The Dedalus Book of Austrian Fantasy;1890-2000
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Dedalus would like to thank the Kunstsektion of the Austrian Bundeskanzleramt in Vienna and East England Arts in Cambridge for their assistance in producing this book.
I would particularly like to thank the Österreichische Gesellschaft für Literatur for funding a stay in Vienna to allow me to gather material for the new, expanded edition of this anthology. MM
Acknowledgements
The editor would like to thank the following for permission to use copyright material
Ilse Aichinger, ‘Where I Live’ from Wo ich wohne. Erzählungen. Gedichte. Dialoge © S Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt/Main.
Gerhard Amanshauser, ‘The Unmasking of the Briefly Sketched Gentlemen’ from Der gewöhnliche Schrecken. Horrorgeschichten, ed P Handke © Residenz Verlag, Salzburg.
H C Artmann, ‘In the Gulf of Carpentaria’ from Die Anfangsbuchstaben der Flagge in Gesammelte Prosa vol 2 © Residenz Verlag, Salzburg and Vienna.
Martin Auer, ‘The Trouble with Time Travel’ from Phantastisches aus Österreich ed Franz Rottensteiner, © Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt/Main.
Rudolf Bayr, ‘Something to be Said for the Rain’ from Ich habe nichts als mich: Professor Dr. Friedrich Harrer.
Theodor Csokor, ‘The Kiss of the Stone Woman’, ‘Shadowtown’ from Ein paar Schaufeln Erde © Langen/Müller, Munich.
Jeannie Ebner, ‘The Moving Frontier’, ‘The Singing in the Swamp’ from Protokoll aus einem Zwischenreich: Jeannie Ebner/ Verlag Styria, Graz.
Erich Fried, ‘An Up-and-coming Concern’ from Fast alles Mögliche © Verlag Klaus Wagenbach, Berlin, 1975, new ed 2000; also in Erich Fried: Gesammelte Werke, Verlag Klaus Wagenbach, Berlin, 1993.
Barbara Frischmuth, ‘Journey to the World’s End’ from Traumgrenze: the author.
Anton Fuchs, ‘Ebb and Flow’, ‘Flow and Ebb’ from Nächtliche Begegnungen, Bibliothek der Provinz, Weitra: Frau Lotte Fuchs.
Marianne Gruber, ‘The Epidemic’ from Protokolle der Angst: the author.
Marlen Haushofer, ‘Cannibals’ from Schreckliche Treue © Claassen Verlag, Munich.
Fritz von Herzmanovsky-Orlando, ‘Signor Scurri’ from Maskenspiel der Genien © Langen Müller, Munich.
G F Jonke, ‘My Day’ from Beginn einer Verzweiflung © Jung und Jung Verlag, Salzburg.
Florian Kalbeck, ‘The Toad’ from Das Basler Träumebuch: Frau Judith Por-Kalbeck.
Michael Köhlmeier, ‘Snitto-Snot’, ‘The Thief’ from Der traurige Blick in die Weite © Franz Deuticke Verlag, Vienna, 1999.
Paul Leppin, ‘The Ghost of the Jewish Ghetto’ from Alt-Prager Spaziergänge: Dierk Hoffmann.
Peter Marginter, ‘Funeral Meats’ from Leichenschmaus: the author.
Leo Perutz, ‘Pour avoir bien servi’ from Herr, erbarme Dich meiner © Paul Zsolnay Verlag, Vienna, 1985.
Jakov Lind ‘Journey through the Night’ from Seele aus Holz: the author.
Barbara Neuwirth, ‘In the Sand’, ‘The Furnished Room’ from In den Gärten der Nacht © Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt/Main.
Georg Saiko: ‘The Dream’ from Sämtliche Werke in fünf Bänden vol 3 Die Erzählungen © Residenz Verlag, Salzburg and Vienna.
Karl Hans Strobl, ‘The Head’ from Unheimliche Geschichten © Langen Müller, Munich.
Peter von Tramin, ‘The Sewermaster’ from Taschen voller Geld © Böhlau Verlag, Vienna.
Hannelore Valencak, ‘At the World’s End’ from Erzählungen: the author.
Franz Werfel, ‘The Playground’ from Erzählungen aus zwei Welten vol 1, S Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt/Main; Alma Mahler-Werfel.
