Fictions from an Orphan State: Literary Reflections of Austria between Habsburg and Hitler by Andrew Barker (review)

Andrew Barker’s compact five-chapter volume is a welcome addition to recent scholarly investigations of the interwar period in Austria from 1918–1938. Attention given to Vienna’s fin-de-siècle and to Berlin and Weimar Germany has too often deflected from the vibrant cultural life in the inter-war period. In his pithy introduction Baker reminds readers of the important inter-war contributions Austrians made in the fields of music, positivist philosophy, economics, mathematics, and psychoanalysis. In response to this oversight, he zeroes in on literature “from and about Austria between the war-torn end of the Dual Monarchy and the jubilant annexation of the First Republic by the Nazis” (1).

With the stated aim “to show how writers across the spectrum of race, politics, and religion responded to the burden of the past, the demands of the present, and the prospect of what was for many a terrifying future” (1), Barker includes contemporary and retrospective accounts by Austrian writers as well as literary responses from German writers. The social and political upheaval in the early years of the First Republic, including the desires of many to be incorporated in the new Germany Republic in 1918, the political conflicts between the Left and government forces, particularly the civil war between the governmental clerical-fascists and the Left, and the Anschluss naturally elicited different literary responses than the German situation.

Barker opens his investigations by examining responses to World War I in the anti-war works of two long-forgotten writers, Andreas Latzko and Ernst Weiß. In his examination of Latzko’s Menschen im Krieg from 1917, he suggests two reasons why the anti-Habsburgian Catholic Jew is unfamiliar to most. First, as an early Nestbeschmutzer, his work—once immensely popular—was overlooked by patriotic scholars, and second, neither he nor his work fits easily into ethnic or literary categorization. Ernst Weiß, on the other hand, is known to many scholars, if for no other reason than his personal relationship to Kafka. Recently, Marcel Reich-Ranicki included Weiß in his Robert Musil bis Franz Werfel. Weiß’s 1919 novel Franta Zlin, expressionist in subject matter and naturalistic in style, also makes easy categorization challenging. Both writers, Barker notes, have absorbed the misogynistic discourse of the time: Latzko blames the cheering women for the war, and Weiß turns to “psycho-medical factors” (36) and impeded sexuality leading to violent behavior (38).

In his second chapter Barker discusses the works of three canonical writers—Arthur Schnitzler, Franz Werfel, and Joseph Roth—as responses to the political and social upheaval created by the dissolution of the monarchy and the founding of a republic in the aftermath of war. A particular highlight of the chapter is his discussion of Schnitzler’s Fraülein Else. He convincingly demonstrates how the contemporary situation works its way into a novella set in the past. By focusing on Else, the situation she finds herself in and her reflections, Schnitzler touches on the anti-Semitism, the misogyny, and the financial woes that continue to plague Austria in the postwar period.

In Chapter Three Barker addresses reactions to the rise of National Socialism in works by writers who are diametrically opposed ideologically, Bruno Brehm and Soma Morgenstern. Soma Morgenstern creates an imaginary refuge in a utopian Eastern European Jewish community. Barker’s discussion of Brehm shows the cynicism and “political and commercial opportunism” (94) in his attempts to erase his anti-Semitic rhetoric when his novels were reprinted after World War II.

In the following chapter Barker focuses on the civil war between the clerical-fascist regime and the Left and maps out a variety of contrasting literary (non-) reactions, both Austrian and German, both contemporary and retrospective. He examines the angry reaction of many to Karl Kraus’s support of the clerical-fascists. While not justifying it, he contextualizes and explains it in Kraus’s belief that the...