German Life and Letters 41:2 January 1988

0016-8777 $2.00

HEIMITO VON DODERER AND NATIONAL SOCIALISM

ANDREW
W. BARKER
During the 1950s and 60s Heimito von Doderer basked in his reputation as
the Grand Old Man of Viennese letters, feted by politicians and literati alike.
For an Austrian writer of real achievement to be celebrated in his native land
during his lifetime is unusual, but this is not the only respect in which Doderer
is something of an exception amongst those writers who have been admitted
to the canonical listings of 20th-Century Austrian Novelists. He was not Jewish,
he suffered no persecution, and apart from war service his only experience of
exile was a short period voluntarily spent in Dachau (the town, not the camp).
In the 1970s the gutglaubige Hagiographen who had largely constituted the
world of Doderer criticism were shaken by studies drawing attention to the
links which he had earlier maintained with the Nazis,* and since then Doderer
has become a writer who nicht selten angefeindet und misverstanden ~ u r d e . ~
Yet as Wendelin Schmidt-Dengler has pointed out, despite numerous critical
studies still relatively little is known about Doderers literary development in
the 1 9 3 0 ~whilst
,~
as recently as 1985 there appeared an extensive review of
Doderers almost paradigmatic Austrian-ness which only touched fleetingly on
the decade 1930-1940. The author was seemingly content with the evidence
of Doderers essential d e ~ e n c y as~ revealed by the high regard in which he
was held by returning Jewish emigrCs such as Hans Weigel, Hilde Spiel and
Friedrich Torberg. Doderer was, however, a fully-fledged party member for
several years after joining up on April Fools Day in 1933, and for a good while
before that he had held opinions which placed him in the mainstream of
fascist thinking in Austria. His anti-Semitism was intense whilst his desire for
AnschluB had all the fervour traditionally associated with Austrian panGermanists since Georg von Schonerer. In April 1929 Doderers mentor Albert
Paris Gutersloh sent a letter to the publisher Rudolf Haybach relishing the
demise of Austria, and Doderer quotes this approvingly in his Skizzenbuch:
Glaube mir, dai3 der Kampf, den Du notig fuhlst, von mir bis zum letzten
durchgefochten werden wird. Ich glaube nur, dai3 wir, ausgehend die
Malerei und Literatur zu ordnen, den osterreichischen Staat sturzen
werden.6
It is not without a considerable irony, then, that after the war Doderer should
have come to be so widely celebrated as the champion of a specifically Austrian
literary tradition. Indeed, he was apparently so confident about the untendentious nature of his work before the war that in 1951 he felt able to write:
Man zeige mir eine Zeile in irgendeinem meiner Bucher, oder auch nur
in einem Aufsatz, in einer kleinen Erzahlung oder in einer kritischen
Notiz, die in irgendeinem, seis kackebraunen, seis kackerlgrunen Sinne

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DODERER AND NATIONAL SOCIALISM

