Leslie Bodi (review)

Abstract

576 Reviews of a great composer. Hans Rudolf Vaget provides a fascinating counterpoint to the implication of cultural decline in the nineteenth century in his study of Thomas Mann's development from a negative view of Hamburg's modernity in Buddenbrooks to an appreciation of its liberal Hanseatentum (as the birthplace of Hans Castorp) in The Magic Mountain. Finally JenniferJenkins explores another aspect of Hamburg's modernity around 1900, showing how Frederick Law Olmsted's New York Central Park influenced the development of the innovatory Winterhude Stadtpark. The old Burgerrepublik may have failed to survive into the nineteenth century, but its ideals were constantly invoked in response to the challenges of national integration and industrialization. On the other hand that did not prevent Hamburg, including its elites, fromsuccumbing to National Socialism. This volume is strongest on the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. For the rest, it raises interesting questions that challenge Schramm's rather self-satisfied vision without, however, providing an alternative. Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge Joachim Whaley Literatur, Politik, Identitat? Literature, Politics, Cultural Identity. By Leslie Bodi. (Osterreichische und internationale Literaturprozesse, 18) St. Ingbert: Rohrig. 2002. 606 pp. ?39. ISBN 3-86110-332-x. Leslie Bodi's great achievement is Tauwetter in Wien: Zur Prosa der osterreichischen Aufklarung, ij8i-iyg$, firstpublished in 1977 and recently reissued with an updated bibliography (Vienna, Cologne, and Weimar: Bohlau, 1995). Not only does it display unrivalled familiaritywith a fascinating and little-known subject, the literaryresponse to Joseph H's ill-starred attempt at enlightenment from above, but it is written in a natural, easy style that makes it a delight to read and reread. This generous selection from Bodi's occasional essays now reveals the intellectual and biographical context from which Tauwetter in Wien developed. An autobio? graphical preface recounts his upbringing amid the assimilated, multilingual Jewish bourgeoisie of inter-war Budapest, and also mentions several years of school in Mi? lan. Since leaving Hungary in 1956, he has been an exceptionally active presence in German studies in Australia, with links to the Hungarian intellectual diaspora around Agnes Heller. His essays reveal a constant preoccupation with the role of intellectuals in dictatorships. The early 1780s in Austria, when Joseph's relaxation of censorship unleashed a vast pamphlet literature from which serious social criticism developed, are presented as a paradigmatic 'thaw', in which the authorities try to modernize an anachronistic-order by allowing limited freedom of expression which they soon retract when writers demand structural changes. Analogies are drawn not only with the Soviet thaw of the early 1960s but with Gorbachev's glasnost. Other essays deal with German revolutionary writers, including Georg Forster and his wife Therese Huber, who reveal the ambivalences of radical intellectuals entangled in a revolution that goes savagely awry. Three essays on Heine, which deserve to be widely known, look closely at his complex imagery of revolution, while other essays show how closely Bodi followed the fates of writers in the GDR and in the new landscape created by the opening of the Stasi files. It was fortunate that, while still in Hungary, Bodi worked on an edition of Forster, the firstGerman to visit the Pacific; Therese Huber wrote the firstGerman novel set in 'Neu-Holland'. Essays on these writers introduce a series concerned with references to Australia in German literature (surprisingly many: Friedrich Gerstacker, Anton Wildgans, and Egon Erwin Kisch all travelled there) and with German-language cul? ture in Australia. These illustrate Bodi's interest in Australia's multicultural society MLR, 100.2, 2005 577 (supported by his colleague Michael Clyne, whose work on pluricentric languages he often cites) and in the place of Austria within German language and culture. As features of Austrian identity Bodi singles out an intense linguistic consciousness and a fondness forparody. Both are illustrated from the Austrian Enlightenment, the for? mer in an important essay entitled 'Sprachregelungals Kulturgeschichte. Sonnenfels: Uber den Geschaftsstil (1784) und die Ausbildung der osterreichischen Mentalitat', the latter by a study of Paul Weidmann's astonishing Der Eroberer (1786), which anticipates Joyce's 'Oxen of the Sun' in its resourceful parody of innumerable styles. Generally, the reflections on identity are welcome in suggesting how to liberate one? self...