Tropics of Vienna: Colonial Utopias of the Habsburg Empire by Ulrich E. Bach (review)

What did Austrian writers envision when they thought of colonies? In this slim but nonetheless substantive volume Ulrich E. Bach adds some thought-provoking answers to existing scholarship on this topic.

The literary works discussed by Bach cover the period between 1870 and 1938 and connect the topic of colonialism with the significant political, social, and cultural changes during the period. In chapter 1, Bach discusses Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s novellas Der Kapitulant (1870) and Paradies am Dniester (1877) as texts that project male anxieties about shifting gender roles onto the Habsburg borderlands. Chapter 2 offers a close reading of Lazar von Hellenbach’s Insel Mellonta (1883), in which a shipwrecked German aristocrat dreams of liberation from the constraints of urban European civilization on an idyllic Pacific island. In chapters 3 and 4, Bach evaluates, respectively, Theodor Hertzka’s novel Freiland (1890) and Theodor Herzl’s novel Altneuland (1902) as examples of utopian texts that present emigration and spatial separation as solutions to the Habsburg monarchy’s increasingly nationalist and anti-Semitic politics. Chapter 5 analyzes Robert Müller’s Tropen: Der Mythos der Reise (1915) and Joseph Roth’s Kapuzinergruft (1938) as works that turn the distinction between colonial and metropolitan spaces on its head. Müller’s novel exoticizes the “social dysfunction of the Habsburg society” (117), while Roth’s increasingly desperate search for that elusive peaceful ethnic coexistence in Europe (123–24) identifies the emperors’ tomb as last utopia.

Tropics of Vienna builds its argument by combining the approaches of Russell E. Berman’s Enlightenment or Empire (1998) and Susanne Zantop’s Colonial Fantasies (1997), two works that proved crucial in the adaptation of postcolonial criticism in German studies. Bach adapts Berman’s focus on the role of Enlightenment principles in German colonial encounters for the various Austrian authors he discusses, portraying them as “marginalized intellectuals within Austrian society [who] claimed to have a more empathetic and more humane colonial policy toward other fringe groups” (2). Zantop’s discussion of how German literary imagination functioned as colonialist conditioning in a Prussian-German imperial context provides Bach with welcome comparative evidence for the political relevance of literary colonial fantasies (3). By positioning Tropics of Vienna in relation to these works, Bach establishes a helpful intellectual road map for the subsequent close readings of the various literary works as colonial narratives.

Two additional layers complicate this base map. First, Tropics of Vienna engages in literary and cultural archeology by claiming the works of Hertzka, von Sacher-Masoch, and von Hellenbach for the utopian genre. While their mixing of literature and social theory has kept them from being included in earlier studies of utopian literature, Bach considers this conflation of genres a productive mélange for studying “history in the making” (4). Second, Bach considers his analyses a “conceptual framework” for assessing the premodern aesthetics in Austrian literature (5).

These triangulated discussions produce exemplary case studies for a nuanced postcolonial approach to the k.u.k. Empire. Bach’s close readings of von Sacher-Masoch’s and von Hellenbach’s novellas, for instance, reveal how utopian spaces at or beyond the periphery of Habsburg territory functioned as displaced socio-political laboratories. In von Sacher-Masoch’s texts the “paracolonial” landscapes of an exoticized Polish-Slavic border region form the backdrop for eroticized enactments of the imperial center’s socio-political power shifts (26–28). Von Hellenbach’s Insel Mellonta in the Pacific Ocean becomes the utopian space where European masculinity finds peace and calm in a paradisiacal mixed-race environment clearly shaped by male sexual desires and racist visions of European superiority (54). Instead of fantasizing about expanding the Empire’s power via colonial acquisitions, these texts re-envision colonial spaces as an opportunity for social transformation.

Bach addresses a more imperialistic trait of colonial visions in his discussion of Theodor Hertzka’s Freiland and Theodor Herzl’s Altneuland. Seemingly progressive in its description of alternative communities, social welfare, and market...