2 - Austrian Prose Fiction, 1918–45

Summary

AUSTRIAN FICTION BETWEEN THE WARS is marked by the trauma of the Habsburg Empire's dissolution. It left a former Imperial capital incongruously stranded in a small, largely Alpine republic. The progressive Socialism of “Red Vienna” was at odds with the conservatism of the provinces. Inflation, unemployment, and threats from opposing paramilitary forces culminated in the Civil War of February 1934, the suspension of parliament, and the installation of the clerical authoritarian Ständestaat (corporate state), which was nevertheless a bulwark against Nazi Germany. The Anschluss in March 1938 drove some writers to suicide and sent many into exile. Of those who remained in Austria, some adjusted to the new regime in ways that have only been uncovered by recent research. Politics and literature are therefore inextricable, yet historical distance has not only disclosed political allegiances but shown that their relation to the value of literary texts is a complex one.

“Austria” is a contested term, and the spatial and temporal boundaries of this chapter cannot be firm. Writers born in the former Habsburg Empire who thematized Austria will be discussed, even if they led much of their lives abroad. Writers from Prague will otherwise be excluded, despite the injustice to the many talented German-language writers of the generation after Kafka who lived in the First Czechoslovak Republic. And some novels will be discussed which, though published after the Second World War, deal with events of the 1920s and 1930s.

“Young Vienna” after 1918

The writers who emerged in the 1890s as members of the “Young Vienna” circle — Arthur Schnitzler (1862–1931), Hugo von Hofmannsthal (1874–1929), Hermann Bahr (1863–1934) — were still active in the uncomfortable new postwar world, though their fiction was still set amid the relative stability of the Habsburg Empire before the war or even earlier. Hofmannsthal's unfinished novel Andreas oder die Vereinigten (translated as Andreas, or The United), begun in 1907 and written mainly in 1912 and 1913, was published only posthumously in 1932. Although Hofmannsthal set it, like his play Der Rosenkavalier (The Chevalier of the Rose, 1911), in the eighteenth century, this modernist Bildungsroman anticipates many concerns of interwar fiction.