Belief Systems in Austrian Literature, Thought, and Culture ed. by Michael Boehringer, Allison Cattell, and Belinda Kleinhans (review)

This richly varied collection of essays, based on papers delivered in 2013 at the University of Waterloo, ranges informatively across a number of disciplines related to literature and other aspects of Austrian identity. The title, Belief Systems, is broad enough to compass architecture, hagiography, politics, feminist studies, opera, and examinations of the periphery in its influence on the center. The main forebear for studies of belief systems is historian Friedrich Heer—here invoked more than once—who explored the many cultural bases (politics, religion, literature) on which Austrians ground their identity in controversial studies such as Der Kampf um die österreichische Identität and Der Glaube des Adolf Hitler. The editors provide a very helpful listing of general works on the subject (17).

Collections like these are all the more valuable since opportunities for publication have dwindled in the English-speaking world. It is disheartening to note how trade presses and university imprints alike have yielded to market forces, repackaging narrow, politically correct platitudes about gender studies or class or race. A structural or historical study, an examination based on aesthetics, a close reading—these hardly stand a chance any more. On the other hand, smaller, serviceable European presses like Praesens Verlag, the publisher of this volume, have often benefited from subsidies that make it possible to preserve relatively ephemeral material—like conference proceedings—whose survival might otherwise not be guaranteed.

Even topics that could by nature be ideologically skewed are preserved from narrow vision by the scholarly vigor of their treatment. Dagmar Lorenz, for example, in "The Struggle of Ideologies: The Defeat of Socialist Feminism in 1930s Vienna as reflected in Veza Canetti's Fiction" (175–93), founds her research on meticulous examination of primary sources and treats the issue with balance, illuminating the extent to which Canetti both "wrote from the headlines" but shaped her fiction into self-contained entities. Likewise, Sarah Painitz ("A Neue Frau?: Women in Austria during the First Republic," 152–74), under the heading of "Weib, Frau or Mensch" (162–65), sketches the discrepancy between the glamour of women's lives as depicted in popular novels and the harsher reality confronting working women. Having once published on women as redeeming characters in Hofmannsthal's libretti, the present reviewer was especially persuaded by Kathleen Hulley's examination of "Women as Muse, Women as Music in Fin-de-Siècle Viennese Opera: Female Sexuality as Inspiration in Franz Schreker's Der ferne Klang" (108–28), which reveals the ambiguity of Grete as muse who both inspires and thwarts creativity. A general examination of the trope of the Muse in Vienna around 1900 (inevitably, Alma Mahler-Werfel takes center stage) is followed by a close analysis of the tensions in Schreker's libretto.

A history of the uses to which religious impulses (very literally a "belief system") can be put is found in Kerstin S. Jobst's provocative "Making Politics with Saints: The Initialization of the Josaphat-Kuntsevych Cult in the Habsburg Monarchy (1860s–1918)" (18–36). Malleable because of what Jobst calls his "globality" (Orthodox and Roman Catholics alike venerated him; he had a large following in Poland and Ukraine, even in Brazil), Josaphat "could not easily be instrumentalized" (19) along nationalistic lines, but his very adaptability has always made him a convenient screen on which to project assorted fervors.

Single-author studies examine Austrian belief systems from a fascinating multiplicity of approaches. Marie Kolkenbrock traces the function of stereotypes about destiny or fate in several of Schnitzler's works that center on negative perceptions of Jews and Jewishness (85–107). Doris McGonagill parallels the banishment of Ovid in Christoph Ransmayr's novel Die letzte Welt to binary views of such imperial configurations as East and West, center and periphery, regime-upholding religion and menacing cultism (194–215); memory, identity, and narrative are the three vehicles of apprehending binaries. Liminality, the space or energy where times, places, and identities overlap, is...