Reviewed by: Zwischen Wahrheit und Dichtung: Antisemitismus und Nationalsozialismus bei Heimito von Doderer by Alexandra Kleinlercher Vincent Kling Alexandra Kleinlercher, Zwischen Wahrheit und Dichtung: Antisemitismus und Nationalsozialismus bei Heimito von Doderer. Vienna: Böhlau, 2011. 472 pp. “Es gibt so einen schwer durchschaubaren Mix”: In conversation with Alexandra Kleinlercher, Doderer‘s former secretary and biographer Wolfgang Fleischer (365) points up the difficulty of reaching clarity about motives and even documentable facts concerning Doderer’s anti-Semitism and membership in the National Socialist party. Thoroughgoing research by scholars like Wendelin Schmidt-Dengler and Klaus Amann in literature or Oliver Rathkolb in history has documented the involvement of Austrian writers with Nazism, frequently giving their denials the lie, but Doderer was an especially artful dodger, telling his story variously at various times with half-truths, conflicting dates, changes of emphasis, selectivity of memory, and strategic omissions. He was also adept at recruiting others to help him airbrush history, like Ivar Ivask abroad and Hans Weigel and Hilde Spiel at home, the latter two valuable because they were Jewish. Hence Kleinlercher‘s inspired title, for it is not possible at times to ascertain if Doderer was just plain lying or if his many drastic changes of heart, always directly contingent on his ego needs and identity gaps, brought about sincere but shallow self-assessments. As Kleinlercher points out, Doderer’s pattern, in his fiction (290–314) and [End Page 148] his diaries alike (315–26), was to furnish long, detailed self-examinations that usually talk around the actual conflict. While there is no doubt that Doderer joined the Nazi Party in 1933, it is not possible to determine at what point his disillusionment led him to drift away. (It is pure invention that he terminated membership.) It was surely not as early as 1936, as he sometimes maintained, for he renewed in 1939 (“Ungereimtheiten zu Doderer as NSDAP-Mitglied” 78–82). His reception into the Catholic Church in 1940 seems to signal definitive rejection, as it also marks the point after which he ceased making anti-Semitic references. As he noted in 1946 (321), the evils he had distortedly judged as primarily “Jewish” vices were the overall failings of the greedy, blinkered middle class at large. More drastically, Doderer modified his approach to his novel in progress (published in 1956 as Die Dämonen but up to 1940 Die Dämonen der Ostmark) by transforming the anti-Semitic theme; his chapter “Auf offener Strecke” clearly signals what Kleinlercher calls “Der Wandel 1940” (265–75). Several scholars, especially Kai Luehrs-Kaiser and Gerald Sommer, have done essential work to establish Doderer’s relations to anti-Semitism and Nazism by including archival records, but in her extensive second section, “Doderers Werk im Wandel der Zeit: Antisemitische und nazistische ‘Substrate’” (209–316), Kleinlercher provides a necessary and unprecedentedly thorough comparison, based on manuscript research in the Archive for Austrian Literature at the Austrian National Library, of the unpublished Dämonen der Ostmark (“Ein antisemitisches Romanprojekt” 229–64) with the published novel, always detailing specific changes. Her starting point here is an “Aide mémoire zu: Die Dämonen der Ostmark” Doderer drafted in 1934 (214–28) and supplemented. That comparison alone would make this book indispensable, but Kleinlercher is as exhaustive in her study of Doderer’s life as in that of his works. In her first part, “Heimito von Doderer—Leben” (21–213) she sifts with painstaking thoroughness through all the myths, legends, surmises (the “Dichtung”) to establish the facts (the “Wahrheit”) by accepting no statement she cannot directly document. Her searches through war records, marriage licenses, residency certificates (Meldezettel), immigration registers, and other documents, in addition to her interviews and correspondence with firsthand witnesses, are the results of uncompromising determination to put to rest unfounded assertions. Kleinlercher is accordingly able to correct and refine a good number of biographical inaccuracies about the author and his associates, proving, for [End Page 149] example, that the story of Paul Hasterlik’s being thrown off a moving streetcar by SS men was a concoction (379) or that his daughter, Gusti, Doderer’s first wife, arrived in the United States earlier than thought (375). She examines every document...
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Apr 14, 2014
Jin Suk Park 
Open Access