Journal of Austrian Studies最新文献

{"title":"Archduke Ferdinand II of Austria: A Second-Born Son in Renaissance Europe ed. by Sylva Dobalová and Jaroslava Hausenblasová (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/oas.2023.a906961","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/oas.2023.a906961","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Archduke Ferdinand II of Austria: A Second-Born Son in Renaissance Europe ed. by Sylva Dobalová and Jaroslava Hausenblasová Robyn Dora Radway Sylva Dobalová and Jaroslava Hausenblasová, eds., Archduke Ferdinand II of Austria: A Second-Born Son in Renaissance Europe. Vienna: Austrian Academy of Sciences, 2021. 569 pp. Archduke Ferdinand II of Tyrol (d. 1595), known primarily for his exceptional Kunstkammer housed at Schloss Ambras, has been the subject of renewed interest in the past decade. Much of this research was supported by a generous grant from the Czech Science Foundation, which allowed an international team of scholars to join forces with the Institute for Art History of the Czech Academy of Sciences. This transnational project, which followed the archduke's career from Prague to Innsbruck and his visits to Speyer and Brussels, sought to overcome the national historiographies that had carved up previous research on his life into seemingly irreconcilable slices. Like most other Central European figures, our understanding of his activities had suffered from a fragmented research landscape divided by linguistic and political boundaries defined in the twentieth century. The grant project resulted in a major exhibition in 2017/2018, which was accompanied by two catalogues, one available in English and German and another expanded version available only in Czech. Archduke Ferdinand II of Austria: A Second-Born Son in Renaissance Europe builds on and complements these catalogues by offering the first significant series of scholarly studies of the archduke and his activities in the English language. It is composed of twenty-three essays bookended by an introduction and conclusion. The essays examine the archduke as a central figure in sixteenth-century Central European culture, highlighting the threads that connected his personal life and his objects across the continent and around the globe. [End Page 99] As a collector, creator, investor, and inventor, the archduke's activities were wide-ranging and extraordinarily well documented. The introduction provides a historiographical overview and brief summaries of each contribution. The first chapter ties the volume together by surveying the processes that shaped Archduke Ferdinand II of Tyrol's biography and his place between the Renaissance and the Baroque. The volume then offers an interdisciplinary set of case studies that engage with comparative methods while remaining deeply rooted in archival sources. The articles are grouped thematically: court culture, architecture, fine arts, humanism, and collections. Many contributions speak across these themes, often approaching the same sources (like inventories, payroll documents, travel narratives, correspondence, and broadsheets) to ask very different questions. For example, inventories are naturally at the core of Kuster's detailed study of inventory-taking processes following the Archduke's death and Sandbichler's and Bukovinská's essay","PeriodicalId":40350,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Austrian Studies","volume":"25 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135640158","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Finding Order in Diversity: Religious Toleration in the Habsburg Empire, 1792–1848 by Scott Berg (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/oas.2023.a906962","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/oas.2023.a906962","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Finding Order in Diversity: Religious Toleration in the Habsburg Empire, 1792–1848 by Scott Berg Peter Höyng Scott Berg, Finding Order in Diversity: Religious Toleration in the Habsburg Empire, 1792–1848. Lafayette, IN: Purdue UP, 2022. 345 pp. Beginning to review Scott Berg's Finding Order in Diversity: Religious Toleration in the Habsburg Empire, 1792–1848 from its back end quickly indicates its forte: the thirty-page-long bibliography divides into six sections: archival sources in Austria and Hungary (1 page), published primary sources (4 pages), separated from a brief but pertinent list of consulted newspapers as printed material, unpublished dissertations (1.5 pages), articles (11 pages), and, at last, books (11 pages). In sum, Berg has accomplished an impressive scope of thorough research in both quantity and, given that he used archival material in German and Hungarian, quality. As a result of Berg's stupendous thoroughness, the accompanying and often detailed notes take close to 100 pages. Given this depth, Berg can authoritatively proclaim his central thesis, one that demystifies the premise that the Habsburgs relied throughout history on Catholicism as a political pillar. Instead, Berg demonstrates that the reigns of Francis II/I (r. 1792–1835) and his son Ferdinand (r. 1835–1848) \"marked the only era\" (203) when the Habsburgs actively pursued tolerance toward confessional diversity to maintain stability within their multiethnic empire. In fact, his research leads him to the bold thesis that \"the idea of authoritarian or nondemocratic regimes, such as the Habsburg Empire, pioneering human rights is an uncomfortable one today