The Dedalus Book of Austrian Fantasy; 1890-2000 E-Book

• Herausgeber: Dedalus
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Serie: Dedalus Anthologies
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 699

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

Ever since the fin de siecle Austrian literature has been fertile ground for fantasy in the widest sense and the genre was taken up again by new generations after the Second World War. The Dedalus Book of Austrian Fantasy: 1890-2000 contains stories from authors of the 1890s (Schnitzler, Hofmannsthal), the years around the First World War (Kafka, Meyrink), the post-war era, when Kafka was rediscovered, (Jeannie Ebner, Ilse Aichinger) to the present day (H C Artmann, Michael Koehlmeier). The stories range from the 'freudian' to the 'kafkaesque', to the surreal, grotesque, comic, occult and straightforwardly supernatural. A.S.Byatt described it in The Guardian as one of the best anthologies she has ever read.

Leseprobe

Dedalus would like to thank the Kunstsektion of the Austrian Bundeskanzleramt in Vienna and East England Arts in Cambridge for their assistance in producing this book.

I would particularly like to thank the Österreichische Gesellschaft für Literatur for funding a stay in Vienna to allow me to gather material for the new, expanded edition of this anthology. MM

Acknowledgements

The editor would like to thank the following for permission to use copyright material

Ilse Aichinger, ‘Where I Live’ from Wo ich wohne. Erzählungen. Gedichte. Dialoge © S Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt/Main.

Gerhard Amanshauser, ‘The Unmasking of the Briefly Sketched Gentlemen’ from Der gewöhnliche Schrecken. Horrorgeschichten, ed P Handke © Residenz Verlag, Salzburg.

H C Artmann, ‘In the Gulf of Carpentaria’ from Die Anfangsbuchstaben der Flagge in Gesammelte Prosa vol 2 © Residenz Verlag, Salzburg and Vienna.

Martin Auer, ‘The Trouble with Time Travel’ from Phantastisches aus Österreich ed Franz Rottensteiner, © Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt/Main.

Rudolf Bayr, ‘Something to be Said for the Rain’ from Ich habe nichts als mich: Professor Dr. Friedrich Harrer.

Theodor Csokor, ‘The Kiss of the Stone Woman’, ‘Shadowtown’ from Ein paar Schaufeln Erde © Langen/Müller, Munich.

Jeannie Ebner, ‘The Moving Frontier’, ‘The Singing in the Swamp’ from Protokoll aus einem Zwischenreich: Jeannie Ebner/ Verlag Styria, Graz.

Erich Fried, ‘An Up-and-coming Concern’ from Fast alles Mögliche © Verlag Klaus Wagenbach, Berlin, 1975, new ed 2000; also in Erich Fried: Gesammelte Werke, Verlag Klaus Wagenbach, Berlin, 1993.

Barbara Frischmuth, ‘Journey to the World’s End’ from Traumgrenze: the author.

Anton Fuchs, ‘Ebb and Flow’, ‘Flow and Ebb’ from Nächtliche Begegnungen, Bibliothek der Provinz, Weitra: Frau Lotte Fuchs.

Marianne Gruber, ‘The Epidemic’ from Protokolle der Angst: the author.

Marlen Haushofer, ‘Cannibals’ from Schreckliche Treue © Claassen Verlag, Munich.

Fritz von Herzmanovsky-Orlando, ‘Signor Scurri’ from Maskenspiel der Genien © Langen Müller, Munich.

G F Jonke, ‘My Day’ from Beginn einer Verzweiflung © Jung und Jung Verlag, Salzburg.

Florian Kalbeck, ‘The Toad’ from Das Basler Träumebuch: Frau Judith Por-Kalbeck.

Michael Köhlmeier, ‘Snitto-Snot’, ‘The Thief’ from Der traurige Blick in die Weite © Franz Deuticke Verlag, Vienna, 1999.

Paul Leppin, ‘The Ghost of the Jewish Ghetto’ from Alt-Prager Spaziergänge: Dierk Hoffmann.

Peter Marginter, ‘Funeral Meats’ from Leichenschmaus: the author.

Leo Perutz, ‘Pour avoir bien servi’ from Herr, erbarme Dich meiner © Paul Zsolnay Verlag, Vienna, 1985.

Jakov Lind ‘Journey through the Night’ from Seele aus Holz: the author.

Barbara Neuwirth, ‘In the Sand’, ‘The Furnished Room’ from In den Gärten der Nacht © Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt/Main.

Georg Saiko: ‘The Dream’ from Sämtliche Werke in fünf Bänden vol 3 Die Erzählungen © Residenz Verlag, Salzburg and Vienna.

Karl Hans Strobl, ‘The Head’ from Unheimliche Geschichten © Langen Müller, Munich.

Peter von Tramin, ‘The Sewermaster’ from Taschen voller Geld © Böhlau Verlag, Vienna.

Hannelore Valencak, ‘At the World’s End’ from Erzählungen: the author.

Franz Werfel, ‘The Playground’ from Erzählungen aus zwei Welten vol 1, S Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt/Main; Alma Mahler-Werfel.

The Editor/Translator

Mike Mitchell is one of Dedalus’s editorial directors and is responsible for the Dedalus translation programme.

He has translated some thirty books, including Simplicissimus and Life of Courage by Grimmelshausen, all the novels of Gustav Meyrink, three by Herbert Rosendorfer and The Maimed by Hermann Ungar.

His translation of Rosendorfer’s Letters back to Ancient China won the 1998 Schlegel-Tieck German Translation Prize.

