the Nazis wormed their way in to the very core of Austrian society, with the political divisions cutting right through individual families.103 Within the novel, the culmination of this “Bruderzwist” in what was once the House of Habsburg comes when, quite by chance, Wohlleben is wounded by his own brother during an attack launched by the Nazis on the buildings of the RAVAG (Austrian Broadcasting Company) as the initial part of the abortive “July Putsch.” Indeed, in the aftermath of the failed coup d’état, Richard is feted as a national hero in the Corporate State. By recalling the social divisions and economic deprivations of the early 1930s as well as the horrors of a civil war whose memory was widely repressed, and by reminding readers how National Socialism conquered Austria both by internal as well as by external annexation, Schlagschatten stands unique among Austrian literature of the first three decades after 1945. However, the novel’s desired objectivity also has much to do with the political dictates of a consensus-driven Second Austrian Republic, which, as it slowly came to terms with the development of its own statehood and identity, contrasted starkly with the many parts of Westen Europe that were being convulsed by radical and youthful opposition to the Vietnam War and the unstoppable growth of American-style capitalism. Objectively speaking, the Left suffered a crushing defeat in February 1934, something Vogel never evades or minimizes. Nevertheless, by having the right-wing (and sympathetic) Wohlleben compromise his politics after falling in love with the left-wing (and sympathetic) Leni, Vogel

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can allow Wohlleben to express an anachronistic political response to her death — and that of her husband — that is more in keeping with Austrian state ideology in the 1960s than a true reflection of the divisions and hatreds of 1934. Similarly, the love of a proletarian woman for a representative of the state that persecutes both her and her family fits only too neatly into the party line of the Second Republic that for so long encouraged Austrians to believe that their recent history had never really happened — and if it had, that they had not been part of it. The underlying message that in the Civil War there had been no victors, only losers, is superficially attractive. As Wohlleben muses at the end of the novel, “Wer hatte verloren? Wer hatte gewonnen? [. . .] haben wir nicht alle verloren” (Who had lost? Who had won? (. . .) Didn’t we all lose?).104 However correct these words may have appeared in later years, in the mouth of a Heimwehr man purportedly speaking in 1934 they present too glib a response to the cruel truths and bitter divisions of the day. Like most historical novels, it is clear that Schlagschatten, while providing insight in to the past, also reflects, perhaps even in spite of itself, the values and aspirations of the society for which, and in which, it was written.

Notes Material in this chapter previously appeared in “Karl Kraus, Friedrich Wolf and the response to February 1934,” in Karl Kraus und “Die Fackel”/Reading Karl Kraus: Essays on the reception of “Die Fackel,” ed. Gilbert J. Carr and Edward Timms (Munich: iudicium, 2001), 163–72; in “Anna Seghers, Friedrich Wolf and the Austrian Civil War of 1934,” The Modern Language Review 95, no. 1 (2000): 144–53; and in “Coming to Terms with 1934? Alois Vogel’s Schlagschatten,” in Fünfzig Jahre Staatsvertrag / The State Treaty Fifty Years On, ed. Gilbert Carr and Catriona Leahy (Munich: iudicium, 2008), 94–102. 1

See Edward Timms, Karl Kraus, Apocalyptic Satirist: The Post-War Crisis and the Rise of the Swastika (New Haven, London: Yale UP, 2005). 2

See G. E. R Gedye, Fallen Bastions (London: Victor Gollancz, 1939), 26–38.

3

C. E. Williams, The Broken Eagle: The Politics of Austrian Literature from Empire to Anschluss (London: Elek, 1974), 194. See Karl Kraus, Die Fackel 400–403 (1914): 1–4. 4

Karl Kraus, Die Fackel 404 (1914): 1–19. As Kraus’s silence at this time was closely linked to painful developments in his personal relationship with Sidonie Nadherny von Borutin, it would probably be inappropriate to draw a parallel between the non-appearance of Die Fackel and Ludwig von Ficker’s politicallyinspired decision to halt the publication of Der Brenner after the appearance of Volume 4 on 15 July 1914. 5

Karl Kraus, Die Fackel 888 (1933): 1–3.

6

Karl Kraus, Die Fackel 888 (1933): 4. The translation is taken from Timms, Karl Kraus, Apocalyptic Satirist, 494.

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7

Karl Kraus, Die Fackel 889 (1934): 1–16.

8

Karl Kraus, Die Fackel 890–905 (1934): 276–77.

9

Karl Kraus, Die Fackel 912–15 (1935), 70.

10

See Soma Morgenstern, Joseph Roths Flucht und Ende: Erinnerungen, ed. Ingolf Schulte (Lüneburg: zu Klampen, 1996), 128.

11

Morgenstern, Joseph Roths Flucht und Ende, 129.

12

Karl Kraus, Die Fackel 876–84 (1932): 7.

13

Williams, The Broken Eagle, 223. It should be noted that the enthusiasm of the Social Democrats for union with Germany faded rapidly after the Nazis came to power. 14

Karl Kraus, Die Fackel 890–905 (1934): 204.

15

Kurt von Schuschnigg, Farewell Austria (London, Toronto, Melbourne, Sydney: Cassell, 1938); Guido Zernatto, Die Wahrheit über Österreich (New York, Toronto: Longmans, 1938). 16

Alma Mahler, Mein Leben (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1977), 278–79.

17

In its distaste for city life the “Heimatroman” acted as a counter to the popular genre of the urban “Wienroman” (Viennese Novel) and reflected the parochialism of much Austrian writing in the First Republic. For all that, the “Heimatroman” achieved real distinction via the unlikely figure of Hermann Broch, whose multi-versioned “Bergroman” (Mountain Novel), eventually published as Der Versucher (The Tempter, 1953), represents one of the most problematic products of the period under discussion. Although he had completed a first version in 1935, the novel, still without a definite title, remained unfinished at the time of its author’s death in Connecticut in 1951. In the novel Broch struggles with representing the roots and nature of Fascism, but by casting his work in the form of an anti-urban novel that claims that cities are the world’s misfortune, he also found himself in the company of a writer like Zernatto. As Wendelin SchmidtDengler points out, there are passages in Sinnlose Stadt that could just as easily have been found in Broch’s novel. See Wendelin Schmidt-Dengler, Ohne Nostalgie: Zur österreichischen Literatur der Zwischenkriegszeit (Vienna, Cologne, Weimar: Böhlau, 2002), 154. 18

Zernatto, Die Wahrheit über Österreich, 101. Copyright was lodged in Paris, and the book was printed in The Hague. 19

Zernatto, Die Wahrheit über Österreich, 107.

20

Dollfuss would probably have preferred to use tear gas, but was unable to do so because in the postwar settlement Austria was banned from holding chemical weapons. 21

See Ulrich Weinzierl, ed., Februar 1934: Schriftsteller erzählen (Vienna, Munich: Jugend & Volk, 1984), 145. 22

Julius Braunthal, Need Germany survive? (London: Victor Gollancz, 1943), 144. 23 Von Schuschnigg, Farewell Austria, 192. There was no determination by the Social Democrats to “seize supreme power in a state in which they were not otherwise prepared to serve.” By February 1934 they were effectively a spent force.

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24

See Sigurd Paul Scheichl, “Politik und Ursprung: Über Karl Kraus’ Verhältnis zur Politik,” in Wort und Wahrheit 27 (1972): 43–51. 25

See Karl Menges, “Karl Kraus und der Austrofaschismus: Bestimmungsversuch anhand der ‘Fackel’ Nr. 890–905,” Colloquia Germanica 14 (1981): 313–31. See also Timms, Karl Kraus, Apocalyptic Satirist, 473–91. 26

See Norbert Frei, “Karl Kraus und das Jahr 1934,” in Österreichische Literatur der dreißiger Jahre, ed. Klaus Amann and Albert Berger (Vienna, Cologne, Graz: Hermann Böhlaus Nachf, 1985), 303–19, here 315. 27

Timms, Karl Kraus, Apocalyptic Satirist, 451–72.

28

Richard von Schaukal, Karl Kraus: Versuch eines geistigen Bildnisses (Vienna, Leipzig: Reinhold, 1933). See further Christian Neuhuber, “‘Der Fall Schaukal’: Richard von Schaukals Auseinandersetzung mit der NS-Presse um ‘Anschluss’ und ‘Österreich-Idee’ 1932–34,” Modern Austrian Literature 38. no. 3/4 (2005): 13–36. 29

Timms, Karl Kraus, Apocalyptic Satirist, 467.

30

Timms, Karl Kraus, Apocalyptic Satirist, 470.

31

Details of the publication history of Die Dritte Walpurgisnacht can be found in Timms, Karl Kraus, Apocalyptic Satirist, 492. 32

Timms, Karl Kraus, Apocalyptic Satirist, 494.

33

See Horst Jarka, “Everyday Life and Politics in the Literature of the Thirties: Horváth, Kramer and Soyfer,” in Austria in the Thirties: Culture & Politics, ed. Kenneth Segar and John Warren (Riverside: Ariadne Press, 1991), 151–77. See also: Horst Jarka, Jura Soyfer: Leben, Werk, Zeit (Vienna: Löcker, 1987), 380–425. 34

Jarka, “Everyday Life,” 170–71.

35

Jura Soyfer, Das Gesamtwerk: Prosa, ed. Horst Jarka (Vienna: Europa Verlag, 1984), 14. 36

Williams, The Broken Eagle, 227.

37

See Andrew Barker, “Anna Seghers, Friedrich Wolf and the Austrian Civil War of 1934,” The Modern Language Review 95, no. 1 (2000): 144–53. 38

Karl Kraus, Die Fackel 890–905 (1934): 179.

39

Karl Kraus, Die Fackel 890–905 (1934), 201.

40

Julius Braunthal, In Search of the Millennium (London: Victor Gollancz, 1945), 284. 41

Freud and the Child Woman: The Memoirs of Fritz Wittels, ed. Edward Timms (New Haven, London: Yale UP, 1995), 43.

42

Timms, ed., Freud and the Child Woman, 44.

43

Elias Canetti, Das Augenspiel: Lebensgeschichte 1931–1937 (Munich: Carl Hanser, 1985), 310. 44

Bertolt Brecht, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 9, Gedichte 2 (Frankfurt am. Main: Suhrkamp, 1968), 501–3. 45

Translation cited from Harry Zohn, Karl Kraus and the Critics (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1997), 44.

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46

Quoted in Morgenstern, Joseph Roths Flucht und Ende, 185.

47

The poem’s translation is by Timms, Karl Kraus, Apocalyptic Satirist, 495.

48

Bertolt Brecht, Die Gedichte von Bertolt Brecht in einem Band (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1981), 505–6. 49

As Timms points out, “their relationship survived the rift, and in November 1934 Brecht wrote to Helene Weigel in Vienna advising her to ‘be nice’ to Kraus and asking her to purchase his Shakespeare adaptations” (Karl Kraus, Apocalyptic Satirist, 495). 50

See, however, the materials gathered in Weinzierl, ed., Februar 1934: Schriftsteller erzählen.

51

For a general review of this literature see Sigrid Bock, “Wirklichkeitsanalyse und Realismusgewinn: Zu Anna Seghers’ Roman Der Weg durch den Februar,” Weimarer Beiträge 21, no. 2 (1975): 21–23. See further Ulrich Weinzierl, “Anna Seghers und der Februar 34,” in Exile: Wirkung und Wertung; Ausgewählte Beiträge zum fünften Symposium über deutsche und österreichische Exilliteratur, ed. D.  G. Daviau and M. Fischer (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1985), 71–104. This also deals with Seghers’s documentary story “Der letzte Weg des Koloman Wallisch.” A list of works dealing with this topic is provided in Ernst Glaser, “Der blutige Februar 1934 in Österreich und seine Widerspiegelung in der Dichtung,” Exil 5, 1 (1985): 22–40. 52

See Monika Seidl, “So schön war es im Roten Wien”: Britische Schriftsteller über das Wien der frühen Dreißiger Jahre und die Februarereignisse 1934 (Vienna: Braumüller, 2006). See also Chris Hopkins, Neglected Texts, Forgotten Contexts: Four Political Novels of the 1930s (Sheffield: Pavic, 1994). Most recently, see Robert Vilain, “An Englishman Abroad: Literature, Politics and Sex in John Lehmann’s Writings on Vienna in the 1930s,” in Interwar Vienna: Culture between Tradition and Modernity, ed. Deborah Holmes and Lisa Silverman (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2009), 246–66. 53

Friedrich Wolf, Floridsdorf: Ein Schauspiel von den Februarkämpfen der Wiener Arbeiter, in Dramen, vol. 4, ed. Else Wolf and Walther Pollatschek (Berlin: Aufbau, 1960). All quotations are taken from this edition. 54

Josef Haslinger, Opernball (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1995), 111.

55

Gedye, Fallen Bastions, 204.

56

Wolfgang Emmerich, Kleine Literaturgeschichte der DDR (Darmstadt and Neuwied: Luchterhand, 1985), 58. 57

See Markus Wolf, Man without a Face: The Memoirs of a Spymaster (London: Jonathan Cape, 1997). 58

Henning Müller, Wer war Wolf? Friedrich Wolf (1888–1958) in Selbstzeugnissen, Bilddokumenten und Erinnerungen (Cologne: Paul-Rugenstein, 1988), 40. 59

Wolf’s other “Austrian” play, Das Schiff auf der Donau, subtitled Ein Drama aus der Zeit der Okkupation Österreichs durch die Nazis, was written in France in 1938. 60

Art and Power, Europe under the Dictators 1930–1945, ed. Dawn Ades, Tim Benton, David Elliott, and Iain Boyd Whyte (London: Thames & Hudson, 1995), 187.

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61

Gedye, Fallen Bastions, 119–20. In his reporting of the event Ilya Ehrenburg has Weissel shout out “Long live the Soviet Union” from the gallows. See Weinzierl, “Anna Seghers und der Februar,” 73. 62

Gedye, Fallen Bastions, 120.

63

See Gerald Stieg, Frucht des Feuers: Canetti, Doderer, Kraus und der Justizpalastbrand (Vienna: Edition Falter, 1990). 64

Gedye, Fallen Bastions, 118.

65

Gedye, Fallen Bastions, 124–25.

66

See Anna Seghers: Eine Biographie in Bildern (Berlin, Weimar: Aufbau, 1994), 77.

67

Quoted in Weinzierl, “Anna Seghers und der Februar,” 85.

68

The Heimwehr (Home Guard) was an Austrian right-wing paramilitary grouping, often comprised of former soldiers, operating during the 1920s and 30s and similar to Germany’s Freikorps. 69

Quotations are taken from Anna Seghers, Der Kopflohn/Der Weg durch den Februar: Gesammelte Werke in Einzelausgaben, vol. 2 (Berlin, Weimar: Aufbau, 1976), 186. 70

On the vexed issue of whether Seghers actually visited Austria as she claimed, see Weinzierl, “Anna Seghers und der Februar,” 78–79. 71

Quoted in Weinzierl, “Anna Seghers und der Februar,” 84.

72

Reprinted in Anna Seghers, Aufstellen eines Maschinengewehrs im Wohnzimmer der Frau Kamptschik: Erzählungen (Neuwied, Berlin: Luchterhand, 1970). 73

The death penalty had not been applied in Austria since 1918.

74

Weinzierl, “Anna Seghers und der Februar,” 87.

75

Gedye, Fallen Bastions, 205.

76

Weinzierl, “Anna Seghers und der Februar,” 94.

77

Karl Schmückle, “Heroische Realität: Zu Anna Seghers neuem Roman Der Weg durch den Februar,” Internationale Literatur 5, no. 10 (1935): 77–94. 78

Heinz Neugebauer, Anna Seghers (Berlin: Volk und Wissen, 1961), 41.

79

According to Sigrid Bock, Willaschek is a Büchner-like character. See Sigrid Bock, “Das Erlebnis Österreich 1934 in seiner verändernden Wirkung auf die Erzählkunst der Anna Seghers (Zum Roman Der Weg durch den Februar),” in Österreicher im Exil 1934 bis 1945 (Vienna: ÖBV, 1977), 306. 80

This chapter has appeared independently of the novel, for example in the above-mentioned collection Aufstellen eines Maschinengewehrs im Wohnzimmer der Frau Kamptschik. 81

Quoted in Bock, “Das Erlebnis Österreich 1934,” 299.

82

Exceptions to the general rule include Lebert, Federmann, Fritsch, and Frischauf. Even here, however, the topic of the 1934 Civil War was widely avoided, despite it forming such a crucial link in the chain of events leading to the Anschluss in March 1938 and the ensuing suppression of a specifically Austrian identity. 83

Klaus Zeyringer, Österreichische Literatur seit 1945: Überblicke, Einschnitte, Wegmarke (Innsbruck: Phaidon, 2001), 66.

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84

Frischauf’s maiden name was Pappenheim. In the summer of 1909, Arnold Schoenberg invited the then twenty-seven-year-old doctor to provide him with a text for his first opera. Within just a few weeks this virtually unknown young writer, whose only previous publication was a handful of poems in Karl Kraus’s Die Fackel, had completed a work that formed the textual basis for one of the most celebrated examples of Viennese modernism: the Expressionist monodrama Erwartung. An extended version of this material was published as “Marie Frischauf’s Der graue Mann: National Socialism and the Austrian Novel,” Austrian Studies 11 (2003): 33–44. 85

Der graue Mann was written in exile in Mexico between 1941 and 1946.

86

Marie Frischauf, Der graue Mann (Vienna: Globus, 1949), 24.

