Musik und Erotik in Doderers Roman Die Dämonen: Semantiken der “zweiten Wirklichkeit” by Mareike Brandtner (review)

About a generation ago, analysis and criticism of Heimito von Doderer’s art took a healthy turn toward examining what’s in the works, not what ideologues project onto them. Earlier efforts by Wendelin Schmidt-Dengler did not keep Doderer from being distorted by commentators with some axe to grind. (Misreadings of his work that seemed almost deliberate throttled his initial reception in the English-speaking world.) Later critics, including Gerald Sommer, have now reframed the terms to continue political and social aspects of the novels but—crucially—within the dynamics of art: structure, form, theme, genre criticism, intertextuality, and analysis through close reading.

Mareike Brandtner’s new study Musik und Erotik in Doderers Roman Die Dämonen is an especially cogent example of this beneficial approach. As her title announces, Brandtner treats two ubiquitous aspects of Doderer’s art, music and eroticism, presenting them as linked energies that delineate character with great accuracy, since they are so primal. Brandtner accordingly not only connects those topics to one another but reveals them to be indices of a character’s entrapment in or freedom from “zweite Wirklichkeit,” that state of self-delusion aiding people to escape their development by hiding behind an ideology or a false pursuit.

Brandtner illustrates this concept by examining the role of music and eroticism in Mary K. and “Quapp,” Charlotte von Schlaggenberg (53– 148). Harking back to Mary in Die Strudlhofstiege, Brandtner points out the narrator’s comment that her piano playing brings order to her world, enabling her “die nahen Dämonen zu bändingen durch die orphische Macht der Töne” (63). Brandtner then builds on comments by Kirk Wetters and Rudolf Helmstetter in linking this passage to Goethe’s “Urworte Orphisch: ΔΑΙΜΩΝ” (56, 72–73), showing that music expresses Mary’s genuine identity. It is when she moves away from her playing and begins trying to rearrange others’ lives, acting like the “Interventionist” Doktor Negria, that she falls into a “deperzeptive Haltung” or “Apperzeptionsverweigerung”—a related Doderer term—and closes herself off from life. Only minutes before her accident, in fact, Mary’s friend and piano teacher Grete Siebenschein remarks on how she almost never hears her pupil play anymore (65). By contrast, and as a reliable indication of her “erste Wirklichkeit,” Mary returns to the piano after her accident and meets her future lover, Leonhard Kakabsa, indicatively in the room where her piano stands. Her renewed interest is “ein ganz wesentliches Zeichen der neu erlangten Gesundheit, in jeder, auch in seelischer Hinsicht” (74).

By contrast, music is all wrong for Quapp (82–111). For years she has forced herself to become a professional violinist, and at no point has her endeavor been valid. This “zweite Wirklichkeit” is a false identity, an analogue to her false parentage, and only when she abandons her violin does she come into her own. This section features an interesting diagram that represents graphically how music is a fulfillment for Mary and an encumbrance for Quapp.

There is a whole array of musicians among the male characters as well, sketched mainly in the chapter on “‘Nicht-Musik’ und ‘Apperzeptionsverweigerung’” (126–42), with special treatment of Teddy Honnegger, who never becomes diminished by his passion. For the most part, though, Brandtner focuses on sexual obsession in the male characters, especially in her skillfully argued chapter “Sexuelle Obsession als ‘zweite Wirklichkeit’” (222–99). In every instance—the sadistic fantasies of Jan Hertzka, the chronique scandaleuse of Kajetan von Schlaggenberg, and the fake witch trials of Achaz von Neudegg—Brandtner points out how the sexual obsession leads to abuses of power that facilitate the rise of totalitarianism. (This Doderer himself had pointed out in his essay “Sexualität und totaler Staat,” arguing that the unlinking of sex from reality traps the deluded in fantasies of total order and control.) She also draws highly illuminating parallels between the sexual...