verfaDt ware. Vergebliches, weil unmogliches Bemuhen: selbst meine

Feinde mufitens aufgeben.7
This is a bold assertion, but its essential correctness would seem confirmed
by the frequent appearance of his novels in many of the Eastern Bloc states.
Intriguingly, two widely translated works there are Ein Mord denjedu begeht and
Ein Umweg, products of the 1930s brought out by the Nazi-sympathising
publishing house C. H. Beck of Munich in 1938 and 1940 respectively. Thus
whilst it may be significant that as yet no editions of his writings have appeared
in the German Democratic Republic, Doderer nevertheless appears to have
received a clean bill of health in most of the other Warsaw Pact countries.
In later life Doderer made much not only of the separate nature of Austrian
culture, but also of his own role in it. Yet in the 1930s when the very survival
of that tradition was largely in the hands of exiled Jews, he considered their
Hervorbringucgen w o r t h l e s ~After
. ~ the war he became a skilled editor of his
past, and whilst his mature disdain for the directly autobiographical in literature
was doubtless sincere, it also provided him with a handy reason for not revealing
too much about his relationship with National Socialism. Moreover, by virtue
of his anti-Semitism and his desire to see the integration of the First Republic
into a Greater Germany Doderer had been more in tune with the overall mood
of his country than those many exiled artists who are today looked upon as
the guardians of the realAustria. Perhaps, however, the reason for many critics
reluctance to dwell on Doderers Nazi period is encouraged by an autobiographical fact which the author was quite happy to allow to emerge during his
own lifetime. That was his increasing alienation from National Socialism
precisely at the point when the Nazis were in the ascendancy. For by 1937,
prior to the Anschluss but at a time when Doderer had left Vienna to live in
the Reich, he apparently had grown disenchanted with Hitlerdom. His career
had not blossomed as expected, the Reichsschrifttumskammer he saw merely
as a bureaucratic impediment to talent rather than an agency fostering genuinely
German letters. What is more, the rebirth of the Reichsidee, which Doderer
the academically trained historian had hoped to find in Nazi Germany, was
turning our to be something palpably different from his naively idealistic
expectations.
Yet for all Doderers increasing alienation from National Socialism after
1936/7, Gutersloh still felt he would be an understanding recipient of the
following verse, accompanying a letter which ends Ich gruBe Sie mit: Heil
Hitler!:

13. Marz 1938

zur
Befreiung Osterreichs und Sudtyrols
Nun steigt in allen Wurzeln deutsches Blut!
Der ganze Garten wieder blutwarm ruht!

Es dorrt kein Kummer mehr an seinen Zweigen,

und wenn sie auch am fernsten Zaun sich neigen,

DODERER AND NATIONAL SOCIALISM

147

an fremde Wangen unsre Schatten malen,

und unsre Frucht in fremde Korbe zahlen!
Hier innen steht ihr Stamm, von da er stammt,
wie Mannesschenkel in den Leib gerammt,
und wird auf tausendfacher Wacht noch stehn,
wenn drauBen Rom und auch Athen verwehn!O
By 1940, however, Doderer had apparently made known his reluctance to have
his name appear on Party lists (there was no mechanism for formal resignation)
and in that same year he compounded his recantation by abandoning the
Protestantism of his family and publicly embracing Roman Catholicism, the
state religion of the deposed Habsburg dynasty. Doderer was called up for
military service in 1940, and believed that this factor alone spared him from
political persecution. (The Protestant Werner Bergengruen, four years older
than Doderer, also turned Catholic at this time, went to live in what had been
Austria, continued to write and was not persecuted.)
After 1945, Doderer paid the price for his earlier enthusiasms when the
new Austrian authorities refused him permission to publish his work. Only
in 1951 with the appearance of Die Strudlhoftiege and D i e erleuchteten Fetister did
Doderers novels return to the booksellers window, both works being produced
by C . H. Beck, suitably transmogrified into what Hans Weigel refers to as
der mit Recht so benannte Biederstein-Verlag. l 1 Doderers career now took
off and his muddy past was allowed to settle, though it remained enough of
an embarrassment to scotch any attempt to nominate him for the Nobel Prize
which many felt he deserved
That a writer ofDoderers stature could, for a time, have become an avid Nazi
clearly remains a problem even today, and not merely for Austrian and German
critics, for it highlights the confusion surrounding our responses to the grey area
where ethics and aesthetics converge. As far as I know there is no novelist of
comparable quality who so closely subscribed to the National Socialist ethos in
the early 1930s, and he stayed in the party when, in theory at least, it was a
proscribed organisation in Austria after DollfuB had banned it on 19June 1933.
The reasons why Doderer remained as an Illegalerin the NSDAP may well be
explained not merely by the fervour of his German Nationalism with its attendant contempt for the laws of the Austrian state, but also by that strand in
his personality which repeatedly drew him to the forbidden fringes of society
in defiance of his privileged background and the constant awareness of his
aristocracy. The difficulties of discussing the development of Doderers outlook
in the 1930s are further compounded by the evidence of his still unpublished
diaries, which as late as 1936 reveal a man with a hatred of Jews and things
Jewish even though he was apparently beginning to dissociate himself from
his fervent admiration of things German. (Here I am reminded above all of
the passage in George Clares Last Waltz in Vienna where he recalls Alfred Polgars
remark that the Germans are first-class Nazis but lousy anti-Semites; the
Austrians are lousy Nazis, but by God what first-class anti-Semites they are!*)