87

See Marie Frischauf, Der graue Mann: Roman und Gedichte für Arnold Schoenberg, ed. Marcus G. Patka (Vienna: Theodor Kramer Gesellschaft, 2000), 134. This edition contains a detailed and highly informative essay on Frischauf’s life and works. However, the novel published there as Der graue Mann is not a modern edition of the book that appeared in 1949. It is a hitherto unknown novel fragment of some 75 pages, only labeled Der graue Mann (2) on the inside pages of the volume. For a fuller account of the original novel see Barker, “Marie Frischauf’s Der graue Mann,” 33–44. 88

Robert Knight, “Narratives in Post-war Austrian Historiography,” in Austria 1945–1955: Studies in Political and Cultural Re-emergence, ed. Anthony Bushell (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1996), 11–36. 89

The Moscow Declaration’s definition of Austria as the first victim of National Socialism meant that politicians in the Second Republic failed for decades to address the country’s singular complicity in the crimes of the Third Reich. 90

Alois Vogel, Schlagschatten/Totale Verdunkelung: Zwei Romane, ed. August Obermayer and Wendelin Schmidt-Dengler (Vienna, Munich: Deuticke, 1999), 481. 91

Alois Vogel, Schlagschatten, ed. E.  W. Herd and A. Obermayer (Dunedin: Otago UP, 1988). 92

Alois Vogel, Refractions, trans. Walter L. Kreeger (Dunedin: Ariadne, 1995).

93

Vogel, Schlagschatten [1999], 482.

94

Gedye, Fallen Bastions, 118.

95

Vogel, Schlagschatten [1999], 482–83.

96

Weinzierl, ed., Februar 1934: Schriftsteller erzählen, 149.

97

See Karl Müller, Zäsuren ohne Folgen: Das lange Leben der literarischen Antimoderne Österreichs seit den 30er Jahren (Salzburg: Otto Müller, 1990). 98

Franz Grillparzer, “In ein Stammbuch,” in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 4, Gedichte und Erzählungen (Vienna: Rudolf M. Rohrer, 1948), 193. 99

Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Reden und Aufsätze III: Buch der Freunde; Aufzeichnungnen 1889–1929 (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1980), 383. 100 Helmut Schönauer, “Alois Vogel: Schlagschatten/Totale Verdunkelung: Zwei Romane,” accessed 17 November 2011. http://www.literaturhaus.at/index. php?id=3157.

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Vogel, Schlagschatten [1999], 482.

102

Ewa Mikulska, “Über Alois Vogel,” accessed 30 December 2011, http:// www.podiumliteratur.at/texte/103mikul.htm.

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Schönauer, “Alois Vogel.”

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Vogel, Schlagschatten [1999], 249.

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5: Finis Austriae?: Joseph Roth, Ernst Weiss, Heimito von Doderer “Rot-Weiss-Rot bis in den Tod!” — Joseph Roth and Ernst Weiss in Paris

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NAZIS GRABBED POWER, many Austrian writers living in Germany knew that the game was up if they stayed on there. Some, like Robert Musil and Stefan Großmann, simply returned home to carry on writing there as best they could.1 Fortunate enough to be supported by a Viennese foundation bearing his name, Musil continued working on Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, whose second volume had appeared in Berlin in December 1932. To remind the public of his existence as he worked on the next installment, Musil published a collection of shorter items with the Humanitas Verlag in Zurich, ironically entitled Nachlass zu Lebzeiten (Posthumous Papers of a Living Writer, 1936). In the prescient and challenging essay “Unabhängiges Österreich” (Independent Austria), published in Klaus Mann’s Amsterdam-based journal Die Sammlung, Großmann turned his attention to the state of the nation itself following the events of February 1934. This essay was promptly banned there.2 Such experiences may explain why many other Austrian writers domiciled in Germany chose not to return home as the country sank into its own form of fascism. A large proportion of these non-returning expatriates were Jews, often with roots in the former “Kronländer” rather than the new Austria. Joseph Roth and Ernst Weiss were two such emigrés who, like Heinrich Heine a century beforehand, travelled to France in the hope it would provide a refuge from Germany’s rottenness. By their very names, works, and destinies they remind us of Schuschnigg’s despairing appeal on the eve of the Anschluss when he called for Austria to remain “Rot-Weiss-Rot bis in den Tod!” (Red-White-Red until you’re dead!). As Roth observed in Juden auf Wanderschaft, French antisemitism, though real enough, was “kein hundertgrädiger” (not 100 proof),3 and those “Ostjuden” who had earlier found their way to Paris found a comparatively safe haven where they and their offspring could prosper. For the latest wave of Jewish arrivals in the 1930s France may still have been relatively secure, but they eked out lives dominated by emotional turmoil, intellectual rancor, and financial exigency. Writing to Roth from Nice, the ROM THE MOMENT THE

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well-off Viennese Stefan Zweig, a staunch friend to both Roth and Weiss, was brutally frank about his dismay at the poisonous atmosphere prevalent amongst the exiles: Außer Ihnen will ich [. . .] nur Ernst Weiß sehen. Was ist das für ein widerliches Gegeneinander jetzt — dieser Feldzug gegen Thomas Mann, Hesse, Kolbe [. . .] Warum die Freude Goebbels bereiten, daß das andere Deutschland sich bespuckt wie weiland Kerr und Kraus! Wie schade das alles, wie unpolitisch!4 [Apart from you [. . .] I only wish to see Ernst Weiß. What a revolting business this campaign against Thomas Mann, Hesse and Kolbe is [. . .] Why give Goebbels the pleasure of seeing the other Germany spit on each other like Kerr and Kraus once did. What a shame this all is, how unpolitical!]

Before fetching up in Paris, Roth and Weiss had been well acquainted with each other professionally and personally. As we know, Roth delivered an incisive assessment of Weiss’s novella Franta Zlin in 1921, while Weiss wrote a general review of Roth’s work for the Berliner Börsen-Courier on 4 January 1925.5 Perhaps because they were politically on different wave-lengths — in the early 1920s Roth had espoused radical leftist causes while Weiss remained essentially apolitical — their relationship never blossomed into friendship. With the onset of the Third Reich, however, their lives, if not necessarily their works, would be colored by the common experience of exile. In his memoirs Ludwig Marcuse recalls how Roth and Weiss were together in Berlin on the very day, 27 February 1933, when it must have become obvious neither had a future in the new Germany: Joseph Roth, der Romanschriftsteller Ernst Weiß und ich saßen in der Mampestube am Kurfürstendamm [. . .] Der Kellner [. . .] kam an den Tisch und sagte: “Der Reichstag brennt.” [Joseph Roth, the novelist Ernst Weiss and I were sitting in the Mampestube on the Kufürstendamm [. . .] The waiter [. . .] approached the table and said: “The Reichstag’s on fire.”]6

Roth left Berlin that same day. As a Czechoslovakian citizen, Weiss initially went to Prague before arriving in Paris in 1934. Of the two authors, Roth, remains far better known today. Since 1970 his grave in the Cimetière de Thiais has sported a polished memorial stone, funded by the Austrian government. Weiss’s remains, on the other hand, are forever lost in a Parisian charnel house. The body of Roth’s writing has also enjoyed a far happier fate, its place assured in the canon of twentieth-century Austro-German literature, whereas that of Weiss still

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hovers on the brink of more widespread recognition. The relationship between the pair is probably best encapsulated in a testy exchange in a Parisian café, when Roth turned to his companion and allegedly declared (in French): “je vous estime comme écrivain, mais je ne vous aime pas.” (I think you are a good writer, but I don’t like you). To which came an equally blunt riposte from Weiss: “je vous aime, Roth, mais je ne vous estime pas.” (I like you, Roth, but I don’t think you’re a good writer.)7 For all their differences, Roth and Weiss had much in common — quite apart from a tendency to mythologize the facts of their lives.8 Each was offered, but neither took, the opportunity of escaping from Europe and going to the USA. For both, however, life was intolerable in Nazi Europe. Effectively committing suicide through drink, Roth died in Paris in 1939. Weiss, sick in body and soul, took his own life as Hitler’s troops entered the city on 14 June 1940. Both represent the old, pre-republican, but non-metropolitan, non-Alpine Austria that looms large in their fiction in the 1930s. Like Weiss, Roth had willingly donned the Kaiser’s uniform in defense of the Habsburg cause, typifying the generally patriotic response of the Austrian intelligentsia deplored by Karl Kraus. Thomas Mann found it an admirable contrast with the many German writers, who from day one of the war indulged in what he called “deutsch-feindliche Kriegssabotage” (anti-German war sabotage).9 After the war’s end, Roth and Weiss both made careers in Weimar Germany, eschewing the comforts of bourgeois respectability, leading peripatetic lives that led them from one hotel room to the next. As fascism cast its net wider, both men found solace in the literary recreation of the lost world of their childhood, succumbing to the lure of the “Habsburg Myth.” The Jewishness of both is constantly reflected in their writing. Roth’s unflattering description of Weiss as a “Mensch aus dem Ghetto” (a person from the ghetto) was probably as applicable to Roth himself as it was to the object of his scorn.10 Franz Kafka, for one, saw Ernst Weiss somewhat differently. He regarded him as a Jew “von der Art, die dem Typus des westeuropäischen Juden am nächsten ist und dem man sich deshalb gleich nahe fühlt” (of the type closest to the West European Jew and to whom one therefore immediately feels close).11 Despite his downbeat outlook on life — not to mention his aversion to Communism12 — Anna Seghers thought highly enough of Weiss to draw upon him for the figure of Weidel in her novel Transit (1944). Weidel is an exiled writer who commits suicide in Paris after the Nazis march in and whose papers are discovered by the hero of the novel. Unlike Roth, Weiss never toyed with Rome. However, Roth’s increasing attraction to Catholicism during the 1930s was probably as much a reflection of his misty-eyed yearning for the perceived stability of the Habsburg past as it was the decision of someone who had undergone

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true conversion. There were conflicting views on the nature of Roth’s relationship to the church. Some believed it genuinely heartfelt; others, with scanty knowledge of Catholic ritual, regarded it as little more than a chance for him to get at the communion wine.13 Despite Roth’s decision to “renounce” his Jewishness in 1935,14 Jewish figures continued to loom large in his fiction, and as late as 1937 he was working on a revised version of Juden auf Wanderschaft. Weiss never wrote such an overtly Jewish novel as Roth’s Hiob (Job, 1930), but according to an Israeli scholar, the figure of Job pervades Weiss’s fiction from first to last.15 Between 1912 and 1924 he was in correspondence with Martin Buber, his essay “Adeliges Volk” (The Noble People), in which Weiss confronts the issue of antisemitism, appearing in Buber’s journal Der Jude (The Jew) in 1926. As late as 1939, Weiss contended that the Book of Job was “das Jüdischte unter allem Jüdischem” (of all things Jewish the most Jewish).16 As Roth progressively tried to disavow Judaism, Weiss grew ever more aware of his, eventually declaring to Soma Morgenstern, a friend shared with Roth, that he had become an Orthodox Jew. This was in May 1940. Orthodox Judaism and Roman Catholicism may represent contrasting — indeed conflicting — answers to the spiritual needs both writers felt when faced by National Socialism. Both indicate the shared need to find values beyond literature and politics. Nevertheless, Roth and Weiss realized that more than faith was required to counter the imminent danger German Fascism posed to them both. Roth, defined by J. M. Coetzee as the “Emperor of Nostalgia,”17 even involved himself with the quixotic movement to restore the Habsburgs to power, finding himself on a clandestine mission to Vienna just days before the Anschluss in a vain attempt to persuade the Austrian government to make the pretender Otto von Habsburg chancellor. Weiss, hoping to call on his experiences from the First World War, made an unsuccessful attempt to volunteer for service as a military doctor in the fight against Franco in Spain.18 When Hitler entered Austria in March 1938, Roth was already engaged upon what proved to be his last novel, Die Kapuzinergruft. Begun in 1937, and completed in the months directly following the Anschluss, its themes of deracination, alienation, and homelessness were underpinned by events in Austria in the 1930s. These, Roth felt, reached their inevitable conclusion in the Nazi takeover. The personal nature of Roth’s loss of “Heimat” had already been sharpened in November 1937 when the Hôtel Foyot, where he had felt at home, was demolished in the name of progress. Even before the disaster of March 1938, Roth lamented how he had lost one “Heimat” after the other.19 Die Kapuzinergruft forms a sequel to the infinitely finer novel Radetzkymarsch (1932),20 tracing the demise of an independent Austria where the earlier novel had charted the collapse of the Habsburg Empire. In this final novel Roth treads familiar ground once more to follow the fortunes of the doomed

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Trotta clan, familiar from Radetzkymarsch.21 Given their misogynistic flavor, Roth’s novels have not always commended themselves to women writers; yet long after the war Ingeborg Bachmann, for whom Hitler’s appearance in her native Klagenfurt in April 1938 was a defining childhood moment, continued to explore the ramifications of Roth’s Trotta figure in the story “Drei Wege zum See” (Three Paths to the Lake). Published in the collection Simultan (1972), this work explores the loss of self in the confrontation of the female protagonist with her own past, and the wider past of the Habsburg Empire. In his final novel Der Augenzeuge (The Eyewitness), Ernst Weiss also appears to range over old territory by delivering yet another pseudobiography of a medical man. More than this, however, Weiss picks up the threads not only of his own earlier fiction, but of Joseph Roth’s as well. In his debut novel Das Spinnennetz (The Spider’s Web, 1923) Roth had introduced into literature the figure of Adolf Hitler, the threat he posed being uncannily clear to the seeing eye of the artist. In his final fiction, the eyewitness narrator of Weiss’s Der Augenzeuge (an unnamed Bavarian Catholic doctor) provides a memorable account of how he cured “A.H.” of his hysterical blindness when in 1918 the future tyrant lay incapacitated in the military hospital at “P” (= Pasewalk in Pomerania).22 In a manner of speaking, the narrator of Weiss’s last novel is the figure who made Hitler fit enough to play his part in the Munich putsch of 1923, the subject of Roth’s debut novel. In his last novel, haunted by the specter of a Hitlerian future, Roth roams again through the lost Habsburg realms from Slovenia across to Galicia. Weiss, however, moves out of the similar territory so feelingly evoked in his two previous novels, Der arme Verschwender (The Poor Spendthrift, 1936) and Der Verführer (The Seducer, 1938), setting his work not in Old Austria, but in Munich, the birthplace of Hitler’s political career. Whereas Roth examines the last days of the Austria in which Hitler was born, ending his novel with the arrival of the Nazis in Vienna in March 1938, Weiss not only puts the figure of A.H. center-stage, he couches his performance in an examination of the Catholic Bavarian society that, like Austria’s, proved such fertile soil for National Socialism. If we accept Walther Mehring’s memoirs as reliable, Roth was himself present at the meeting in the Café Royal in Paris in the summer of 1933, when the psychiatrist Edmund Forster, who had treated the gas-blinded Hitler in Pasewalk, passed on his case notes to Weiss in the hope that, as both a doctor and artist, he would eventually make use of the information. Like the subsequent narrator of Der Augenzeuge, Forster was hounded because of the compromising knowledge he held, and after being interrogated by the Gestapo on his return to Germany “committed suicide” soon afterwards.23 That Weiss clung to the knowledge he had obtained for five years before turning it into a novel speaks equally of his commitment to the Hippocratic oath and a dislike

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of overtly political literature. What changed his mind were the events of 1938, and the lure of a monetary prize. By the autumn he had completed the novel’s first draft and submitted it for a literary competition sponsored by the American Guild for German Cultural Freedom. It did not win the prize, and a revised version, incorporating many suggestions made by Stefan Zweig, has disappeared.24 The setting for Der Augenzeuge obviously differs from that of Die Kapuzinergruft, but both novels display their authors’ strikingly similar strategies as they attempt to use fiction as a means of confronting the Nazi threat. Both cover the same time span, from the last days of peace in 1914 through to the troubled days of the late 1930s. Both are cast in the form of fictional autobiographies, a device favored by Weiss throughout his career, and both are narrated by non-Jews with a close relationship to a dominant mother who disapproves of the mate her son chooses. The father-son relationship common to so many of the works of both authors is present yet again. Sven Spieker believes this can be related to the longing for a guiding figure in the lives of men who both lost their father at a young age, and more generally, the longing for security in an age of ever-growing uncertainty. In Die Kapuzinergruft this longing for security amid engulfing chaos leads to the relentless mythologizing of the Habsburg Monarchy, with the venerable father figure of Kaiser Franz Joseph at its head. In the case of Ernst Weiss, the recurrence of the father figure has been related variously to the influence of both Franz Kafka and the Judaic patriarchal tradition.25 It may not be too fanciful to see in Weiss’s fascination with A.H. a parallel to the figure of Franz Joseph in several of Roth’s works from the 1930s. The insistent focus on powerful male figures in the works of both authors finds its obverse in attitudes towards women that today appear crude and prejudiced. The dominance of patriarchal thinking in many male Jewish — and indeed Gentile — Austrian writers may also be a key to explaining the lasting impact of Otto Weininger’s tendentious tract Geschlecht und Charakter (Sex and Character, 1903) in the earlier twentieth century. In both Die Kapuzinergruft and Der Augenzeuge, women are portrayed as either mother figures or betrayers. Sexual treachery is practiced by Trotta’s lesbian wife Elisabeth; ideological treachery by Viktoria, the wife of the eyewitness, who reveals the whereabouts of her husband’s case-notes on A.H. to his Nazi pursuers. This, admittedly, is only done in an attempt to spare his life when he is being held in the Bavarian concentration camp at “D.” Viktoria is herself Jewish, and the way her husband construes her actions appears to reflect Weininger’s contention that the Woman and the Jew are essentially the same and that neither is capable of ethical behavior.26 Although both novels are related by goyim, Die Kapuzinergruft and Der Augenzeuge are profoundly concerned with the relationship between

