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  • Ein Bild von einem Mann: Österreichische und deutsche Offiziere in der Literatur: Eine Studie zum Klischee in erzählender Prosa by Verena Stindl
  • John E. Fahey
Verena Stindl, Ein Bild von einem Mann: Österreichische und deutsche Offiziere in der Literatur: Eine Studie zum Klischee in erzählender Prosa. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2014. 361 pp.

German and, to a slightly lesser extent, Austrian officers are well-known figures in the world of literature, film, and imagination. Military fiction set in the years before and during World War I is a major sub-genre in German literature, which reflects the importance of officers and men in fin-de-siècle Germany and Austria. In Imperial Germany and Habsburg Austria-Hungary, officers were a ubiquitous sight—they helped to maintain and model the desired social order of their respective states. This imagined social order within the German and Austro-Hungarian armies lives on in fiction and memory. Novels like Aus einer kleinen Garnison, Radetzkymarsch, Im Westen [End Page 138] nichts Neues, and Die goldene Spange have decisively shaped popular memory of Germany and Austria-Hungary before and during World War I as well as of military life in general. Verena Stindl in Ein Bild von einem Mann: Österreichische und deutsche Offiziere in der Literatur: Eine Studie zum Klischee in erzählender Prosa does a remarkable job of collecting, organizing, and analyzing clichés within German and Austrian military fiction in the late nineteenth and the mid-twentieth centuries. Focusing on books published between 1889 and 1941, Stindl shows the evolving nature of clichés during war and peace and the importance of literary representations of officers for German and Austrian identity and memory.

Clichés abound within the military and between nations. Military careers tend to cliché, since every officer will have a similar set of experiences: training, garrison life, transfers, superior officers, slow promotions, and so on. These clichés extend to national stereotypes. Unsurprisingly, Stindl shows that yes, the German army and its officers were typically portrayed as the model of efficiency, discipline, and professionalism, while Austrian officers were typically imagined as simply muddling through their military duties between fancy balls. However, within the broad stereotypes, there are many variations. Within Germany, Prussian officers embodied different virtues than their Bavarian comrades, and the variation among the dozen nationalities of Austria-Hungary became fodder for proverbs. Despite these differences, Stindl finds common experiences and clichés across all of her sources. It is in the use of clichés that she finds real variation and innovation. For example, every fictional officer Stindl looked at had a special relationship with his uniform. The uniform is a powerful symbol of military duty and identity, causing officers to act and think differently when wearing it. Identification with the uniform could be a source of strength and purpose, but it is also of en a stifling and constrictive influence. For Anton Hofmiller in Ungeduld des Herzens, the uniform is a straitjacket. Young Karl von Trotta, in Radetzkymarch, finds his freest and happiest moments when he takes the uniform off to play in Vienna or elsewhere.

In addition to uniforms, Stindl examines clichés about officers and romance, officers and honor, and officers and death—specifically in World War I. A remarkable amount of military fiction includes honor courts, duels, gambling, and the resultant debt, and Stindl does a good job of categorizing and differentiating between examples. During World War I literary representations of officers and men clashed harshly with official propaganda. While official propaganda showed officers and men as selfless and heroic, military fiction written [End Page 139] after the war could take a more nuanced view. Military fiction can provide a useful perspective from below—in the books Stindl examines, lieutenants and captains are shown as heroic and tragic victims of the war, caught up in events beyond their control. Doomed to sacrifice, suffering, and probably death, the exact fate of literary characters varied from one author to another.

By looking at both German and Austrian fictional military literature, Stindl is able to underline several differences. Of course, German clichés emphasize order and military efficiency and virtue, while the Austrians...

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