The Editor/Translator
Mike Mitchell is one of Dedalus’s editorial directors and is responsible for the Dedalus translation programme.
He has translated some thirty books, including Simplicissimus and Life of Courage by Grimmelshausen, all the novels of Gustav Meyrink, three by Herbert Rosendorfer and The Maimed by Hermann Ungar.
His translation of Rosendorfer’s Letters back to Ancient China won the 1998 Schlegel-Tieck German Translation Prize.
Contents
Title
Dedication
Acknowledgements
The Editor/Translator
Introduction
1. Flowers
Arthur Schnitzler (1862–1931)
2. The Master
Gustav Meyrink (1868–1932)
3. Extracts from The Great Bestiary of Modern Literature
Franz Blei (1871–1942)
4. Folter’s Gems
Paul Busson (1873–1924)
5. Sergeant Anton Lerch
Hugo von Hofmannsthal (1874–1929)
6. The Death of Christoph Detlev Brigge of Ulsgard
Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926)
7. Signor Scurri
Fritz von Herzmanovsky-Orlando (1877–1954)
8. The Head
Karl Hans Strobl (1877–1946)
9. The Ghost of the Jewish Ghetto
Paul Leppin (1878–1945)
10. Pour avoir bien servi
Leo Perutz (1882–1957)
11. Outside the Law
Franz Kafka (1883–1924)
12. A Country Doctor
Franz Kafka (1883–1924)
13. Gracchus the Huntsman
Franz Kafka (1883–1924)
14. The First Hour after Death
Max Brod (1884–1968)
15. The Kiss of the Stone Woman
Franz Theodor Csokor (1885–1969)
16. Shadowtown
Franz Theodor Csokor (1885–1969)
17. The Playground: A Fantasy
Franz Werfel (1890–1945)
18. The Dream
Georg Saiko (1892–1962)
19. The Reason for It
Hermann Ungar (1893–1929)
20. The Moving Frontier
Jeannie Ebner (1918– )
21. The Singing in the Swamp
Jeannie Ebner (1918– )
22. Something to Say for the Rain
Rudolf Bayr (1919–1990)
23. Ebb and Flow – Flow and Ebb
Anton Fuchs (1920–1995)
24. Cannibals
Marlen Haushofer (1920–1970)
25. The Toad
Florian Kalbeck (1920–1996)
26. An Up-and-coming Concern
Erich Fried (1921–1988)
27. Where I Live
Ilse Aichinger (1921– )
28. In the Gulf of Carpentaria
H. C. Artmann (1921– )
29. Journey through the Night
Jakov Lind (1927– )
30. The Unmasking of the Briefly Sketched Gentlemen
Gerhard Amanshauser (1928– )
31. At the World’s End
Hannelore Valencak (1929– )
32. The Sewermaster
Peter von Tramin (1932– )
33. Funeral Meats
Peter Marginter (1934– )
34. Incident in St Wolfgang
Peter Daniel Wolfkind (1937– )
35. The Journey to the World’s End
Barbara Frischmuth (1941– )
36. The Epidemic
Marianne Gruber (1944– )
37. My Day
G. F. Jonke (1946– )
38. The Thief
Michael Köhlmeier (1949– )
39. Snitto-Snot
Michael Köhlmeier (1949– )
40. The Trouble with Time Travel
Martin Auer (1951– )
41. In the Sand
Barbara Neuwirth (1958– )
42. The Furnished Room
Barbara Neuwirth (1958– )
43. Extracts from Novak: A Grotesque
Günther Kaip (1960– )
Copyright
Introduction
‘It is a sad but incontrovertible fact that the world stands in profound ignorance of the phenomenon of Austria.’
Since Fritz von Herzmanovsky-Orlando wrote those opening lines to his anarchic comic novel, Maskenspiel der Genien (Masque of the Spirits) at the end of the 1920s, much more has become known of Austria than ‘the mistakes contained in a few tourist guides published abroad.’
Freud was already on his way to becoming a household name even then, but the other figures who are now widely associated with the cultural florescence of the turn-of-the-century Habsburg Empire were almost unknown outside Austria: Mahler, Schoenberg, Klimt, Kokoschka, Schiele, Wittgenstein, Mach, Schnitzler, Hofmannsthal. Now the whole concept of fin de siècle Vienna is so well-known that it is an effective tourist attraction vigorously promoted by the Austrian Tourist Board.