Contents

Title

Dedication

Acknowledgements

The Editor/Translator

Introduction

  1.  Flowers

Arthur Schnitzler (1862–1931)

  2.  The Master

Gustav Meyrink (1868–1932)

  3.  Extracts from The Great Bestiary of Modern Literature

Franz Blei (1871–1942)

  4.  Folter’s Gems

Paul Busson (1873–1924)

  5.  Sergeant Anton Lerch

Hugo von Hofmannsthal (1874–1929)

  6.  The Death of Christoph Detlev Brigge of Ulsgard

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926)

  7.  Signor Scurri

Fritz von Herzmanovsky-Orlando (1877–1954)

  8.  The Head

Karl Hans Strobl (1877–1946)

  9.  The Ghost of the Jewish Ghetto

Paul Leppin (1878–1945)

10.  Pour avoir bien servi

Leo Perutz (1882–1957)

11.  Outside the Law

Franz Kafka (1883–1924)

12.  A Country Doctor

Franz Kafka (1883–1924)

13.  Gracchus the Huntsman

Franz Kafka (1883–1924)

14.  The First Hour after Death

Max Brod (1884–1968)

15.  The Kiss of the Stone Woman

Franz Theodor Csokor (1885–1969)

16.  Shadowtown

Franz Theodor Csokor (1885–1969)

17.  The Playground: A Fantasy

Franz Werfel (1890–1945)

18.  The Dream

Georg Saiko (1892–1962)

19.  The Reason for It

Hermann Ungar (1893–1929)

20.  The Moving Frontier

Jeannie Ebner (1918– )

21.  The Singing in the Swamp

Jeannie Ebner (1918– )

22.  Something to Say for the Rain

Rudolf Bayr (1919–1990)

23.  Ebb and Flow – Flow and Ebb

Anton Fuchs (1920–1995)

24.  Cannibals

Marlen Haushofer (1920–1970)

25.  The Toad

Florian Kalbeck (1920–1996)

26.  An Up-and-coming Concern

Erich Fried (1921–1988)

27.  Where I Live

Ilse Aichinger (1921– )

28.  In the Gulf of Carpentaria

H. C. Artmann (1921– )

29.  Journey through the Night

Jakov Lind (1927– )

30.  The Unmasking of the Briefly Sketched Gentlemen

Gerhard Amanshauser (1928– )

31.  At the World’s End

Hannelore Valencak (1929– )

32.  The Sewermaster

Peter von Tramin (1932– )

33.  Funeral Meats

Peter Marginter (1934– )

34.  Incident in St Wolfgang

Peter Daniel Wolfkind (1937– )

35.  The Journey to the World’s End

Barbara Frischmuth (1941– )

36.  The Epidemic

Marianne Gruber (1944– )

37.  My Day

G. F. Jonke (1946– )

38.  The Thief

Michael Köhlmeier (1949– )

39.  Snitto-Snot

Michael Köhlmeier (1949– )

40.  The Trouble with Time Travel

Martin Auer (1951– )

41.  In the Sand

Barbara Neuwirth (1958– )

42.  The Furnished Room

Barbara Neuwirth (1958– )

43.  Extracts from Novak: A Grotesque

Günther Kaip (1960– )

Copyright

Introduction

‘It is a sad but incontrovertible fact that the world stands in profound ignorance of the phenomenon of Austria.’

Since Fritz von Herzmanovsky-Orlando wrote those opening lines to his anarchic comic novel, Maskenspiel der Genien (Masque of the Spirits) at the end of the 1920s, much more has become known of Austria than ‘the mistakes contained in a few tourist guides published abroad.’

Freud was already on his way to becoming a household name even then, but the other figures who are now widely associated with the cultural florescence of the turn-of-the-century Habsburg Empire were almost unknown outside Austria: Mahler, Schoenberg, Klimt, Kokoschka, Schiele, Wittgenstein, Mach, Schnitzler, Hofmannsthal. Now the whole concept of fin de siècle Vienna is so well-known that it is an effective tourist attraction vigorously promoted by the Austrian Tourist Board.

However, Herzmanovsky-Orlando’s lament, as far as it was intended to be taken seriously (and there is a serious concern lurking deep beneath the comic-grotesque surface of his novel), does not refer to these cultural icons of a golden age that was brought to an end by the First World War. For him, the ‘phenomenon of Austria’ was an essence, a mode of being that found expression in the Habsburg Empire or, rather, in his vision of Austria as a state where the elemental forces embodied in the myths of antiquity still managed to survive behind a grotesquely bureaucratic surface.

These two disparate elements are brought together in one of Herzmanovsky’s pictures (he was also an artist of some stature): ‘Austrian customs officials supervise the birth of Venus’. They are also present in the story included in this anthology, ‘Signor Scurri’, in the soldier who, when invalided out of the army, was given ‘The Sea’, just as others were given the more traditional barrel organ or tobacco shop. Herzmanovsky’s novel is set in an imaginary buffer state between the German, Slav and Latin areas of Europe, a concept that has reappeared on the political menu of the real world since the collapse of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. This state combines an anarchic vitality with the most rigidly formal of constitutions, which is based on the rules of Tarock, a popular Austrian card game. Hence its name: Tarockania.

Another more widely known fantasy version of Austria, and conceived at about the same time, is Kakanien (Cacania) in Robert Musil’s novel, The Man without Qualities. The name derives from a combination of the initials K. K. standing for ‘Imperial and Royal’ and seen everywhere in the old Empire, and Kacke, crap. Musil’s country might be regarded as the negative to Herzmanovsky’s positive, since in Cacania the dead hand of bureaucracy tends to stifle rather than protect positive forces, although it does allow Musil to examine potential realities as a counterweight to the actual world.

A third example of these fantasy states is the Dream Realm in Alfred Kubin’s novel The Other Side (Dedalus 2000). The Dream Realm is a state founded somewhere in the middle of Asia by Klaus Patera, a fabulously wealthy school-friend of the narrator. Its buildings have all been transported from various parts of Europe, none being later than 1860. The narrator never meets Patera, who remains a mysterious force at the centre of this kingdom where time has stopped, guarded by a punctilious and impenetrable bureaucracy. This combination of mystical force and rigid bureaucracy relates the Dream World to Herzmanovsky’s and Musil’s creations, though the atmosphere of Kubin’s country reeks of decadence and decay.

Probably the best-known literary evocation of the bureaucratic spirit is the castle in Kafka’s novel of the same name. There, whatever authority resides within the castle is surrounded by an impregnable wall of bureaucracy. Yet however mean, spiteful or stupid the subordinates seem to be, those qualities do not reflect on whatever is at the centre, which remains powerful but unknowable. These features are illustrated here in the little parable ‘Before the Law’. The intimidating figure of the doorkeeper cannot diminish the radiance of the light pouring out from the door he guards so effectively. Paradox becomes an existential mode of being.

