Travellers in Time and Space: The German Historical Novel/Reisende durch Zeit und Raum: Der deutschsprachige historische Roman by Osman Durrani , Julian Preece (review)

Abstract

MLRy 99.2, 2004 553 contrast to the Nestroy boom), and on the unfriendly Viennese reaction to Horvath's critical Volksstiicke(Louise Adey Huish), while John Warren provides a masterly brief survey of theatrical criticism between the wars, giving particular praise to David Josef Bach. W. E. Yates's essay on 'The Rise and Fall ofthe One-Act Play' attends especially to the financial circumstances and public preferences that help explain the popularity of one-acters from the 1850s to the 1880s and their revival by Modernists. Parody, both a form of reception and an integral part of Viennese theatre, is concisely surveyed by Peter Branscombe and illustrated from Viennese mockery of Wagner in a paper by Robert Vilain. The commercial imperatives governing theatre are treated in Birgit Pargner's study of Charlotte Birch-Pfeiffer,the 'Mutter des Riihrstucks', who mass-produced sentimental dramas, distributed them through agents, and profited by the new royalty system. Another constraint, censorship, is examined in Gilbert Carr's study of the Naturalist drama Waare, written by Otto Stoessl and Robert Scheu in 1896-97 but premiered only in 1910. The physical realities of the theatre are brought home in Michael Patterson's horrifyingaccount of the firein the Ringtheater on 8 December 1881, in which as many as eight hundred people may have died. The concept of theatre is extended to include the cabaret of Egon Friedell and Alfred Polgar (Janet Stewart), and Helmut Qualtinger (Osman Durrani), and, in Andrew Barker's contribution, to Schoenberg's monodrama Erwartung, forwhich Marie Pappenheim (a relative of the more famous Bertha ('Anna O.'), but well worth rediscovering in her own right as a poet, medical doctor, and later Communist exile) wrote the libretto. Almost all these papers are based on extensive research, which enables them, de? spite their brevity, to pack in a remarkable amount of data. Thanks no doubt to careful editing, they are concise and well presented. Rather than a comprehensive survey, they offera variety of unexpected insights into their subject, providing both solid information and stimulus forfurtherenquiry. Besides the genre surveys by such Altmeister as Yates, Branscombe, and Warren, I would single out the papers on Mell, Qualtinger, and Jelinek as providing thoughtful, original, and challengingtreatments of their subjects which will be essential reference points in future. Any individual or institution with an interest in Austrian theatre (or indeed theatre in general) should acquire this volume. St John's College, Oxford Ritchie Robertson Travellers in Time and Space: The German Historical Novel/Reisende durch Zeit und Raum: Der deutschsprachigehistorischeRoman. Ed. by Osman Durrani and Ju? lian Preece. (Amsterdamer Beitrage zur neueren Germanistik, 51) Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi. 2001. ix + 473pp. $85; ?91 (pbk $32; ?34). ISBN 90420 -1405-9 (pbk 90-420-1395-8). Recently, while reading the introduction to a differentcollection of essays, I remem? bered participating in the conference where shorter versions had been presented as papers. Since I left early on the last day, I did not learn that the organizers hoped to produce a volume, but I also noticed that the ten contributions they included constituted less than a third ofthe original presentations. Rather than accepting everything that came in over the podium, they shaped a smaller number of chapters into a coher? ent book. Moreover, despite the difficulties of getting anyone even to consider such miscellanies these days, they placed their labours with a respectable university press. If they made enemies in the process, the price was worth paying. I wish I could say the same for Travellers in Time and Space. Its twenty-nine es? says appear in the same order in which they were presented at a symposium at the 554 Reviews University of Kent at Canterbury, and I cannot discern any organizing principle. For example, the eight contributions that deal with pre-twentieth-century texts are numbers 1-3, 12-14, 18, and 28. Far from covering the topic, the essays devoted to the nineteenth century omit Gustav Freytag, Wilhelm Raabe, and the century's most popular and prolific author, Luise Muhlbach. There is almost no discussion of the status of the genre, nor any sustained explanation of why so many readers found (and find) historical...