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Jew and Gentile. In Roth’s novel the Galician Jewish coachman Manes Reisiger is a major presence. He enjoys a long and symbolic friendship with the Slovenian peasant Josef Branco, their relationship serving as Roth’s model for the potential within relationships in the former empire. In the figure of Reisiger’s son Ephraim, a leftist who dies fighting for the cause in February 1934, Roth the politically reactionary Eastern European Jew takes heed of the far better-known example of the “Ostjude” as a leader of the Socialist revolutions of the earlier part of the twentieth century. Only in the marginal figure of Dr. Grünhut does Roth come close to depicting the sort of Jewish figures present in Der Augenzeuge. Dr. Grünhut, who attends to the dying manservant Jacques as Trotta and his wife celebrate their disastrous nuptials in Baden bei Wien, is a closely related figure to Dr. Kaiser, the long-suffering and deeply sympathetic Jewish family doctor in Der Augenzeuge, who is systematically humiliated by the narrator’s deeply unattractive Bavarian Catholic mother. Awarded the Iron Cross as a volunteer in the Franco-Prussian War, Dr. Kaiser treats poor people free of charge and goes unpaid after restoring the young narrator’s health with what appears to be a miracle cure. After he leaves the room, the mother opens the windows, “Nicht etwa, weil der Arzt einen unangenehmen Geruch verbreitete, sondern weil er Jude war” (Not because the doctor left behind a nasty smell, but because he was a Jew).27 Indeed, it is Dr. Kaiser whose example inspires the narrator to become the doctor who will restore A.H. to “health,” and thus enable the terrible demise of all the Dr. Grünhuts and Dr. Kaisers. Still more ironically, the future dictator is released from mental benightment by a doctor owing his vocation to a Jew, whose cunning — and not entirely honest — therapy employs psychoanalytic techniques developed and refined by Jews in Vienna, the city Hitler loathed as much as the Jews themselves.28 The narrator-cum-doctor ultimately demonstrates his proximity to Jewry by marrying a Jewish woman, by playing a prominent role in the Deutsche Demokratische Partei — the so-called “Judenpartei” (Jewish Party)29 — and by being tortured in a concentration camp. This identification with things Jewish in his personal, political and professional sphere is unconsciously acknowledged by the camp guards, who taunt him with being one of the Elders of Zion while almost beating him to death as they try to discover the whereabouts of his case-notes from Pasewalk.30 In terms of narrative technique, both novels reveal evidence of the duress the authors were living under, and from a strictly aesthetic viewpoint perhaps neither novel finds a place amongst its creator’s best achievements. Only too aware of his novel’s defects, Weiss took steps to eradicate them in the lost revision. Trapp, however, contends that Weiss was hypersensitive to the criticism of Stefan Zweig, upon whose patronage and money he was so reliant. In the critic’s view, far from Der Augenzeuge being an unfinished draft completed in desperate haste, as Weiss

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maintained to Zweig, there are few exile novels that are constructed with such care. Its faults, he contends, are not of a magnitude to deflect from its status as one of the most significant political novels produced in exile.31 Similarly, Alan Bance excuses the contradictions within Die Kapuzinergruft as functions of the characterization of the narrator as a confused and inept storyteller, a neophyte driven to picking up his pen by the events of the age.32 However, it can only have been the pressure under which Roth was now working that has him portray Jacques with a mane of hair in one scene and a shiny pate in the next. In the end, though, the very heavyhandedness of the narrator, the tedious repetition of motifs and images, the contradictions and slapdash of Die Kapuzinergruft are outweighed by the emotional impact of the novel. Similarly, many readers of Der Augenzeuge will ignore narrowly aesthetic issues in the face of feelings aroused by a novel about Hitler written by a Central European Jew facing his nemesis. Norman Ächtler has no doubt about the novel’s significance in our understanding of both Hitler and the wider phenomenon of National Socialism itself. For him Der Augenzeuge represents quite simply one of the most ambitious attempts in German exile literature to provide an explanation for the success of National Socialism: The novel is not a biography of the Nazi leader, but rather an attempt to understand the psychological and social processes that made the rise of a character like Hitler possible. From the psychoanalytic perspective Weiss adopts, A.H.’s neurosis is an extraordinary example of a mental disease from which many soldiers suffered, and one that, as Ernst Simmel stresses, melted together with the mass trauma of a beaten people who lost ground in the turbulent aftermath of a total war. From that point of view, the desire of the paralyzed crowds becomes comprehensible: being an outstanding example of all the people affected by war and revolution, A.H. is designated to be a leader of the disoriented masses. Following him they hope to experience the same “miraculous cure” as the corporal himself had been through.33

Where Die Kapuzinergruft and Der Augenzeuge most radically diverge from each other is in their final response to the political challenge of the 1930s. In his first exile novel Tarabas: Ein Gast auf Erde (1934), Roth examined the psychology of a power-crazed leader and the attendant issue of antisemitism, but in a mystically Slavic rather than a contemporary Germanic context. As we saw, at a time when Germany was dominated by political antisemitism, Roth examined its Christian roots and had the brutal, Jew-baiting Russian Tarabas repent his cruelty and die as a repentant monk-like vagrant, full of remorse and humility. In the outstanding novel Der arme Verschwender (1936), Weiss equally addressed issues of power and control; but, even more than Roth, he restricted

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this to a purely personal rather than societal level. The approach of both authors to the realities of the 1930s thus remained essentially oblique. By 1938 this could no longer remain the case. Whereas until the Anschluss, Roth as a private individual had retained enough despairing faith — or self-delusion — to try and engineer the return of the Habsburgs, the narrator in Die Kapuzinergruft succumbs to utter despair when confronted with the reality of the annexation of Austria to the Third Reich. The final, poignant words of the Austrian patriot outside the Kapuzinergruft (Capuchin Crypt) in Vienna, where the emperors lie buried, bears witness to the total collapse of morale Roth himself suffered when Hitler grabbed power in Austria: “Wohin soll ich jetzt, ein Trotta? . . .” (Where shall I go now, me, a Trotta? . . .).34 The hapless reactions of the narrator in the face of history are, however, a faithful reflection of the past-oriented nostalgic conservatism of Roth himself.35 That past is not flawless, as the novel makes abundantly clear. Indeed, Roth’s contempt for the “fröhliche Apokalypse” (merry apocalypse) in decadent Vienna on the eve of war in 1914 inspires one of the most celebrated sections in Die Kapuzinergruft. However, the writer’s political conservatism, coupled with personal despair, permit him no vision of the future either for himself or for his fictional creation. Only in legend, concluding with a good and friendly death, will Roth’s writing find a solution to the dilemma of the present.36 Ernst Weiss’s narrator, on the other hand, springs a last surprise. Throughout his fictional oeuvre, Weiss projects a relentless sense of the futility and hopelessness of the world that his characters inhabit. Yet at the last, in a gesture at odds with the author’s own personal despair and pessimism, the eyewitness glimpses hope for the future. Franz Ferdinand Trotta, bearing the name of the man whose murder in Sarajevo had triggered the Great War, asks rhetorically: where now? An answer is provided by Weiss’s narrator: leave France! Go to Spain! Fight Franco, oppose Fascism not with words, but with direct action! In fiction at least, Weiss challenges and transcends his own conservative despair. What ill health had previously prevented the author from doing, his fictional creation is able to carry out in the world of the imagination.37

Heimito von Doderer — From National Socialist to Austrian Patriot Heimito von Doderer, the scion of a recently ennobled Protestant family, was born in Weidlingau, on the edge of imperial Vienna, on 5 September 1896. Just two years previously, Joseph Roth had been born in Brody, a small, predominantly Jewish town on the Empire’s Galician fringe. As young men, both Roth and Doderer fought to defend the House of

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Habsburg — Roth as a humble rifleman, the patrician Doderer serving in the cavalry before being taken prisoner of war and imprisoned in Siberia. Roth also claimed to have been captured by the Russians, but this was probably yet another of the many myths he wove about his life. In Paris in the 1930s, Roth let it be known that he had actually served in the cavalry during the war, and even took to wearing the lower part of an Austrian cavalry officer’s uniform. Both Roth and Doderer also gravitated to Roman Catholicism in the 1930s, and as political conservatives and monarchists each excelled in chronicling the annals of the dying Empire. In 1933 Roth was forced into a French exile that ended in death, in 1937 Doderer elected to abandon Austria for a time to seek his fortune (without success) in the Third Reich. There, however, similarities between the two end. In fact, Doderer’s path through life marks him out from every the other writer examined here. He was a child of the Viennese Establishment who knew neither exile, racial discrimination, nor persecution. By the time he died in 1939, Roth had created a body of work that guaranteed his status in the eyes of posterity. At this juncture Doderer was still struggling to make a name for himself, a publishing career stretching back like Roth’s to 1923 having brought neither fame nor fortune. Whereas Roth’s political despair tempted him to romanticize the past, Doderer’s frustrated ambition led him to romanticize the future, and like many Austrian Protestants, he became a Nazi.38 He thus cast his lot with a party dedicated to wiping the state of Austria from the map of Europe and the idea of Austria from the hearts and minds of its citizens. By the 1950s, however, the apparently repentant Doderer had put his pan-Germanism behind him and managed to reinvent himself in the new Second Republic as the very essence of an Austrian writer.39 In April 1929, Doderer’s mentor and father figure, the artist-cumwriter Albert Paris Gütersloh, wrote a letter to the publisher Rudolf Haybach in which he gleefully anticipated the demise of the Austrian Republic. Doderer quotes this approvingly in his “Skizzenbuch” (Sketchbook): Glaube mir, daß der Kampf, den Du nötig fühlst, von mir bis zum letzten durchgefochten werden wird. Ich glaube nur, dass wir, ausgehend die Malerei und Literatur zu ordnen, den österreichischen Staat stürzen werden.40 [Believe me, the battle you feel is necessary will be fought through to the end by me. I only believe that by putting painting and literature in order we shall topple the Austrian state.]

Gütersloh’s influence on Doderer was immense, not just on a personal level, but also through his Bekenntnisse eines modernen Malers (Confessions of a Modern Painter, 1926), a mixture of theory and autobiography

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characterized by a glorification of the irrational, a detestation of the liberal, and support for the “Führerprinzip.” On 1 April 1933 — also the day of the national boycott of Jewish businesses in Germany — Heimito von Doderer, who was not a fool, joined the NSDAP, then still a legal party in Austria.41 Only after a period of “Schreibverbot” between 1945 and 1950, when party membership counted against him in the newly-founded Second Republic, did Doderer finally establish his renown. This was thanks to two enormously long novels, Die Strudlhofstiege oder Melzer und die Tiefe der Jahre (The Strudlhof Steps, 1951) and its even bulkier sequel Die Dämonen: Nach der Chronik des Sektionsrates Geyrenhoff (The Demons, 1956). Suddenly basking in his reputation as the “Grand Old Man” of Viennese letters, feted by politicians and literati alike, the older Doderer achieved something rarely achieved by any Austrian writer, “Aryan” or Jewish: he achieved fame, acclaim and acceptance in his own lifetime. By the time the “Großer Österreichischer Staatspreis” (Great Austrian State Prize) came his way in 1957, Doderer’s Nazi past had been brushed a long way under the red carpet. His was no isolated example, either. A similar process of domestic cleansing enabled the “Staatspreis” to be awarded to several other politically compromised, conservatively-minded writers in the 1950s: Felix Braun in 1951, Rudolf Henz in 1953, Max Mell in 1954, and Franz Karl Ginzkey in 1957.42 Only a decade after Doderer’s death in 1966 would skeptical West German scholars43 begin to examine the political implications of Doderer’s oeuvre in a way that brought them into conflict with the “gullible hagiographers”44 who had worked so hard to cement his place in the Austrian canon. Prominent amongst these were returning Jewish émigrés such as Friedrich Torberg and Hans Weigel (not mincing words, Doderer’s biographer and erstwhile secretary Wolfgang Fleischer calls them “Alibi-Juden”45) whose virulent anti-Communism probably predisposed them to Doderer’s fundamental conservatism. Despite such impeccable support, the irony of the postwar Doderer — an enthusiastic former Nazi — being reborn as the cheerleader for a specifically Austrian literature needs little further comment. Not for nothing does his alter ego in Die Strudlhofstiege and Die Dämonen bear the name René (French for “reborn”). In fact, so confident was he that even his pre-war writing had been free of any political shading that in 1951 Doderer challenged anyone to find a single line in anything he had ever written that revealed a “kackebraun” (shit-brown) mindset.46 The essential correctness of this cocksure claim seems borne out not just by the loud support of returning Jewish exiles, but also by the publication in translation in several former Communist Bloc countries of two of Doderer’s novels written in the 1930s and published in Munich with the then Nazi-leaning firm C. H. Beck. Ein Mord den jeder begeht (Every Man a Murderer) appeared in 1938, the earlier historical novel Ein Umweg (A Diversion), a “Roman aus dem österreichischen Barock” (Novel from

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the Austrian Baroque), though completed in 1934, was eventually published in 1940.47 Revealingly, neither of these pre-war works, nor indeed any other of Doderer’s writing, ever appeared in the German Democratic Republic. There, unlike in Poland or Romania, the authorities would have been more aware of his submerged Nazi past. Equally revealingly, in a survey of twentieth-century Austrian authors published in East Berlin in 1988, Doderer — despite being the pre-eminent postwar Austrian novelist — does not warrant a mention, apart from a brief comment in the introduction placing him among a group of conservatively inclined writers who emphasize tradition.48 In 1954 Doderer looked back disparagingly on both Ein Umweg and Ein Mord den jeder begeht and dismissed them for their technical shortcomings. He felt they were too plot-driven.49 Set in the immediate aftermath of the Thirty Years’ War, Ein Umweg had started life as a novella; Ein Mord den jeder begeht appears superficially to be a modern detective novel, but one where the rationalist assumptions of a narrative form unresponsive to political manipulation are subverted by the role of chance and the promptings of dreams in the unraveling of the mystery. This may make it the first anti-detective novel in German fiction, the forerunner of a genre made famous by the postwar stories of Friedrich Dürrenmatt.50 Celebrating the triumph of the irrational, both Ein Umweg and Ein Mord den jeder begeht reflect the Spengler-dominated intellectual climate of the 1920s and 1930s in Austria and Germany, which, in the aftermath of war, rejected optimistic nineteenth-century notions of progress. Both works are dominated by a deep pessimism about people’s ability to control their own destiny, but their irrationalism may, paradoxically, owe as much to Viennese psychoanalysis as to the broader intellectual currents manifesting themselves in National Socialism. The arrestingly Freudian opening to Ein Mord den jeder begeht could surely not have been predicted from a Nazi author publishing with a Nazi firm whose opinion of Freud was not high:51 Jeder bekommt seine Kindheit über den Kopf gestülpt wie einen Eimer. Später erst zeigt sich, was darin war. Aber ein ganzes Leben lang rinnt das an uns herunter, da mag einer die Kleider oder auch Kostüme wechseln wie er will.52 [Everyone gets their childhood poured over their head like a bucket. Only later are the contents revealed. But they run down us for a lifetime, no matter how often you change your clothes or costume.]

There are other important features in Ein Mord den jeder begeht that appear to distance it from conventional Nazi values. Above all, the novel seems devoid of “völkisch” elements, and the main character Conrad Castiletz, though blond and blue-eyed, makes a hash of his life — Doderer later

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referred to the first part of the novel, set in the Third District of Vienna where he himself grew up, as an extended personal biography. Of the Nazis’ brash optimism about the future of their country, their race and their world, there is no evidence whatsoever in a novel whose main action takes place in Swabia and Berlin. In one aspect alone does Nazi ideology seem reflected in Ein Mord den jeder begeht, as an American critic pointed out as long ago as 1965, and that is in Doderer’s portrayal of what he openly calls “Brückenmenschen” (bridge people).53 These are people whose function is merely to facilitate the lives of others: “dazu gehört, daß sie am Ende übergangen werden, diese ‘pontifices’” (it’s their lot to be walked over, these “pontifices”).54 Ein Mord den jeder begeht was the first of Doderer’s novels to appear with C.  H. Beck, who remained his postwar publisher, although now under the name of the Biederstein Verlag.55 However, Doderer owed his entrée to the firm not to that novel, but to Ein Umweg, begun as early as 1931 when he was also working on the earliest drafts of Die Dämonen (then still known by its working title of “DD” — this abbreviation stood originally for the “Dicke Damen” [lardy ladies] with whom he was as obsessed in reality as he was in fiction56). Whereas “DD” is set in the First Republic, Ein Umweg plays in the aftermath of the Thirty Years’ War, and thus seems, superficially at least, worlds away from the contemporary setting of what was to become Die Dämonen. However, the two novels share a setting in Vienna and Eastern Austria, and closer examination reveals further parallels. Thematically, both books discuss sexual obsession as a determinant of human behavior, and both portray a troubled postwar Vienna split by ethnic differences and tensions. Doderer completed Part One of the novel originally known as “DD” in summer 1936, its title having changed to “Die Dämonen der Ostmark” (The Demons of the Ostmark) to make it more attractive to potential publishers. The demons in question are the Viennese Jews. Despite an obvious allusion to Dostoevsky, the novel’s title could hardly be more revealing of its author’s politics, thanks to its aping of the Nazis’ preferred designation for Austria. Swamped by a surge of racial pride, Doderer claimed his work was the first “von einem rein deutschen Autor” (by a purely German author) to portray “die jüdische Welt im Osten deutschen Lebensraumes” (the Jewish world in the eastern part of the German Lebensraum).57 He dismisses writers who had previously entered this arena, the reason for this disdain being clear and predictable for an antisemite boasting an impeccable German bloodline: “Denn die bisher darüber schrieben (Schnitzler, Wassermann etc. etc.) waren selbst Juden und ihre Hervorbringungen können wohl seit langem nicht mehr ernsthaft gelesen werden” (For those who wrote about it previously [Schnitzler, Wassermann etc. etc] were themselves Jews, and their effusions haven’t been able to be read seriously for a long time now).58