These fantasy images of Austria such as Tarockania or Cacania are not merely nostalgic recreations of the multinational Empire which was wiped from the map at a stroke in 1919, though there were also many of those. There is a quality of paradox underlying them all, and in this they hark back to the Monarchy’s increasingly desperate search, as the 19th century proceeded, for a unifying idea to justify a state which held together so many disparate nationalities. Immediately after the 1848 revolution a distinguished historian, J. G. Helfert, pointed out that for most citizens of the Empire there was a distinction between Heimat, the region to which they felt an emotional tie, and Vaterland, the state to which they owed loyalty, and he proposed a vigorous programme of education to inculcate an attachment to the fatherland. As far as they were ever carried out, Helfert’s ideas did not have any great success; until the end of the Empire the loyalties of its subjects were focused mainly on the person of the Emperor, rather than on the state he represented. This ambiguity the inhabitants felt as to where they actually belonged, can perhaps best be seen in the fact that the state had no real name. Although commonly referred to as ‘Austria’, that was only the name of two tiny medieval dukedoms that form the north-eastern corner of the present state. Its official designation was: The Kingdoms and Countries represented in the Imperial Diet. Not a name to engender a strong feeling of belonging.

The contrast between the ceremonial splendour of the centuries-old Habsburg Empire, with the apparently permanent Francis Joseph at its head, and the shifting sands of increasingly disaffected nationalities on which it was based, has something baroque about it and, indeed, the baroque is an important part of Austria’s cultural heritage. Baroque art has a splendour which is undermined by the fact that its all-too-palpable physicality is not important in itself, but as a symbol of a transcendental, spiritual world. Life is not something independent, self-sufficient, but merely a pale image of another, more real world. Life, in the words of the title of Calderon’s play which the Austrian Grillparzer also used, is a dream.

To the baroque inheritance and the awareness, often unconscious, of the insecurities beneath the glittering surface of Imperial society must be added the researches of a school of psychologists, of which Freud is only the best-known, which laid bare the powerful urges and desires beneath the surface respectability of the personality. It was also in Vienna that Ernst Mach, the scientist whose name has been perpetuated in the term for the speed of sound, concluded, when he was looking for a solid foundation on which to base his science, that the self as an independent, ordering entity was ‘irretrievably lost’. The literature which sprang from this background was one which casts doubt on the apparently solid surface of reality, which questions the meaningfulness of human activity, which is always ready to admit that the opposite might just as well be true. It is a literature that is a fertile ground for the fantastic.

It is this which distinguishes Austrian literature from German. A culture which emphasises the potential as much as the real, which has a taste for the humour of paradox, is one which does not take a too earnest view of itself. German literature takes itself, the world and the supernatural far more seriously. There was a fashion, in the first twenty years or so of the twentieth century, for literature of the supernatural in the manner of E. T. A. Hoffmann and Edgar Allan Poe in which some Austrian writers, in particular Karl Hans Strobl, were prominent. But more characteristic Austrian fantasy tends to emphasise the puzzling coincidences, parallels and paradoxes of this world, revealing it as less solid than we would think. A good example of this is Leo Perutz. He was a mathematician and his novels are finely calculated equations of chance, coincidence and mystery. It is a style which is less well-suited to the restricted length of the short story, but ‘Pour avoir bien servi’ has a typical twist at the end which turns its whole basis inside out, revealing the apparently clear relationships as a construction of the narrator’s imagination.

As part of Austria’s baroque heritage death, too, is seen not as the end, the negation of life, but rather as a continuation in another sphere. Dying is often shown not as an abrupt event, but a slow transition of which the character and the reader gradually become aware. A good example is Csokor’s ‘Shadowtown’ where the characters only gradually realise they are dead and where death is like ‘a safe, dark cave, which will protect me as I fall asleep.’ In Hofmannsthal’s ‘Sergeant Anton Lerch’, the whole subtle transformation of mood through the day is a prelude to Lerch’s unexpected and unexplained death. In Max Brod’s story the ‘first hour after death’ is a period of adjustment to a continuation of existence on a more spiritual level. The personification of death in the extract from Rilke’s novel, The Papers of Malte Laurids Brigge, is not a mere literary device. For Rilke, the depersonalisation of death was the ultimate sign of the loss of individual substance in life, which he experienced particularly strongly in Paris.

In Kafka’s story, ‘Gracchus the Huntsman’, death is an intermediate state, neither the one thing nor the other, since the hero’s funeral barge ‘went the wrong way,’ leaving him ‘on the great staircase leading up … sometimes at the top, sometimes down below, sometimes to the right, sometimes to the left, always in motion.’ But this is the state in which most of Kafka’s characters find themselves: Gregor Samsa is a man who has metamorphosed into an insect, but still retains human feeling; Josef K. in The Trial has been arrested but does not know what he is accused of, nor by what law; K believes he has been appointed surveyor to the castle, but cannot convince the administrators of the fact; the man from the country in ‘Outside the Law’ spends his life at the gate to the Law, hoping to be granted entrance, and the country doctor in the story of the same name does not belong in the country area he serves. This sense of not belonging doubtless had its roots both in Kafka’s relationship with his father and in his situation as a Germanised Jew in the increasingly Czech city of Prague, but in his writings it is raised to an existential plane. (The cryptic references to his own name in the names Kafka gave to his characters has frequently been commented on; kavka in Czech and graculus, in Latin, related to ‘Gracchus’, both mean ‘jackdaw’, for example.) These stories, which have been called ‘parables from which the first term is missing,’ present man as a displaced person in the scheme of eternity. For many readers they express the condition humaine of the twentieth century and this doubtless explains Kafka’s worldwide popularity since the end of the Second World War.

Like a number of the writers included in this anthology – Brod, Leppin, Perutz, Rilke, Werfel and Ungar – Kafka lived in Prague which, in the early part of this century, came to rival Vienna and Berlin as a centre of German literary life. But the figure with whom Prague, with its brooding castle, crowded ghetto and mysterious atmosphere, is most closely associated is Gustav Meyrink, who went to live there as an adult. An elegant dandy around whom legends naturally accumulated (he once supposedly challenged the whole of the officers’ corps to a duel), he began writing while recovering from tuberculosis in 1901. His popularity was established by his short stories (The Opal and Other Stories, Dedalus 1994), in many of which his fantasy has a sharp satirical edge, attacking all kinds of narrow-mindedness, especially military, religious and scientific.

The story included in this anthology, ‘The Master’, is an example of Meyrink’s combination of the grotesque and the occult, with which he became increasingly concerned. He joined many occult groups, only to be disappointed at their spuriousness, and spent much time investigating, and often exposing, mediums; at the same time he edited a number of occult texts and, despite his frequent disappointment in the practitioners, clearly believed in the existence of occult forces. He later claimed his novels and stories should be judged by spiritual rather than aesthetic criteria.