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DODERER AND NATIONAL SOCIALISM

Just why Doderers Nazi leanings were for a time so strong can perhaps be
best explained by reference to some readily identifiable, and often overlapping,
personal, social and intellectual factors. The Doderers were members of the petty
nobility and early conditioning within the family sphere may initially have helped
dispose the young Heimito to the Right of the political spectrum, as might also his
experiences as an officer in an Clite Viennese cavalry regiment during the Great
War. There he underwent four years Russian captivity, observed the Bolshevik
revolution at first hand and like so many other conservative intellectuals of
the day underwent a Rilkean-tinged love affair with Mother Russia. After his
return from captivity in 1920 his emotional life was dominated for over a decade
by an overwrought relationship with Gusti Hasterlik, a Jewess whom he married
in 1930, left in 1932 and divorced in 1934. Personal anti-Semitism clearly did
not prevent him from falling in love with Gusti, but the failure of their relationship probably intensified in him that institutionalized anti-Semitism known
in Vienna since the days of Schonerer and Lueger. Anti-Semitism and PanGerman sentiments had a long history at Vienna University, which to this day
stands on a section of the Ringstrase dedicated to Dr Karl Lueger, and it was
there that Doderer obtained his doctorate in history in 1925. Despite the high
regard in which he was held by his teacher Oswald Redlich, Doderer decided
against an academic career in favour of literature, but the failure of his relationship with Gusti was allied to his failure to make headway as a writer, and this
he ascribed to the machinations ofJews, whose dominance in the fields of art,
literature and publishing was a commonly noted feature of intellectual life in
pre-Hitler Vienna.
In exploring reasons why Doderer should have become a Nazi it is necessary
also to recall some powerful literary and philosophical influences. Like virtually
every intellectual in Central Europe after the Great War (not all of whom
became Nazis), he soon made the acquaintance of Spenglers Der Untergang der
Abendlandes, whilst even the mature Doderer never ceased to admire the work
of Otto Weininger whose Geschlecht und Charakter (1903) is characterised by its
toxic mixture of anti-Semitism and mysogyny. In passing, it should nevertheless
be noted that Weininger and Spengler were also major intellectual influences
on Ludwig Wittgenstein, which as Allen Janik notes, may come as something
of a shock to his admirers who by and large have regarded Spenglers murky
metaphysics as the complete antithesis of everything Wittgenstein stood for.l 3
Weininger, it may be recalled, was purportedly Hitlers favourite Jew,14 whilst
the Nazis tried long and hard, though without success, to lure Spengler formally
into their camp. In 1929 Doderers first publisher Rudolf Haybach, a friend
from the days in a Siberian P . 0 . W camp and later himself to become a Nazi,
invited Doderer to write a book about Albert Paris Gutersloh, the painter-cumwriter whose novel Die tanzende Torin is one of the most significant pieces of
early Expressionist prose. Doderer had been long conversant with this text and
had even made the fleeting acquaintance of its author in 1924 without much
warming to him. However, the work which made a lasting impression on
Doderer was not so much this early novel as Guterslohs Die Bekenntnisse eines
modernen Malers, a theoretical and biographical work which at a fell swoop

