Studies in Austrian literature, culture and thought.

"Based upon his own impressions of Brazil and personal experiences there, the author portrays a vast, inviting, fertile land with seemingly endless resources; a history devoid of major wars, in which all conflicts are resolved in a spirit of conciliation; the type of society for which he himself longed, composed of multinational elements that combine to form a harmonious whole free of racial tensions, strife, and destructive tendencies." "All of these and more contribute to his vision of an almost utopian place that seems to stand apart from the ills of the modern world while providing refuge from its hostility and hope that mankind can find a more peaceful direction in the future."--Jacket.

"Max Stone, born in Canada as the son of Austrian Jewish emigres, has been living peacefully in Vienna since the age of five, wanting only to be a "good Austrian." But one day in the mid-1980's, thirty-six years after taking up residence in the Austrian capital, Stone enters a tobacco shop and becomes the unwitting target of an anti-Semitic remark. Stone's inability to react to this sentence subsequently splits his "good Austrian" identity in two, giving rise to a crisis that becomes both psychological and political, personal and national.". "With Stone suddenly and unexpectedly cast into the role of "Jewish fellow-citizen," Peter Henisch's novel reproduces the debates about Austria's democratic present and its fascist past. Far from an individual affliction, Stone's paranoia arises from and responds to the often contentious interactions between personal and national narratives, between individual and collective identities in modern Austria."--BOOK JACKET.

"This play is Thomas Bernhard's satire on the business of literature. The novelist Moritz Meister, after years of neglect, has finally achieved the status of Grand Old Man of German literature. With breathtaking regal condescension he receives his minions: a graduate student writing a thesis on him, a journalist preparing an adulatory article, his publisher arranging the publication of his magnum opus. He regales them - and the audience - with noble, high-flown thoughts on art and life, while exploiting his situation to the full to gain honors and material comforts."--Jacket.

The Austrian architect, Sebastian Winter, flies to San Diego from Vienna to attend a conference, filled with apprehension about returning to the city where he had once lived, until the love of his life, Claudia, without warning, stepped out of their car and out of his life, never to return. At the final banquet Winter is seized by the fear that his wife could suddenly appear among the guests. He gets drunk and in driving home kills a pedestrian and is arrested. While in jail awaiting bail from Vienna, he relives the past that has led up to this point in his life. A young murderer placed in the cell with him becomes a catalyst for Winter's life. He views the young man as the personification of a statue of Saint Sebastian which Claudia had admired in a village church in Tuscany but which had made him feel inferior. The bail money arrives, and Winter expects to forget the entire episode like a bad dream. But the experience will not leave him, the trauma will not end. The aesthete who had always considered himself superior to others and in control of his life has learned by being thrust into reality that he too is vulnerable.

Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (1836-1895), the author of Venus in Furs, is known for his tales of dominant women and suffering men, if indeed he is remembered at all today. But in his own lifetime he was also famous as the author of vibrant tales from Galicia, the exotic eastern edge of the Austrian empire, where he championed the cause of the region's most oppressed minorities, the Ruthenians and the Jews. This collection focuses on some of his better-known Jewish tales. Sacher-Masoch's unusual ability to capture the essence of a person or place with a telling detail brings this vanished world of Galician Jewry back to life in all its splendor and all its squalor, mixing the grays, browns, and blacks of European Realism with the bright, sparkling colors of legend, myth, fairy tale, and tradition. Long forgotten in the German and English-speaking countries, his work is currently enjoying a modest revival among scholars and general readers alike.

"A novel that resembles a Kafkaesque puppet theater: a mad director regards the world as a stage that he alone controls. He forces his associates into roles determined by him - his directorial concept proves as absurd as it is consistent. Skwara, with his mastery of language, has composed not only a fascinating, intimate literary work but also a discourse on many evils of every era, including our own. Thus the novel, which originally was published in German in 1979, remains valid over the years and beyond its narrower theme."--Jacket.

"Elisabeth Freundlich's memoir The Traveling Years begins with a description of the author's childhood against the backdrop of the final decade of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the turbulent years of the First Republic and Austrofascism. The second section concerns the Freundlich family's flight from Vienna after the Anschluss, which took them first to Paris, then over the Pyrenees to Lisbon, and finally to New York. An emigrant activist herself, Freundlich relates with modesty, humor, and empathy her experiences as a refugee and her encounters with such figures as Otto Heller, Friedrich Adler, and Bertolt Brecht. Concluding with a description of the difficulties Freundlich faced upon her return to Vienna in the early 1950s, Freundlich's chronicle reaffirms her commitment to using literature as a means to combat fascism and as a memorial to its otherwise forgotten victims."--BOOK JACKET.