but one that is rooted in historical reality\" (14). Starting with Joseph II's enlightened policies, Berg guides the reader in six chapters through the institutionalization of toleration that took place in the \"much-maligned regime (1792–1848) that followed Joseph II's brief, unsuccessful reign\" (13). Yet Joseph II's decade-long reign was not as futile as Berg insinuates here. After all, he himself shows that, despite many opportunities to overturn Josephism \"and to promote an alliance of throne and altar,\" [End Page 101] Francis \"remained under the influence of his Josephist advisors\" (37). While recognizing these limited attempts at Catholic revivalism in reaction to the French Revolution and the Enlightenment, therefore, Berg largely follows and supports Pieter Judson's line of argument in The Habsburg Empire: A New History (2016) that the Empire provided, thanks to Josephism, a common imperial citizenship that for stability's sake respected its multiethnic and religious diversity. In 1846, the monarchy counted 26.3 million Catholics, 6.8 million Orthodox Christians (Greek Catholic and non-united Orthodox), 3.3 million Protestants (Lutherans and Calvinists), and 729,000 Jews, \"making non-Catholics nearly a third of the monarchy's population\" (6). Despite the admiration that Berg shows for the conserva","PeriodicalId":40350,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Austrian Studies","volume":"27 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135640162","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Erasures and Eradications in Modern Viennese Art, Architecture, and Design ed. by Megan Brandow-Faller and Laura Morowitz (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/oas.2023.a906965","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/oas.2023.a906965","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Erasures and Eradications in Modern Viennese Art, Architecture, and Design ed. by Megan Brandow-Faller and Laura Morowitz Alison Rose Megan Brandow-Faller and Laura Morowitz, eds., Erasures and Eradications in Modern Viennese Art, Architecture, and Design. New York: Routledge, 2023. 278 pp. Why are some artists included in the Vienna 1900 canon and others forgotten? How has the intense focus on Vienna 1900 led to the erasure of artists and artistic movements? These are some of the questions addressed in Megan Brandow-Faller and Laura Morowitz's Erasures and Eradications in Modern Viennese Art, Architecture and Design. While Viennese artists who sympathized with the Nazis looked down on the turn-of-the-century period as \"Jewish\" and degenerate, the reckoning with history in the 1980s focusing on Vienna 1900 sought to reclaim links to Jewish culture without acknowledging its destruction. The romanticizing of Vienna 1900 and the project to deflect attention from the Nazi period has led some scholars to dismiss interwar developments, obscure continuities, and erase many important artists and their work. Intersectionality also plays a role in the erasure of many artists as their overlapping identities \"rendered them especially vulnerable to marginalization or later eradication\" (12). The book includes sections on Jewish erasures, gendered erasures, erasures of understudied artists and movements, and an epilogue connecting past erasures to the present-day aims of the VBKÖ (Association of Austrian Wom*n Artists). Contributors rethink themes such as the Jews' relationship to visual arts, women's contributions to interwar decorative arts, modernists' [End Page 109] attraction to African tribal culture and folk art, and the Aryanization of the Secession movement in the 1930s. Part 1 addresses the erasure of Viennese modernism's links to Austrofascism and National Socialism and of Jewish artists and buildings associated with Jewish life. Elana Shapira shows that Austrian architect Josef Hoffmann, who was promoted by Jewish patrons like Berta Zuckerkandl, \"turned against his Jewish colleagues' progressive idea of Austrianism,\" embraced Austrofascism, and collaborated with Nazi officials (61); Laura Morowitz looks at the troubled relationship between Viennese modernism and reactionary politics; and Frances Tanzer explores Jewish refugee art dealer Otto Kallir's impact on the nostalgic understanding of Viennese modernism. Nathan Timpano and Steven Beller focus on the erasure of Viennese Jewish art and architecture. Timpano argues that Max Oppenheimer's obscurity resulted from accusations of forgery made by Oskar Kokoschka and his identity as a gay Jewish man, while Beller documents and explains the de-Judaizing of postwar Vienna's streetscape. Destroyed Jewish properties and buildings were not restituted or rebuilt in part because government officials did not want Viennese Jews to return. Part 2 looks at forgotten women artists of the Secession an","PeriodicalId":40350,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Austrian Studies","volume":"5 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135640163","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"From Night to Light: Harmony as Allegory in Die Zauberflöte","authors":"Adrian Baez-Ortega","doi":"10.1353/oas.2023.a906957","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/oas.2023.a906957","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: Mozart's final opera, Die Zauberflöte , wields visual and musical metaphor to deliver possibly the most effective allegory of Enlightenment themes ever achieved in Austrian art. Supported by