Veza Canetti im Kontext des Austromarxismus by Vreni Amsler (review)

Veza Canetti (née Taubner-Calderon) was born to Jewish parents in Vienna in 1897, at the height of the cultural extravagance of the fin de siècle. She completed her education in the midst of the First World War, whose armistice left Vienna the grand capital of a rump state, stripped of its territories, its crown, and its self-narrative. Yet within months of the war's end a set of young leftist intellectuals had embraced this loss of imperial prominence, proposing radical solutions to the state's social and cultural ills. By the middle of the 1920s Veza Canetti had become a prominent member of that circle, a Marxist-inspired intellectual avant-garde that believed that poetry, novels, and polemical essays could shape a different, more humane future for Europe. Over the course of the interwar period, Canetti became the friend, confidant, co-writer, and amanuensis to some of the canonical figures of interwar Viennese culture: Karl Kraus (1874–1936), Hermann Broch (1886–1951), and Anna Mahler (1904–1988), to name just a few, as well as the man who eventually became her husband, Elias Canetti (1905–1994). Though her memory has largely been eclipsed by that of her more prominent interlocutors, Canetti was herself a prolific and versatile writer, composing (often under a variety of pseudonyms) essays, short stories, poems, novels, and translations: "Veza Canetti hat sich in ihren Erzählungen, Theaterstücken und Romanen nicht nur mit den verschiedenen zeittypischen literarischen und künstlerischen Strömungen wie Neue Sachlichkeit auseinandergesetzt, sondern sich auch intensiv mit vergangenen Epochen wie der Wiener Moderne" (9). Some of these works appeared in her lifetime, primarily in the Arbeiter Zeitung, Vienna's socialist daily. But many more remained unpublished, resurfacing only in the opening decades of the twenty-first century, long after her death in London in 1963.

In her new book Veza Canetti im Kontext des Austromarxismus, Vreni Amsler seeks to reconstruct the role that Canetti's writings played in the Marxist-inspired circles of interwar Vienna. Those seeking a more comprehensive biography of Canetti's life and relationships should turn to Julian Preece's The Rediscovered Writings of Veza Canetti. Amsler points interested readers toward this and other, more biographical literature on Canetti, but Amsler's book is decidedly more focused. In this volume, Amsler attempts a new critique of the literature of "Red Vienna," asking the specific question: How might our understanding of interwar Viennese socialist culture change by including in our readings the work of Veza Canetti? The answer is, wonderfully, a great deal. For example, after a thirty-page intertextual reading of the works of Canetti and Broch, Amsler writes: "Dieser kurze Abriss der intertextuellen Bezüge zwischen den Texten von Veza Canetti und Hermann Broch bildet nur die Spitze des Eisberges. Eine vertiefte Auseinandersetzung—ganz im Sinne der Interdiskurses—könnte einiges an gesellschaftspolitisch Relevantem zu Tage fördern" (243).

These sorts of close readings—which Amsler conducts with depth and clarity—between Canetti and nearly a dozen other interwar Viennese writers and artists are the real triumph of the book. Amsler organizes these exegeses along two intersecting narrative axes: larger intellectual themes that both contextualized and compelled Canetti's work and particular literary personalities with whom Canetti was either closely aligned or with whose work hers was intimately engaged. often, these come together in a single section, such as during Amsler's discussion of the writings of Canetti and Alice RühleGerstel (1894–1943) or in the chapter on "Austro-Marxist Literary Theory," about Canetti and Ernst Fischer (1899–1972). (As much as is possible with the relevant sources, Amsler provides an important gender balance in her choice of subjects throughout the book.)

Many readers will find this book both useful and insightful. First, Amsler is systematic in her analysis of Canetti's literary works. A scholar who finds herself wanting a first-take exegesis of a particular Canetti story or essay should turn immediately to...