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It is, however, evidence of the contradictions in his character that Doderer also remained a staunch admirer of non-Viennese Jewish authors. Writing at his family’s country house in Prein an der Rax on 4 August 1925, he declares Kafka’s Der Prozeß (The Trial) to be among the best books he knows.59 Fourteen years later, in journal entries dated between 5–9 September 1939, Doderer mentions merely en passant the outbreak of war: “Indessen hat man übrigens den Krieg erklärt” (Meanwhile they have declared war). The throw-away fashion in which Doderer records this momentous event typifies his approach to writing as a whole. For him, literature always took precedence over life, his motto being “primere scribere deinde vivere”: write first and live later. Hence the center of his interest is not a world-shaking event, but remains “Franz K.,” of whom he speaks “wie nie vorher” (as never before).60 On 9 September, in language mimicking Kafka’s, Doderer notes that when reading him he is “ein Esser, der sich ernähren will” (an eater wishing to find nourishment).61 Similarly, throughout the 1920s and 1930s, Doderer’s diaries refer repeatedly and often appreciatively to the (pre-Marxist) criticism of Georg Lukács, a writer whom, although Jewish, he finds “fast ebenso schätzenswert wie fragwürdig” (almost as estimable as he is questionable).62 Shortly after finishing work on “Die Dämonen der Ostmark,” Doderer turned his back on Vienna and went to live in the Third Reich. He was convinced Germany would be a more suitable place for someone of his persuasion, since it had cleaned up the “liberale Schlammflut” (tide of liberal mud) that had swamped postwar Europe.63 Failing to find anywhere to stay in Munich, he moved on to Dachau, which in his diary for 16 July 1937 he describes as a “freundliches Städtchen auf dem Berge” (friendly little town on the hill).64 There he claims he can enjoy the blessing of living in freedom in a state governed by the rule of law.65 There is no mention in his diaries of the Dachau concentration camp. As Ritchie Robertson points out, however, indications of the camp were to be found everywhere in the town, from the omnipresent SS officers to the files of prisoners en route to their work in the porcelain factories. The camp even had a plant nursery attached to it, where townspeople went to buy trees and flowers for their gardens.66 Yet as we have seen, what Doderer so signally failed to observe at first hand, Ernst Weiss managed to evoke from distant Paris in the chapters of Der Augenzeuge, depicting the narrator’s imprisonment and torture in a Bavarian concentration camp described simply as “D.” Unable to complete “Die Dämonen der Ostmark” to his satisfaction, Doderer’s failure to find a publisher for Ein Umweg was long a bone of contention. At the height of his postwar success he still recalled how “außerordentlich deprimiert”67 (extraordinarily depressed) he had been because of it. A first version of the novel had been turned down by Eugen Diederichs Verlag in Jena in 1932. This was at a time when Doderer was

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in low spirits after the breakdown of his marriage to Gusti Hasterlik, a (normal-sized) baptized Jew whom, despite his underlying bisexuality, he had married in 1930 following a ten-year courtship. His diary at the time of the novel’s rejection rails against liberalism, rationalism, and the state of Viennese publishing: “Fast alles jüdisch und daher jetzt zergehend wie Eis in der Hand” (Almost everything Jewish and therefore now disappearing like ice in the hand).68 Doderer’s entrenched antisemitism is inextricably linked to his long and difficult relationship with Gusti Hasterlik, whom he never actually lived with, and whom he only divorced after the Anschluss.69 An early literary reflection of that antisemitism can be found in the little-known novel Das Geheimnis des Reichs (The Secret of the Empire, 1930), an account of the Russian revolution in which the brutality of the times is personified in the figure of Hugo Blau, a Viennese fashion salesman who deserts the Habsburgs for the Czech Legion before reverting once more to a legitimist position. This he then abandons for Bolshevism, before eventually meeting his end at the hands of the Red Army. Hugo Blau, a man of total moral turpitude, bears a surname as unmistakably Jewish as that of Joseph Roth.70 All too apparent here is the Nazi stereotype of the assimilated Jew as a self-seeking opportunist, lacking any bonds of allegiance that would enable him to transcend immediate self-interest. After completing a revised version of Ein Umweg in September 1934, Doderer dispatched it to Hesse & Becker in Leipzig, but with the same depressing result as before. Convinced he was a writer well-suited to the Third Reich, where supposedly “a new dawn had broken” for writers like him — “für Schriftsteller meiner Art (ist) nun ein Morgenrot angebrochen”71 — this latest rejection hit him especially hard. That Doderer came to write a historical novel fits both with his own training as an academic historian — his doctorate from the University of Vienna in 1925 was on a late medieval topic — and with the vogue for the genre in the 1930s amongst conservative-minded writers. Historical novels were certainly well-regarded in the Reich, but this soon led to over-production, as the National Socialist critic Walter Merzdorf noted in 1935, fearing the book market would soon be awash with them. In 1938, the pre-eminent Nazi critic Hellmuth Langenbucher warned of the flood of historical novels that, in the years 1935 and 1936, was threatening to assume what he considered “dangerous” proportions.72 The rejection of Ein Umweg must, therefore, be seen in the wider context, but also in the light of the novel itself, which reveals a good measure of political naivety on the author’s part. After all, this was a novel set in the Austrian baroque, a period of particular significance for all who believed in the existence of that specifically Austrian identity that the Third Reich wanted at all costs to obliterate. It is also a novel notably lacking the propagandistic fervor expected of an aspiring writer trying to

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curry favor with the arbiters of Nazi taste. There are, for example, no stylized portraits of great figures from the Germanic past, parading German-national values as a means of enthusing the readers for the National Socialist present and future.73 National Socialist ideology was keen to promote manly, warrior-like values, but the two main male figures in Ein Umweg, although military men, are devoid of anything remotely heroic: Paul Brandter is simply brutal, Manuel Cuendias is dreamy and idealistic. Equally problematic may have been also Doderer’s underlying methodology, which cannot be divorced from his academic training under the eminent historian Oswald Redlich. Although a work of fiction, Ein Umweg draws on historical sources for much of its substance, and therefore contrasts with “völkisch” versions of the historical novel that are concerned not with the quasi-objective portrait of a past era, but with the mythologizing of the past from an ideological perspective.74 Despite his obvious approval of the Third Reich, Doderer’s inability to conform to its narrower aesthetic dictates is not dissimilar to Anna Seghers’s difficulty in responding to the Socialist Realist expectations of the political movement she warmly supported. According to the later Lukács, the historical novel is about the portrayal of individuals in whom “die Lebensprobleme der Epoche unmittelbar und zugleich typisch zum Ausdruck kommen” (the everyday problems of the age are expressed directly and at the same time typically).75 This does not seem very different from what Doderer was trying to achieve in Ein Umweg, a novel that set out to grasp “den vielberufenen “Barockmenschen” im Zustande der Entstehung, in der Zeit seiner Bildung” (the much quoted “Baroque person” as he came about, at the time of his formation).76 Wendelin Schmidt-Dengler, Doderer’s best and most informed critic in matters both aesthetic and ideological, has claimed there is little in either Ein Umweg or in Ein Mord den jeder begeht to reveal the novels’ provenance in the 1930s.77 Nevertheless, a major contrast in Ein Umweg — that between the city and the countryside — is quite typical of “völkisch” writing, as is the novel’s glorification of the peasant’s relationship to the soil: “der Bauer (ist) nicht nur der sässigste und heimattreueste aller Menschen, sondern zugleich auch der Mann, dem die weite Erde ganz gehört” (The peasant is not only the most sedentary of all people and the most faithful to his region, at the same time he is also the man to whom the whole wide world belongs).78 Thematizing the links between the two branches of the Habsburg dominion in the seventeenth century, Ein Umweg highlights the tensions in Vienna between the host city and the “spanischen Fremdlingen in Wien” (Spanish foreigners in Vienna),79 who have “taken over” desirable residential areas of the capital. The Spaniards in the novels are portrayed as conventionally swarthy, while the Germanic stock is equally conventionally fair-skinned. Indeed, the novel as a whole displays an avid interest in the problems of ethnic

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confrontation and assimilation, even if we should hesitate to draw a direct parallel between Spaniards in the seventeenth century and Jews in the twentieth. According to the novel, even in the middle of the seventeenth century Austrians were obsessed with the recording of their bloodline in a “Stammbaum” (family tree).80 Historical novels are often coded versions of contemporary life, and Doderer regarded the novelist as “den eigentlichen contemporären Geschichts-Schreiber seiner Zeit” (the real historian of his age).81 Hence the rumblings of the Peasants’ Rebellion in Styria depicted in Ein Umweg can feasibly be related to the events of February 1934, in which Styrians, under Koloman Wallisch, played a crucial part.82 These events would have been fresh in the author’s memory when he completed the novel in September of that year. Similarly, in the novel’s depiction of the warlike activities of unemployed ex-soldiers, there are obvious parallels between Austria in the aftermath of the Thirty Years’ War and the situation in postwar Germany and Austria, where the antics of first the Freikorps and then the various paramilitary wings of the political parties were a constant scourge. Ein Umweg is driven by the socially inappropriate sexual obsession of the Spanish grandee Manuel Cuendias for the serving-girl Hanna, and traces his attempts at integration into Austro-German life as a means of coping with his inner demon. Unusually for someone of his background, Cuendias even tries to learn German, but all attempts at integration founder, including a relationship with the flaxen-blond Styrian Margret von Randegg. The notion that alien corn remains ever alien pervades the novel. The justification for this is provided by the Viennese student Ruodl Pleinacher, who teaches Cuendias German, but whose ideas belong at least as much to the earlier twentieth as to the mid-seventeenth century. His notion of a “Reichsidee” (imperial idea) that encourages unity in diversity is reminiscent of views held by some of National Socialism’s more naively intellectual supporters (such as Doderer). As Adam Wandruszka points out, ideas drawing on the nationalist notions of Herder and the Romantics, whilst also propagating the traditions of the monarchy, were particularly prevalent at the University of Vienna in the 1920s when Doderer studied there. Dismissive of parliamentary democracy, proponents of such views were searching for a supranational settlement that would protect the interests of ethnic Germans in the geopolitical settlement following the breakup of the Habsburg Empire.83 Equally, the language of Ein Umweg vacillates between an attempt to recapture seventeenth-century speech and the “völkisch” idiom of the 1930s. Pleinacher declares, for example, that all Swedish influence “gehört [. . .] vom deutschen Boden gedrängt” (should be dispatched from German soil) and that each individual people should remain firmly “in seiner Art und seinen Grenzen” (with its own kind and within its own borders).84

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An essay by Doderer of August 1933 entitled “Völker ohne Chauvinismus: Deutsches und russisches Nationalgefühl” (Peoples without Chauvinism: German and Russian National Sentiment) sheds further light on the notion of the “Reichsidee” expressed in Ein Umweg. Citing the well-worn lines from Emanuel Geibel’s poem “Deutschlands Beruf” (Germany’s Calling, 1861), Doderer contends that “das deutsche Wesen”85 is not fundamentally chauvinistic, but that Germans have to defend themselves against “zersetzende Gegner” (enemies who would tear them apart).86 Betraying the tendency to aestheticize politics that characterized the wider Nationalist movement, Doderer talks about this defense as “das großartige und heldische Schauspiel, das er diesem Jahrhunderte wieder einmal bietet” (the great and heroic drama that Germans once again offer this century).87 Reinhold Treml concludes that such passages display how very easily Doderer’s ideas mapped on to those of the National Socialist state.88 When in 1931 Doderer started work on “Dicke Damen,” a novel that in its ultimate guise as Die Dämonen would take him a quarter of a century to complete, his writing career was going nowhere.89 His most recent works — the critical study of his mentor Der Fall Gütersloh (The Case of Gütersloh, 1930) and the novel Das Geheimnis des Reichs — had achieved minimal impact. His mental state was febrile, his marriage on the rocks. Ein Umweg thus itself represents a diversion from that greater literary undertaking, which was itself inspired at least in part by marital distress.90 Like Grillparzer and Kafka before him, Doderer too doubted whether conventional matrimony could be compatible with literary creativity. In “Die Dämonen der Ostmark” Doderer’s alter ego René von Stangeler comments that he finds it absurd for a proper intellectual to have a wife.91 By July 1936, Doderer was already distancing himself from Ein Umweg, looking on it as something produced “von einem mir ganz fremden Organ unter einer Decke von Bewusstlosigkeit” (under a blanket of unconsciousness by an organ completely foreign to me).92 Nevertheless, in a letter to his publisher in 1939, Doderer concedes that without the two lesser works, Die Dämonen would have long been completed, but it would have been a disaster.93 If it is indeed true that Ein Umweg is less compatible with National Socialist ideology than its author thought (or indeed intended), then it appears equally so for “Die Dämonen der Ostmark.” As Wendelin Schmidt-Dengler observes, the 705-page manuscript, finished in the summer of 1936, and intended to portray the “Theatricum Judaicum” of contemporary Viennese life,94 failed to appear in print because its execution simply was not National Socialist enough. After the war, author and publisher alike set much store by this non-appearance, ascribing it to adverse political factors, but failing to specify which.95 Given the virulent tone of Doderer’s diaries and letters prior to the completion of the

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novel — not to mention its provocative title — the unstrident tenor of much of the writing in “Die Dämonen der Ostmark” comes as a surprise. The work is undeniably obsessed with Jews, but the overall tone less overtly antisemitic than might have been expected, especially given the unsavory evidence of the “Aide mémoire zu ‘Die Dämonen der Ostmark,’” a series of often overtly racist reflections that Doderer jotted down in his notebook in autumn 1934.96 The work is nevertheless deeply personal in its utterances, especially in the two autobiographical figures Stangeler and Schlaggenberg, each of whom is stormily involved with a Jewish woman. Problems in these relationships are seen to stem far more from the Gentile males than from their feisty, highly intelligent partners. As in the published version of Die Dämonen, Doderer has his novel narrated by the chronicler Geyrenhoff, a figure exuding a liberal humanism utterly at odds with the Doderer-figures, of whom he is frequently unsparing. Only on rare occasions does the author’s own animus against Jews invade the narrative. Geyrenhoff, although painfully aware of racial difference, is no racist. Through Geyrenhoff, Doderer again ponders the compatibility of marriage with artistic creativity, striving to come to terms with his own recent past via the medium of fiction. Nevertheless, the rhetoric of National Socialism does color the language occasionally, as when Geyrenhoff describes “jene unterirdische Spannung und Feindschaft einer tiefen Artfremdheit” (that subterranean tension and hostility between profoundly alien species)97 that exists between the deplorable Kajetan von Schlaggenberg and his wife Camy Schedik. Apart from showing bare-chested young men doing enthusiastic physical exercises together in the snow (which might reflect a Riefenstahlian attitude to body culture), there is relatively little in the novel to support the author’s strongly politicized assessment of his achievement (in contrast to the “Aide memoire”). The sympathetic Jewish businessman Siegfried Markbreiter refuses to conform to stereotype, as does the Jewish Selma Steuermann, characterized as “die Güte” (goodness itself).98 Nonetheless, the most sinister figure in the novel is the scheming, duplicitous, Polish-born Kammerat Levielle, né Levi.99 What the “Die Dämonen der Ostmark” presents is an often compelling account of a segment of Viennese society where Jews play a major role, but it is a work largely at odds with the outspokenly antisemitic tenor of Doderer’s diaries and letters during the period of the novel’s composition. To again cite Doderer’s own postwar defense of his pre-war writing, “Die Dämonen der Ostmark” is not obviously writing “im kackebraunen Sinne.” Equally, however, there can be no doubt that for much of the 1930s, for reasons both personal and political, Doderer was animated by a distaste for Jews and things Jewish and that when he reveals his feelings in diaries and letters there can be no question that the language employed is deeply colored by the spirit and vocabulary of National Socialism.100

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Throughout Doderer’s life there always ran a rebellious, non-conformist streak. To remain a member of the Nazi party in Austria after it was banned in 1934 was just one manifestation of this. Seemingly bizarre, however, was Doderer’s ever-growing awareness of his Austrian identity during the lead up to the annexation of March 1938, after which Austria became the “Ostmark” that all Austrian Nazis (and many other Austrians too) had long dreamed of. In Dachau, on 18 June 1937, Doderer even concluded: “Ich bin wieder Ausländer geworden, sapienti sat, et Deo gratias” (I have become a foreigner again, that’s all one needs to know, and thanks be to God).101 It is tempting to speculate whether this confession was triggered by a widely-publicized event near Regensburg that had taken place just twelve days previously. In a rite that captured the attention of the entire Reich, Hitler had unveiled a bust of the Austrian composer Anton Bruckner at Walhalla, the collection of marble sculptures of eminent “Germans” housed in a Doric-style temple overlooking the Danube. In his accompanying speech, Goebbels stressed that Bruckner, as a son of the Austrian land, was particularly destined to symbolize the inextinguishable intellectual and spiritual community of fate that embraces the entire German “Volk.”102 Thus the dedication of the Bruckner bust developed into a highly political act, the first symbolic “fetching home” of an Austrian into the German Reich.103 Though remaining just as antisemitic as ever — the bisexual author remained convinced race alone had caused his marriage’s breakdown — Doderer might well have found in the ceremony at Walhalla further grounds for his fear that the National Socialist state was failing to encourage that diversity within unity without which the “Reichsidee” became meaningless. Despite — perhaps even precisely because of — Doderer’s growing disillusionment with the reality of the Third Reich, Gütersloh felt he would be a willing recipient of the tendentious poem he sent him on the occasion of the Anschluss entitled “13. März 1938 zur Befreiung Österreichs und Südtyrols” (13 March 1938 on the liberation of Austria and South Tyrol), to which are appended the words: “Ich grüße Sie mit: Heil Hitler!” (I greet you with: Heil Hitler!).104 As the Nazi grip tightened, Doderer’s alienation expressed itself in two related ways: a belief in Austria’s separateness, and an attraction to Roman Catholicism, to which he formally converted in 1940. Although it was impossible to resign from the NSDAP, Doderer made it known he no longer wanted to be regarded as an active party member. However, as Doderer’s trenchant biographer notes, not all who knew him in the Second Republic were convinced that he had truly changed his colors. A prewar friend, the artist Marie-Louise Moteciszky, who had sought refuge in London, and whose brother was a Nazi victim, admitted she could never be sure whether Doderer’s recantation was not simply a lie.105 When trying to weigh the strength of Doderer’s commitment to Hitlerism in the