a systematic tonal analysis, this article reviews, integrates and expands upon decades of scholarly research on this opera, with a strict focus on the thematic symbolism of its harmonic elements. By unifying disparate sources and providing an independent overview of tonality throughout the two acts of Die Zauberflöte , this study aims to foment subtler appreciation of Mozart's application of harmonic contrasts. Special attention is devoted to the manner in which the symbolic meaning of such contrasts evolves together with the opera's dominant themes, to build a formidable musico-dramatic metaphor of a fundamental narrative of European Enlightenment—the philosophical struggle of reason against ignorance.","PeriodicalId":40350,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Austrian Studies","volume":"74 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135640171","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"H. C. Artmann & Berlin ed. by Sonja Kaar and Marc-Oliver Schuster (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/oas.2023.a906969","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/oas.2023.a906969","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: H. C. Artmann & Berlin ed. by Sonja Kaar and Marc-Oliver Schuster Paul Buchholz Sonja Kaar and Marc-Oliver Schuster, eds., H. C. Artmann & Berlin. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2021. 294 pp. Academic literary-critical discourse on H. C. Artmann has tended to be sporadic and eclectic, and one reason for this is that his writings rarely if ever lend themselves to hermeneutic readings. Artmann's works are ludic, as the author himself pointed out, in a way that stringently adheres to Johan Huizinga's idea of play as a free act with no social function and no meaning outside itself. For this reason, the most fruitful scholarly work on H. C. Artmann is not based in hermeneutic close readings but rather seeks to capture the social and cultural world in which he wrote, performed, collaborated, and socialized. Sonja Kaar and Marc-Oliver Schuster's edited [End Page 119] volume H. C. Artmann & Berlin is, in this regard, an essential scholarly publication, valuable both to literary historians of the postwar era and to general Artmann enthusiasts. The book collects the proceedings of a 2019 conference of the same name, held in the Wien-Bibliothek in the Vienna Rathaus. Its title is, at any rate, a bit reductive: while the book indeed gives diverse accounts of the author's stays in Berlin in 1962, 1965–66, and 1967–68, it also delves into an array of other fascinating topics. Indeed, this book seems somewhat like a prelude to the Artmann biography being published in 2023, co-written by Schuster with Veronika Premer. H. C. Artmann und Berlin shows how the author's enthusiastic and sociable relationship to Berlin yielded some of the most iconic works of his career, including his story \"dracula dracula\" and its iterations across media (performative happening, printed text, and woodcut print). While in Berlin, Artmann became a social node for younger Austrian writers for whom he was an iconoclastic role model and interlocutor, such as Peter Chotjewitz and Wolfgang Bauer. Finally, the book provides a clearer sense of how Artmann—who scrupulously avoided political commentary in his works, taking a very different postwar path than the Gruppe 47—in his own way was deeply embedded in the political-cultural landscape of the 1960s: his dislike of the militant leftist language that flooded the cultural scene of West Berlin in the later sixties, his (apocryphal) claim to having been present at the 1967 West Berlin student demonstration against the Shah of Iran, his cordial encounters with RAF terrorist Gudrun Ensslin, and time spent socializing with Peter Weiss. These stories, presented in biographical, historical, and analytic chapters as well as interviews, are by no means only raw anecdotes; they have the cumulative purpose of showing how Artmann's highly eccentric path was taken deliberately and in lively dialogue with his literary contemporaries. The book is divided into four sections, each of which is in itself eclectic in terms of genre. Marc-Oliver ","PeriodicalId":40350,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Austrian Studies","volume":"141 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135640156","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Das Ich in Anderer Gestalt: Weiblichkeit und Männlichkeit in Robert Musils Roman Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften by Vladimira Valkova (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/oas.2023.a906966","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/oas.2023.a906966","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Das Ich in Anderer Gestalt: Weiblichkeit und Männlichkeit in Robert Musils Roman Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften by Vladimira Valkova Pamela S. Saur Vladimira Valkova, Das Ich in Anderer Gestalt: Weiblichkeit und Männlichkeit in Robert Musils Roman Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2022. 415 pp. In her 2022 book, Das Ich in Anderer Gestalt, author Vladimira Valkova offers considerable discussion of literary theory and history as context for her central aim, namely, analysis of masculine and feminine identities in Robert Musil's lengthy and important but unfinished Austrian novel, Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (1930, 1931). The subtitle of Valkova's book is \"Weiblichkeit und Männlichkeit in Robert Musils Roman Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften.\" She refers in the text several times to this book project as her \"dissertation.\" However, the book hardly seems like a fledgling foray into scholarly work. The complex and extensively researched volume is over 400 pages long; it incorporates references to numerous developments in literary theory, from nineteenth-century trends to postmodernism, poststructuralism, and feminism, as well as such theorists as Freud, Weininger, Lacan, Irigaray, Kristeva, and Foucault. Even strict professors who do not allow their students to quote dissertations in their term papers ought to accept this volume's scholarly stature; after all, it has recently been published by Königshausen & Neumann. Moreover, the author has several other scholarly publications to her credit, including other studies on Musil. If one does search for features reminiscent of the classroom, one might note an overly zealous impulse toward comprehensiveness and exhaustive detail, particularly in the three opening chapters providing literary and historical background. Indeed, the passages defining literary movements in sequence resemble classroom notes. Some of the lists or brief mentions of literary movements, ideas, and theories or theorists are too long to be easily comprehended or give the impression that the writer is rushing forward, combining disparate items or leaving names or analytical points unexplained. Examples of such bewildering combinations are \"Rousseau, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Wedeking, Kraft-Ebing, Hirschfeld und Freud\" (39) and \"Dekadenz, Jugendstil, Ästhetizismus, Expressionismus und Lebensphilosophie\" (40). The novel Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften is discussed to some degree in early chapters but does not take center stage until the fourth chapter, beginning on page 159. The three opening chapters are titled \"Das Geschlecht in [End Page 112] der Musil-Forschung,\" \"Theoretisch—methodologische Grundlagen,\" and \"Über die Konstruktion von modernen Geschlechteridentitäten.\" Following a passage on the development of modernism, the third chapter emphasizes relationships between Musil's philosophy and creative work and the ideas of Freud, Weininger, and Musil's own professor, Georg Simmel. Valkova asserts that Mu","PeriodicalId":40350,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Austrian Studies","volume":"188 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135640170","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Die hellen Jahre über dem Atlantik: Leben zwischen Deutschland und Amerika by Frank Trommler (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/oas.2023.a906974","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/oas.2023.a906974","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Die hellen Jahre über dem Atlantik: Leben zwischen Deutschland und Amerika by Frank Trommler Joseph W. Moser Frank Trommler, Die hellen Jahre über dem Atlantik: Leben zwischen Deutschland und Amerika. Cologne: Böhlau, 2022. 384 pp. After 1945, the study of German literature and culture had to redefine itself in the United States, and this was largely accomplished by exile scholars who had escaped from Nazi Germany and Austria, such as Adolf Klarmann at the University of Pennsylvania and Egon Schwarz at Washington University in St. Louis. Then starting in the 1970s, the first generation of postwar Germans started to modernize and shape the study of German in the United States, which also contributed to the creation of German Studies and the German Studies Association. Frank Trommler, as a professor of German at the University of Pennsylvania from 1970 to 2007, assumed a leadership role in the development of German Studies in the United States; his primary contribution was to redefine the field at the end of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. His autobiography, Die hellen Jahre über dem Atlantik: Leben zwischen Deutschland und Amerika, is a fascinating read and gives testimony to the Zeitgeschichte of German-American relations. It is written for a German audience but is nonetheless of great interest to German Studies scholars in the United States. This rich book is much more than a history of American German Studies, however. Trommler also redefined the role of Austrian literature within the German-language literary canon of the 1960s and 1970s, thus assuring that Austria would not be overlooked or subsumed into a general German narrative. His groundbreaking monograph Roman und Wirklichkeit: Eine Ortsbestimmung am Beispiel von Musil, Broch, Roth, Doderer und Gütersloh (Kohlhammer Verlag, 1966) actually demonstrates that some of the greatest German-language narrators of the twentieth century were in fact Austrian, and that the significance of Vienna as a center of German-language thought cannot be overlooked, even if the immediate post–World War II Second Republic of Austria was a somewhat less culturally diverse place than it [End Page 132] had been before 1938 (or than it is today). In his subchapter \"Als Piefke auf Österreich-Mission,\" Trommler describes how he was received in Vienna in 1966, even if Hilde Spiel reminded him that Austrian literature did not end with Doderer—Handke had just debuted that same year. Trommler contributed to a rethinking of Austria as a multicultural and quintessentially European space within the German-language narrative. Trommler's work emerged