However, Herzmanovsky-Orlando’s lament, as far as it was intended to be taken seriously (and there is a serious concern lurking deep beneath the comic-grotesque surface of his novel), does not refer to these cultural icons of a golden age that was brought to an end by the First World War. For him, the ‘phenomenon of Austria’ was an essence, a mode of being that found expression in the Habsburg Empire or, rather, in his vision of Austria as a state where the elemental forces embodied in the myths of antiquity still managed to survive behind a grotesquely bureaucratic surface.
These two disparate elements are brought together in one of Herzmanovsky’s pictures (he was also an artist of some stature): ‘Austrian customs officials supervise the birth of Venus’. They are also present in the story included in this anthology, ‘Signor Scurri’, in the soldier who, when invalided out of the army, was given ‘The Sea’, just as others were given the more traditional barrel organ or tobacco shop. Herzmanovsky’s novel is set in an imaginary buffer state between the German, Slav and Latin areas of Europe, a concept that has reappeared on the political menu of the real world since the collapse of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. This state combines an anarchic vitality with the most rigidly formal of constitutions, which is based on the rules of Tarock, a popular Austrian card game. Hence its name: Tarockania.
Another more widely known fantasy version of Austria, and conceived at about the same time, is Kakanien (Cacania) in Robert Musil’s novel, The Man without Qualities. The name derives from a combination of the initials K. K. standing for ‘Imperial and Royal’ and seen everywhere in the old Empire, and Kacke, crap. Musil’s country might be regarded as the negative to Herzmanovsky’s positive, since in Cacania the dead hand of bureaucracy tends to stifle rather than protect positive forces, although it does allow Musil to examine potential realities as a counterweight to the actual world.
A third example of these fantasy states is the Dream Realm in Alfred Kubin’s novel The Other Side (Dedalus 2000). The Dream Realm is a state founded somewhere in the middle of Asia by Klaus Patera, a fabulously wealthy school-friend of the narrator. Its buildings have all been transported from various parts of Europe, none being later than 1860. The narrator never meets Patera, who remains a mysterious force at the centre of this kingdom where time has stopped, guarded by a punctilious and impenetrable bureaucracy. This combination of mystical force and rigid bureaucracy relates the Dream World to Herzmanovsky’s and Musil’s creations, though the atmosphere of Kubin’s country reeks of decadence and decay.
Probably the best-known literary evocation of the bureaucratic spirit is the castle in Kafka’s novel of the same name. There, whatever authority resides within the castle is surrounded by an impregnable wall of bureaucracy. Yet however mean, spiteful or stupid the subordinates seem to be, those qualities do not reflect on whatever is at the centre, which remains powerful but unknowable. These features are illustrated here in the little parable ‘Before the Law’. The intimidating figure of the doorkeeper cannot diminish the radiance of the light pouring out from the door he guards so effectively. Paradox becomes an existential mode of being.
These fantasy images of Austria such as Tarockania or Cacania are not merely nostalgic recreations of the multinational Empire which was wiped from the map at a stroke in 1919, though there were also many of those. There is a quality of paradox underlying them all, and in this they hark back to the Monarchy’s increasingly desperate search, as the 19th century proceeded, for a unifying idea to justify a state which held together so many disparate nationalities. Immediately after the 1848 revolution a distinguished historian, J. G. Helfert, pointed out that for most citizens of the Empire there was a distinction between Heimat, the region to which they felt an emotional tie, and Vaterland, the state to which they owed loyalty, and he proposed a vigorous programme of education to inculcate an attachment to the fatherland. As far as they were ever carried out, Helfert’s ideas did not have any great success; until the end of the Empire the loyalties of its subjects were focused mainly on the person of the Emperor, rather than on the state he represented. This ambiguity the inhabitants felt as to where they actually belonged, can perhaps best be seen in the fact that the state had no real name. Although commonly referred to as ‘Austria’, that was only the name of two tiny medieval dukedoms that form the north-eastern corner of the present state. Its official designation was: The Kingdoms and Countries represented in the Imperial Diet. Not a name to engender a strong feeling of belonging.