Paul Leppin was a disciple of Meyrink and the figure of Nicholas, who flits in and out of Severin’s Road into Darkness (Dedalus, 1997) is a tribute to him. However neither that novel, despite its subtitle of ‘A Prague Ghost-Story’, nor the piece in this collection, ‘The Ghost of the Jewish Ghetto’, is a story of the supernatural in the traditional sense. Rather, they evoke the atmosphere of decadence associated with fin de siècle Prague which captures young men in the clutch of its ‘ghostly’ tentacles.

It is perhaps worth pointing out that Prague as a city of decadence and mystery, where the Golem walks or a whore becomes a kind of succubus, is a German image. For most Czechs of the period, Prague was the vital symbol of a people who were about to take what they regarded as their rightful place in history.

Brod and Werfel belong to the next generation of writers, which made Prague the most important centre of Expressionism in the Monarchy. Although both later abandoned the exaggeratedly expressive style, they remained concerned with a renewal of the spiritual side of man which was fundamental to Expressionism and which informs both the stories in this anthology. Brod’s ‘The First Hour after Death’, first published in 1916, goes beyond Expressionism in its addition of humour to satire and spirituality. It creates a future world which has been at war for so long it is regarded as the natural condition of mankind. The apostle of this acceptance, the minister, is confronted with the spirit of a being from another sphere, whose punishment for his sins is to be sent for an hour to our – lower – world. What makes the story particularly attractive is that the ghost, who temporarily converts the minister away from his rationalistic relativism, is a comic figure who has great difficulty adapting to the physical conditions of this world.

At the beginning of his career Werfel was primarily a poet, and there is something of the expansive gestures of the writer of Der Weltfreund (The World-Friend) in the texture of ‘The Playground’. There is also something post-Freudian about its dreams within dreams, especially the first section recreating the hero’s relationship with his father. What Werfel takes from Freud is not, however, psychological analysis so much as archetypal relationships which he transforms into poetic symbols. The central section, on love/sex, is probably a working-out of some of the guilt Werfel felt at his relationship with Alma Mahler-Gropius, who was already pregnant with his child before she left Gropius for Werfel in 1920, the year in which ‘The Playground’ was first published.

Another Jew from what is now the Czech Republic who wrote in German was Hermann Ungar. Like the short piece, ‘The Reason for It’, the two novels (eg The Maimed, Dedalus 2002) he completed before his early death are stories of degradation descending to the grotesque and macabre narrated with an unemphatic, bleak matter-of-factness which only serves to intensify the monstrousness of the events.

Much closer to Freud was the oldest writer represented in this anthology, Arthur Schnitzler. He trained as a doctor (his father’s profession) and continued to practise for some years after his initial success as a writer. His interest in psychology was scientific as well as literary (he had been an assistant in the clinic of Freud’s teacher, Theodor Meynert). Freud, six years his senior, even felt a superstitious thrill at the similarity between them. In a letter congratulating Schnitzler on his sixtieth birthday, he wrote:

I have plagued myself over the question how it comes about that in all these years I have never sought your company … The answer is this much too intimate confession. I think I have avoided you from a kind of awe of meeting my ‘double’ … whenever I get deeply interested in your beautiful creations I always seem to find, behind their poetic sheen, the same presuppositions, interests and conclusions as those familiar to me as my own.

Schnitzler’s style is, in general, a finely nuanced social and psychological realism, and the suggestion of the supernatural in the story in this anthology is used to highlight the psychological analysis, rather than out of sensationalism. The hero of ‘Flowers’ feels the ghost of his former lover is taking possession of him through the flowers that come to him after her death. In fact, it is his belated pangs of conscience for his heartless treatment of her that give the memory its hold over him. His release from the spell, when his healthy, uncomplicated current mistress throws the withered stalks out of the window, has much of the moral ambiguity that abounds in Schnitzler’s work. Life wins over death, health over sickness, but also, so it seems, egoism over moral sensitivity.

Schnitzler’s characters tend to live for the moment. Ethical values which suggest a longer-term commitment usually crumble when faced with immediate demands. In some younger writers of the generation that followed Schnitzler and Freud, writers who appeared in the 1890s, this developed into an extraordinary sensitivity to mood and atmosphere, which threatened to dissolve the personality into nothing more than the focus for a multitude of separate impressions, which was all that was left of the ‘self’ in Ernst Mach’s philosophy. Rilke’s early poems are products of this subjective impressionism, which in his New Poems of 1907–8 he attempted to overcome by concentrating on objects from the world outside. The Papers of Malte Laurids Brigge is a product of that period of what has been called the ‘crisis of subjectivity’, when Rilke learnt, from his association with Rodin, for whom he acted as secretary for a time, to ‘see’ the external world, rather than the reflection of his own soul in it.

The main representative of this ‘impressionism’ in this anthology is Hugo von Hofmannsthal. He astonished the Viennese with his delicate, almost perfect lyrics published in the early 1890s when he was still at school. They reproduce moments of intense harmony with the beauty of the world, a beauty which he was aware was fragile, that could easily be shattered by contact with social and political realities, with ugliness and squalor. The problem of this aesthetic mode of existence runs through his short verse plays, which show a clearer awareness that it might come into conflict with the demands of ethical values than one finds in Schnitzler, who appears to record the problem without taking sides. Around the turn of the century Hofmannsthal went through a crisis of confidence in the ability of language to express what he really wanted to say, caused to a certain extent by his own facility, which is almost paradigmatic of twentieth-century European intellectuals’ difficulties with language.

His short story, ‘Sergeant Anton Lerch’, was written in 1899, three years before the ‘Chandos Letter’, in which he described his crisis of language. Although the hero of the story is not one of the aesthetes of Hofmannsthal’s early verse plays who shut themselves off from the world outside, there are parallels in the intensely experienced inner world and the squalor outside. Lerch sets off with his cavalry troop on reconnaissance during the Italian campaign of the year of revolution, 1848. An apparently trivial incident during a highly successful series of operations turns his thoughts away from reality and into a day-dream of a future where he can mould his life to his own, rather crude desires. From then on the narrative hovers with remarkable sensitivity between the real and the unreal until the sergeant comes face to face with his own double. His death at the end (summarily executed for insubordination) is crude reality breaking in on a state of mind which he cannot or will not relinquish; it is left to the reader to decide the balance of daydream, trance or supernatural, but that is one of the factors which make the story so powerful.

