Abstract
Till his recent retirement from the University of Edinburgh, Andrew Barker was one of only two Professors of Austrian Studies that this country has seen (the other was the late Peter Branscombe at St Andrews). Besides his extensive work on the fin de siècle, especially on Peter Altenberg, he has been keenly interested in twentieth-century Austrian fiction ever since his doctoral thesis on Heimito von Doderer. His many articles in this area (all conscientiously listed in his bibliography) have now been distilled and developed into this study of prose fiction produced under the Second Republic, which existed from the fall of the Habsburg Empire in 1918 till Austria’s (largely willing) absorption into the Third Reich in 1938.
One of Barker’s main aims is the admirable one of rescuing the reputations of unjustly neglected or forgotten writers. Hence he begins with two texts on the First World War, which, unlike the well-known German war fiction by Arnold Zweig and E. M. Remarque, were written close to the events: Andreas Latzko’s pacifist Menschen im Krieg (1917) and Ernst Weiss’s short story about a traumatized and emasculated war victim, ‘Franta Zlin’ (1918). These texts may not be subtle – Barker says the reader feels ‘bludgeoned’ by Weiss – but when literature reports on atrocious suffering, subtlety may be inappropriate.
Barker then examines three texts which look back to the pre-war era: Arthur Schnitzler’s Fräulein Else (1924), Franz Werfel’s Der Tod des Kleinbürgers (1927) and Joseph Roth’s Zipper und sein Vater (1928). Here he reveals in immense detail the half-hidden discourses of Jewish or Czech ethnicity which pervade these stories, though he provokes dissent when he says that the voyeuristic art dealer Dorsday in Schnitzler’s text ‘would not have seemed out of place in the Völkischer Beobachter’ (p. 53); one sees the point, but Schnitzler’s indirectness is worlds away from the crudity of Nazi propaganda.
Once we reach the 1930s, the contrast grows sharper between the conservative, ruralist fiction that won literary prizes and the writing by (mostly) Jewish writers, based in Vienna, that has proved durable. Barker perhaps dismisses conservative fiction too readily: I would at least plead for Johannes Freumbichler’s Philomena Ellenhub (1937), not mentioned here; and he wrongly describes as an ‘erstwhile Nazi’ (p. 90) the Styrian novelist Franz Nabl, who, though too closely involved with the Nazi authorities for his own good, never joined the Party. However, Barker provides a valuable study of the conservative Bruno Brehm, described as ‘a slick and entertaining storyteller’ (p. 87), whose Imperial Trilogy, published in the 1930s and hugely popular under the Third Reich, was reissued in heavily revised – and clearly much duller – form as Die Throne stürzen in 1951. Brehm provides an instructive case study of how a writer who should have been discredited was helped to adapt to the Second Republic, which was only too anxious to avoid facing the recent Austrian past.
A potentially controversial chapter deals with literary representations of the Civil War of February 1934 which ushered in the authoritarian but anti-Nazi Corporate State under Engelbert Dollfuss. It might have been better to begin this chapter with a factual narrative of events, since the political choices they demanded still, understandably, awake strong passions. Though measured, Barker is sympathetic to the Socialists and harsh towards Karl Kraus, whose criticism of their ineffectual leadership is called an ‘obsession’; hissupport for the Corporate State is said to have ‘irredeemably sullied’ his reputation(p. 119). Barker uses the emotive word ‘Fascism’ to describe the Dollfuss government too freely and without the necessary qualifications (for example, Austria’s one concentration camp contained only Nazis). But these issues demand fuller analysis than a short review permits.
Barker deserves gratitude for discussing the depictions of the February events by two German Socialist refugees in Austria, Anna Seghers and Friedrich Wolf, and particularly for his positive appreciation of Seghers as a ‘great humanist’ (p. 151). He ends with a comparison of the exile novels by Weiss and Roth and with a thorough exploration of possible Nazi elements in Doderer’s fiction of the 1930s. Looking forward, he persuasively applauds the liberal outlook of the narrator in Doderer’s Die Dämonen (1956) and the optimism apparent in Die erleuchteten Fenster (1951, but written in 1939). What brought about this transformation in Doderer? Although Barker’s reflections help, no critic has yet taken the measure of this extraordinary writer, great but sometimes morally blind, who transcends all established categories.
In sum, this is an invaluable book which draws on a lifetime’s intimacy with Austrian literature to map a body of fiction, much of it barely known, against a relatively unfamiliar historical setting, with a lucid and engaging style. It must surely become a standard work.