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1930s, one cannot help being reminded of Alfred Polgar’s famous quip that the Germans are first-class Nazis but lousy antisemites whereas the Austrians are lousy Nazis but first-class antisemites.106 While it is probably impossible to determine the extent of Doderer’s allegiance to National Socialism, one thing is certain: from the late 1930s onwards, a new optimism enters his imaginative writing that is at odds with the gloom of Ein Umweg and Ein Mord den jeder begeht. This is apparent in a new novel, Die erleuchteten Fenster oder die Menschwerdung des Amtsrates Julius Zihal (The Illuminated Windows, or, the Humanization of Councilor Julius Zihal), which was completed in 1939 but had to wait until 1951 before being published.107 Short and satirical, at times absurdist, the work is set in the fairly recent past: the last peacetime days of the Habsburg Empire so loathed by Adolf Hitler. The basis for much of the novel’s humor is in questionable taste, being the voyeurism of the main character, a freshly pensioned-off imperial tax collector given to spying upon and recording the night-time activities of his female neighbors. This he does in a warped attempt to fill the chasm in his life that retirement from the civil service has opened up. Doderer satirizes here the way bureaucracy stifles and perverts its practitioners, and Zihal’s punishment for his perversion is to be caught out in humiliating circumstances and plunged into existential uncertainty. This, however, also releases him from the grip of his obsession, allowing him to enter into a new relationship with both language and reality. The bureaucratic cadences of the tax manuals that had hitherto shaped his speech disappear. In the evening of his life, Zihal finds contentment and is even rewarded with conjugal bliss. The sexual puritanism of the Third Reich was probably itself enough to prevent the novel’s publication before 1945. To that, however, must be added the seditious nature of a novel looking back with warmth and detached humor on the days when Austria was still independent. As Die erleuchteten Fenster suggests, the Empire was far from perfect, but for all its faults, human fulfillment for even the unlikeliest individuals had been possible there. A novel completed just a year after the Anschluss, which ironically but lovingly evokes a country that no longer dared speak its name, destined to lose its identity forever in the Thousand Year Reich, was never going to butter any parsnips with the cultural commissars of the National Socialist state. Nor was a novel that pinpointed through humor the socially and linguistically perverting tendencies of an all-pervasive and prying state apparatus, even when that state was the Habsburg Monarchy rather than the new Germany. The evidence of Die erleuchteten Fenster confirms a trend that was already apparent when Doderer was living in Dachau. At a time when the Third Reich was in seemingly unstoppable ascendancy, Heimito von Doderer was already on the road to reclaiming a specifically Austrian cultural identity at odds with the pan-German ideology of National Socialism to which

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he overtly subscribed. Following the collapse of the Third Reich in 1945, Doderer was therefore perfectly poised to join the general movement in the reborn Second Republic, which — aided and abetted by the Moscow Declaration of 1943 — was only too eager to dissociate itself from Austria’s seminal contribution to Nazism in both theory and practice. The massive success of first Die Strudlhofstiege (a novel set in the years 1911–13 and 1923–25) and then of Die Dämonen (set in 1925–27)108 can be ascribed in no small measure to their author’s abilities to deflect readers from the uncomfortable facts of the very recent past, and through the medium of quasi-historical fiction reconnect the newly independent Austria with its relatively recent but still prefascist history.109 For most of his life Doderer had been out of step with the society he lived in. Finally falling into line, he achieved the fame he had long craved. It came, however, in a country living a lie that would only be exposed twenty years after his death. To employ some of the idiosyncratic terminology that permeates the theoretical/philosophical sections of Doderer’s diaries, the reborn Austria — whose cultural identity Doderer helped shape — was also a land whose “Apperzeptions-Verweigerung” (refusal to apperceive) meant it failed to confront the world as it was (and recently had been). The reasons for this failure are easy enough to pinpoint, if not condone, and Austria has been almost universally reviled for refusing to face up to its Nazi history until compelled to do so in the wake of the Waldheim scandal of the 1980s. What often escapes critics who condemn Austria for its political amnesia is the depth of the scars left by the civil war of 1934. This was a calamity that had not befallen inter-war Germany, and its memory and consequences dominated the mindset of the founding fathers of the Second Republic, united in their quest for postwar consensus. Discouraged by the state and its institutions from confronting the truth about their complicity in the crimes of National Socialism, many Austrians during the first decades of their country’s new existence now inhabited what Doderer would have termed the “Pseudo-Konkretion” of a “zweite Wirklichkeit” (second reality). In the historical evasions and aesthetic reformulations of this fine writer and flawed human being they could not have found literature more fitting to represent the mentality of both themselves and their reborn state.

Notes Some material in this chapter previously appeared in “Austrians in Paris: The last novels of Joseph Roth and Ernst Weiß,” in Co-existent Contradictions: Joseph Roth 1896–1938, ed. Helen Chambers (Riverside: Ariadne, 1991), 201–14; in “Heimito von Doderer and National Socialism,” German Life and Letters 41, no. 2 (1988): 145–58; and in “Heimito von Doderers Ein Umweg: Gedanken zu

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einem ‘Barockroman’ der dreißiger Jahre,” in Untersuchungen zum Werk Heimito von Doderers, ed. Jan Papior (Poznan: Wydawnictwo Naukowe Uniwersytetu im. Adama Mickiewicza, 1991), 75–90. 1

In Die Fackel 889, “Nachrufe auf Karl Kraus,” the satirist gives his bête noire Großmann the last word (16). 2

Stefan Großmann, Die Schultern der Mizzi Palme, ed. Traugott Krischke (Vienna: Kremayr & Scheriau, 1995), 182–96. See Wien-Berlin: Mit einem Dossier zu Stefan Großmann, ed. Bernhard Fetz & Hermann Schlösser (Vienna: Paul Szolnay, 2001). 3

Joseph Roth, Juden auf Wanderschaft (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2000), 55. 4

Joseph Roth, Briefe 1911–1936, ed. Hermann Kesten (Cologne, Berlin: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1970), 448. 5

Sven Spieker, “Österreicher, Juden, Emigranten und Rivalen: Aspekte des Pariser Exils von Ernst Weiß und Joseph Roth,” Weiß-Blätter 3 (1985): 18. 6

Spieker, “Österreicher, Juden, Emigranten und Rivalen,” 8.

7

Franz Haas, Der Dichter von der traurigen Gestalt (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1986), 215. 8

In the case of Ernst Weiss, see Frithjof Trapp, Der Augenzeuge — ein Psychogramm der deutschen Intellektuellen zwischen 1914 und 1936 (Frankfurt am Main: Büchergilde Gutenberg, 1986), 11–13. 9

See Egon Friedell, ed., Das Altenbergbuch (Vienna, Zürich, Leipzig: Verlag der Wiener Graphischen Werkstätte, 1921), 77. 10

Roth, Briefe 1911–1936, 148.

11

Franz Kafka, Tagebücher 1910–1923 (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1967), 219.

12

See Klaus Peter Hinze, “‘Und das mir, dem Antikommunisten’: Die politische Haltung des Romanciers Ernst Weiß,” Text + Kritik 76 (1982): 46–58. 13

David Bronsen, Joseph Roth: Eine Biographie (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1974), 488–89. 14

Bronsen, Joseph Roth: Eine Biographie, 494.

15

Margarita Pazi, Fünf Autoren aus dem Prager Kreis (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1978), 71. 16

Pazi, Fünf Autoren, 103.

17

J.  M. Coetzee, “Emperor of Nostalgia,” The New York Review of Books, 28 February 2002. 18

See Ulrike Laengle, “Les dernières années d’Ernst Weiss (1934–1940), conditions de vie, contacts culturels et production littéraire,” Allemagnes d’aujourd’hui 89 (1984): 71–86. Weiss made clear his intention to volunteer his medical services in an autobiographical sketch he prepared for the “American Guild for German Cultural Freedom” in 1938. See Trapp, Der Augenzeuge — ein Psychogramm, 10. 19

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Bronsen, Joseph Roth: Eine Biographie, 517.

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20

For a feisty defense of the merits of Die Kapuzinergruft see Kati Tonkin, Joseph Roth’s March into History: From the Early Novels to “Radetzkymarsch” and “Die Kapuzinergruft” (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2008), 167–96. 21

The novel was first published in 1938 by De Gemeenschap, Bilthoven, Holland. 22

Hitler often used just his initials when signing his early watercolors.

23

For further details see David Lewis, The Man Who Invented Hitler: The Making of the Führer (London: Headline Book Publishing, 2003). 24

When the original version finally came out in 1963, the publishers were forced give it a new title, Ich, der Augenzeuge, so that it would not be confused with the recent German translation of Alain Robbe-Grillet’s Le Voyeur, which had also appeared as Der Augenzeuge. The opening chapters of the otherwise lost revised version were published in 1940 in Thomas Mann’s journal Maß und Wert under the title of Der Narrenkaiser (The Fools’ Emperor). 25

Spieker, “Österreicher, Juden, Emigranten und Rivalen,” 16.

26

Otto Weininger, Geschlecht und Charakter (Vienna: Wilhelm Braumüller, 1903), 452. See also Otto Weininger, Sex and Character: An Investigation of Fundamental Principles, trans. Ladislaus Löb, ed. Daniel Steuer and Laura Marcus (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2005). 27

Ernst Weiß, Der Augenzeuge (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1982), 12–13.

28

See Norman Ächtler, “Hitler’s Hysteria: War Neurosis and Mass Psychology in Ernst Weiss’s Der Augenzeuge,” German Quarterly 80, no. 3 (2007): 325–49. See also Norman Ächtler, “Kriegstrauma und Massenpsychologie: Ernst Weiß’ Der Augenzeuge und das Phänomen Hitler,” Krieg und Literatur/War and Literature: Internationales Jahrbuch zur Kriegs- und Antikriegsliteraturforschung/International Yearbook on War and Anti-War Literature 13 (2007): 23–47. Ächtler rejects the widespread view of Der Augenzeuge as a historically reliable source to fill the biographical gaps in Hitler’s life. Stressing the fictive nature of the “A. H.” character, Ächtler underlines the glaring contrast between the classically Freudian techniques used by Weiss’s narrator in curing A.  H. and the published work of Forster that doubts the very existence of a specific condition that can by defined as “Kriegsneurose” (shell-shock). 29 See Im Zeichen Hiobs: Jüdische Schriftsteller und deutsche Literatur im 20. Jahrhundert, ed. G.  E. Grimm and H. Bayerdörfer (Königstein/Ts: Athenäum, 1985), 12. 30 In his brilliant and suggestive study, Trapp convincingly shows how in an extreme reaction to his wife’s desire to save her husband’s life, the narrator himself succumbs to the latent antisemitism he rationally deplores as a democrat and opponent of A.H. (Trapp, Der Augenzeuge — ein Psychogramm, 30). 31

Trapp, Der Augenzeuge — ein Psychogramm, 44–45.

32

Joseph Roth, Die Kapuzinergruft, ed. A. F. Bance (London: Harrap, 1972), 142–44. 33

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Ächtler, “Hitler’s Hysteria,” 344.

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34

Joseph Roth, Die Kapuzinergruft (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1999), 189. 35

This is disputed in Tonkin, Joseph Roth’s March into History, 168.

36

Joseph Roth, Die Legende vom heiligen Trinker, in Der Leviathan: Erzählungen (Munich: dtv, 1978), 168–96.

37

Trapp, however, argues that the narrator’s decision to go to Spain should not be construed as a political act. Rather it should be seen as his final decision to break with his wife, whom he cannot forgive for her “treachery” in handing over Forster’s case notes to the Nazis, and thereby ensuring his life-saving release from the concentration camp. See Trapp, Der Augenzeuge — ein Psychogramm, 29. 38

For a long time the Catholic Church supported the notion of Austrian independence, perceiving that its influence could be made more widely felt there than in an Austria that was part of a greater German state. 39

Doderer’s stylization of himself as “verfolgt” (persecuted) after he was forbidden to publish his works after 1945 will strike many as distasteful. See Heimito von Doderer, Tangenten: Tagebuch eines Schriftstellers 1940–1950 (Munich: Biederstein, 1995), 64. 40

See Heimito von Doderer, Albert Paris Gütersloh, Briefwechsel 1928–1962, ed. Reinhold Treml (Munich: Biederstein, 1986), 38. 41

Gütersloh’s Bekenntnisse are proto-fascist, as were his opinions throughout the 1930s. Turned down for membership of the NSDAP, he eventually found his work condemned by the Nazis as degenerate. This aided his postwar career considerably, when he became a leading light in the development of the “fantastic realism” movement in Viennese painting. His literary career culminated in the novel Sonne und Mond (Sun and Moon, 1962), in which Doderer is lampooned as a verbose Nazi in the figure of Ariovist von Wissendrum. With this their long relationship came to an abrupt end. 42

See Karl Müller, Zäsuren ohne Folgen: Das lange Leben der literarischen Antimoderne Österreichs seit den 30er Jahren (Salzburg: Otto Müller, 1990). 43

See Anton Reininger, Die Erlösung des Bürgers; eine ideologiekritische Studie (Bonn: Bouvier, 1975); Hans Joachim Schröder, Apperzeption und Vorurteil: Untersuchungen zur Reflexion Heimito von Doderers (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1976). 44

Wendelin Schmidt-Dengler, “Heimito von Doderer: Rückzug auf die Sprache,” in Österreichische Literatur der Dreißiger Jahre, ed. Klaus Amann and Albert Berger (Vienna, Cologne & Graz: Böhlau, 1985), 291–302, here 297. 45

Wolfgang Fleischer, Das verleugnete Leben: Die Biographie des Heimito von Doderer (Vienna: Kremeyr & Scheriau, 1996), 404. 46

Elizabeth C. Hesson, Twentieth-Century Odyssey: A Study of Heimito von Doderer’s “Die Dämonen” (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1982), 86. 47

Ein Unweg appeared in a Romanian translation in 1967, Ein Mord den jeder begeht appeared in Polish, Estonian and Serbo-Croat. For details see Andrew Barker, “Heimito von Doderers Ein Umweg: Gedanken zu einem ‘Barockroman’ der dreißiger Jahre,” in Untersuchungen zum Werk Heimito von Doderers, ed. Jan

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171

Papior (Poznan: Wydawnictwo Naukowe Uniwersytetu im. Adama Mickiewicza, 1991), 75–90, here 76. 48

Österreichische Literatur des 20. Jahrhunderts: Einzeldarstellungen von einem Autorenkollektiv, ed. Horst Haase and Antal Mádl (Berlin: Volk und Wissen, 1988), 45. 49

Heimito von Doderer, Commentarii 1951 bis 1956, ed. Wendelin SchmidtDengler (Munich: Biederstein, 1976), 281. 50

Vincent Docherty, “The reception of Heimito von Doderer as exemplified by the critics’ response to Ein Mord den jeder begeht and Die Merowinger” (PhD diss., Glasgow University, 1985). See also Ritchie Robertson, “Every Man a Murderer? Violent Death in German Modernism,” The Bernays Lecture 2003 (London: King’s College, 2004). 51 See Kai Luehrs-Kaiser, “‘Schnürlzieherei der Assoziationen’: Doderer als Schüler Freuds, Bühlers und Swobodas,” in Gassen und Landschaften: Heimito von Doderers ‘Dämonen’ vom Zentrum und vom Rande betrachtet, ed. Gerald Sommer (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2004), 279–92. 52

Heimito von Doderer, Ein Mord den jeder begeht (Munich: Biederstein, 1959),

5. 53 Michael Shaw, “An interpretation of Doderer’s novel Ein Mord den jeder begeht,” Symposium 19, no. 2 (1965): 153. 54

Doderer, Ein Mord den jeder begeht, 188–89.

55

Between 1946 and 1988 the publishing house C. H. Beck also produced many works under the imprimatur Biederstein Verlag. 56 In 1929 Doderer placed an advert in the Neue Freie Presse seeking contact with a forty-year-old, distinguished Viennese Jewish woman “von nur sehr starker korpulenter größerer Figur und schwarzem Haar.” See Hesson, Twentieth-Century Odyssey, 21. 57 Heimito von Doderer, Tagebücher 1920–1939, vol. 2, ed. Wendelin SchmidtDengler, Martin Loew-Cadonna, and Gerald Sommer (Munich: C.  H. Beck, 1996), 820. 58

Doderer, Tagebücher 1920–1939, vol. 2, 820.

59

Doderer, Tagebücher 1920–1939, vol. 1, 273.

60

Doderer, Tagebücher 1920–1939, vol. 2, 1227.

61

Doderer, Tagebücher 1920–1939, vol. 2, 1230.

62

See Barker, “Heimito von Doderers Ein Umweg,” 84. For Luckács’s impact on Doderer see Kai Luehrs-Kaiser, “Fledermausflügel im Bücherkasten: Wirkungen Lukács’ im Werk Heimito von Doderers,” in“Erst bricht man Fenster: Dann wird man selbst eines”; Zum 100. Geburtstag von Heimito von Doderer, ed. Gerald Sommer and Wendelin Schmidt-Dengler (Riverside: Ariadne, 1997), 107–20. Luckács’s Die Theorie des Romans had first appeared in 1920. Doderer’s own theoretical work Grundlagen und Theorie des Romans was published in 1959. In the 1930s he still disclaimed any interest in producing such a work: “Eine Theorie der Prosa-Erzählung zu geben, wie Lukács das versucht hat [. . .] liegt mir gänzlich fern” (Doderer, Tagebücher 1920–1939, vol. 2, 686).

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63

Heimito von Doderer, “Die Dämonen der Ostmark.” Unpublished manuscript, Austrian National Library, Vienna, Ser. n. 14.071–72. 64

Doderer, Tagebücher 1920–1939, vol. 2, 1021.

65

“Dass man nämlich in einem eminent sozialen Rechts-Staate lebt, und zwar in jener Freiheit, wie sie gemeinhin verstanden wird. Das sind Wohltaten” (Doderer, Gütersloh, Briefe 1928–1962, 105). 66

Robertson, “Every Man a Murderer?” 18.

67

Doderer, Commentarii, 224.

68

Doderer, Tagebücher 1920–1939, vol. 1, 541.

69

Doderer’s vile behavior towards Gusti Hasterlik is examined in depressing detail in Wolfgang Fleischer’s biography of Doderer, Das verleugnete Leben. 70

The names of certain colors were adopted by many Jews in the eighteenth century when forced to adopt European-style surnames. Beside Blau and Roth, Grün, Schwarz and Weiss proved especially popular. 71

Doderer, Tagebücher 1920–1939, vol. 1, 650.