The contrast between the ceremonial splendour of the centuries-old Habsburg Empire, with the apparently permanent Francis Joseph at its head, and the shifting sands of increasingly disaffected nationalities on which it was based, has something baroque about it and, indeed, the baroque is an important part of Austria’s cultural heritage. Baroque art has a splendour which is undermined by the fact that its all-too-palpable physicality is not important in itself, but as a symbol of a transcendental, spiritual world. Life is not something independent, self-sufficient, but merely a pale image of another, more real world. Life, in the words of the title of Calderon’s play which the Austrian Grillparzer also used, is a dream.
To the baroque inheritance and the awareness, often unconscious, of the insecurities beneath the glittering surface of Imperial society must be added the researches of a school of psychologists, of which Freud is only the best-known, which laid bare the powerful urges and desires beneath the surface respectability of the personality. It was also in Vienna that Ernst Mach, the scientist whose name has been perpetuated in the term for the speed of sound, concluded, when he was looking for a solid foundation on which to base his science, that the self as an independent, ordering entity was ‘irretrievably lost’. The literature which sprang from this background was one which casts doubt on the apparently solid surface of reality, which questions the meaningfulness of human activity, which is always ready to admit that the opposite might just as well be true. It is a literature that is a fertile ground for the fantastic.
It is this which distinguishes Austrian literature from German. A culture which emphasises the potential as much as the real, which has a taste for the humour of paradox, is one which does not take a too earnest view of itself. German literature takes itself, the world and the supernatural far more seriously. There was a fashion, in the first twenty years or so of the twentieth century, for literature of the supernatural in the manner of E. T. A. Hoffmann and Edgar Allan Poe in which some Austrian writers, in particular Karl Hans Strobl, were prominent. But more characteristic Austrian fantasy tends to emphasise the puzzling coincidences, parallels and paradoxes of this world, revealing it as less solid than we would think. A good example of this is Leo Perutz. He was a mathematician and his novels are finely calculated equations of chance, coincidence and mystery. It is a style which is less well-suited to the restricted length of the short story, but ‘Pour avoir bien servi’ has a typical twist at the end which turns its whole basis inside out, revealing the apparently clear relationships as a construction of the narrator’s imagination.
As part of Aust
ria’s baroque heritage death, too, is seen not as the end, the negation of life, but rather as a continuation in another sphere. Dying is often shown not as an abrupt event, but a slow transition of which the character and the reader gradually become aware. A good example is Csokor’s ‘Shadowtown’ where the characters only gradually realise they are dead and where death is like ‘a safe, dark cave, which will protect me as I fall asleep.’ In Hofmannsthal’s ‘Sergeant Anton Lerch’, the whole subtle transformation of mood through the day is a prelude to Lerch’s unexpected and unexplained death. In Max Brod’s story the ‘first hour after death’ is a period of adjustment to a continuation of existence on a more spiritual level. The personification of death in the extract from Rilke’s novel, The Papers of Malte Laurids Brigge, is not a mere literary device. For Rilke, the depersonalisation of death was the ultimate sign of the loss of individual substance in life, which he experienced particularly strongly in Paris.
In Kafka’s story, ‘Gracchus the Huntsman’, death is an intermediate state, neither the one thing nor the other, since the hero’s funeral barge ‘went the wrong way,’ leaving him ‘on the great staircase leading up … sometimes at the top, sometimes down below, sometimes to the right, sometimes to the left, always in motion.’ But this is the state in which most of Kafka’s characters find themselves: Gregor Samsa is a man who has metamorphosed into an insect, but still retains human feeling; Josef K. in The Trial has been arrested but does not know what he is accused of, nor by what law; K believes he has been appointed surveyor to the castle, but cannot convince the administrators of the fact; the man from the country in ‘Outside the Law’ spends his life at the gate to the Law, hoping to be granted entrance, and the country doctor in the story of the same name does not belong in the country area he serves. This sense of not belonging doubtless had its roots both in Kafka’s relationship with his father and in his situation as a Germanised Jew in the increasingly Czech city of Prague, but in his writings it is raised to an existential plane. (The cryptic references to his own name in the names Kafka gave to his characters has frequently been commented on; kavka in Czech and graculus, in Latin, related to ‘Gracchus’, both mean ‘jackdaw’, for example.) These stories, which have been called ‘parables from which the first term is missing,’ present man as a displaced person in the scheme of eternity. For many readers they express the condition humaine of the twentieth century and this doubtless explains Kafka’s worldwide popularity since the end of the Second World War.