parallel to that of Claudio Magris. As a member of the first postwar generation, he understood that Austrian literature needed to examine the Nazi period in order to become significant again—something that the generation of writers around Doderer had avoided doing. But of course Thomas Bernhard along with Peter Handke, Ingeborg Bachmann, and Ilse Ai","PeriodicalId":40350,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Austrian Studies","volume":"13 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135640164","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Bambi, Or Life in the Forest by Felix Salten (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/oas.2023.a906975","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/oas.2023.a906975","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Bambi, Or Life in the Forest by Felix Salten Monica Strauss Felix Salten, Bambi, Or Life in the Forest. Translated by Damion Searls, with an afterword by Paul Reitter. New York: The New York Review of Books, 2022. 146 pp. Thanks to the enduring appeal of Walt Disney's animation, \"Bambi\" has become a household name. When the copyright on the 1928 English version of Felix Salten's 1923 novel recently lapsed, it was inevitable that a new English translation would be in the offing. Surprisingly, not one but two new translations were published one after the other in 2022. Princeton University Press was the first off the mark with Jack Zipes's contribution, titled The \"Original\" Bambi, The Story of a Life in the Forest, published in February. The hardcover volume includes a lengthy introduction by Zipes and illustrations by Alenka Sottler (see my review in JAS 56.1, Spring 2023). In September 2022, the New York Review of Books came out with their own version. A plainer presentation in paperback—one that even does without chapter numbers—is translated by Damion Searls, with a brief afterword by Paul Reitter. In 2015, Professor Reitter had published a book with the provocative title Bambi's Jewish Roots and Other Essays on German-Jewish Culture (Bloomsbury Press). In his essay on Salten, he points out that, unlike most of the other Jewish members of the Jung Wien group, Salten had been sympathetic to Theodor Herzl's Zionist vision. Taking this into account, Reitter suggests that Bambi could be read as a parable of the persecution of the Jews with the wise Old Prince, Bambi's father and mentor, as a stand-in for Herzl. Though Reitter touches on this theme in his afterword to the new translation (which [End Page 134] he urged Damion Searls to take on), he is more convincing when he reminds the reader that Salten's primary intention was to \"humanize animals\" and evoke sympathy for the way they were treated. A challenge for the translator, Bambi is an ambitious novel going far beyond a tale of a young deer's life from birth to maturity. What Salten conveys in a variety of tonalities is the struggle for survival of all the animals in the forest. He illuminates the physical demands of the changing seasons, the shifts from plenitude to famine, and the overarching fear of the deadly incursions of man. Salten's animals speak—each in a version of their own tongue. A chattering chorus of commentary by birds, smaller beasts, and occasionally insects accompanies the action throughout. Bambi's own inner life moves the narrative forward. His is a bewildered voice confused by new experiences and the instincts that propel him. Clarity comes from his father, the Old Prince of the forest, who helps decipher Bambi's drives and discoveries for him. Although Searls's translation maintains the narrative flow of the German, there are three particular problems throughout the text. These are omissions of key words, infelicities of usage, and rare but crucial misinter","PeriodicalId":40350,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Austrian Studies","volume":"14 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135640166","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"\"Glück, das mir verblieb\": Ein Erich Wolfgang Korngold-Lesebuch ed. by Heide Stockinger (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/oas.2023.a906968","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/oas.2023.a906968","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: \"Glück, das mir verblieb\": Ein Erich Wolfgang Korngold-Lesebuch ed. by Heide Stockinger Vincent Kling Heide Stockinger, ed., \"Glück, das mir verblieb\": Ein Erich Wolfgang Korngold-Lesebuch. Vienna: Böhlau, 2022. 232 pp. Heide Stockinger's edited collection \"Glück, das mir verblieb\": Ein Erich Wolfgang Korngold-Lesebuch, titled after \"Marietta's Song\" in Die tote Stadt, joins two biographies published in the 1990s, a recent concert review, and occasional other publications to reassess the life and work of a composer by turns extolled and scorned. The distance between the highs and lows of Korngold's reception calls for some background to contextualize the book under review. [End Page 116] Korngold's precocious compositional talent evoked serious comparisons to none other than Mozart. Major works in several demanding genres flowed with seeming ease from the adolescent composer's pen. His father Julius, Vienna's most influential music critic, injected himself harmfully, championing his son's talent with damaging aggressiveness. The senior Korngold was already mistrusted as a \"Parteigänger statt Journalist,\" to quote the Wiener Zeitung (13 October 2020); \"Die Schützenhilfe des Vaters war so massiv, dass die Familie ins Satirevisier von Karl Kraus geriet.