As well as these writers, who represent the main streams of literature in Austria in the period before and after the First World War, there were a number who used the supernatural and macabre in a more direct manner as a means of arousing horror. The best known of these, Karl Hans Strobl, was probably as responsible as anyone for the spread of the influence of Edgar Allan Poe in the German-speaking world. Between 1900 and 1920 he initiated something of a fashion in the ghost/horror story, at which many writers tried their hand. Strobl himself brought out numerous anthologies and collections of his own stories. He is generally not seen as a serious writer, but ‘The Head’, which presents incidents during the French Revolution from the point of view of a head which has been cut off from its body by the guillotine, is a masterpiece of the macabre genre.

Paul Busson was another once popular writer who used elements of the supernatural, including folk beliefs, in his novels. The short story, ‘Folter’s Gems’, published in 1919, is a good example of the influence of Edgar Allan Poe. The 1929 Guardian review of Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf quoted Busson’s novel The Rebirth of Melchior Dronte as a typical example of German novelists ‘overdoing the exploitation of the macabre in fiction.’

Perhaps the best example of this type of story, however, is Csokor’s ‘The Kiss of the Stone Woman’, written in 1915. Csokor was a dramatist, the main representative of Expressionism in Vienna, who also wrote a number of short stories. ‘The Kiss of the Stone Woman’ is his only foray into the Gothic, which was probably written as a stylistic exercise or in the hope of being able to sell it. What raises it above the others is the trace of Expressionism in the style. His deliberate choice of active vocabulary, especially verbs, for what are really static objects – trees, houses, churches etc – invests the whole setting with a dynamism and sense of threat which is not unlike the effect of distorted backgrounds used in the German Expressionist films of the time (e.g. The Golem or The Cabinet of Dr Caligari).

*

The small state created in 1919 by the Treaty of St Germain had never attracted the loyalty of the majority of Austrians, who either looked back to the days of the Monarchy, or wanted to be part of a greater Germany, which the treaty expressly forbade. The authoritarian state, set up by Dollfuß in 1933 and continued by Schuschnigg after Dollfuß’s murder by Nazis, attempted to remedy this by combining all conservative elements in a Patriotic Front. Despite the signal lack of impact this made on the population in general, when Hitler invaded in March 1938 it was because the Austrian government was about to hold a plebiscite which was expected to result in a majority in favour of Austria’s continued independence. When the Nazis held their own referendum a month later, however, the result was a 99.5 % majority in favour of union with the German Reich. There were many reasons for the size of the majority, but there is no doubt that a substantial portion of the population welcomed the German troops and their Führer.

The one certain and, as it turned out, permanent cure for the Austrians’ wish for union with Germany was to have that wish granted. As the Second World War came to its inevitable end, they embraced with fervour the Moscow Declaration of 1943 in which Austria was designated ‘the first free country to fall a victim to Nazi aggression.’ This allowed the state to bask in the status of ‘liberated victim’, which to an extent it was, and sweep the crimes committed by the many willing collaborators in the country under the carpet. Amnesia as to what happened between 1938–1945 became official policy. A history of Austria published with government support as late as 1970 stated that ‘The Second World War … was not an Austrian war. Austria as a state did not participate in it;’ its only sections on the Nazi period are headed ‘Austrian victims’ and ‘Austrian resistance’.

As far as literature was concerned, there was, in the immediate aftermath of the war, no shortage of calls for a complete break with the past and the development of a new culture of critical awareness. It soon became apparent, however, that what the public at large wanted, after decades of instability, culminating in the horrors of the Nazi dictatorship and the destruction of the war, was a return to the familiar, the tried-and-tested. Official cultural policy, too, started to look backwards rather than forwards, to the policies of the authoritarian state of the 1930s, which itself had propagated the ‘Austrian idea’ developed in the latter days of the Habsburg Empire.

Continuity, then, rather than innovation was to be a major aspect of Austrian literature in the post-war years. Although Austrian writers such as Ilse Aichinger were associated with the German Gruppe 47, no similar critical forum developed in Austria. When a radical group, including H. C. Artmann among others, did appear in the 1950s, it was aesthetically rather than politically or socially radical, its method a critique of language rather than of politics or society. This was also true of the loose grouping around the Forum Stadtpark in Graz, which dominated avant-garde Austrian literature in the 1960s and later. It was only in the mid-1970s and 1980s that a substantial literature which dealt critically with contemporary society emerged, with writers such as Franz Innerhofer, Elfriede Jelinek, Michael Scharang and Josef Winkler.

Although, in comparison to its size, Austria seems to have provided a surprisingly large number of important writers to post-war literature in German, it was in painting that Austrian artists enjoyed the greatest international success through the group known as the Vienna Fantastic Realists, to whom might be added Friedensreich Hundertwasser (whose ‘Bleeding Houses’ is used on the cover of this anthology) and Gottfried Helnwein. Rudolf Hausner’s portraits of himself as Adam, the representative of humanity, and Helnwein’s pictures, painted with almost photographic realism, of heads bound in bandages with metal forks and similar implements over the eyes, nose or mouth are immediately recognised throughout the world. The post-war rediscovery of Freud’s psychoanalysis was one stimulus to these painters who plumbed the subconscious to give expression to fears, longings and obsessions in the guise of myths, daydreams and fantasies painted with masterly precision.

This combination of unreal or surreal subject matter with a realistic style also characterises some of the best Austrian writing of the post-war years. In literature the rediscovered Kafka, banned like Freud under National Socialism, was an equally important inspiration in producing stories which seem to work as parables, yet do not dictate to the reader what truths they illustrate.

Examples of this are Jeannie Ebner’s ‘The Singing in the Swamp’ and ‘The Moving Frontier’ and Ernst Fuchs’s ‘Ebb and Flow’ which inhabit a mythical world beyond history and yet reflect on contemporary concerns. Ilse Aichinger’s ‘Where I Live’, on the other hand, has a very precise location, which, however, turns out to be not as stable as we assume our everyday world to be. But it is the protagonist’s unhesitating acceptance of the dislocation which encourages the reader to look for meaning in the surreal events and places her close to figures in Kafka. A similar type, not uncommon in post-war German literature as well, whom one might describe as ‘by Oblomov out of Kafka,’ is the protagonist of Rudolf Bayr’s ‘Something to be Said for the Rain’ who takes to his bed as a kind of training for his ‘one long, last look’ before he takes his leave of the world.

