12 - An Englishman Abroad: Literature, Politics, and Sex in John Lehmann's Writings on Vienna in the 1930s

Summary

IN THE LATE 1920S AND 1930S Austria was often only obliquely or retrospectively the subject of its own literature. Alienated by Austrofascism, authors such as Ödön von Horváth, Theodor Kramer, Rudolf Brunngraber, and Jura Soyfer did address contemporary social and political reality, but they represent the exception rather than the rule. In their major fictional works, the canonical writers of the period as Broch, Kraus, and Musil tended to look backward at Austria's decline. Stefan Zweig's nostalgia had no room for what he called “Pseudo-Wirklichkeitsreferate” (pseudoreports on reality). His main literary treatment of the political events of this period is couched in symbolic and allegorical form in Triumph und Tragik des Erasmus von Rotterdam (The Triumph and Tragedy of Erasmus of Rotterdam, 1934). Even Joseph Roth's Kapuzinergruft (Capuchins' Crypt, 1938), which includes the Anschluss in its narrative, is heavily weighted toward the past. Other authors, such as Alexander Lernet-Holenia, injected a strong note of fantasy into their retrospectives. Felix Braun's idealism took him far away from contemporary reality and even when he tentatively explored the politics of the 1920s in Agnes Altkirchner (1927), his apolitical nature was clearly in evidence. The same is true of Raoul Auernheimer's novel Die linke und die rechte Hand (The Left Hand and the Right, 1927).

It sometimes took non-Austrians to confront head-on the key political events of the 1930s. Der Weg durch den Februar (The Path through February), about the social conditions that led to the 1934 uprisings, is by Mainzborn Anna Seghers and was published in Paris in 1935.