Hans Weigel: Kabarettist—Kritiker—Romancier—Literaturmanager ed. by Wolfgang Straub (review)

This collection of texts derives from a conference on Hans Weigel that took place in Vienna and Krems in November 2013 within the framework of Wolfgang Straub’s fwf-funded project “Die Schaltstelle Hans Weigel.” The intent of the volume—the first to treat Weigel on a broad scholarly basis—is to recall to mind this dynamic figure of postwar Austrian letters and his wide-ranging literary, journalistic, and mentoring activities. The articles focus primarily on the early postwar period, beginning with Weigel’s return to Vienna from Swiss exile in 1945 and extending into the 1950s and early 1960s. They are divided into four sections: the novelist, the “cold warrior,” the mentor, and texts about and for the theater. Hertha Hurnaus’s photographs of Weigel’s Arbeitszimmer in Maria Enzersdorf form an interlude between the second and third sections.

Two Weigel novels are treated in Part I. Evelyne Polt-Heinzl discusses Unvollendete Symphonie (1951/1992), a “Schlüsselroman” in which the early postwar Viennese encounter and love affair between the older Jewish Remigrant writer Peter Taussig (Weigel) and a young artist and budding writer “aus der Provinz” is related in the first person by the (unnamed) young woman (who is meant to represent Ingeborg Bachmann). Polt-Heinzl points out that Weigel’s choice of narrator does not result in the uncensored inner perspective of traditional first-person narration; she argues instead that the narrator’s role is to reflect Taussig (that is, Weigel) in a positive light. Polt-Heinzl finds it “befremdlich” (17) that Bachmann specialists treat the novel as an authentic source of information about Bachmann’s Viennese years.

Doris Neumann-Rieser discusses Der grüne Stern, a satirical novel written in 1943 in Swiss exile about the rapid rise to power of the charismatic demagogue Got fried Hofer, a newcomer in the city of Hochheim. Neumann-Rieser tries—in my opinion, unnecessarily—to place Weigel’s novel within the Stalin/ns totalitarianism discourse. It seems clear that Weigel places the primary responsibility for Hofer’s ascension not on Hofer—Hofer repeatedly expresses his amazement that the people swallow his absurd doctrine and wonders if he has not taken his “Spiel” too far—but rather on the various groups and layers of society whose gullibility, opportunism, inertia, and cowardice make it easy for him to succeed.

In the second section, Stefan Maurer shows that Weigel, who had earlier sympathized with the Soviet Union, became a fervent anti-communist after experiencing the Soviet occupation of Vienna. Weigel published a multitude of journalistic texts condemning communism in the 1950s and succeeded in blocking Austrian stagings of Brecht. Maurer elucidates Weigel’s erratic relationship with the American-backed Der Monat and its spurious editor Melvin J. Lasky, and with the Lasky-controlled Kongress für kulturelle Freiheit. Maurer mollifies Weigel’s image as a rigid anti-communist, noting that he soon distanced himself from Lasky and his organizations.

The second article in this section, by Wolfgang Straub, outlines Weigel’s one-sided, contentious relationship with the dramatist and Austrian PEN president Franz Theodor Csokor. The “cold warrior” Weigel denounced the organization as a Stalinist bridgehead, a Trojan horse that threatened to infiltrate Austria’s cultural sphere. Weigel railed against the Austrian PEN and Csokor with increasing vitriol until 1955, when Weigel’s “Bockgesang” culminated in Csokor’s suing Weigel for journalistic defamation (“Übertretung einer Presseehrenbeleidigung”).

In Part III, Joseph McVeigh analyzes Ingeborg Bachmann’s private and professional relationship with her “mentor” Weigel from their first meeting in 1947 to the final break some ten years later, primarily on the basis of letters she wrote to Weigel during this period, letters expressing admiration, gratitude, love, jealousy, and disappointment (this last especially when Weigel married another woman in 1951). That Weigel was an important teacher and promoter of Bachmann is clear. But the emotional ups and downs of her Viennese years with Weigel shaped her as well and, as McVeigh shows, formed the biographical basis...