Fantasy is also a vehicle for explorations of the conscious and subconscious mind. Two stories look at suicides from almost opposite perspectives. In Barbara Frischmuth’s ‘The Journey to the World’s End’ a young woman’s suicide by drowning becomes a journey under water in the course of which her experiences, her hopes, desires and fantasies are revealed as she gradually takes her leave of the world. In Barbara Neuwirth’s ‘The Furnished Room’ we learn little about the woman who moves in there, but her alienation is reflected in the objects and furnishings that come to life around her. Death as a journey rather than a single point is the subject of Hannelore Valencak’s ‘At the World’s End’, though it relies on more classical forms. Two suicides meet on the banks of the Styx in a Rilkean soulscape.

Subconscious desires of a more violent nature are laid bare in two stories in which cannibalism surfaces in a railway carriage, Jakov Lind’s ‘Journey through the Night’ and Marlen Haushofer’s ‘Cannibals’. While Haushofer reveals the secret desires triggered off by the presence of an apparently innocent, scarcely pubescent girl, Lind’s unrepentant cannibal is more an extremely vivid concretisation of the secret fears of the victim.

In Florian Kalbeck’s ‘The Toad’ the account the madman writes in his own ‘defence’ develops inexorably into a megalomaniac vision of himself and his like freeing the world of the people he sees as ‘toads’. The parallel to recent history is hinted at in the doctor’s final comments.

In two pieces the bizarre events have the surreal qualities of a dream. George Saiko’s fantasy in which the insides of the protagonist’s body and his internal organs are at the same time the city of Paris complete with buildings and monuments, people, trains and traffic, is entitled ‘The Dream’. Günther Kaip’s ‘Novak’, on the other hand, narrates its dreamlike happenings with a certain comic élan but as if they were normal, everyday reality. The increasingly surreal events narrated with the straightest of faces in Gert Jonke’s ‘My Day’ result in grotesque humour.

More traditional types of Austrian fantasy are represented by Peter Marginter, whose witty and sometimes grotesque inventions mark him out as the successor to Fritz von Herzmanovsky-Orlando. Peter von Tramin’s ‘The Sewermaster’ takes up the menacingly macabre atmosphere of Karl Hans Strobl. Michael Köhlmeier, who has had great success with his retelling of Greek myths, is represented by two stories from his amusing and inventive collection of pastiche folk tales.

A more modern variant of fantasy, science fiction, has also attracted Austrian authors. There are suggestions of it in the creation and repair of the human body by industrialised processes that form the background to Marianne Gruber’s ‘The Epidemic’ and Erich Fried’s ‘An Up-and-coming Concern’, though both use the futuristic setting to examine the age-old relations between the sexes. More straightforward science fiction, with a sardonic twist on time travel, comes from Martin Auer. Gerhard Amanshauser and Peter Daniel Wolfkind both use the appearance of a Quatermass-like alien growth to undermine the basis of what we accept as normal reality. Another strand of science fiction appears in Barbara Neuwirth’s miniature ‘In the Sand’, in which the traveller describes a strange unknown civilisation. H. C. Artmann’s ‘In the Gulf of Carpentaria’ appears to belong to the same genre, but is revealed as a resumé of a Hollywood film of that type, with, of course, a further twist at the end. The exuberance of Artmann’s imagination, which includes playing with genre in a wide variety of ways, could be called baroque, making him perhaps the best representative of traditional ‘Austrian’ characteristics carried into the post-war world.

Flowers

Arthur Schnitzler

I’ve just spent the whole afternoon wandering round the streets, with white snowflakes floating down, slowly, noiselessly, and now I’m back home, and the lamp is burning, and my cigar is lit, and my books are beside me, and everything is ready for me to enjoy a cosy evening … But it’s all to no avail, I can’t stop my thoughts continually coming back to the same thing.

She had long since been dead for me, hadn’t she? … Yes, dead, or even, as I put it to myself with the rather childish grandiloquence of the betrayed lover, ‘worse than dead’ … And now, since I learnt that she is not ‘worse than dead’, no, simply dead, like all the others out there, lying beneath the earth whenever spring is here, and whenever the sultry summer comes, and whenever the snow is falling as today … dead without any hope of returning – since then I have realised that she did not die for me a moment sooner than for everyone else. Grief? No. It’s only the usual frisson we feel when someone that once belonged to us sinks into the grave while their whole being is still quite fresh in our minds, down to the light in their eyes and the sound of their voice.

There was certainly much sadness when I discovered she had been unfaithful to me; … but how much else there was as well! My anger and sudden hatred and disgust with life and – yes, that too – my hurt pride. I only gradually came to realise I felt grief as well. But then I could relieve it with the comforting thought that she was suffering too. I still have them all, all those dozens of letters, sobbing, begging, pleading for forgiveness; I can read them whenever I want! And I can still see her in that dark English dress with the little straw hat, standing on the street corner in the twilight whenever I came out of the house … and watching me walk away … And I can remember her at that last meeting, standing there with her big, wondering eyes and round girlish face, that had become so pale and haggard … I didn’t even shake hands with her when she left, when she left for the last time. And I watched her from that window as far as the street corner and then she disappeared, for ever. Now she can never return…

It’s the purest chance I know about it at all. It could have been weeks, months before I heard. I haven’t seen her uncle for a good year now, he only rarely comes to Vienna, and I met him this morning! I had only spoken to him a few times before. The first time was that skittles evening when she and her mother had come along as well. And then the next summer; I was with a few friends in the garden of that restaurant in the Prater, the Csarda it was called. And her uncle was sitting at the next table with two or three other old gentlemen, in unbuttoned mood, almost merry, and he raised his glass to me. And before he left, he came over and told me, as if it were a great secret, that his niece had a crush on me! And in my half-tipsy state I found it odd and funny, piquant almost, that the old man should be telling me that there, to the sound of the cymbalom and the shrill violins – me, who knew it only too well, who still had the taste of her last kiss on my lips … And then this morning! I almost walked straight past him. I asked after his niece, more out of politeness than interest … I didn’t know what had become of her; the letters had stopped coming a long time ago; only flowers she still sent regularly, reminders of one of our most blissful days; once a month they came; no message with them, mute, humble flowers … And when I asked the old man, he was quite astonished: You didn’t know that the poor child died a week ago? It gave me quite a start. Then he told me more. That she had been ailing for some time but had been bed-ridden for scarcely a week … And what was wrong with her? … ‘Some emotional disorder … anaemia … The doctors never really know.’

