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Reviewed by:
  • A History of Austrian Literature: 1918–2000
  • Katherine Arens
A History of Austrian Literature: 1918–2000. Edited by Katrin Kohl and Ritchie Robertson. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2006. 344 pages + 15 b/w illustrations. $85.00.

A History of Austrian Literature is a very inadequate title for this fine volume of Austrian literary and cultural history in the post-Habsburg era, as might be expected from a volume drawing on an international team of scholars, edited out of England, at the moment perhaps the most interesting locus for Austrian studies outside of Austria itself. This text needs to be on the reading list of any seminar in Austrian literature in the Anglophone world, and on every PhD reading list that values cultural history as tied to precise history, politics, and the sociology of media.

The text is pitched carefully at a readership that may or may not know German (all quotations are included bilingually), and that most likely has not meditated on the significance of the multiple political forms of "Germany" of the twentieth century standing as part of Europe next to the other Germanophone countries of Austria and Switzerland. Yet this volume is no primer: it offers succinct, careful, and informative overviews of the various domains of culture (high and popular media included) at play after World War One.

A brief timeline with significant dates and a short narrative history of Austria [End Page 580] in the twentieth century (2–10) start off the volume, setting up a nuanced overview of the most frequently posed question about Austria: does Austria have an independent literature? (10–17), an on-going debate here outlined in its most important moments. At the other end of the text is a fine list of "Suggestions for Further Reading" keyed to each second of the volume, and a useful index. The body of the text is broken into 12 chapters by various contributors, arranged by topics and very rough chronology. All of them share a dedication to clear themes, incisive historical reference, and readability.

The first four of these chapters treat 1918–1945 in various framings, taking on the years between the demise of the Habsburg monarchy and the end of the Nazi era. Judith Beniston's essay on "Drama in Austria, 1918–1945" (21–52) sets the tone for subsequent ones. Drama and the theater are pictured as a major political force in the interwar era, with very specific party alignments. She devotes a section to the master dramatists of the era—Hofmannsthal, Schnitzler, and Schönherr—as she mixes in illuminating ways explications of significant texts, issues that the authors were implicated in, and their reception. Further sections within the chapter take on not only hegemonic forms of theater, but also dialect theater, how Austrian identity was constructed on the stage, the relation of history and Catholicism in drama, and how the theater functioned under Austro-Fascism, in the Anschluss era, and in exile. Robertson Ritchie matches Beniston's essay with an equivalent about "Austrian Prose Fiction, 1918–45" (53–74), addressing "Young Vienna," the modern masters (Musil, Broch, Doderer), the Heimatroman, international or exile writers like Franz Werfel, and the impact of women authors.

Murray G. Hall explains "Publishers and Institutions in Austria, 1918–1945" (75–86), to show how the book trades and attendant cultural institutions were participant in day-to-day transmission of culture. Particularly noteworthy are the connections he makes back to nineteenth-century publishing, including a digest of important publishing and royalty agreements. He continues by outlining how political and economic forces affected the circulation of culture, and how institutions like the PEN Club and various literary societies fostered the production and distribution of culture.

Janet Stewart offers a nice parallel to Hall's essay in discussing "Popular Culture in Austria: Cabaret and Film, 1918–1945" (87–106), which traces other sites of cultural production and dissemination, including the Prater, the dawn of the mass media (especially film, treated generally as a medium), the cultural projects associated with Red Vienna and its programs for social improvement (90–97), and the conservative and particularly Catholic reactions against them (97–103). Stewart's deft positionings of these cultural...

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