"During the summer 1990, Peter Rosei spent a few weeks on the author's farm at St. Isidore, Quebec. In the living room, during nature walks, during extended excursions, they held conversations which were, in part, recorded on a cassette and are presented in this work. Concentrating on Peter Rosei's works, poetics, intentions and problems, all conversations began with prepared questions, although the discussions occasionally were freed from that format and stood on their own merits." "The exchanges sought to get Mr. Rosei's points of view and interpretations about his themes and characters, as well as his stand on literary and philosophical trends." --Book Jacket.

Fifty years after the death of her husband, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Constanze reflects on her long life.

"International Zone is a detective/mystery novel set in postwar Vienna. The milieu is that of Graham Greene's The Third Man. The plot centers around a number of characters, many of them refugees from Eastern Europe, struggling to survive in difficult times. The black market, especially involving cigarettes, plays a prominent role. Political intrigue is also important, as representatives of the Russian and Western occupational forces vie for the allegiance of spies and informants. The relationship between personal motivation (survival and greed) and political allegiances is complex. The geography of Vienna is important; the city was split between Eastern and Western zones but also had an "international zone," shared by the occupation forces, which gives the book its title."--BOOK JACKET.

Paracelsus (1898) has the theme "All the world's a stage" and combines it with hypnotism. The green cookatoo (1898) is an intermingling of illusion and reality. Marionettes and The puppeteer have as a theme the tendency of some human beings to treat others as mere playthings or puppets. The great puppet show features both puppets-on-a-sting and "real" characters.

Peter Handke's dramatic poem Walk about the Villages is the fourth part of Handke's "homecoming cycle," whose other three parts [A Slow Homecoming, The Lesson of St. Victoire, and A Child Story] can be found under the American title A Slow Homecoming. The underlying story line of Walk about the Villages could not be simpler. The "prodigal" writer Gregor returns to his home village. He and his brother Hans, a construction worker, and his shopkeeper sister have a dispute over the disposition of the house which the parents had built and the land which they had cleared with their own hands many years before. Within this straightforward conflict, Handke touches upon almost every aspect of our existence. It is a lyrical play, a poetic drama on the order of Thornton Wilder's Our Town, and Dylan Thomas' Under Milk Wood. It is an "Everyman and Everywoman" dramatic poem for our time.

Book digitized by Google from the library of Harvard University and uploaded to the Internet Archive by user tpb.

"It's Up to Us!" introduces American readers to a kind of Austrian literature which, though not art of the literary canon, has proved of such enduring value and relevance that even histories of literature can no longer overlook it. Written during the depression of the 1930s, Soyfer's works stand out as documents of the human spirit in an inhuman time. The volume includes all of Soyfer's major works and selections from his political verse and short prose. His five plays combine political engagement with the tradition of Viennese popular comedy in the spirit of Nestroy: The End of the World, Soyfer's warning against impending world destruction; Trip to Paradise, protesting technological determinism; Astoria, a satire on the State as an inhuman abstraction, Vineta, a surrealist nightmare of a dead society, and Broadway-Melody 1492, an anti-Columbus play written fifty years before the controversial quincentennial. Soyfer's most important prose work, Thus Died a Party, combining political analysis and literary imagination, examines the underlying causes of the Social Democratic defeat in 1934. The volume closes with Soyfer's "Dachau Song," a triumph of human dignity over barbarism.

Ein Mann betritt die Bühne, in der Hand einen Strauß Rosen. Er fängt an zu reden, zu erzählen, zu schreien. Er heißt Sad. Er ist Ausländer. Araber. An den Abenden verkauft er Rosen, um sein Studium zu finanzieren. In einem großen Monolog erzählt er von sich und seiner Heimat, von seinen Erinnerungen, seinen Träumen, seinen Hoffnungen.

Since his breakthrough on the stage in 1971 Peter Turrini has continued to write plays that have escalated him into the forefront of the Austrian theater scene. He began writing as a critic of society and has remained among the political loyal opposition to the present day. Regardless of genre - whether essay, play, television series, or poetry - his works all address major problems and concerns of the time.

158 p. 20 cm

"Kolleritsch's novel investigates Austria's relationship to National Socialism through the eyes of Joseph Algebrand, whose adolescent experiences during the war years in rural southern Austria continue to impact his life and that of his homeland years after its end. The insidiousness of an ideology that required strict uniformity and stifled expression is contrasted to the main character's innate attempt to preserve his own individuality and the uniqueness and variety of nature. Allemann, Joseph's teacher at the school he attends and himself a member of the Party, becomes a victim to its principles; his physical deformities and intellectual perversion cast him outside the desired mold. Kolleritsch transforms what might appear to be a timeworn "historical" theme into a semi-autobiographical statement about the present as the evil from the past latently and semiconsciously pervades the present. The scars on Joseph's body from his past are rediscovered in the virtually unreformed lives of his fellow countrymen."--BOOK JACKET.

