Exercises in Brotherhood: The Recent Austrian Novel

Abstract

The contemporary Austrian isolation from literature printed in Germany, an isolation which exists as a result of financial and publishing conditions, has not deterred Austrian novelists from employing the German scene, although their chief characters are almost without exception from home ground.' Those writers who were born during the First World War feel a special tie; they grew up to become citizens of the Third Reich and members of the German army. Kurt Ziesel, Franz Tumler, and Fritz Habeck all served in the Wehrmacht. Today they are best-sellers and Habeck the recipient of Vienna's Goethe Prize for 1952. Ziesel, a Tyrolean (b. 1911), is the most controversial of the three, having gone to great pains to deny his past. In 1938 he published Verwandlung der Herzen, the story of a musician's conversion to National Socialism. The change occurs when a Communist group murders the youth's closest friend. The obstinacy with which Ziesel pounds at his theme betrays more than lip service to the regime. The musical work was followed in 1939 by an innocuous and still popular novel on motherhood, Der kleine Gott; then Ziesel did not return to the novel genre until 1951 with Und was bleibt ist der Mensch, the hero of which is an American flier, Lieutenant John Starwick. The lieutenant, after his life has been spared by a gallant German aviator (actually a Viennese), shoots his opponent down. Throughout the rest of the novel he tries to find the widow; his search and the bereaved Frau Reineder's escape from East Prussia are described in alternate chapters. Ziesel intends to say that all men are or should be brothers. His thesis does not convince, since he has given all the virtues to one side.