37? Reviews The wartime fate of Schloss Leopoldskron certainly lacked the glamour of theReinhardt days. Concerts were held and various artistswere quartered there, including the Festival director, Clemens Krauss, but little happened to excite the imagination. Towards the end of the war there was some bomb damage but not enough to prevent theAmerican army from requisitioning it in 1945. In 1947 the 'Salzburg Seminar inAmerican Civilization' (later 'inAmerican Studies') was established there, founded by Clemens Heller, son of Freud's publisher. Helene Thimig (Reinhardt's wife) returned from the United States to claim her half-share of the property (the other half having been left to his two sons), and the situation was a complicated one with prolonged legal battles. This book iswell illustrated and well researched but will be of limited interest unless one's curiosity has been awakened by the sight of this beautiful house, reflected in its lake and looking across to themountains, and by what one has read about its heyday when archbishops, filmmagnates, authors, and world famous conductors and performers were entertained there. What happened after Reinhardt leftwas, until its rebirth, as sad a comedown as the fate of the Festival itselfduring those NS years. Oxford Brookes University John Warren Wunscherf?llungen. Erz?hlstrategien im Prosawerk Alexander Lernet-Holenias. By Franziska Mayer. B?hlau: Cologne, Weimar and Vienna. 2005. 322 pp. 39,90. isbn 3-412-16004-0. The centenary of Lernet-Holenia's birth in 1997 was followed by a series of publications devoted to this currently rather unfashionable Austrian romancier and dramatist, including a full-length biography, a collected volume of critical essays and the first substantial study in English. Franziska Mayer's Wunscherf?llungen builds upon thiswork by offering the first extensive academic analysis of Lernet-Holenia's prose. In itself, this is no mean feat, as Lernet Holenia published some thirteen novels and a number of other long prose works variously classified as Erz?hlungen and Novellen. Of these, around a half dozen are currently in print. For this reason alone, Mayer's scrupulous bibliographical listingwill prove a valuable reference point for future scholars, though, as she admits, the author's prolific output is in need of a full scholarly bibliography, despite the publication of a bibliography of secondary literature by Barri?re, Eicher and M?ller in 2001. Unusually for a work that began life as a German doctoral dissertation, Mayer's approach to her subject is uncluttered and admirably concise. She draws upon the Freudian paradigm of 'wish fulfilment', developing this in a special sense to refer to the notion that narrative, like dream or fantasy,may offer compensation for 'deficits' experienced in waking life. In a general introduction, Mayer discusses the instability of identity in Lernet-Holenia's principal fictional characters ? who typicallyhave multiple names, pseudonyms or concealed identities and exploit this instability as a survival strategy in an uncertain world. That world is in almost all of Lernet-Holenia's fiction the AUSTRIAN STUDIES, I4, 20 6 371 Austrian rump state emerging from the dissolution of theHabsburg Empire in November 1918. While clearly rooted in their author's experiences as a cavalry officer on the Eastern Front, Lernet-Holenia's heroes are not bound by simple biographical horizons. Their sense of 'deficit', the disappearance of the values and ideas that once structured their lives, ispart of a complex exploration of the failures of the inter-warAustrian Republic by a conservative writer whose utopia was all too clearly backward-looking. As Mayer puts it, the caesura of 1918 enjoys a privileged status in the author's uvre. The later ruptures inAustria's history appear a mere repetition of the same. And always the experience of individuals at the level of a regiment or military unit stands pars pro totofor the fate of nations, like the Ukrainian conscripts in Lernet-Holenia's best-known novel Die Standarte (1934), whose sullen refusal to cross the Danube results in a massacre that signals both the end of the war and the end of the Austrian German 'mission' within Central Europe. Readers familiar with Joseph Roth's Radetzkymarsch (1932) or Die Kapuzinergruft (1938) will recognize affinities, and it is perhaps a disappointment...