Zwischen Wahrheit und Dichtung: Antisemitismus und Nationalsozialismus bei Heimito von Doderer by Alexandra Kleinlercher (review)

Kleinlercher, a faculty member at University College, London, has in this impeccable volume taken up the perpetually thorny problem of Austrian author Heimito von Doderer and his implication in both antisemitism and National Socialism. To supplement her thorough survey of the published material on the author, Kleinlercher conducted interviews with Doderer’s secretary and biographer Wolfgang Fleischmann and exchanged emails with Hasterlik’s niece, as well as accessing collections of letters that have heretofore not been made available to scholars (“The Hine Collection” 367–368). The result is a readable, superbly documented book that has done the incredible service of collecting all the evidence available on those charges, addressing them openly and even-handedly, without preconception. The author should be commended for pointing toward the situation’s almost inevitable but unappetizing conclusions, without claiming definitive answers that would push further into a complicated era than the evidence warrants.

The book is divided into two sections, the first dedicated to Doderer’s biography and the second to his work. Kleinlercher first addresses letters from his first wife August (Gusti) Hasterlik and correspondence from family and friends that reflect on Doderer and his antisemitism on a day-to-day level. Those insights, however, are pulled into a broader exposition of his life that carefully verifies dates, names, and issues. Thus her first chapter, “Herkunft und Jugend,” addresses his German heritage and how he identified with it, his possible bisexuality or at least bisexual curiosity, and his experiences as a POW in World War I. The second chapter adduces evidence for his antisemitism and his approach to the National Socialist cause, starting with his 1933 entry into the party. Chapter 3 takes on his “career” as a Wehrmacht officer (1940–1945); chapter 4 traces his road from POW to successful author after a nominal denazification. Chapters 5 and 6 illuminate his postwar negotiations with fame and establishment as a public figure, especially with respect to friends shared with Gusti Hasterlik and particularly with Albert Paris Gütersloh. This history confirms a general conspiracy to cover up the author’s National Socialist past and establish him as the voice to renew an Austrian national literature after the war.

The second part of Kleinlercher’s project turns toward the evidence from text criticism. The centerpiece is a comparison of Die Dämonen (1956) with its early version, Die Dämonen der Ostmark, and other documentation back as far as a 1929 personal ad that Doderer inserted into the Neue Freie Presse, seeking “Anschluß an ca. 40-jährige distinguierte israelitische Dame (Wienerin) von nur sehr starker korpulenter größerer Figur und schwarzem Haar,” guaranteeing discretion—an author looking for material on a projected novel, Dicke Damen, which presaged both versions of the Demons. In this category also fall the essay “Sexualität und totaler Staat” and the mid 1930s “Aide mémoire” for the project. All the levels of the book retain clear evidence of his concern with antisemitic and racist stereotypes, and with his desire to split the races.

Kleinlercher is careful in tracing the links between Aryan and Jewish characters in the novel, and how the novel was gradually edited to reduce the prominence of various characters’ Jewish heritage and to stress instead a more philosophical thesis differentiating two realities, the gaps between inner and outer worlds. She leaves little question that the novel retains significant racial prejudices, even as it withdraws from overt National Socialist viewpoints.

The final section of Kleinlercher’s book publishes some of the most important recovered documentation, including most notably a thorough exposition about the question of Doderer’s Aryanizing an apartment (401–422), which shows that there is not enough evidence to support an answer. Nonetheless, it is clear that Doderer edited his own history with the Nazi party—he renewed his membership as late as 1939. Yet he also joined the Catholic Church in 1940 and claimed that date...