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Reviewed by:
  • Alexander Lernet-Holenia und Maria Charlotte Sweceny: Briefe 1938–1945 by Christopher Dietz
  • Robert Dassanowsky
Christopher Dietz, Alexander Lernet-Holenia und Maria Charlotte Sweceny: Briefe 1938–1945. Literatur und Leben. Neue Folge 83. Vienna: Böhlau, 2013. 462 pp.

This collection of recently discovered correspondence (141 letters and ten postcards from July 1938 to July 1945) from Austrian author Alexander Lernet-Holenia to the daughter of the Jewish founder of the Manz publishing firm in Vienna and an editor in her own right and its compelling contextualization and analysis by Christopher Dietz is nothing less than a substantial contribution to Austrian (and Germanophone) literature/cultural study of the era. The Dietz collection allows for a fresh understanding of a major twentieth-century Austrian author whose personal correspondences have been difficult to locate (he habitually destroyed letters and notes, including those from Hofmannsthal and Rilke) unless they were part of a publication, as with Gottfried Benn or Carl Zuckmeyer. This unexpected investigative opportunity and its masterful follow-through by Dietz will certainly resonate in several fields of study. It also introduces us to a vibrant and courageous woman whose “discovery” is invaluable.

The new material and the meticulously researched and presented annotations by Dietz will no doubt increase the value of an author whose unique philosophical underpinnings and critical viewpoints as the one of the final representatives of the Jung Wien school has until more recently been neglected in favor of his lighter entertainment writings. The private aspect articulated here provides a rare opportunity to look beneath the intensely self-controlled [End Page 125] image of this writer to locate the convictions, complexities, and aspirations of the man. It should help to humanize Lernet-Holenia to the level of his contemporaries Joseph Roth, Leo Perutz, Heimito von Doderer, Stefan Zweig, and Robert Musil. His detestation of National Socialism and sorrow over the destruction of the interwar remnants of the Habsburgian Mitteleuropa he so mythologized collides with opportunism and a fervent desire to remain an important writer with a strong sense of independence. But it is clear that his conflicts and his concerns as a writer and an Austrian belie the coolly detached aristocratic persona he styled for himself, revealing a self-effacing, critical, and often frustrated idealist.

While the actual extent of his relationship with Maria Charlotte Sweceny (1904–1956), born Stein and known simply as Lotte, remains somewhat clouded, clues suggest an affair on an early 1939 cruise to North and South America taken at a time when Lernet-Holenia was considering exile emigration (34). Far more important, however, are the sensitive and often troubled missives that which he sent to Lotte, a woman he trusted with his inspirations and fears from the time of the Anschluss to the end of the war. He called her “Hase,” and she named him “Neni” in these coded discussions that were written to avoid censorship or worse, and Dietz does a remarkable job in deciphering innumerable cryptic allusions to people, places, and occurrences. Seemingly inconsequential details prove to be important declarations on life, creativity, or the workings of the Nazi regime. For example, Lotte’s sudden use of the old Kurrentschrift handwriting style at one point was understood by Lernet-Holenia as a critical statement against Martin Bormann’s prohibition of the traditional gotische Schrift in 1941 because it was discovered to have “Jewish origin.”

Often, blatantly overcooked pride in the accomplishments of Hitler or rote repetition of propaganda phrases against anything that Lernet-Holenia admired that was now deemed unacceptable would interrupt the flow of a letter’s discourse without warning. Dietz explains that this was done to reassure the censors that there was nothing suspect in the postal relationship between this problematic author in a Wehrmacht uniform (his literature had been placed on the first ns-German “Schwarze Liste” in 1933, yet he enjoyed an impressive income after 1938 and through his brief involvement with film) and a woman officially considered a “Mischling 1. Grades” who had a few genealogical advantages. Lotte’s mother was a gentile and divorced her Jewish father, a convert to Protestantism, early in the 1920s, and Lotte’s progressive [End Page 126] open-relationship...

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