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149

provided Doderer with that self-validation which he had long craved but
been unable to discover. The import of this text is anti-Puritan, anti-Marxist,
anti-Gnostic, anti-Hegelian and occasionally anti-democratic. l5 Doderer was
enthralled both by book and author, and despite fundamental differences between
the two men what continued to attract him over the years was Giiterslohs
insistence upon the necessity of accepting the created world as something
fundamentally good, a notion which he summed up in the Hofmannsthalian
motto Die Tiefe ist aden. That is to say, depth is on the surface and appearances do not necessarily deceive, either in the phenomenal world or in the
psyche. Not surprisingly, Gutersloh, like Weininger before him, set great store
by physiognomical categorisation, and this is also a marked feature of Doderers
writing.
Gutersloh thus emerged as the figure of authority to whom Doderer could
look up with no sense of abashment. (In the unpublished 1936 version of Die
Damonen the autobiographical figure of RenC Stangeler is characterised by einen
ehrfurchtigen Autoritatsglauben.16)In Giitersloh Doderer also found a fatherfigure to counter domestic disapproval from his real father, but there is a dark
side to this somewhat adolescent aspect of Doderers character, for Guterslohs
Confessionsrepresent a glorification of the irrational, a detestation of the liberal
and support for the Fuhrerprinzip which Doderer (presumably) carried over
from the sphere of art into his political philosophy. Although Guterslohs book
has many proto-fascist elements, the author himself was ultimately to find his
own work condemned as entartet, and that did him no harm after the war
when he assumed a leading role in the development of phantastic realism in
Viennese painting. His literary career culminated in the massive total novel
Some und Mond of 1962, a work in which his friend Doderer is lampooned as
a verbose Nazi in the figure of Ariovist von Wissendrum.
Doderers best known novel is probably Die Dimonen of 1956, a work in
which he attempts to come to terms with fascism by positing a relationship
between sexual aberration and political totalitarianism (a connection not
so outlandish as might at first appear - in his famous attack on linguistic
philosophy, Ernest Gellner makes much the same point when he describes an
ideology as a system of ideas with powerful sex appeaP7). In Die Damonen
Kajetan von Schlaggenbergs obsession with portly middle-aged women serves
as the embodiment of Doderers ideas, which he first expounded theoretically
in the essay of 1948 entitled Sexualitat und totaler Staat.*
Despite the best efforts of Karl Kraus to reveal its inadequacies, Die Neue
Freie Presse is still sometimes regarded as the Central European equivalent of
the London Times in its palmier days. One of its less reputable functions is
revealed, however, by the following advertisement placed there by Doderer
in 1929:
Junger Doktor aus guter Familie, finanziell unabhangig, tadellose
Erscheinung, sucht Anschlud an ca. 4Ojahrige distinguierte issuelitische
Dame (Wienerin) von nur sehr starker korpulenter groderer Figur und
schwarzem Haar. Strengste Diskretion. Unter NeueJugend 4,7302 etc.lg

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DODERER AND NATIONAL SOCIALISM

The profoundly personal roots of the novel are here laid bare, but by June
1932, by which time Doderers marriage had collapsed, the original working
title of Dicke Damen had become Die Damonen and an autobiographically
inspired chronique scandaleuse had become, in the words of its author, ein
grofier Zeitroman, der das sozusagen unterirdische Werden eines neuen
Deutschlands . . .in seiner Vorgeschichte zeigen
By the summer of 1936,
around the time of Schuschniggs fateful accommodation with Hitler, the working
title had been changed again, now giving up its specifically Dostoievskian ring
to become the unmistakeably National Socialist Die Damonen der Ostmark.
As early as 1933, however, with his marriage over, his career still earth-bound,
and resentful of Jewish publishers, Doderer had toyed with the idea of living
in Germany, the land he felt had cleaned up the liberale Schlammflut of
post-war Europe, the land where das Irrationale wieder einen seiner grogen
Einbruche in die Geschichte vollzogen hat.**Nothing remains, it seems, of
the earliest drafts of the novel; if they had survived, I suspect that they would
give the lie to Doderers later protestations about the non-political nature of
his writing even at the height of his involvement with National Socialism.
Perhaps he had forgotten how after completing the first part of Die Damonen
in 1936 he was swamped by a surge of racial pride, noting in a letter that
thanks to the Reinheit meines BlutedZ3he was admirably placed to record the
tensions and contradictions of a Viennese society riddled with Jewish influence.
He also believed he had shown how Marxist machinations had brought about
the dire circumstances culminating in the firing of the Viennese Justizpalast
in July 1927. He wrote:
Ich glaube, es ist das erste Mal, dal3 die jiidische Welt im Osten deutschen
Lebensraumes von einem rein deutschen Autor in den Versuchsbereich
der Gestaltung gezogen wurde. Denn die bisher driiben schrieben. . .waren
selber Juden und ihre Hervorbringungen konnen wohl seit langem nicht
mehr ernsthaft gelesen werden. Ich versuchte, dieses Theatricum Judaicum
. . .v~rzufuhren.*~
Recalling Doderers own colourful vocabulary, I would suggest that this is
writing im kackebraunen Sinne. Yet strange to relate, in spite of his desperate
need to publish work and make his name, Doderer turned down the chance
to have this 705 page manuscript published as Part 1 of Die Damonen der
Ostmark, and after the war both author and publisher set great store by the
non-appearance of the novel, putting down its failure to appear to adverse
political factors. Wendelin Schmidt-Dengler, however, recognises the real
nature of these factors when he remarks: Der Verlag fand die Bewdtigung
des Themas in den Dumonen nicht profiliert genug, freilich in seinem Sinne,
namlich im nati~nalsozialistischen.~~
Certainly, given the tenor of Doderers personal utterances at this time, a
reading of the 1936 version of the novel comes as a surprise, for although the
work undeniably reveals an obsession with Jews it is far from being stridently
anti-Semitic in its overall tone. A Jewish businessman such as Siegfried
Markbreiter is portrayed in a notably sympathetic light, whilst a Jewess,

