Like a number of the writers included in this anthology – Brod, Leppin, Perutz, Rilke, Werfel and Ungar – Kafka lived in Prague which, in the early part of this century, came to rival Vienna and Berlin as a centre of German literary life. But the figure with whom Prague, with its brooding castle, crowded ghetto and mysterious atmosphere, is most closely associated is Gustav Meyrink, who went to live there as an adult. An elegant dandy around whom legends naturally accumulated (he once supposedly challenged the whole of the officers’ corps to a duel), he began writing while recovering from tuberculosis in 1901. His popularity was established by his short stories (The Opal and Other Stories, Dedalus 1994), in many of which his fantasy has a sharp satirical edge, attacking all kinds of narrow-mindedness, especially military, religious and scientific.
The story included in this anthology, ‘The Master’, is an example of Meyrink’s combination of the grotesque and the occult, with which he became increasingly concerned. He joined many occult groups, only to be disappointed at their spuriousness, and spent much time investigating, and often exposing, mediums; at the same time he edited a number of occult texts and, despite his frequent disappointment in the practitioners, clearly believed in the existence of occult forces. He later claimed his novels and stories should be judged by spiritual rather than aesthetic criteria.
Paul Leppin was a disciple of Meyrink and the figure of Nicholas, who flits in and out of Severin’s Road into Darkness (Dedalus, 1997) is a tribute to him. However neither that novel, despite its subtitle of ‘A Prague Ghost-Story’, nor the piece in this collection, ‘The Ghost of the Jewish Ghetto’, is a story of the supernatural in the traditional sense. Rather, they evoke the atmosphere of decadence associated with fin de siècle Prague which captures young men in the clutch of its ‘ghostly’ tentacles.
It is perhaps worth pointing out that Prague as a city of decadence and mystery, where the Golem walks or a whore becomes a kind of succubus, is a German image. For most Czechs of the period, Prague was the vital symbol of a people who were about to take what they regarded as their rightful place in history.
Brod and Werfel belong to the next generation of writers, which made Prague the most important centre of Expressionism in the Monarchy. Although both later abandoned the exaggeratedly expressive style, they remained concerned with a renewal of the spiritual side of man which was fundamental to Expressionism and which informs both the stories in this anthology. Brod’s ‘The First Hour after Death’, first published in 1916, goes beyond Expressionism in its addition of humour to satire and spirituality. It creates a future world which has been at war for so long it is regarded as the natural condition of mankind. The apostle of this acceptance, the minister, is confronted with the spirit of a being from another sphere, whose punishment for his sins is to be sent for an hour to our – lower – world. What makes the story particularly attractive is that the ghost, who temporarily converts the minister away from his rationalistic relativism, is a comic figure who has great difficulty adapting to the physical conditions of this world.
At the beginning of his career Werfel was primarily a poet, and there is something of the expansive gestures of the writer of Der Weltfreund (The World-Friend) in the texture of ‘The Playground’. There is also something post-Freudian about its dreams within dreams, especially the first section recreating the hero’s relationship with his father. What Werfel takes from Freud is not, however, psychological analysis so much as archetypal relationships which he transforms into poetic symbols. The central section, on love/sex, is probably a working-out of some of the guilt Werfel felt at his relationship with Alma Mahler-Gropius, who was already pregnant with his child before she left Gropius for Werfel in 1920, the year in which ‘The Playground’ was first published.
Another Jew from what is now the Czech Republic who wrote in German was Hermann Ungar. Like the short piece, ‘The Reason for It’, the two novels (eg The Maimed, Dedalus 2002) he completed before his early death are stories of degradation descending to the grotesque and macabre narrated with an unemphatic, bleak matter-of-factness which only serves to intensify the monstrousness of the events.
