Marie Frischauf's "Der graue Mann": National Socialism and the Austrian Novel

Abstract

Marie Frischauf 's Der graue Mann: National Socialism and theAustrian Novel ANDREW BARKER Universityof Edinburgh In the summer of 1909, Arnold Schoenberg invited a twenty-seven-year-old Jewish doctor named Marie Pappenheim to provide him with a text for his first opera. Within just a few weeks this virtually unknown young writer, whose only previous publication was a handful of poems inKarl Kraus's Die Fackel, had completed a work which formed the textual basis for one of the most celebrated examples ofViennese modernism: the Expressionist mono drama Erwartung} Though finished by September 1909, this searing portrayal of a betrayed woman's spiritual anguish had to wait until 1924 before receiving itsbelated first performance under Alexander Zemlinsky's baton in Prague. Exactly forty years after the completion of Erwartung the same writer, now calling herself by her married name Marie Frischauf, published her only novel, Der graue Mann, inVienna. This work was all but ignored when it first appeared, and it has subsequently failed to attract any extended critical attention. Nevertheless, given Pappenheim's role in forging one of the central works ofDie Wiener Moderne, itwas not too surprising when an edition of Der graueMann was published in 2000 by the Theodor Kramer Gesellschaft in Vienna. This edition, along with some previously unknown poems forArnold Schoenberg, contains a detailed and highly informative essay on Pappenheim/Frischauf's life and works by theViennese scholar Marcus Patka.2 However, the novel which Patka published as Der graueMann is not a modern edition of the book that sank without trace after 1949. Instead, we are presented with a hitherto unknown novel fragment of some seventy-five pages, only labelled Der graue Mann (2) on the inside pages of the volume. As the 'Editorische Notiz' rather casually informs us: In 1949Marie Frischauf published a novel by the title ofDer graue Mann with the Viennese publisher Globus. This isnot identical with the book presented here. Der graue Mann (Part )was written in exile inMexico between 1941 and 1946, the action is set inVienna in the 1930s. In the years following her return from exile 1 Karl Kraus, Die Fackel, 202 (1906), 23. 2 Marie Frischauf, Der graue Mann. Roman und Gedichte f?r Arnold Schoenberg, ed. by Marcus G. Patka (Vienna, 2000). Hereafter referred to as Patka. 34 Frischauf's Der graue Mann Marie Frischauf wrote Part 2, presented here, which takes place inVienna directly after the war.3 So the original novel remains virtually unobtainable and almost completely unknown, more than fifty years after its initial publication. Yet this is a narrative that not only has literarymerit, it is also one that forces us to think afresh about theways inwhich the post-war Austrian novel has responded to the country's involvement with National Socialism. Encouraged by the Moscow Declaration of 1943, which had defined Austria's status as the first victim of National Socialism, politicians in the Second Republic failed for decades to address the country's singular complicity in the crimes of the Third Reich. In literature too, a similar amnesia seemed to take hold, with an ex-Nazi like Heimito von Doderer being elevated to the rank ofStaatsdichterin the 1950s and 60s. In a fit ofwell justified enthusiasm at the emergence of a great chronicler ofViennese life and mores, itwas conveniently forgotten that for several years after thewar Doderer had been forbidden to publish his work. When the ban was finally lifted, his enormous and beautifully crafted novel Die Strudlhofstiege ( 1951 ) set the tone for quasi-historical novels that blithely ignored events in the years 1938-45. Only with the emergence of younger writers like Thomas Bernhard (1931?1989) and ElfriedeJelinek (b. 1946), so it isnow widely held, did Austrian literature start to engage with the barely submerged legacy of the fascist past. In his recent study of Austrian writing after the restoration of literary life in 1945, Klaus Zeyringer notes that authors generally avoided the political sphere, for 'literature should emphasise "eternal values" '.4Already inDer graue Mann, however, a Viennese novelist, in a novel set and published inVienna, quite openly tackles the question of Austrian complicity in theNazi take-over of the country. The novel's central figure, the...