Reports on Austrian Writers in 1945 and Lectures in American Exile by Raoul Auernheimer (review)

A salient characteristic of post-1900 Western literature is its reflection of political and historical developments and movements. This quality is positive, even inspiring, when it refers to literary works that express humanistic ideological views in artistic form, but grim indeed when literary history records the effects of war, tyranny, and genocide on artistic expression and writers themselves. Many Austrian writers had their careers and lives cut brutally short when the Nazi regime came to power or tried to continue writing as exile writers in various countries. Before the Nazi takeover of Austria in 1938, Raoul Auernheimer (1876–1948), a novelist, playwright, poet, aphorist, historian, and theater critic, was a prominent figure on the Viennese literary scene. In 1923 he was elected the first chairman of the Austrian pen Club with Arthur Schnitzler as honorary president. Ten days after the Nazi military takeover of Austria in 1938, Auernheimer was arrested and sent to the concentration camp at Dachau. Due to friends’ efforts he was released after a few months. He spent the remainder of his life in the United States, three years in New York and seven in California.

This volume consists of reports and speeches reflecting Auernheimer’s activities as a public figure. Its intriguing content, accompanied by detailed and informative introductions to each section, footnotes, a timeline, and bibliographies, may stimulate long-overdue interest in his literary oeuvre. In the acknowledgments, editor Donald G. Daviau, who has published extensively on Auernheimer, thanks the writer’s widow, Irene, and daughter, Clara Auernheimer Fellner, for allowing him to interview them and entrusting much of his literary estate to him. He adds that he has used these documents “to assist my efforts to revive the author’s literary reputation and keep his memory alive, as I have tried to do over the years” (n.p.). Daviau’s next step in the project is the forthcoming publication of a volume of Auernheimer’s poems and aphorisms.

The first section, “Reports Prepared for the American Office of Strategic Services (oss) in 1945,” consists of reports on thirty-three Austrian authors, most of them personally known to Auernheimer, providing an assessment of “their reliability in terms of contributing to rebuilding Austria and Germany” (11) in the spirit of the processes of de-Nazification. Similar reports were also written for the American government by the writer Carl Zuckmayer, who produced approximately 150 reports on writers, artists, actors, and directors. Auernheimer’s two- or three-page reports conform to a template of brief biographical facts followed by sections on Family History, Education and Work History, and most importantly Political Attitude. Auernheimer offers his assessments of each writer’s likely constructive role in the future. He does label some writers as pro- or anti-Nazi but more frequently adds individualized comments. He explains the evidence for various types of cooperation with the Nazi authorities and analyzes mitigating or otherwise pertinent factors as social class, religion, political sophistication, and attitude toward authority. The writers discussed are generally still known but of minor stature. Of the thirty-three, nineteen are listed in Wynfried Kriegleder’s 2011 reference book Eine kurze Geschichte der Literatur in Österreich (Praesens Verlag). Included are such figures as Franz Theodor Csokor, Enrica L. Handel-Mazzetti, Mirko Jelusich, Alexander Lernet-Holenia, Friedrich Schreyvogel, Karl Heinrich Waggerl, Josef Weinheber, and Paul von Zsolnay.

The representative lectures selected for the second part of the volume were written and delivered in New York and California from 1939 to 1947, many of them while World War II was still raging and Hitler was still in power. They bring the realities of that era to current readers with a compelling sense of immediacy. Auernheimer’s American audiences must have been moved and sobered to have before them not only an eyewitness to historical events but an actual survivor of one of the infamous Nazi death camps. Auernheimer’s words reflect...