Surrealism in Post-War Vienna

Abstract

Owing to its fundamental lack of national esteem and slim prospects after the First World War and the end of the multi-ethnic Habsburg monarchy, there was a significant delay in the historical avant-garde reaching Austria. During the Nazi regime, ‘avant-gardist’ art and literature had not been available in Austria, which also led to a later lack of clarity in regard to what could be considered ‘surrealist writing’. For a young generation of progressive artists and writers in Vienna at the end of the 1940s and the beginning of the 1950s, among them the poet Andreas Okopenko, surrealism became a much-discussed topic. Confronted with its intoxicating and anarchic energies for the first time, those artists perceived surrealism as an opportunity to radically break with the predominantly conservative literature of the last decades. Paradoxically, the radical questioning of traditions through the reception of international experimental arts would subsequently provide a significant contribution to the strengthening of a national identity, by forming an Austrian counterculture.