Austrian Literature - The 20th Century - First Half of The 20th Century

First Half of The 20th Century

The Jugendstil movement was primarily a cultural movement of architecture and decorative arts. On the other hand, especially the Viennese Jugendstil was marked by the presence of artists of every genre, thus also compositors and writers. The Viennese writers, such as Arthur Schnitzler and Stefan Zweig, are often mentioned in this context. Arthur Schnitzer may be named a very typical writer of that time. He wrote his major works between 1890 and the end of World War I, namely novels, short stories and theater plays.

A very important center of Austrian literature during the ca. 20 years before the end of World War I was Prague. It was the center of many German-speaking, mostly Jewish, authors who did not only give important impulses to the entire Austrian and partly even to world literature, but represent a very important part of Austrian literature; their influence endured until the 1930s. Authors to mention are Oskar Baum, Max Brod, Franz Kafka, the journalist Egon Erwin Kisch, Gustav Meyrink, Robert Musil, Rainer Maria Rilke, Franz Werfel, and Oskar Wiener.

Expressionism was presented primarily by the poet Georg Trakl and the dramatist and narrator Hugo von Hofmannsthal, both originating from Salzburg.

The end of World War I reduced Austria to a very small and mainly German-speaking country. Some Austrian (and German writing) authors opted for the new emerging countries, such as Kafka and Werfel for Czechoslovakia, others migrated, such as Robert Musil to Berlin and Vienna, Rainer Maria Rilke to Vienna and later Paris, Elias Canetti to Vienna. The political rupture and the fact that this small German-speaking Austria had lost most of its territory, industry and agriculture, led to the fatal conviction of many Austrians that only a union with Germany would be able to save the country from a total downfall, a conviction which paved the way to the later annexation by Hitler in 1938. The texts of some writers give an insight to this conviction. Hence, Robert Musil and Hugo von Hofmannsthal expressed their "German centric" point of view, while others, such as Stefan Zweig, Franz Werfel and Alexander Lernet-Holenia, strictly spoke up for Austria and Austrian tradition and culture.

The time between the two world wars gave way to a very rich literature in Austria. Robert Musil wrote the well-known novel The Man without Qualities, Stefan Zweig published a multitude of essays, stories and novels, Karl Kraus edited the magazine Die Fackel (The Torch), for which he wrote almost all articles by himself, Franz Werfel wrote some of his best novels, e.g. The Forty Days of Musa Dagh which narrates the Armenian tragedy of 1915, and after Franz Kafka's death, his life-time friend Max Brod began to publish Kafka's unfinished novels. Later Nobel Prize winner Elias Canetti studied and lived in Vienna and wrote his only novel Auto-da-Fe; before the Anschluss he fled to England. In analogy to Musil's Kakania (from the anagram for the k. u. k., i.e. imperial and royal monarchy till 1918), Fritz von Herzmanovsky-Orlando created Tarockania for the weird figures of his humorous novels and stories.