Sven Hakon Rossel (review)

Abstract

MLR, 100.4, 2005 1163 be taking issue not with historical reality,but with the supposed representation (ac? tually idealization) of it in literary discourse: the classical Islendingasogur themselves. He sees Kroka-Refs saga as a proto-postmodernist parody ofthe classical sagas; until now critics have dismissed it as derivative, or even plagiaristic. One might argue, of course, that Arnold's judgements are as context-bound as those which precede him. But the Islendingasogur can survive a little neglect, and their successors are very well served by the illuminating revisionist attention Arnold offersin this book. Linacre College, Oxford Heather O'Donoghue 'Reisen ist leben, dann wird das Leben reich und lebendig': Der danische Dichter Hans Christian Andersen und Osterreich. By Sven Hakon Rossel. (Wechselbeziehungen Osterreich-Norden, 3) Vienna: Edition Praesens. 2004. 157 pp. ?26.10 ISBN 3-7069-0264-8. Hans Andersen was an inveterate traveller and travel-writer. For him, as forso many of his northern contemporaries, Italy was the longed-for and repeatedly sought destination ; but his command of German encouraged him to linger on the way there. On six of his foreign journeys Austria, and especially Vienna, detained him for a variety of reasons, both scenic and cultural, one of the most compelling being the Viennese stage: during his nineteen-day stay in the Austrian capital on his way home from Italy in 1842 he managed to fitin five operas and ten plays, including Schiller's Wilhelm Tell, Grillparzer's Die Ahnfrau, Halm's Der Adept, and Donizetti's opera Torquato Tasso, and to make his customary pilgrimage to the Augustinerkirche to see Canova's monument to the Archduchess Maria Christina, which had attracted his admiring attention during his firstvisit in 1834. And all the while he was keeping a travel diary which he put to good account in En Digters Bazar (1842), which Reginald Spink described as 'an enchanting book?a vivid, crowded, shifting pattern of colourful people and places, an Oriental kaleidoscope' (Hans Christian Andersen and his World (London: Thames & Hudson, 1972), p. 62). Sadly, Spink's work is not mentioned in Sven Hakon Rossel's select bibliography, which, like his book, is aimed at German, Austrian, and, perhaps, American readers. Andersen's long and intense relationship with Austria has been touched on by Lotte Eskelund in . . . Sah ich zum erstenmal die Donau: Hans Christian Andersen in Osterreich (Vienna: Jugend & Volk, 1979) and in Da Andersen var i Wien: H. C. Andersens rejser i Ostrigi drene 1834-1872 (Copenhagen: Spektrum, 1991), a survey of his six visits to the Austrian capital, and her precedent is acknowledged by Rossel at the start of his fascinating and informative study,clearly designed to be read in 2005, An? dersen's bicentenary year. On the evidence he generously provides, Andersen was an observant and well-informed traveller. But this is more than just an attempt to retrace a traveller's footsteps, forhe was also a writer with a rapidly growing reputation of his own and an enthusiastic yet not uncritical observer of nineteenth-century Austrian life and attitudes; his travelogues are rich in trenchant verbal sketches of Austrian personalities from Grillparzer and Castelli (a particular friend ofAndersen's) to Char? lotte Birch-Pfeiffer,whose Danish-born theatre-manager husband provided him with many a complimentary ticket, as did Joseph Sonnleitner, who had a Danish wife and introduced him to Deinhardstein, whose plays Garrick in Bristol and Hans Sachs he had already seen on his firstvisit to Vienna in June 1834, and who addressed him as 'Herr Professor', to his delight. On his fourth visit, twenty years later, Andersen not only enjoyed Mosenthal's Der Sonnwendhof (thanks to a complimentary ticket, this time from Heinrich Laube), but actually set about translating it into Danish: it was in his version that this once celebrated Volksstiickreceived its Danish premiere in Copen? hagen in 1855. This visit was also of great personal importance, for it was in Vienna 1164 Reviews that he said his last farewell to Jenny Lind, an episode retold in Mit Livs Eventyr, his autobiography. His farewell to Austria came in 1872. It brought his long experience of the German-speaking world to a muted, ironic, yettouching close which will put...