Much closer to Freud was the oldest writer represented in this anthology, Arthur Schnitzler. He trained as a doctor (his father’s profession) and continued to practise for some years after his initial success as a writer. His interest in psychology was scientific as well as literary (he had been an assistant in the clinic of Freud’s teacher, Theodor Meynert). Freud, six years his senior, even felt a superstitious thrill at the similarity between them. In a letter congratulating Schnitzler on his sixtieth birthday, he wrote:
I have plagued myself over the question how it comes about that in all these years I have never sought your company … The answer is this much too intimate confession. I think I have avoided you from a kind of awe of meeting my ‘double’ … whenever I get deeply interested in your beautiful creations I always seem to find, behind their poetic sheen, the same presuppositions, interests and conclusions as those familiar to me as my own.
Schnitzler’s style is, in general, a finely nuanced social and psychological realism, and the suggestion of the supernatural in the story in this anthology is used to highlight the psychological analysis, rather than out of sensationalism. The hero of ‘Flowers’ feels the ghost of his former lover is taking possession of him through the flowers that come to him after her death. In fact, it is his belated pangs of conscience for his heartless treatment of her that give the memory its hold over him. His release from the spell, when his healthy, uncomplicated current mistress throws the withered stalks out of the window, has much of the moral ambiguity that abounds in Schnitzler’s work. Life wins over death, health over sickness, but also, so it seems, egoism over moral sensitivity.
Schnitzler’s characters tend to live for the moment. Ethical values which suggest a longer-term commitment usually crumble when faced with immediate demands. In some younger writers of the generation that followed Schnitzler and Freud, writers who appeared in the 1890s, this developed into an extraordinary sensitivity to mood and atmosphere, which threatened to dissolve the personality into nothing more than the focus for a multitude of separate impressions, which was all that was left of the ‘self’ in Ernst Mach’s philosophy. Rilke’s early poems are products of this subjective impressionism, which in his New Poems of 1907–8 he attempted to overcome by concentrating on objects from the world outside. The Papers of Malte Laurids Brigge is a product of that period of what has been called the ‘crisis of subjectivity’, when Rilke learnt, from his association with Rodin, for whom he acted as secretary for a time, to ‘see’ the external world, rather than the reflection of his own soul in it.
The main representative of this ‘impressionism’ in this anthology is Hugo von Hofmannsthal. He astonished the Viennese with his delicate, almost perfect lyrics published in the early 1890s when he was still at school. They reproduce moments of intense harmony with the beauty of the world, a beauty which he was aware was fragile, that could easily be shattered by contact with social and political realities, with ugliness and squalor. The problem of this aesthetic mode of existence runs through his short verse plays, which show a clearer awareness that it might come into conflict with the demands of ethical values than one finds in Schnitzler, who appears to record the problem without taking sides. Around the turn of the century Hofmannsthal went through a crisis of confidence in the ability of language to express what he really wanted to say, caused to a certain extent by his own facility, which is almost paradigmatic of twentieth-century European intellectuals’ difficulties with language.
His short story, ‘Sergeant Anton Lerch’, was written in 1899, three years before the ‘Chandos Letter’, in which he described his crisis of language. Although the hero of the story is not one of the aesthetes of Hofmannsthal’s early verse plays who shut themselves off from the world outside, there are parallels in the intensely experienced inner world and the squalor outside. Lerch sets off with his cavalry troop on
reconnaissance during the Italian campaign of the year of revolution, 1848. An apparently trivial incident during a highly successful series of operations turns his thoughts away from reality and into a day-dream of a future where he can mould his life to his own, rather crude desires. From then on the narrative hovers with remarkable sensitivity between the real and the unreal until the sergeant comes face to face with his own double. His death at the end (summarily executed for insubordination) is crude reality breaking in on a state of mind which he cannot or will not relinquish; it is left to the reader to decide the balance of daydream, trance or supernatural, but that is one of the factors which make the story so powerful.
As well as these writers, who represent the main streams of literature in Austria in the period before and after the First World War, there were a number who used the supernatural and macabre in a more direct manner as a means of arousing horror. The best known of these, Karl Hans Strobl, was probably as responsible as anyone for the spread of the influence of Edgar Allan Poe in the German-speaking world. Between 1900 and 1920 he initiated something of a fashion in the ghost/horror story, at which many writers tried their hand. Strobl himself brought out numerous anthologies and collections of his own stories. He is generally not seen as a serious writer, but ‘The Head’, which presents incidents during the French Revolution from the point of view of a head which has been cut off from its body by the guillotine, is a masterpiece of the macabre genre.
