Migration as Mediation: Neue Freie Presse American Correspondent Ann Tizia Leitich and Stefan Zweig's "Die Monotonisierung der Welt"

On page five of the Sunday, 9 May 1926 edition of the Viennese Neue Freie Presse appeared a three-quarter page advertisement for a department store called "Moden-Palais Julius Krupnik." As seen in Figure 1, the advertisement includes a picture of three or four large skyscrapers standing behind the silhouette of recognizable landmarks in Vienna's skyline. The once-impressive vestiges of the old city – the gothic spire of the Stephansdom, the baroque outline of the Karlskirche, the recognizable shapes of the Rotunde and the Riesenrad in the the Prater – all these are dwarfed by the impossibly oversized, stylistically incoherent architecture of the skyscrapers. At the top of the advertisement a caption proclaims "Amerika in Wien!" Below the caption is an explanation for the juxtaposed American and Viennese images: "Einzig und allein das Festhalten an den amerikanischen Geschäftsmethoden: Größter Umsatz – kleinster Nutzen sowie unser Prinzip: Bar-Einkauf – Bar-Verkauf versetzt uns in die Lage, das Beste bei phantastischen Preisen zu bieten." After a long list of examples of their "phantastischen Preisen," the management makes the reader aware of the immediate visceral consequences that such American business practices will have upon the populace of Vienna: "Infolge des Riesenandranges in den Nachmittagsstunden ersuchen wir unsere P. T. Kunden in liebenswürdigster Weise, auch den Vormittag zum Einkauf zu benützen" (5). Even if the skyscrapers in the advertisement are merely symbolic, the effects of Vienna's Americanization will still be felt in a very tangible way by the city's shoppers.

The juxtaposed skyscrapers and church towers in the "Amerika in Wien" advertisement are iconic representations of Europe's age-old civilization in the face of America's invasive economic models. The jarring images in the advertisement participate in an ideologically charged discourse about Americanism that took place in post–World War I Austria and Germany. This article will investigate a specific exchange in this larger discourse. In her rebuttal to Stefan Zweig's now-canonical feuilleton "Die Monotonisierung der Welt," the Neue Freie Presse's American correspondent Ann Tizia Leitich rejects the alternating lionization and demonization of America that she perceives in European intellectual discourse. Leitich's unique viewpoint depends upon movement between the two seemingly opposed cultures. Among the streets and skyscrapers of America's cities Leitich uses her own migration – as experienced by her European readers through her weekly feuilleton articles – as a forum for mediation between the European culture and an increasingly threatening manifestation of American modernity.

Figure 1.

Those who read the "Amerika in Wien" advertisement in Vienna's Neue Freie Presse were the citizens of a newly formed political entity called "Deutsch-Österreich," a remnant of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire. Deprived of the stability brought about by the Hapsburg's imperial hegemony and strained by years of war, citizens of the new republic – including those in the city of Vienna – were subjected to hunger, inflation, and political and social instability (Kernbauer et al. 345–60). In his memoir Die Welt von Gestern, Zweig remembers the importance that European art, literature, music, and cultural traditions came to hold for the Austrians as money lost its value and once-solid institutions were suddenly rendered obsolete: "Was uns vordem wichtig gewesen, wurde noch wichtiger; nie haben wir in Österreich mehr die Kunst geliebt als in jenen Jahren des Chaos, weil wir am Verrat des Geldes fühlten, daß nur das Ewige in uns das wirklich Beständige war" (272). Zweig and other Austrians sought refuge in "dem Ewigen," a vague vestige of a culture that remained untouched by the economic and social upheavals that surrounded them. This "eternal" realm served as an alternate landscape, or, using Arjun Appadurai's term, an "ideoscape" or ideological landscape that transcended the official political borders and identities of the postwar era (Appadurai 31, 33).

As the influence of imperial cultural institutions waned, development in the technologies of architecture, industry, film, radio, and phonographs made American mass culture increasingly available to European consumers (Mattl 49...