72

See Kunst und Kultur im deutschen Faschismus, ed. Ralf Schnell (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1978), 188. 73

See H.-G. Meier, Romane der konservativen Revolution in der Nachfolge von Nietzsche und Spengler (1918–1941) (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1983), 85. 74

Meier, Romane der konservativen Revolution, 85.

75

Georg Lukács, Probleme des Realismus III: Der historische Roman, in Werke, vol. 6 (Neuwied/Berlin: Aufbau, 1965), 346–47.

76

Doderer, Tagebücher 1920–1939, vol. 2, 820.

77

Schmidt-Dengler, “Heimito von Doderer: Rückzug auf die Sprache,” 292.

78

Heimito von Doderer, Ein Umweg (Munich: C. H. Beck’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1940), 236. As Schmidt-Dengler has pointed out, Doderer disdained the kail-yard writing of “Heimatdichter” such as Karl Heinrich Waggerl (“Heimito von Doderer: Rückzug auf die Sprache,” 297). See Doderer, Tagebücher 1920– 1939, vol. 2, 936. 79

Doderer, Ein Umweg, 31–32.

80

Doderer, Ein Umweg, 33.

81

Doderer, Tagebücher 1920–1939, vol. 2, 818.

82

See for example, Bert Brecht’s 1934 fragment Koloman Wallisch Kantate (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997), dedicated to Wallisch’s resistance in Upper Styria. 83

See Adam Wandruszka, “Österreichs politische Struktur: Zur Entwicklung der Parteien und politischen Bewegungen,” in Geschichte der Republik Österreich, ed. H. Benedikt (1954), 289–486. Quoted in Gerd Schattner, Der Traum vom Reich in der Mitte: Bruno Brehm; Eine monographische Darstellung zum operationalen Charakter des historischen Romans nach den Weltkriegen (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1996), 39. 84

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Doderer, Ein Umweg, 117, 118.

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85

“Und es mag am deutschen Wesen / Einmal noch die Welt genesen” (And one day by the German soul / Shall the world be made whole). See Emanuel Geibel, Werke, vol. 2 (Leipzig, Vienna: Bibliographisches Institut, 1918), 218–20. Translation quoted from Alan Kramer, Dynamic of Destruction: Culture and Mass Killing in the First World War (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007), 181. 86

Doderer, Tagebücher 1920–1939, vol. 1, 610.

87

Doderer, Tagebüche 1920–1939, vol. 1, 610.

88

Doderer and Gutersloh, Briefe, 1928–1962, 30–31.

89

In its finished form Die Dämonen culminates in the burning of the Vienna Palace of Justice on 15 July 1927. This seminal moment in the history of the First Republic is reflected in a less direct, but equally intense, form in Canetti’s novel Die Blendung, a work that was completed in 1931, just as Doderer began his. In Das Augenspiel (1985) Canetti describes in unflattering terms an encounter with Doderer in the 1930s. As Wolfgang Fleischer points out, however, Canetti’s account bears no relationship to historically verifiable facts. See Fleischer, Das verleugnete Leben, 244. 90

See Barker, “Heimito von Doderers Ein Umweg,” 78–79.

91

The manuscript of the novel is located in the Austrian National Library, Vienna. NB Ser. n. 14.238, 218. 92

Doderer, Tagebücher 1920–1939, vol. 2, 812.

93

The letter is located in the Austrian National Library, Vienna, ÖNB Ser. n. 14.075. 94

Doderer, Tagebücher 1920–1939, vol. 2, 820.

95

Schmidt-Dengler, “Heimito von Doderer: Rückzug auf die Sprache,” 296.

96

See Gerald Sommer, “In die ‘Sackgasse’ und wieder hinaus: Über den zur Romantendenz erhobenen Antisemitismus in Heimito von Doderers ‘Aide mémoire,’” in Sommer and Luehrs-Kaiser, ed., Gassen und Landschaften, 73. 97

Heimito von Doderer, “Dämonen: Studien 11,” ÖNB Ser. n. 14.239, 419.

98

Heimito von Doderer, “Dämonen: Studien 1,” ÖNB Ser. n. 14.238, 213.

99

See Sommer and Luehrs-Kaiser, ed., Gassen und Landschaften, 57. In the published version of the novel Levielle becomes half-Parisian. There may well also be an element of bilingual punning in the naming of another of the novel’s negatively portrayed Jewish characters, Cornel Lasch. In French, “lâche” means cowardly. Wolfgang Schediwy (pers. comm.) notes that amongt the circles in which Doderer moved the name Lasch would have been readily construed negatively. Duden gives its meaning as “schlaff, lässig.” 100

The extent to which the final version of the novel still bears the stain of its conception is discussed at length in F. Bleker, ed., “Beiträge zu einer laufenden Debatte über Antisemitismus in Heimito von Doderers Die Dämonen,” in Sommer and Luehrs-Kaiser, ed., Gassen und Landschaften, 413–65. 101

Doderer, Tagebücher 1920–1939, vol. 2, 1006.

102

Christa Brüstle, “The Musical Image of Bruckner,” in The Cambridge Companion to Bruckner, ed. John Williamson (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004), 244–60, here 257.

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Brüstle, “The Musical Image of Bruckner,” 257.

104

Doderer and Gütersloh, Briefe, 1928–1962, 133. Wishful thinking must have got the better of Gütersloh’s regard for facts, since as part of Italy since 1919 South Tyrol was spared invasion in March 1938. 105

Fleischer, Das verleugnete Leben, 528.

106

Quoted in George Clare, Last Waltz in Vienna: The Destruction of a Family 1842–1942 (London: Pan Books, 1982), 188. There is an interesting parallel here with Richard von Schaukal, who found his works proscribed by the Nazis after 1933. Like Doderer a virulent antisemite whose views largely coincided with National Socialism, Schaukal’s major divergence from Nazism lay in his belief in the desirability of an Austrian state independent from Germany. See Christian Neuhuber, “‘Der Fall Schaukal’: Richard von Schaukals Auseinandersetzung mit der NS-Presse um ‘Anschluss’ und ‘Österreich-Idee’ 1932–34,” Modern Austrian Literature 38, no. 3/4 (2005): 13–36. 107

See “Er las nur dieses eine Buch”: Studien zu Heimito von Doderers “Die erleuchteten Fenster,” ed. Stefan Winterstein (Berlin: Königshausen & Neumann, 2009). 108

Schmidt-Dengler talks of Doderer as a “second Fontane,” finding success at an already advanced age (“Heimito von Doderer: Rückzug in die Sprache,” 291). 109

It is hardly coincidental that Die Dämonen is subtitled a “Chronik” (chronicle) and that historians feature strongly amongst the dramatis personae of the novel. In earlier versions of the novel, the burning of the Justizpalast with which the published version of Die Dämonen culminates would have been followed by material set just before what Doderer calls “die deutsche Revolution” (the German revolution), i.e. Hitler’s coming to power (this emerges from the “Aide mémoire” to the “Dämonen der Ostmark”). By the time of completion of the 1936 version, the novel was to end in that same year.

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Postscript

I

1878 RICHARD WAGNER PUBLISHED an essay posing the deceptively simple question “Was ist deutsch?” (What is German?).1 It was a question whose complex, ultimately murderous, ramifications reverberated through much of the twentieth century. It was indisputably a pivotal question at the inception of the small and vulnerable Austrian republic, born out of the rubble of a great empire, that originally elected to name itself “DeutschÖsterreich.” The often overlooked literary reflections of what transpired there in those two short decades before the “German Question” was seemingly put to rest by Hitler’s annexation of the First Austrian Republic into the “Thousand Year Reich” have formed the stuff of this book. To an innocent observer coming from a tradition comfortable with disjunctions between mother tongue and civic identity — self-evidently, to speak English does not implicitly suggest that one is English — it can seem odd that the “German Question” could have cast such a long shadow over Austria’s development as an autonomous state. After all, apart from speaking a unique language, the country had possessed all the attributes relating to statehood (and a national literature) long before independence was restored in 1945.2 As we have seen in this book, the cultural manifestations of Austria’s obstinate hesitancy in acknowledging its cultural and political autonomy related time and again to the central concept of “Germanness” (and, sadly, its often attendant antisemitism) for a people who were not citizens of the German state, but whose medium of expression was the German language. By the middle of the nineteenth century clear distinctions, both cultural and political, were already being drawn between Austrians — i.e. those German speakers living under Habsburg rule, often known as “Deutschösterreicher” — and those living in what Bismarck turned in to the Second German Empire after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1. Literary culture had famously played a leading role in awakening the sense of a common German destiny in what had been a conglomeration of over three hundred states before Napoleon set unification in motion by abolishing the Holy Roman Empire and reducing the number of German states to under forty. Of immeasurable impact in its overt mixture of the aesthetic with the political was the work of the academic literary historian Georg Gottfried Gervinus,3 the first edition of whose Geschichte der poetischen NationalLiteratur der Deutschen (History of the Poetic National Literature of the N

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Germans) appeared in 1835. By 1851 it had reached its fourth edition, now under the title Geschichte der deutschen Dichtung (History of German Literature). A work shaped by a North German, Protestant mentality with its roots in the German Enlightenment, it claimed that writing in German had reached its apogee in the works of Goethe and Schiller, and that everything since then had gone downhill. In particular, Gervinus’s work showed next to no understanding of the literature produced in the southernmost, Habsburg-ruled, Roman Catholic part of the Germanspeaking world, where the Kantian Enlightenment had achieved only marginal impact. As this study has striven to show, the impact of Gervinus’s narrowly German critical focus has lasted until today, with the exclusion of so much Austro-German writing from his work exerting a dual effect on both critics and writers. The first was negative, his perceived authority meaning that the writing of histories of literature in the Habsburg Empire and the successor republics constantly lagged behind Germany. Indicative of the low cultural self esteem of Austrians in the mid-nineteenth century was the remark by Ferdinand Wolf (librarian of the Vienna Hofbibliothek, forerunner of today’s Austrian National Library) that since there was no such thing as an Austrian nation or language, there was no Austrian literary history either.4 As Peter Hanák has observed, the critical reception of Gervinus in Austria fundamentally reflected the divided loyalty to German culture and the German Fatherland on the one hand, and the Austrian state and the Habsburg dynasty on the other.5 It will be recalled that the ultimate exclusion of the multicultural Austrian Empire from Bismarck’s grand design for a new, linguistically homogeneous German Empire was only engineered through Austria’s defeat in the 1866 Austro-Prussian War (which at the time went also by the name of “der deutsche Krieg” [the German War]). From then on, a fateful fracture became apparent between those who accepted that Austria no longer had a role to play in German affairs, and those who never came to terms with the exclusion of German-speaking Austria from the new Germany and who dreamed of an “Anschluss” with the new order. Significantly, many of the academics teaching German literature in Austrian universities in the later nineteenth and earlier twentieth centuries were pan-German in outlook, with a consequentially detrimental effect upon the definition and study of the specifically Austrian tradition in Germanlanguage literature. Another effect of Gervinus was, however, more positive in that the wounded amour-propre of Austrian writers led them to reconsider their status and position within what was then still known only as “German literature.” Perhaps most famously, Franz Grillparzer, a very loyal servant of the Habsburg state, was stung into writing an essay of lasting significance, published in 1837: “Worin unterscheiden sich die östreichischen Dichter von

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den übrigen?” (In Which Ways do Austrian Writers Differ from the Rest?).6 With this essay Grillparzer initiated the laborious process whereby Austrian authors began to consider themselves in contradistinction to German ones, thus allowing both for the acknowledgement of an autonomous literary identity and the recognition of an earlier Austrian tradition of writing in German parallel to, but distinct from, the one in Germany itself.7 By the turn of the twentieth century, encouraged to a large degree by the Austro-centric promptings of the critic and writer Hermann Bahr, the notion of the two cultures was becoming more fixed, though generally a feeling of some sort of “dual nationality” seems to have prevailed. Typical of this attitude was that of Hugo von Hofmannsthal, author of “Preuße und Österreicher,” the great essay of 1917 thematizing the relationship between the “Prussians” and the “Austrians.”8 Hofmannsthal’s identity was proudly Austrian, but he had no difficulty in considering himself a German writer. In 1929, the year of Hofmannsthal’s death, a new National Anthem was adopted for the First Republic, employing a text by the Carinthian poet/priest Ottokar Kernstock (1848–1928) that seemed to express perfectly the ambiguities both of Hofmannsthal’s position, and indeed that of the state as a whole. The virtually umbilical connection once felt to link Germany with Austria is explicit in the first stanza, intended to be sung to the melody of Haydn’s imperial hymn of 1797: Sei gesegnet ohne Ende, Heimaterde wunderhold! Freundlich schmücken dein Gelände Tannengrün und Ährengold. Deutsche Arbeit ernst und redlich, Deutsche Liebe zart und weich — Vaterland, wie bist du herrlich, Gott mit dir, mein Österreich!9 [Endless blessings upon you, Wondrous native land! Friendly green firs and golden crops adorn your lands. Earnest, honest German toil, Soft and tender German love — Fatherland, how marvelous you are, God be with you, my Austria!]

In the end, it required the long-hankered after “Anschluss” with Germany between 1938–45 to provide the greatest impetus to the final realization of an Austrian identity distinct from a German one. After the resumption of statehood in 1945, a concerted attempt was made to reinforce the understanding of an independent Austrian identity in both culture and politics, and vital to this ambition was the active cooperation of

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artists and writers, many of whom, whether on the Left or the Right, had been advocates of union with Germany during the period 1918–38. The price of such support — often from ex-Nazis and/or supporters of the clerical-fascist governments of Dollfuss and Schuschnigg — was, however, a willful blotting out of much of Austria’s cultural and political history during the First Republic. Austria’s notorious unwillingness to come to terms with its very recent past, the country’s long refusal to partake in what Germans dubbed “Vergangenheitsbewältigung,” would last until the country was shaken to its core by the Kurt Waldheim affair in the 1980s. Even today, the memory of the fractious First Republic can be a source of unease. Although it is indisputable that individual Austrian authors from the period 1918–38 have attracted critical international attention and acclaim — the name of Robert Musil may stand here for many — the wider literary landscape in Austria during this period has, as we have seen, suffered from relative neglect. The literary-historical reasons for this should by now be familiar. The tortuous acknowledgement both within and beyond Austria of the specificity of its literary inheritance, and the way this interacted with the country’s problematic social and political history, has doubtless played a role. So too has the often meager academic esteem in which literary history in general is held, especially in an age of critical theories. Even so, given that within three decades of its foundation, the German Democratic Republic (whose statehood lasted barely forty years) had produced a multi-volume history of German literature charting its progress from its beginnings up to the present day, it remains perplexing that no complete history of Austrian literature has appeared in Austria since Josef Nadler’s problematic volume of 1948 — the work of a scholar whose reputation cannot be divorced from his relationship to National Socialism and the accompanying ideology that took it as selfevident that there could be no Austria. My hope is that when such a new work eventually comes to be written, this present study may prove to be of some interest and value.

Notes Some material in this chapter previously appeared in “What’s in a name, or, how ‘German’ has bedevilled Austrian literary history,” Weg und Bewegung: Medieval and Modern Encounters: Festschrift in Honour of Timothy R. Jackson and Gilbert J. Carr, ed. Cordula Politis and Nicola Creighton (Konstanz: Hartung-Gorre Verlag, 2008), 113–20. 1

Richard Wagner, “Was ist deutsch?” in Sämtliche Schriften und Dichtungen, vol. 10 (Leipzig: E. W. Fritzsch, 1883), 36–53. 2

For discussion of this see Klaus Zeyringer, “Literaturgeschichte als Organisation: Zum Konzept einer Literaturgeschichte Österreichs,” in Literaturgeschichte:

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179

Österreich; Prolegomina und Fallstudien, ed. Wendelin Schmidt-Dengler, Johann Sonnleitner, and Klaus Zeyringer (Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 1995), 43. 3

Here I am indebted to Johann Sonnleitner, “Razzien auf einen Literarhistoriker: Gervinus und die österreichischen Schriftsteller des 19. Jahrhunderts,” in Schmidt-Dengler, Sonnleitner, and Zeyringer, ed., Literaturgeschichte: Österreich, 158–80. 4

See Sonnleitner, 160, quoting Constant von Wurzbach, Biographisches Lexikon des Kaiserthums Österreich, enthaltend die Lebensskizzen der denkwürdigen Personen, welche seit 1750 in den österreichischen Kronländern geboren wurden oder darin gelebt und gewirkt haben, vol. 46 (Vienna, 1882), 219–22. 5

Peter Hanák, “Österreichischer Staatspatriotismus im Zeitalter des aufsteigenden Nationalismus,” in Wien und Europa zwischen den Revolutionen (1789–1848), ed. Reinhard Urbach (Vienna & Munich: Jugend und Volk, 1978), 315–30. 6

Franz Grillparzer: Sämtliche Werke, vol. 3, ed. Peter Frank and Karl Pörnbacher (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1964), 809. 7

Grillparzer had little time for literary history as a genre. Marie von EbnerEschenbach recalls in her memoir of the writer how he once exclaimed — “No ja Literaturgeschichte — ein gemaltes Mittagessen!” (Literary history, eh? Like a painting of a lunch!). See Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach, Meine Kinderjahre: Biographische Skizzen (Munich: Nymphenburger Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1959), 244. 8

Hugo von Hofmannsthal, “Preuße und Österreicher: Ein Schema,” in Gesammelte Werke in zehn Einzelbänden: Reden und Aufsätze II (1914–1924) (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag 1979), 459–61. 9

See Andrew Barker, “Setting the tone. Austrian anthems from Haydn to Haider,” Austrian Studies 17 (2009): 12–28.