The Massive File on Zwetschkenbaum is a picaresque (and picturesque) novel based on the misfortunes of a young Talmud scholar, whose story is allegedly recorded by the author as a young attorney between the two world wars.The protagonist is an anti-hero who for the most trifling of offenses - after a nap under a plum tree he unthinkingly eats some of the fruit - becomes ensnared in the legal machinery which grinds on relentlessly, although all authorities feel the charges should be dropped. Hence the massive file is created. Drach pillories mindless bureaucracy of the legal system, the bumbling medical profession, and the general corruption of the times along with the prevalent anti-Semitism.

Robert Schindel's Born-Where is a novel about origins, a novel about the wages of history. Its protagonists are contemporary Viennese and German Jews who are the children of those who were killed in the German extermination camps. The uneasy intertwining of their lives with contemporary Germans and Austrians constitutes the panoramic epic that the Viennese author unfolds with keen insight and mordant humor. The protagonist is a concentration-camp survivor, who is summoned back to Vienna to testify at a belated war-crimes trial. In the course of his reluctant return, he meets the past and the present in Austria, making readers aware of how things were and how much of history and of the legacy of racism still lingers on today. This confrontation/assimilation makes for, among other things, an intergenerational, psychological ghost story. Born-Where touches on every aspect of the unresolved and perhaps unresolvable relations between contemporary Germans/Austrians and Jews. One subtheme concerns the Left's resistance to Nazism. Another takes us inside the workings of contemporary Austrian bureaucracy. There are also the invariably impossible romantic relationships between Jews and Germans.

This volume contains the last three plays by Arthur Schnitzler that have been published. In the Play of Summer Breezes, the last of Schnitzler's plays to appear in his lifetime, is a subtle comedy of reconciliation reminiscent of Chekhov at his best. The two other works in this volume, The Word and Procession of Shades, were not published until long after his death. Both plays were begun much earlier, approximately 1907 and 1909 respectively and fit perfectly into the thematic progression of his works. They provide variations on a number of his favorite themes: the function and the responsibility of the artist, the misuse of language, the double standard of sexual behavior for men and women, and the extent to which one individual is legitimately entitled to influence the life of another.

"Widowed and newly retired, the turn-of-century Austrian civil servant Julius Zihal has left the safe haven of the Tax Office and its orderly, codified administrative practices and now faces a drab and uncertain future alone. This gloomy scene suddenly becomes brighter when he discovers that the lighted windows of the adjacent apartment building offer a nightly display of variously-endowed ladies undressing as they prepare for bed. The expected Jekyll and Hyde contrast between Julius' Biedermeier daytime conduct and his nocturnal activities never quite materializes as the bureaucrat within him dominates the voyeur and the attempts to open a file on Eros, as it were, by carefully noting down and categorizing all the pertinent details of his observations, rather than simply surrendering to their pleasures." "But the attractions of the flesh are not long kept at arm's - or telescope's - length. Eventually, Julius' "observatory" ends up a shambles and the "astronomer" himself suffers a nervous collapse from which he is rescued by his housekeeper and a postmistress of mature and opulent charms - a pair of ladies who know when the indirect approach is out of place."--Jacket.

Herzmanovsky-Orlando's 1928 novel The Tragic Demise of a Faithful Court Official tells of the romantic entanglements, inexorable decline, and subsequent tragicomic death of the rigid and proper Biedermeier bureaucrat Jaromir Edler von Eynhuf. In his unwavering efforts to gain the attention of his beloved Emperor Franz I and to further his career, Eynhuf loses sight of all propriety and embarks on an irreversible path of obsession leading into the netherworld of the diva Hoellteufel and to his eventual ruination.

"This translation of Thomas Bernhard's Der Weltverbesserer makes a contemporary masterpiece available to English language readers for the first time. While echoing the dramatic works of Samuel Becket, Heiner Muller and Peter Handke, The World-Fixer is quintessentially Bernhardian and one of his most stage-worthy plays. Presenting a theme he would explore in the play Ritter Dene Voss and the novels Wittgenstein's Nephew and The Loser, The World-Fixer revolves around a self-centered, self-styled genius loosely patterned on Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. The protagonist is the author of an obscure philosophical tract ostensibly designed to improve the condition of the world, if the world could only understand it. Over the course of a day he looks forward to receiving an honorary degree while reflecting on his life and engaging in dysfunctional banter. Combining absurdist comedy with an astute satire of academic pomposity, The World-Fixer ultimately gives a moving portrait of simple human frailty."--Jacket.