\" Kraus's opinions were revered enough to cast a long shadow, admiration for the composer now tainted by his father's distasteful, even unethical pushiness. Kraus's condemnation was so crucial in shaping the Korngolds' reputation, at least in Vienna, that its omission in this book leaves a gap in understanding reception history. Nor did the younger Korngold's esteem increas when he became a Hollywood composer after his forced emigration at a time when writing \"movie music\" disqualified any composer from being taken seriously. Reviewing a performance of his violin concerto in those years, critic Irving Kolodin coined the glib tagline \"more corn than gold.\" In his memoirs (Im Atem der Zeit), fellow composer Ernst Krenek pillories the father for turning his son into \"ein gebrochener, desillusionierter Mann, der nichts aufweisen konnte als eine Anzahl unbedeutender, längst vergessener Filmmusiken.\" Accordingly, Korngold's large-scale Symphony in F-Sharp, completed in 1952, could not find performance in his lifetime and was long dismissed—although Dmitri Mitropoulos and Bruno Walter admired it (144)—as an overblown hodgepodge of recycled themes from his film scores. Until just recently, that is: the symphony was several times hailed as a masterpiece on a recent American tour by the Berlin Philharmonic under Kirill Petrenko, culminating in an ecstatic review by Alex Ross in The New Yorker (30 November 2022). Korngold's story is not one of an abrupt upgrading or sudden rescue from complete obscurity, however. As Kurt Arrer points out in \"Eine gefeierte (Wieder)-Entdeckung,\" \"Von einem völligen Vergessensein […] konnte eigentlich ohnehin nie die Rede sein\" (161), as he traces the continuity in pe","PeriodicalId":40350,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Austrian Studies","volume":"16 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135640168","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Grete Meisel-Hess: The New Woman and the Sexual Crisis by Helga Thorson (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/oas.2023.a906967","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/oas.2023.a906967","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Grete Meisel-Hess: The New Woman and the Sexual Crisis by Helga Thorson Scott Spector Helga Thorson, Grete Meisel-Hess: The New Woman and the Sexual Crisis. Women and Gender in German Studies 9. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2022. 278 pp. In terms of the scope and originality of her contribution, Grete Meisel-Hess is a key figure in fin-de-siècle feminism, although she has hardly been recognized as such. One thing that Helga Thorson's new book, Grete Meisel-Hess: The New Woman and the Sexual Crisis, makes evident is how widely known Meisel-Hess was in her own lifetime and how much at the heartbeat of the shifting thinking of the period she remained in the first two decades of the twentieth century. A monograph in English dedicated specifically to her life and work was in this sense very much in order. The book is not chiefly a biography but a recounting of Meisel-Hess's varied cultural production (literary, scientific, and polemical) in the broad context of the movements, debates, and ambivalences of her time. One of this account's great strengths is the convincing [End Page 114] way it braids together these cultural contexts with Meisel-Hess's feminist and sociological thinking, her belletristic writing, and her life. In doing so, Thorson makes several strong and interlocking arguments. Meisel-Hess's intellectual disposition was strongly oriented toward the then rising idea of monism, or the unity of seemingly disparate things and refusal of essential binaries such as that of the ideal and the material; this was the ground of a potentially radical reconfiguration of gender relations. Like many others of her epoch, she was swept up in a sense that humanity was on the brink of an epic shift of ways of living to correspond with (or catch up to) new modes of understanding emergent in the last third of the previous century. Modernism (die Moderne was a term that encompassed this term as well as \"modernity\") promised to realize this potential; at the same time, the ways in which the social order was broken were seen to be a result of the rapid changes of modernity. Meisel-Hess's commitment to a major shift forward was an investment in the promise of the Moderne. In Thorson's reading, Meisel-Hess's Moderne, her feminism, and her Jewishness were of a piece. True to Meisel-Hess's own monist predilections, Thorson sees a breakdown of the boundary between author and work, such that the subject's own life is merged with her cultural contribution. The oft-discussed \"New Woman\" of the period is, in Thorson's book, both a discursive figure and an agent of change. Meisel-Hess, according to Thorson, represents and critically appraises the figure even as she fashions herself as a \"fervent\" New Woman with agency. In an equally provocative move, Thorson argues that the \"sexual crisis\" of Meisel-Hess's best-known title is not just an object of her analysis and critique, it comes to be the condition that entraps her and leads to her own demise. After a co","PeriodicalId":40350,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Austrian Studies","volume":"5 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135640169","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}