Paul Busson was another once popular writer who used elements of the supernatural, including folk beliefs, in his novels. The short story, ‘Folter’s Gems’, published in 1919, is a good example of the influence of Edgar Allan Poe. The 1929 Guardian review of Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf quoted Busson’s novel The Rebirth of Melchior Dronte as a typical example of German novelists ‘overdoing the exploitation of the macabre in fiction.’
Perhaps the best example of this type of story, however, is Csokor’s ‘The Kiss of the Stone Woman’, written in 1915. Csokor was a dramatist, the main representative of Expressionism in Vienna, who also wrote a number of short stories. ‘The Kiss of the Stone Woman’ is his only foray into the Gothic, which was probably written as a stylistic exercise or in the hope of being able to sell it. What raises it above the others is the trace of Expressionism in the style. His deliberate choice of active vocabulary, especially verbs, for what are really static objects – trees, houses, churches etc – invests the whole setting with a dynamism and sense of threat which is not unlike the effect of distorted backgrounds used in the German Expressionist films of the time (e.g. The Golem or The Cabinet of Dr Caligari).
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The small state created in 1919 by the Treaty of St Germain had never attracted the loyalty of the majority of Austrians, who either looked back to the days of the Monarchy, or wanted to be part of a greater Germany, which the treaty expressly forbade. The authoritarian state, set up by Dollfuß in 1933 and continued by Schuschnigg after Dollfuß’s murder by Nazis, attempted to remedy this by combining all conservative elements in a Patriotic Front. Despite the signal lack of impact this made on the population in general, when Hitler invaded in March 1938 it was because the Austrian government was about to hold a plebiscite which was expected to result in a majority in favour of Austria’s continued independence. When the Nazis held their own referendum a month later, however, the result was a 99.5 % majority in favour of union with the German Reich. There were many reasons for the size of the majority, but there is no doubt that a substantial portion of the population welcomed the German troops and their Führer.
The one certain and, as it turned out, permanent cure for the Austrians’ wish for union with Germany was to have that wish granted. As the Second World War came to its inevitable end, they embraced with fervour the Moscow Declaration of 1943 in which Austria was designated ‘the first free country to fall a victim to Nazi aggression.’ This allowed the state to bask in the status of ‘liberated victim’, which to an extent it was, and sweep the crimes committed by the many willing collaborators in the country under the carpet. Amnesia as to what happened between 1938–1945 became official policy. A history of Austria published with government support as late as 1970 stated that ‘The Second World War … was not an Austrian war. Austria as a state did not participate in it;’ its only sections on the Nazi period are headed ‘Austrian victims’ and ‘Austrian resistance’.
As far as literature was concerned, there was, in the immediate aftermath of the war, no shortage of calls for a complete break with the past and the development of a new culture of critical awareness. It soon became apparent, however, that what the public at large wanted, after decades of instability, culminating in the horrors of the Nazi dictatorship and the destruction of the war, was a return to the familiar, the tried-and-tested. Official cultural policy, too, started to look backwards rather than forwards, to the policies of the authoritarian state of the 1930s, which itself had propagated the ‘Austrian idea’ developed in the latter days of the Habsburg Empire.
Continuity, then, rather than innovation was to be a major aspect of Austrian literature in the post-war years. Although Austrian writers such as Ilse Aichinger were associated with the German Gruppe 47, no similar critical forum developed in Austria. When a radical group, including H. C. Artmann among others, did appear in the 1950s, it was aesthetically rather than politically or socially radical, its method a critique of language rather than of politics or society. This was also true of the loose grouping around the Forum Stadtpark in Graz, which dominated avant-garde Austrian literature in the 1960s and later. It was only in the mid-1970s and 1980s that a substantial literature which dealt critically with contemporary society emerged, with writers such as Franz Innerhofer, Elfriede Jelinek, Michael Scharang and Josef Winkler.