I stood there for a long time at the spot where the old man had left me; I was worn out, as if I had just made some great effort. And now I feel as if I should regard this day as marking the end of an era in my life. Why? – Why? It is not something that concerns me closely. I no longer had any feelings for her, I hardly ever thought of her any more. Writing all this down has done me good: I am calmer. I am starting to enjoy the comfort of my home. It’s pointless to go on tormenting myself with thinking about it … There’ll be someone, somewhere who has more cause for mourning today than I have.

I have been out for a walk. A fine winter’s day. The sky was so pale, so cold, so distant … and I am very calm. The old man I met yesterday … it seems as if it were weeks ago. And when I think of her, her image appears in my mind’s eye in strangely sharp, complete outline; only one thing is missing, the anger that until very recently accompanied the memory. It has not really sunk in that she is no longer in this world, that she is in a coffin, buried … I feel no pain at all. Today the world seemed quieter. At some point I realised that there is no such thing as joy or sorrow; no, we twist our faces in expressions of desire or grief, we laugh and cry and invite our souls to join in. Just now I could sit down and read profound, serious books and would soon penetrate all their wisdom. Or I could stand looking at old pictures that used to mean nothing to me, and I would respond to their dark beauty. And when I call to mind people who were dear to me and whom death has taken away, my heart does not ache as it usually does: death has turned into something pleasant; it walks among us and means us no harm.

Snow, white snow piled high in all the streets. Little Gretel came to see me and suggested it was time we finally went out for a sleigh ride. So there we were, out in the country, flying along the smooth bright tracks with a jingle of bells and a pale grey sky above us, flying along between gleaming white hills. And Gretel leant against my shoulder, watching the long road stretching out before us with bright eyes. We went to an inn that we knew well from the summer, when it was surrounded by greenery, and now looked so different, so lonely, so completely unrelated to the rest of the world, as if we had to discover it afresh. And the stove in the lounge was glowing so hot that we had to move the table well away because little Gretel’s left cheek and ear had gone quite red. I just had to kiss the paler cheek! Then the drive back, in the semidark already. How Gretel snuggled up to me and held both my hands in hers. Then she said, ‘Today I’ve got you back again.’ Without having to think about it at all, she had found the right words, and it made me happy. Perhaps the crisp, frosty air out in the country had relaxed my senses, for I felt freer and easier than I had during the last few days.

Once again recently, while I was lying half asleep on the sofa, a strange thought crept over me. I felt as if I was cold and hard. Like someone standing without tears, without any capacity for feeling even, beside the grave into which a loved one had just been laid. Like someone who has become so hard that not even the shudder at an early death can placate him … Yes, implacable, that was it…

It has gone completely, completely. Life, pleasure and a little love has swept away all those silly ideas. I’m back amongst people once again. I like them, they’re harmless, they ramble on about all sorts of cheerful matters. And Gretel is an adorable, loving girl, and so beautiful when she stands there by the window with the sunbeams glistening in her blond hair.

Something strange happened today … It’s the day she used to send me flowers every month … And the flowers arrived, as if … as if nothing had changed. They came with the early morning post in a long, slim, white box. It was still very early; my eyes and my brain were still drugged with sleep. I was already opening the box before I became fully aware of what it was … I almost jumped with fright … and there they were, tied up with a delicate gold thread, carnations and violets … They lay there as if they were in a coffin. And as I picked up the flowers, my heart shuddered. I know why they still came today. When she felt her illness coming on, perhaps even a presentiment of her approaching death, she sent her usual order to the florist’s. She did not want me to go without her tender gesture. Certainly that must be the explanation for the package; it’s quite natural, touching even … And yet, as I held them in my hand, the flowers, and as they seemed to tremble and droop, I could not help but feel, against all reason and determination, that there was something ghostly about them, as if they came from her, a greeting from her … as if she still wanted to tell me, even now, when she was dead, of her love and her -belated - fidelity. Oh, we do not understand death, we never understand it; creatures are only truly dead when everyone else has died who knew them … Today I handled the flowers in a different way than usual, more tenderly, as if I could hurt them if I held them too tight, as if their gentle souls might start to whimper softly. And looking at them now on the desk in front of me in their slender, dull green vase, I seem to see them bow their blossoms in melancholy thanks. With their fragrance I inhale the whole sorrow of a futile yearning, and I believe they could tell me something, if we could understand the language of all living, not just all speaking beings.

I refuse to fall under their influence. They are flowers, nothing more. Greetings from the other side, but not a call, not a call from the grave. They are flowers and some shop-assistant in some florist’s tied them up mechanically, wrapped a little cotton-wool round them, put them in the white box and posted them off. And here they are, what is the point of brooding over them?

I spend a lot of time in the open air, take long walks by myself. When I am with other people I feel no real relationship with them, the links have all torn. I even notice it when my dear, blond girl is sitting in my room chattering on about … that’s just it, I have no idea what she’s talking about. When she leaves, the very moment she has gone she is so distant from me; as if she were far away, as if she had been swept away for good by the current of humanity, as if she had disappeared without trace. It would hardly surprise me if she never came back.

The flowers are in their vase of shimmering green glass, their stalks reach down into the water and their fragrance fills the room. They still give off a scent, even though they have been in my room for a week and are slowly starting to wither. And I have come to understand all sorts of nonsense that I used to laugh at, I can understand people holding conversations with natural objects … I can understand people waiting for an answer when they talk to clouds and springs; here I am, staring at these flowers and waiting for them to start to speak … No, no, I know that they are speaking all the time … even now … that they are constantly speaking, sorrowing, and that I am close to understanding them.

