Bestsellers of the Third Reich: Readers, Writers, and the Politics of Literature By Christian Adam. Translated by Anne Stokes. New York: Berghahn Books, 2021. Pp. xii + 297. Cloth $135.00. ISBN: 978-1800730397.

Abstract

Munich than Vienna, was a prime target for this sanction, but the festival’s cosmopolitan audiences held up, and there was some recognition in Vienna that the festival was of sufficient national importance to merit support despite the straitened economic circumstances. Rehrl was eventually removed from his position only following the German annexation of Austria in 1938. Her survived the war, despite an indirect association with the 1944 bomb plot that landed him in Ravensbrück. He returned to Salzburg after the war, re-engaged with local politics despite his health problems, and died in 1947 leaving a tremendous legacy. This is a meticulously researched and comprehensive study of the Salzburg Festival’s origins and early development over a period of some twenty years between the wars. The history itself occupies some 400 pages and is followed by extensive appendices containing pictures and documents. It is one of the book’s strengths that the detailed account of plans and negotiations is interwoven with the turbulent political and economic history of Austria (and Europe) between the wars. Amidst all this, it sometimes seems that – despite his prominence in the title – Rehrl gets less of a look-in, and we get little sense of him as a man, still less as a politician. The main narrative ends with a testament to his commitment, under Gestapo interrogation, to Austria and to democracy. That commitment was presumably tested in 1933, when Rehrl responded to the government’s use of procedural chicanery to suppress parliament with a pious speech blaming opposition “obstruction,” a position echoed in the text by an explanation setting out – albeit in the subjunctive mood – the “difficult” choices facing the Austrian chancellor. We get little or no sense of Rehrl’s response to the violent coup d’état of the following February, and as party leader in Salzburg Rehrl remained an important figure in the dictatorship. Even so, Kriechbaumer’s study of the festival’s early years is, in many respects, a model of cultural history and deserves a wide readership.