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Index Ächtler, Norman, 153 Adler, Victor, 124 Admira FC, 112 Adorno, Theodor Wiesengrund, 109 Agit-Prop, 122, 123 Agudas Jisroel, 104–5 Aichinger, Ilse, 107 Aleichen, Sholom, 104 Allinson, Mark, 13 Altenberg, Peter, 14, 22–23, 79 Altenberg, Peter, works by: “Kriegshymnen,” 22–23; “Romantik der Namen! — U9” 45 American Guild for German Cultural Freedom, 151 Anschluss, 1, 3, 5, 10, 13, 57, 58, 90, 96, 108, 115, 116, 117, 121, 143, 146, 149, 154, 160, 165, 166, 175, 176, 177 antisemitism, 8, 9, 10, 13, 14, 41, 49–50, 51–52, 53–54, 55, 57, 59, 65, 66, 78, 86, 93–94, 99, 100–102, 104, 111, 146, 149, 152, 153, 160, 164, 165, 169, 175 Anton Schroll Verlag, 14 Arbeiter-Zeitung (newspaper), 13 Aristophanes, 27 Austria, First Republic, 1–15, 49, 58, 65, 77, 127, 132, 140, 158, 173, 177, 178 Austria, Second Republic, 8, 12, 90, 133, 135, 139, 144, 155, 156, 166, 167 Austria-Hungary. See Habsburg Empire Austrian Christian Social Party, 5, 8, 9, 115, 126, 128, 134, 135 Austrian Civil War, 1934, 2, 7, 11, 12, 13, 14, 116–17, 118, 121–39, 143, 146, 152, 162, 167

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Austrian Communist Party, 14, 54, 117, 124–25, 133 Austrian Corporate State, 1934–1938, 11, 12, 14, 58, 81, 97, 113, 114, 116, 117, 118, 133, 138 Austrian identity, 2, 5, 64, 87, 107, 133, 135, 138, 143, 160, 165, 166, 167, 176–78; and German identity, 2, 5, 10, 58, 62, 174–78; and Roman Catholic Church, 58, 65, 108, 148, 165, 170 Austrian literature, 1, 10, 14–15, 27, 121, 138, 156, 178 Austrian National Anthems, 4, 6, 177 Austrian Nazi Party. See National Socialism Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP), 135 Austrian Social Democrat Party, 2, 5, 7, 11, 14, 15, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 124, 125, 126, 128, 129, 130, 133, 134, 135, 137, 140 Austrian State Treaty, 1955, 131 Austro-Fascism. See Austrian Corporate State, 1934–1938 Austro-Hungarian Empire. See Habsburg Empire Bach, David Josef, 2 Bachmann, Ingeborg, 150 Bachmann, Ingeborg, works by: “Drei Wege zum See,” 150; Simultan, 150 Bachrach, Stephi, 49 Bahr, Erhard, 59 Bahr, Hermann, 10, 22, 177 Bahr, Hermann, works by: Österreich in Ewigkeit, 10 Bance, Alan, 153 Barbusse, Henri, 24, 33 Barner, Wilfried, 95

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196

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INDEX

Bauer, Felice, 23 Bauer, Otto, 11, 124, 130, 133, 134 Bavarian Soviet Republic, 35 Becher, Johannes R., 121 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 56 Békessy, Imre, 113, 115 Beller, Steven, 4, 50 Benjamin, Walter, 96 Benn, Gottfried, 22, 122 Berg, Alban, 2, 11, 96, 97, 115 Bergner, Elisabeth, 73, 83 Berlin, 1, 2, 7, 9, 12, 13, 15, 22, 38, 50, 68–69, 72–75, 76, 89, 97, 98, 102, 103, 117, 120 Berliner Börsen-Courier (newspaper), 33, 147 Berliner Tageblatt (newspaper), 34 Bermann-Fischer Verlag, 14 Bernhard, Thomas, 131 Bertaux, Félix, 34, 47 Bettauer, Hugo, 9, 18 Bettauer, Hugo, works by: Die freudlose Gasse, 18; Stadt ohne Juden: Ein Roman von Übermorgen, 9 Beumelburg, Werner, 89 Biederstein Verlag, 158 Billinger, Richard, 990 Birkenau, 97 Bismarck, Otto von, 175, 176 Bohemia and Moravia, 59, 61, 65, 90 Brahms, Johannes, 2 Braun, Felix, 90, 156 Braunthal, Julius, 59; and Karl Kraus, 119 Braunthal, Julius, works by: In Search of the Millennium, 119; Need Germany Survive? 140 Brecht, Bertolt, 107, 120, 121, 122, 125, 135; and Austria, 120; and Karl Kraus, 120–21 Brecht, Bertolt, works by: Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny, 120; “Koloman Wallisch Kantata,” 107; “Kranich und Wolke,” 120; “Über den schnellen Fall des guten Unwissenden,” 120; “Über die Bedeutung des zehnzeiligen Gedichts in der, 888. Nummer der ‘Fackel’,” 120

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Brehm, Bruno, 10, 12, 85–95, 96; and Leo Perutz, 87; and Piper Verlag, 86, 87 Brehm, Bruno, works by: Apis und Este: Ein Franz Ferdinand-Roman, 85, 87; Die Throne stürzen, 87, 92, 93; Das war das Ende, 85, 87, 88, 90, 91, 94; Weder Kaiser noch König: Der Untergang der habsburgischen Monarchie, 85, 91 Broch, Hermann, 1, 10, 12 Broch, Hermann, works by: Pasenow oder Die Romantik, 12; Der Versucher, 107 Bruckner, Anton, 3, 105, 165 Buber, Martin, 149 Buber, Martin, works by: Der Jude (journal), 149 Buchenwald, 118 Budapest, 31, 45, 117 C. H. Beck Verlag, 156 Canetti, Elias, 1, 96, 173; and Karl Kraus, 118, 119 Canetti, Elias, works by: Das Augenspiel: Lebensgeschichte, 1931–1937, 96, 119, 173; Die Blendung, 13, 173; Die Fackel im Ohr, 119 Carnap, Rudolf, 3 Cavell, Edith, 35 Chekhov, Antonin, 122 Chopin, Frédéric, 56 Clemenceau, Georges, 1 Clerical Fascism. See Austrian Corporate State, 1934–1938 Coetzee, J. M., 149 Communism, 11, 29, 53, 76, 90, 91, 117, 118, 119, 121, 122, 124, 125, 126, 129, 130, 132, 133, 135, 148, 156 Corporate State. See Austrian Corporate State, 1934–1938 Csokor, Franz Theodor, 107 Czechoslovakia, 7, 34, 35, 58, 59, 61, 106, 124, 125, 138, 147 Czernin, Ottokar, 90–91, 93 Dachau, 97, 159, 165, 166

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INDEX Der Brenner (literary journal), 139 Der getreue Eckart (literary journal), 86 Der Jude (journal), 149 Der Kampf (literary journal), 126 Der letzte Mann (film), 81 Der neue Tag (newspaper), 12 Der Spiegel (journal), 118 Deuticke Verlag, 134 Deutsche Demokratische Partei, 152 Deutsche Demokratische Republik. See German Democratic Republic Deutsch-Österreich/ Deutschösterreich, 5, 6, 58, 62, 175 Die Frankfurter Zeitung (newspaper), 68, 96, 105 Die freudlose Gasse (film), 18 Die Sammlung (journal), 146 Die Weissen Blätter (journal), 25 Die Zeit (newspaper), 90 Dimitrijevic, Dragutin, 107 Dix, Otto, 48 Döblin, Alfred, 22, 122 Döblin, Alfred, works by: Berlin Alexanderplatz, 60, 73 Doderer, Heimito von, 12, 21, 86, 121, 135, 154–67; and antisemitism, 157–58; and Austrian identity, 155–56, 165; and Elias Canetti, 173; and Dachau, 159; and Friedrich Dürrenmatt, 157; and the German Democratic Republic, 157; and Franz Kafka, 159; and Georg Lukács, 159; and National Socialism, 12, 108, 155–67; and psychoanalysis, 157; and Roman Catholicism, 165 Doderer, Heimito von, works by: “Aide mémoire zu ‘Die Dämonen der Ostmark’,” 164; Commentarii, 1951 bis, 1956, 171; “Die Dämonen der Ostmark,” 158–60, 163, 164; Die Dämonen: Nach der Chronik des Sektionsrates Geyrenhoff, 131, 156, 164; “Dicke Damen,” 158, 163; Ein Mord den jeder begeht, 156–58, 161, 166; Ein Umweg, 156–58, 160–63,

Barker.indd 197

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197

166; Die erleuchteten Fenster oder die Menschwerdung des Amtsrates Julius Zihal, 166; Der Fall Gütersloh, 163; Das Geheimnis des Reichs, 160; Grundlagen und Theorie des Romans, 171; Die sibirische Klarheit: Texte aus der Gefangenschaft, 45; Die Strudlhofstiege oder Melzer und die Tiefe der Jahre, 156; Tagebücher, 1920–1939, 158–59, 171, 172, 173; Tangenten: Tagebuch eines Schriftstellers, 1940–1950, 170; “Völker ohne Chauvinismus: Deutsches und russisches Nationalgefühl,” 163; Die Wasserfälle von Slunj, 64 Doderer, Heimito von, and Albert Paris Gütersloh, Briefwechsel, 1928– 1962, 170 Dollfuss, Engelbert, 2, 11, 114, 115, 116, 117, 121, 123, 124, 125, 127, 128, 135, 136, 140, 178 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 158 Drake, William A., 61 Dual Monarchy: See Habsburg Empire Dumas, Alexandre, 55 Dürrenmatt, Friedrich, 157 Eastern Jews. See Ostjuden Ebner-Eschenbach, Marie von, works by: Meine Kinderjahre: Biographische Skizzen, 179 Edinburgh International Festival, 16 Ehrenburg, Ilya, 116 Ehrenstein, Albert, 34 Emmerich, Wolfgang, 122 Erich Reiss Verlag, 97 Eugen Diederichs Verlag, 159 Europa Verlag, 134 Expressionism, 25, 34, 76, 144 Fadiman, Clifton P., 60, 61 Fallada, Hans, works by: Kleiner Mann, was nun? 60, 89 Federmann, Reinhard, works by: Das Himmelreich der Lügner, 135 Ferrier, Kathleen, 16 Fiala, Joseph, 81

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198

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INDEX

Ficker, Ludwig von, works by: Der Brenner, 139 First World War, 2, 5, 6, 21–44, 58, 86, 88, 89, 98, 113, 114, 137, 149 Fischer Verlag, 97 Fleischer, Wolfgang, 156 Fontane, Theodor, 68 Fontane, Theodor, works by: Effi Briest, 68 Forster, Edmund, 150 Frank, Leonhard, 33 Frank, Leonhard, works by: Der Mensch ist gut, 24 Frankfurter Zeitung (newspaper), 68, 96, 105 Franz Ferdinand, Archduke, 7, 85, 107, 113, 154 Franz Joseph, Emperor, 12, 63, 91, 106, 151 Freud, Sigmund, 4, 10, 36, 49, 61, 157 Freud, Sigmund, works by: Jenseits des Lustprinzips, 36, 37; “Narzissus,” 54; Studien über Hysterie, 57; “Zur Ätiologie der Hysterie,” 57 Freumbichler, Johannes, 107 Freund, Robert, 86, 87 Fried, Erich, 13 Friedell, Egon, 10 Frischauf, Marie, 11, 132–33, 135, 144 Frischauf, Marie, works by: Erwartung, 11; Der graue Mann, 132– 33, 135, 136; Der graue Mann: Roman und Gedichte für Arnold Schoenberg, 144 Fritz, Marianne, 107 Fussenegger, Gertrud, 107 Galicia, 34, 35, 39, 40, 98, 99, 100, 102, 104, 106, 154 Galician Jews. See Ostjuden Garbo, Greta, 18 Gauss, Karl-Markus, 90 Gedye, G. E. R., 7, 122, 123–24 Gedye, G. E. R., works by: Fallen Bastions, 7–8 Geibel, Emanuel, works by: “Deutschlands Beruf,” 163

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Genius (journal), 33 German Democratic Republic, 11, 18, 59, 89, 121, 157, 178 Gervinus, Georg Gottfried, 175–76 Gervinus, Georg Gottfried, works by: Geschichte der deutschen Dichtung, 176; Geschichte der poetischen National-Literatur der Deutschen, 175–76 Ginzkey, Franz Karl, 90, 156 Globus Verlag, 133 Gödel, Kurt, 3 Goebbels, Josef, 86, 87, 88, 147, 165 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 176 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, works by: Götz von Berlichingen, 126 Gordimer, Nadine, 82 Graf, Oskar Maria, 121 Greater Glory (film), 18 Greene, Graham, works by: The Third Man, 133 Grillparzer, Franz, 136, 163, 176–77, 179; and literary history, 179 Grillparzer, Franz, works by: “In einem Stammbuch,” 136; “Worin unterscheiden sich die östreichischen Dichter von den übrigen?” 176 Grimm, Hans, works by: Volk ohne Raum, 89 Großer Österreichischer Staatspreis, 90, 135, 156 Großmann, Stefan, 146 Großmann, Stefan, works by: Die Schultern der Mizzi Palme, 168; “Unabhängiges Österreich,” 146 Gruppe 47, 95 Gütersloh, Albert Paris, 155, 165; and National Socialism, 155, 170 Gütersloh, Albert Paris, works by: Bekenntnisse eines modernen Malers, 155; Sonne und Mond, 170 Haas, Willy, 63 Habe, Hans, works by: Ich stelle mich, 135 Habsburg, Otto von, 4, 149

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INDEX Habsburg Empire, 1, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10, 12, 15, 21, 28, 29, 33, 34, 39, 50, 57–58, 61, 62–63, 64, 65, 67, 68, 69, 71, 74, 75, 76, 83, 85, 87, 88, 90, 91, 95, 101, 102, 106, 107, 108, 113, 115, 131, 137, 138, 148, 149, 150, 151, 154, 155, 160, 161, 162, 166, 175, 176 Habsburg Myth, 23, 29, 34, 115, 148 Hackert, Fritz, 76 Hakoah-Wien, 53 Hanák, Peter, 176 Hašek, Jaroslav, 6 Hašek, Jaroslav, works by: The Adventures of the Good Soldier Schweyk and His Fortunes in the World War, 6–7 Haslinger, Josef, works by: Opernball, 122 Hasterlik, Gusti, 160 Haybach, Rudolf, 155 Haydn, Franz Josef, works by: “Kaiserhymne,” 4, 177 Hayek, Friedrich von, 3 Haynt (newspaper), 101 Heimatroman, 116, 134, 140 Heimwehr, 126, 127, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139, 143 Heine, Heinrich, 65–66, 146 Heine, Heinrich, works by: “Die Ilse,” 66; “Die Lorelei,” 65 Henz, Rudolf, 135, 156 Herd, E. W., 134 Herzl, Theodor, 52 Herzl, Theodor, works by: Der Judenstaat, 52 Hesse, Hermann, 97, 147 Hesse & Becker Verlag, 160 Hirschfeld, Magnus, 22 Hirschfeld, Magnus, works by: Sittengeschichte des Weltkriegs, 22 Hitler, Adolf, 4, 10, 11, 12, 13, 15, 44, 49, 68, 79, 86, 90. 96, 97, 114, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 122, 124, 148, 149, 150, 151–53, 154, 165, 166, 169, 175 Hitler, Adolf, works by: Mein Kampf, 87 Hofmannsthal, Hugo von, 1, 3, 10, 22, 43, 56, 137, 177

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Hofmannsthal, Hugo von, works by: “Das Märchen der, 672. Nacht,” 43; “Preuße und Österreicher. Ein Schema,” 177 Hohlbaum, Robert, 10 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 91 Horváth, Ödön von, 1, 23 Horváth, Ödön von, works by: Geschichten aus dem Wienerwald, 60 Huddleston, Sisley, 69 Humanitas Verlag, 146 Innitzer, Cardinal, 127 Isherwood, Christopher, 121 Isonzo Front, 22–24, 32 Jahn, Hans Henny, 131 Jelinek, Elfriede, 131 Jelusich, Mirko, 10 Jews: and assimilation, 51, 52, 54, 60, 65–67, 95–107, 106, 160, 162; loyalty to Franz Joseph, 4–5; musicality, 55–56, 59–60, 105; Roman Catholicism, 23, 97; sport, 52–53 Joffe, Adolph Abramovitch, 91 Johnson, Uwe, 59 Judt, Tony, 2 Justizpalast [burning of] 13, 73, 124, 131, 132, 174 Kafka, Franz, 1, 11, 23, 63, 81, 102, 103, 112, 148, 151, 159, 163 Kafka, Franz, works by: Ein Landarzt, 63; “Ein Landarzt,” 103; Der Prozeß, 159; “Rede über die jiddische Sprache,” 103; Tagebücher, 1910–1923, 112; “Das Urteil,” 81; “Die Verwandlung,” 81; “Vor dem Gesetz,” 63, 64 Karasek, Hellmuth, 110 Karl, Emperor, 85, 91 Karl-Marx-Hof, Vienna, 7, 17, 116, 137 Kernstock, Ottokar, works by: “Sei gesegnet, ohne Ende,” 177 Kerr, Alfred, 147 Kerstenberg, Leo, 2

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Kiepenheuer & Witsch Verlag, 97 Kindermann, Heinz, 10 Kleist Prize, 131 Klenau, Inge von Klenau, 106 Klenau, Paul von, 106 Klimt, Gustav, 2 Knight, Robert, 133 Knopf, Alfred A., 33 Koestler, Arthur, 106 Koestler, Arthur, works by: Arrow in the Blue, 106–7 Kohn, Hans, 57 Kokoschka, Oskar, 2 Kolbenheyer, Erwin Guido, 10 Korbel, Eduard, 125 Kortner, Fritz, 83 Kralowitz, 61, 62 Kraus, Karl, 10, 11, 24, 44, 61, 113–21, 147, 148; and AustroFascism, 117, 118; and Bertolt Brecht, 120–21; and Elias Canetti, 118, 119; and Communism, 117, 118; and Engelbert Dollfuss, 115, 121; and Adolf Hitler, 114; and Andreas Latzko, 25; and Soma Morgenstern, 115; and Johann Schober, 13, 113, 115; and Social Democracy, 114, 115, 117, 118, 119; and Franz Werfel, 60, 66; and Fritz Wittels, 45, 60, 119 Kraus, Karl, works by: Die demolierte Literatur, 18; Die dritte Walpurgisnacht, 117–18; Die Fackel, 22, 25, 114, 120; “Heine und die Folgen,” 66; “Hüben und Drüben,” 115; “In dieser großen Zeit,” 113; Die letzten Tage der Menschheit, 5–6, 21, 24; “Nachrufe auf Karl Kraus,” 114; Die Unüberwindlichen, 113; “Warum die Fackel nicht erscheint,” 114, 115, 118, 119 Kreisky, Bruno, 134 Kremayr & Scheriau Verlag, 134 Křenek, Ernst, 9, 106 Křenek, Ernst, works by: Jonny spielt auf, 9 Kühlmann, Richard von, 90–91 Kurt Wolff Verlag, 68