How happy I am that the frozen winter is coming to an end. There is already a hint of the approach of spring floating in the air. Time passes in a strange way. I live my life as usual, and yet I sometimes feel as if the outlines of my existence were less sharply defined. Even yesterday is blurred, and everything that lies just a few days in the past takes on the character of a hazy dream. It keeps on happening when Gretel goes, and especially when I don’t see her for a couple of days, that I feel as if it were an affair that is long since over. When she comes it is from so far away! Of course, once she starts chattering on, everything is back to normal and I have a clear sense of immediacy, of life. And the words then are almost too loud, the colours too bright; and just as the darling girl vanishes into some indefinable distance the moment she leaves me, so abrupt, so fiery is her presence. Moments of brightness, of vibrancy used to leave an after-image, an echo within me; now sound and light die away at once, as if in a dim cave. And then I am alone with my flowers. They are already withered, quite withered. Their fragrance has gone. Up to now Gretel has ignored them; today for the first time her gaze rested on them a while, and I sensed the question rising within her. Then, suddenly, some hidden qualm seemed to stop her asking it; she said not a single word more, but took her leave of me and went.

They are slowly losing their petals. I never touch them; if I did they would crumble to dust between my fingers. I feel an inexpressible sadness that they have withered. Why I have not the strength to put an end to the ridiculous spell they cast, I don’t know. They are making me ill, these dead flowers. Sometimes I can’t stand it any more; I rush out. And then in the middle of the street a thought grips me, I have to come back, have to check that they are all right. And then I find them, tired and sad, in the same green vase I left them in. Yesterday I stood there and cried, as one would cry at a grave, and I wasn’t even thinking of the girl from whom they actually came. Perhaps I’m wrong, but it seems to me as if Gretel too feels the presence of something strange in my room. She has stopped laughing when she comes to visit me. She doesn’t talk so loud, not in that fresh, lively voice I was used to. Also I am tormented by a constant fear that she might ask me; I know that I would find any question intolerable.

She often brings some needlework, and when I am working at my books, she sits quietly at the table, sewing or crocheting, patiently waiting for me to put the books away, stand up, come over to her and take her needlework out of her hands. Then I take the green shade off the lamp she was sitting by, and the whole room is flooded with warm, soft light. I don’t like it when it’s dark in the corners.

Spring! My window is wide open. Late in the evening I was looking down into the street with Gretel. The air around was soft and warm. And when I looked towards the street corner, where the lamp casts a faint light, there was suddenly a shadow. I could see it and I couldn’t see it … I knew I was not seeing it … I closed my eyes. And suddenly I could see through my closed lids; there was the wretched figure, standing in the faint light of the lamp, and I could see her face with an eerie clarity, as if it were illuminated by a yellow sun, and I saw her pale, careworn face with her large, wondering eyes … Then I walked slowly away from the window and sat down at my desk; the candle was flickering in a breath of wind that came from outside. And I sat there motionless; for I knew that the poor creature was standing, waiting at the street corner; and if I had dared to touch the dead flowers, I would have picked them out of the vase and taken them to her … Those were my thoughts, perfectly lucid thoughts, and yet at the same time I knew they were irrational. Then Gretel too came away from the window and stood for a moment behind my chair, and brushed my hair with her lips. Then she went, leaving me alone…

I stared at the flowers. They are hardly flowers any more, just bare stalks, thin and pathetic … They are making me ill, driving me mad. And it must be plain to see; otherwise Gretel would have asked me; but she feels it too, she sometimes flees as if there were ghosts in the room. Ghosts! They exist, they do exist! Dead things playing at life. And if flowers smell of decay as they wither, it is only a memory of the time when they were blooming and fragrant. And dead people return as long as we do not forget them. What does it matter if she can no longer speak – I can still hear her! She doesn’t appear any more but I can still see her! And the spring outside, and the bright sun streaming over the carpet, and the scent of fresh lilac coming from the nearby park, and the people walking past below who are no concern of mine, is that life? I can close the curtains, and the sun is dead. I can ignore all those people, and they are dead. I close the window, the fragrance of the lilacs is not wafting around me any more, and the spring is dead. I am more powerful than the sun and the people and spring. But memory is more powerful than I am, it comes when it will and there is no escape. And these brittle stalks in the vase are more powerful than all the lilac scent and spring.

I was bent over these pages when Gretel came in. She has never come so early before. I was surprised, amazed almost. For a few seconds she stood in the doorway; I looked at her without saying hello. Then she smiled and came closer. She had a bunch of fresh flowers in her hand. Without a word she came up to the desk and laid the flowers before me. The next moment she grasped the withered ones in the green vase. It felt as if someone were squeezing my heart, but I was incapable of saying anything; and as I was about to stand up to grab the girl by the arm, she looked at me with a laugh. Holding her arm aloft as she carried the withered flowers, she rushed round the desk to the window and simply threw them out into the street. I felt as if I ought to follow them … But there was the girl, leaning against the window-sill, her face towards me. And the sun was streaming over her blond hair, the warm, living sun … And a rich scent of lilac coming from across the road. I looked at the empty green vase standing on the desk; I was not sure how I felt; freer, I think, much freer than before. Then Gretel came over, took her little bouquet and held it up to my face: cool, white lilac … such a healthy, fresh scent, so soft, so cool, I wanted to bury my face in it. Laughing, white, kissing blooms: I knew the spell was broken. Gretel was standing behind me running her hands wildly through my hair. You fool, you darling fool, she said. Did she know what she had done? I took her hands and kissed them … And in the evening we went out into the open air, out into the spring. I have just come back with her. I lit the candle; we had a long walk and Gretel was so tired she has nodded off in the armchair by the stove. She is very beautiful as she smiles in her sleep.

Before me is the lilac in the slender green vase; down below in the street – no, no, they disappeared from there long ago. The wind has already scattered them with all the other dust.

The Master

Gustav Meyrink

Leonhard sits in his Gothic chair, motionless, eyes wide, staring into space.

The flames blazing up from the twigs in the small fireplace send the light flickering over his hair-shirt, but the immobility surrounding him allows it no purchase, and it slides off his long white beard, his furrowed face and old man’s hands so deathly still they seem part of the brown and gold of the carving on the arms of the chair.

Leonhard is staring at the window. Outside, the ruinous, half-tumbledown castle chapel where he is sitting is surrounded by snowy mounds the height of a man, but his mind’s eye sees the bare, narrow, unadorned walls behind him, the squalid pile of bedding and the crucifix over the worm-eaten door, sees the jug of water, the loaf of bread he baked himself from beech-nut flour and the knife with the notched bone handle beside it in the corner recess.