Although, in comparison to its size, Austria seems to have provided a surprisingly large number of important writers to post-war literature in German, it was in painting that Austrian artists enjoyed the greatest international success through the group known as the Vienna Fantastic Realists, to whom might be added Friedensreich Hundertwasser (whose ‘Bleeding Houses’ is used on the cover of this anthology) and Gottfried Helnwein. Rudolf Hausner’s portraits of himself as Adam, the representative of humanity, and Helnwein’s pictures, painted with almost photographic realism, of heads bound in bandages with metal forks and similar implements over the eyes, nose or mouth are immediately recognised throughout the world. The post-war rediscovery of Freud’s psychoanalysis was one stimulus to these painters who plumbed the subconscious to give expression to fears, longings and obsessions in the guise of myths, daydreams and fantasies painted with masterly precision.
This combination of unreal or surreal subject matter with a realistic style also characterises some of the best Austrian writing of the post-war years. In literature the rediscovered Kafka, banned like Freud under National Socialism, was an equally important inspiration in producing stories which seem to work as parables, yet do not dictate to the reader what truths they illustrate.
Examples of this are Jeannie Ebner’s ‘The Singing in the Swamp’ and ‘The Moving Frontier’ and Ernst Fuchs’s ‘Ebb and Flow’ which inhabit a mythical world beyond history and yet reflect on contemporary concerns. Ilse Aichinger’s ‘Where I Live’, on the other hand, has a very precise location, which, however, turns out to be not as stable as we assume our everyday world to be. But it is the protagonist’s unhesitating acceptance of the dislocation which encourages the reader to look for meaning in the surreal events and places her close to figures in Kafka. A similar type, not uncommon in post-war German literature as well, whom one might describe as ‘by Oblomov out of Kafka,’ is the protagonist of Rudolf Bayr’s ‘Something to be Said for the Rain’ who takes to his bed as a kind of training for his ‘one long, last look’ before he takes his leave of the world.
Fantasy is also a vehicle for explorations of the conscious and subconscious mind. Two stories look at suicides from almost opposite perspectives. In Barbara F
rischmuth’s ‘The Journey to the World’s End’ a young woman’s suicide by drowning becomes a journey under water in the course of which her experiences, her hopes, desires and fantasies are revealed as she gradually takes her leave of the world. In Barbara Neuwirth’s ‘The Furnished Room’ we learn little about the woman who moves in there, but her alienation is reflected in the objects and furnishings that come to life around her. Death as a journey rather than a single point is the subject of Hannelore Valencak’s ‘At the World’s End’, though it relies on more classical forms. Two suicides meet on the banks of the Styx in a Rilkean soulscape.
Subconscious desires of a more violent nature are laid bare in two stories in which cannibalism surfaces in a railway carriage, Jakov Lind’s ‘Journey through the Night’ and Marlen Haushofer’s ‘Cannibals’. While Haushofer reveals the secret desires triggered off by the presence of an apparently innocent, scarcely pubescent girl, Lind’s unrepentant cannibal is more an extremely vivid concretisation of the secret fears of the victim.
In Florian Kalbeck’s ‘The Toad’ the account the madman writes in his own ‘defence’ develops inexorably into a megalomaniac vision of himself and his like freeing the world of the people he sees as ‘toads’. The parallel to recent history is hinted at in the doctor’s final comments.
In two pieces the bizarre events have the surreal qualities of a dream. George Saiko’s fantasy in which the insides of the protagonist’s body and his internal organs are at the same time the city of Paris complete with buildings and monuments, people, trains and traffic, is entitled ‘The Dream’. Günther Kaip’s ‘Novak’, on the other hand, narrates its dreamlike happenings with a certain comic élan but as if they were normal, everyday reality. The increasingly surreal events narrated with the straightest of faces in Gert Jonke’s ‘My Day’ result in grotesque humour.
The Dedalus Book of Austrian Fantasy;1890-2000 Page 2