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Lange-Kirchheim, Astrid, 50, 55, 57 Langenbucher, Hellmuth, 160 Latzko, Andreas, 11, 21–33 Latzko, Andreas, works by: Friedensgericht, 31; Menschen im Krieg, 21, 23–33 Lehmann, John, 121 Lenin, V. I., 123 Lensing, Leo A., 19 Liszt, Franz, works by: Rácóczy March, 30–31 Loos, Adolf, 7, 114 Lowe-Porter, Helen, 59, 61 Lukács, Georg, 159, 161, 171 Lunacharsky, Anatol, 2 Lunzer, Heinz, 73 Lunzer-Talos, Victoria, 73 Maderthaner, Wolfgang, 7 Magris, Claudio, 23, 34 Mahler, Gustav, 2, 61, 105 Mahler, Gustav, works by: Das Lied von der Erde, 16; Symphony No. 2, 105; Symphony No. 5, 105 Mahler-Werfel, Alma, 58, 64, 105, 112, 116; and Franz Werfel, 58 Mahler-Werfel, Alma, works by: Mein Leben, 112 Mann, Klaus, 146 Mann, Thomas, 33, 147, 148 Marcuse, Ludwig, 147 Marxism, 7, 27, 126, 128, 131, 133, 159 Maß und Wert (journal), 169 Massenet, Jules, works by: Manon, 55–56 Maupassant, Guy de, 55 Max, Mell, 156 Mayer, Hans, 126 Mehring, Walter, 150 Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, Felix, 105 Mérey, Kajetan von Kapos-Mére, 92, 93 Merzdorf, Walter, 160 Moeschlin, Felix, 25 Moeschlin, Felix, works by: Schweizerland, 25 Morgenstern, Dan, 112

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INDEX Morgenstern, Soma, 11, 12, 69, 95–107; and Alban Berg, 11, 96, 97; and Elias Canetti, 96; and Franz Kafka, 102–3, 111; and Karl Kraus, 115; and Georg Lukács, 109; and Gustav Mahler, 105–6, 112; and Robert Musil, 97; and Joseph Roth, 11, 12, 96, 103, 111; and Ernst Weiss, 11; and Franz Werfel, 97, 103 Morgenstern, Soma, works by: Berg und seine Idole, 96, 97; Funken im Abgrund, 11, 95; Idyll im Exil, 100, 101; Joseph Roths Flucht ohne Ende: Erinnerungen, 96; Der Sohn des verlorenen Sohnes, 69, 95, 97–101, 102–7; Das Vermächtnis des verlorenen Sohnes, 111 Moscow, 2, 11, 122, 123, 124, 125, 126, 129 Moscow Declaration, 133, 144, 167 Moteciszky, Marie-Louise, 165 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 3 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, works by: The Marriage of Figaro, 56 Munich, 13, 33, 35, 85, 150, 156, 159 Murnau, Friedrich Wilhelm, 81 Musik- und Theater Fest, Vienna, 1924, 2 Musil, Robert, 1, 21, 86, 97, 146, 178 Musil, Robert, works by: Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, 15, 85, 146; Nachlass zu Lebzeiten, 146 Nabl, Franz, 90 Nadler, Josef, 86, 178; and Bruno Brehm, 86 National Socialism, 10, 61, 73, 86, 87, 90, 91, 94, 95, 104, 105, 115, 116, 117, 128, 132, 133, 138, 149, 150, 153, 154, 157, 160, 161, 162, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167, 178 Nationalpreis für Buch und Film, 86 Nazism. See National Socialism Neue Freie Presse (newspaper), 171 Neue Sachlichkeit, 38

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Neue Zürcher Zeitung (newspaper), 25, 97 Neugebauer, Heinz, 129 Neurath, Otto, 3 New York Times (newspaper), 2 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 33, 35 Nietzsche, Friedrich, works by: Also sprach Zarathustra, 47 Nordau, Max, 52, 104 Obermayer, August, 133, 134 Olbrich, Josef, 7 Orlowski, Hubert, 85 O’Shaughnessy, Edith, 8–9 O’Shaughnessy, Edith, works by: Viennese Melody, 8–9 Österreichische Radio-VerkehrsAktiengesellschaft (RAVAG), 138 Ostjuden, 4, 40, 51, 95, 98–99, 100, 103–4, 106, 111, 146, 152, 158 Owen, Wilfred, 26 Owen, Wilfred, works by: “The SendOff,” 26, “Strange Meeting,” 31 Pabst, Georg, 18 Pappenheim, Marie. See Frischauf, Marie Paris, 11, 13, 33, 68, 69, 72, 96, 99, 100, 124, 126, 129, 146, 147, 148, 150, 155, 159 Patzak, Julius, 16 Paul Zsolnay Verlag, 97 Paul-Neff Verlag, 134 Peretz, I. L., 104 Perutz, Leo, 87 Peyser, Herbert F., 2 Piper, Klaus, 87, 89 Piper, Reinhard, 94 Piper Verlag, 85, 86, 87 Poe, Edgar Allan, works by: “The Facts in the Case of M. Waldemar,” 81 Polgar, Alfred, 10, 166 Prague, 2, 7, 12, 57, 58, 59, 63, 87, 124, 147 Prutti, Brigitte, 53 Puchberg am Schneeberg, 3 psychoanalysis, 2, 36, 91, 152

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202

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Quarry Hill Flats, Leeds, 17 Querido Verlag, 97 Rapid Vienna FC, 112 Rascher, Max, 24 RAVAG. See Österreichische RadioVerkehrs-Aktiengesellschaft Rawaruska, battle of, 37, 41 Red Vienna, 2, 7–9, 60, 116 Redlich, Oswald, 161 Reich, Wilhelm, 132 Reich-Ranicki, Marcel, 21 Reichsidee, 10, 162, 163, 165 Reifenberg, Benno, 68, 70 Reinhardt, Max, 3 Remarque, E. M., works by: Im Westen nichts Neues, 21 Renner, Karl, 6, 89, 124 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 1 Robbe-Grillet, Alain, works by: Le Voyeur, 169 Robertson, Ritchie, 159 Roland, Otto, 18 Rolland, Romain, 23, 24 Rosegger, Peter, 90 Roth, Friedl, 75 Roth, Joseph, 4, 21, 86, 121, 146–55, 160; and Ingeborg Bachmann, 150; and Bruno Brehm, 111; and Christianity, 148–49, 153, 155; and cinema, 73–75; and Judaism, 148–49; and Franz Kafka, 111; and Soma Morgenstern, 12, 98–100, 105; and Robert Musil, 85; and Ernst Weiss, 147–48, 150; and Stefan Zweig, 4, 12, 100, 147 Roth, Joseph, works by: “Abschied vom Hotel,” 76; “Die Büste des Kaisers,” 102; Flucht ohne Ende, 69; “Franta Slin,” 36–37; “Der General,” 29; Hiob, 149; Juden auf Wanderschaft, 73, 98, 107, 146, 149; Die Kapuzinergruft, 62, 65, 68, 69, 72, 73, 149, 151–54; Die Legende vom Heiligen Trinker, 68; Radetzkymarsch, 12, 15, 29, 30, 69, 72, 73, 88, 102, 149–50; Rechts und Links, 69, 73; “Seine

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k. und k. Apostolische Majestät,” 61; Das Spinnennetz, 12, 68, 150; Tarabas: Ein Gast auf dieser Erde, 99–100, 101, 104, 153; Zipper und sein Vater, 67–76 Rowohlt Verlag, 33, 134 Salzburg Festival, 3 Sanzara, Rahel, 33 Schalek, Alice, 24 Schalek, Alice, works by: Am Isonzo: März bis Juli, 1916, 24 Schattendorf, 13 Schaukal, Richard von, 117, 174 Schediwy, Wolfgang, 173 Schenker, Heinrich, 2 Schickele, René works by: Die Weissen Blätter, 25 Schiele, Egon, 2 Schiller, Friedrich, 176 Schlick, Moritz, 3 Schmidt, Franz, 2 Schmidt, Franz, works by: Das Buch mit sieben Siegeln, 2; Deutsche Auferstehung, 2; Symphony No. 4, 2 Schmidt-Dengler, Wendelin, 68, 134, 161, 163–64 Schmückle, Karl, 129 Schneider, Rolf, 118 Schnitzler, Arthur, 9, 10, 11, 34, 49–57, 122, 158; and Sigmund Freud, 36, 54, 56–57; and Hugo von Hofmannsthal, 56; and Ernst Weiss, 34 Schnitzler, Arthur, works by: Frau Berta Garlan, 34; Fräulein Else, 34, 50–57, 58, 60; Jugend in Wien, 51, 53; Leutnant Gustl, 33; Reigen, 9, 50, 51; Therese: Chronik eines Frauenlebens, 34 ; “Der tote Gabriel,” 79; Der Weg ins Freie, 77, 79 Schnitzler, Julius, 34 Schober, Johann, 13, 113, 115 Schoenberg, Arnold, 2, 5, 11, 144 Schönauer, Helmuth, 137, 138 Schubert, Franz, 105

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INDEX Schumann, Robert, works by: Carnaval, 56 Schuschnigg, Kurt von, 3, 4, 115, 116, 117, 118, 125, 128, 135, 146, 178 Schutzbund, 13, 118, 124, 125, 128, 134, 135, 136, 137, 138 Schwarz, Egon, 9, 57 Second Viennese School, 2 Seelig, Carl, 24 Seghers, Anna, 11, 118, 121–31, 135, 161; and Social Democracy, 126; and Ernst Weiss, 148 Seghers, Anna, works by: Aufstellen eines Maschinengewehrs im Wohnzimmer der Frau Kamptschik, 143; “Der letzte Weg des Koloman Wallisch,” 126, 127; Die Toten bleiben jung, 123; Transit, 148; Der Weg durch den Februar, 125–31, 132, 135, 136 Seidl, Johann Gabriel, 6 Seidl, Johann Gabriel, works by: “Gott erhalte, Gott beschütze,” 6 Seipel, Ignaz, 9, 127 Semmering, 64 Sforim, Mendele Mocher, 104 Shakespeare, William, 142 Shakespeare, William, works by: Coriolanus, 55; Macbeth, 115 Simmel, Ernst, 153 Socialist Realism, 121, 123, 125, 132 Sonne, Abraham, 96 Soviet Union, 4, 71, 75, 79, 106, 124, 129 Soyfer, Jura, 118 Soyfer, Jura, works by: “Dachaulied,” 118; So starb eine Partei, 118 Sozialistische Gesellschaft für Sexualberatung und Sexualforschung, 132 Sozialistischer Schutzbund, 13, 118, 124, 125, 128, 130, 134, 135, 136, 137, 138 Spender, Stephen, 121 Spengler, Oswald, 157 Spieker, Sven, 151 Stalin, Josef, 99, 124, 129

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Ständestaat. See Austrian Corporate State, 1934–1938 Strauss, Johann (father), works by: Radetzkymarsch, 29 Strauss, Johann (son), 29 Strauss, Johann (son), works by: Blue Danube Waltz, 29, 30; Die Fledermaus, 55 Strauss, Richard, 3 Strauss, Richard, works by: Salome, 55–56, 79 Stuppäck, Hermann, 10 Styria Verlag, 134 Sudetendeutscher Kulturpreis, 90 Szábó, Janos, 25 The New York Times (newspaper), 2, 18 The Sunday Times (newspaper), 8 The Times (newspaper), 122 Theresienstadt, 97 Third Reich, 4, 8, 11, 14, 85, 86, 89, 90, 108, 120, 131, 144, 147, 154, 155, 159, 160, 161, 165, 166, 167 Thirty Years’ War, 157, 158, 162 Time (journal), 89 Timms, Edward, 9–10, 117 Torberg, Friedrich, 156 Trakl, Georg, 21 Trakl, Georg, works by: Grodek,” 21, 38 Trapp, Frithjof, 152, 169, 170 Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, 90, 92, 93 Treaty of St Germain, 5 Treaty of Versailles, 85, 95, 106 Treml, Reinhold, 163 Trotsky, Leon, 92 Trotsky, Leon, works by: Mein Leben: Versuch einer Autobiographie, 109 Tucholsky, Kurt, 15 Ullstein Verlag, 38 University of Otago, 134 Vakhtangov Theater, Moscow, 123 Vaterländische Front, 114, 116 Verdi, Giuseppe, 59

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204

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Vienna: and architecture, 7; art, 2; music, 2–3, 29, 105; social conditions, 7–8, 35; university, 2, 160, 162 Vienna Circle, 3 Viennese Medley (film), 18 Vogel, Alois, 12, 131–39 Vogel, Alois, works by: Schlagschatten, 131–39 Völkischer Beobachter (newspaper), 53, 86 Vorarlberg, 35, 44 Waal, Edmund de, 2 Wagener, Hans, 61 Waggerl, Karl Heinz, 10 Wagner, Otto, 7 Wagner, Richard, 44, 103, 175; and antisemitism, 53–54; and Viennese Jews, 59–60 Wagner, Richard, works by: Der fliegende Holländer, 55; Die Meistersinger, 59; Lohengrin, 59; Tristan und Isolde, 44; “Was ist deutsch?” 175 Waldheim, Kurt, 89, 134, 178 Walhalla (Regensburg), 165 Wallisch, Koloman, 126, 127, 130, 162 Walter, Bruno, 16 Wandruszka, Adam, 162 Wassermann, Jakob, 49, 158 Waugh, Alexander, 2 Webern, Anton, 2 Wedekind, Frank, 42 Wedekind, Frank, works by: Die Büchse der Pandora, 42 Weigel, Hans, 156 Weigel, Helene, 142 Weimar Republic, 1, 2, 5, 13, 14, 21, 51, 69, 76, 122, 148 Weinheber, Josef, 10 Weininger, Otto, 27, 35, 151 Weininger, Otto, works by: Geschlecht und Charakter, 27, 54, 151 Weinzierl, Ulrich, 127, 129, 131, 135 Weiss, Ernst, 10, 22, 122, 146–54; and Sigmund Freud, 152; and

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Adolf Hitler, 150–54; and Judaism, 149; and Franz Kafka, 23, 33, 148, 151; and Thomas Mann, 33; and Soma Morgenstern, 149; and Joseph Roth, 147–48, 150; and Arthur Schnitzler, 34; and Otto Weininger, 151; and Stefan Zweig, 147, 151, 152–53 Weiss, Ernst, works by: “Adeliges Volk,” 149; Der arme Verschwender, 34, 150, 153; Der Augenzeuge, 36, 44, 150–54, 159; Franta Zlin, 21, 27, 33–44, 100, 147; Mensch gegen Mensch, 34, 36; Tiere in Ketten, 34; Der Verführer, 34, 150 Weissel, Georg, 123–24 Werfel, Franz, 10, 12, 97; and Christianity, 97; and Heinrich Heine, 65–66; and Karl Kraus, 60, 66; and politics, 11, 19, 58, 59, 61, 81, 115–16, 121; and Arthur Schnitzler, 80; and Giuseppe Verdi, 59; and Richard Wagner, 59–60 Werfel, Franz, works by: The Death of a Poor Man, 60, 61; “Der göttliche Portier,” 63; “Können wir ohne Gottesglauben leben?” 110; The Man who Conquered Death, 61; Spiegelmensch, 66; Der Tod des Kleinbürgers, 57–67, 69, 71; Twilight of a World, 59, 61; Verdi: Roman der Oper, 59 West Ham United FC, 79 Wiener Kreis. See Vienna Circle Wiener Zeitung (newspaper), 14 Wienroman, 140 Wilder, Billy, 73 Wildgans, Anton, 107n3 Williams, C. E., 33, 113, 118 Winter, Ernst Karl, 128 Wischnewskij, Wsewolod, 123 Wittels, Fritz, 45, 60; and Karl Kraus, 45, 60, 119 Wittels, Fritz, works by: Freud and the Child Woman: The Memoirs of Fritz Wittels, 119; Zacharias Pamperl, 45 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 3

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INDEX Wittgenstein, Ludwig, works by: Logisch-philosophische Abhandlung, 3; Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 3 Wolf, Christa, works by: Der geteilte Himmel, 123 Wolf, Ferdinand, 176 Wolf, Friedrich, 11, 118, 121 Wolf, Friedrich, works by: Floridsdorf: Ein Schauspiel von den Februarkämpfen der Wiener Arbeiter, 121–25; Das Schiff auf der Donau. Ein Drama aus der Zeit der Okkupation Österreichs durch die Nazis, 142 Wolf, Konrad, 123 Wolf, Markus, 122–23 Yates, W. E., 49 Yiddish, 66, 82, 102, 103, 104, 112 Zentralkommission zur Bekämpfung der NS-Literatur (Vienna), 88–89

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Zernatto, Guido, 115–16, 118 Zernatto, Guido, works by: Sinnlose Stadt: Roman eines einfachen Menschen, 116; Die Wahrheit über Österreich, 116 Zeyringer, Klaus, 95 Zionism, 52, 107 Zipper, Herbert, 83 Zoppel, Christina, 90 Zweig, Arnold, works by: Der Streit um den Sergeanten Grischa, 21 Zweig, Stefan, 4, 10, 12, 97; and Andreas Latzko, 24, 25; and Soma Morgenstern, 97, 100; and Romain Rolland, 24; and Joseph Roth, 100, 146–47; and Ernst Weiss, 147, 151 Zweig, Stefan, works by: Jeremias, 33; Tagebücher, 25 Zweite Wiener Schule. See Second Viennese School

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Barker.indd 206

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