10 - Facts and Fiction: Rudolf Brunngraber, Otto Neurath, and Viennese Neue Sachlichkeit

Summary

THE VIENNESE NOVELIST Rudolf Brunngraber (1901–60), whose first novel Karl und das 20. Jahrhundert (1933; freely translated as A Twentieth-Century Tragedy) forms the focus of this essay, remains an undeservedly forgotten figure in twentieth-century Austrian literature. Although his commercially successful publishing career spanned the turbulent decades between the early 1930s and the late 1950s, it has seldom attracted scholarly interest. His debut novel, according to Claudio Magris a “masterpiece,” is only a partial exception. It is revealing that this innovative literary text, a remarkable novel of the Great Depression in Austria, plays a marginal role in two entirely distinct lines of scholarly inquiry. On the one hand, it is frequently aligned with contemporary novels, many of which were written in response to the economic crisis, of the so-called Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) — a phenomenon usually associated with Germany of the Weimar Republic. On the other hand, the text is just as often understood as a distinctly Austrian novel, indebted to the theories and practices of Viennese polymath and Wiener Kreis (Vienna Circle) member Otto Neurath, the influence of whose statistical methods and socialist-humanist ideas is discernible in both the form and content of the novel. When examined side by side, these responses to the text reveal the originality of a work that is worthy of fuller and more differentiated appraisal. This essay explores these parallel avenues of reception, assessing the novel's supposed status as an example of Neue Sachlichkeit as well as reflecting on relevant political, literary, and intellectual currents in Vienna of the early 1930s.