Preamble: A Cold Sun

Summary

“L'Autriche, c'est ce qui reste”

This 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. In short, I want to show how much literary life there was beyond the bounds of Weimar and Berlin.

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. 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.