Die “Neuen Deutschen Beiträge”: Hugo von Hofmannsthals Europa-Utopie by Corinne Wagner-Zoelly (review)

This fine little book has its origins in a dissertation done at the University of Zurich, under the supervision of Dr. Martin E. Schmid, about Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s Neue Deutsche Beiträge. That literary magazine was conceived as a way to deal with the consequences of the First World War (as was his great editing project at the Österreichische Bibliothek, 1914–1919), continuing Hofmannsthal’s work in support of the idea of Europe and a common European culture after the end of the Habsburg monarchy. The magazine was founded by Hofmannsthal to influence a European intellectual elite, but it ended a financial disaster, appearing only sporadically between 1922 and 1927, for a total of six issues in two volumes.

Wagner-Zoelly has given us here less a typical scholarly monograph than a new approach to discussing literary magazines. She threads her way through those six issues to find those texts that specifically speak to Hofmannsthal’s idea of European culture, aiming at explaining his mixture of contemporaneous texts with older ones and the contrasts made between European and non-European texts.

What Wagner-Zoelly achieves is the best of what historical-critical text editions can do, but in this new framework she orchestrates this variety of texts so that we can feel their original force today. In doing so she helps rescue Hofmannsthal’s postwar work as perhaps utopian but nonetheless relevant to the cultural projects of his day and age. His goal, as she presents it, was to retie the broken threads of European culture, not to return to some mythic past.

The context of Hofmannsthal’s project is built up carefully here. The editor starts with history and the rationale for Hofmannsthal’s choices of what was actually published in the journal. After that, she documents the project’s prehistory, provides a guide to the six issues, and introduces the journal’s program in its own voice and the Bremer Press that published it (especially by using Hofmannsthal’s correspondence with Willy Wiegand, one of the two responsible for the publishing house’s program). After that material history, she traces in Hofmannsthal’s correspondence what he means by his European idea, taking it up thematically and in conjunction with other projects he was involved with (such as the 1926 Internationaler Kongress der Kulturverbände).

Wagner-Zoelly then explains her own choice of texts to provide full commentary on, including Hofmannsthal’s Der Turm and Das Salzburger große Welttheater, texts by Rudolf Borchert and Walter Benjamin (“Goethes Wahlverwandtschaften” and Der Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels) as well as translated texts from various contexts. In each case, the editor situates the text, traces how it came to be, and provides the information the reader needs to understand it. She includes quotations from letters, provides biographies of interlocutors, and explains contemporaneous situations that speak to its content and origin.

This volume should be on the shelf of every scholar working on Hofmannsthal, as it is a model for approaching his work as a set of cultural products rather than as a series of texts alone. In addition, scholars who work on authors involved in producing literary magazines could profit from her model on how to work with their authors’ collaborative projects. Wagner-Zoelly shows us what excellent text editing can achieve for the reader and for scholars alike.