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151

Selma Steuermann, is described quite simply as die Giite.26The novel is

deeply personal in many of its utterances, particularly in its portrayal of the
two autobiographical figures Stangeler and Schlaggenberg. Each man has a
stormy relationship with a Jewess and in both cases the problem lies far more
with the deficiencies of the Gentile male than it does with the long-suffering
woman. Moreover, Doderer has his novel narrated by the chronicler Geyrenhoff
who demonstrates a liberal humanism overwhelmingly at odds with the
Doderer-figures of whom he is frequently unsparing. Only on rare occasions
does some indication of the authors own anti-Semitism creep into the narrative
voice, for though Geyrenhoff is clearly aware of racial differences this does not
automatically make him a racist. Talking to Schlaggenberg he recalls, for
instance, how
der alte Schedik ganz recht hatte, als er einmal mir gegenuber klagte,
Sie hatten seine Tochter zur fanatischen Judin gemacht. Kein Wunder!
Hier liegt Ihr einziges Verdienst, Kajetan. Sie haben jemand, der Ihren
Lebensweg kreuzte, gezwungen, sich zu definieren, Farbe zu bekennen,
Verkleidungen abzulegen, und seien diese noch so anmutig gewesen. Sie
haben Carny gewungen, sozusagen ihre eigene Abkunft ein~uholen~
In the second chapter, Ruckblick auf eine groi3e Liebe und auf die Mondsucht,
the bitterness surrounding the break-up of Doderers own marriage is barely
concealed in the portrayal of Schlaggenbergs failed marriage to the Jewess Carny
Schedik. The tensions within Doderer are palpably obvious here as he excoriates
himself in the deeply unflattering portrait of the writer Schlaggenberg. In the
Austrian tradition of Grillparzer and Kafia, Doderer, haunted by the failure
of his relationship with Gusti, ponders the very feasibility of matrimony coexisting with literary creativity. All the while he strives mightily to distance
himself from his confusion and bitterness through his narrator Geyrenhoff,
though even he sinks into Nazi rhetoric as he describes jene unterirdische
Spannung und Feindschaft einer tiefen Artfremdheit which exists between
Camy and Kajetan.28
A tendency for young men in the novel to indulge in communal bare-chested
physical jerks in the snow might perhaps be regarded as revealing a Riefenstahlian
approach to body culture, but it is otherwise difficult to square up the 1936
version of Die Damonen with its authors strongly politicised view of it at the
time of its completion. It is a frequently compelling portrayal of a segment
of Viennese society which shows for the most part an obsessive awareness
of Jews rather than Hitlerian anti-Semitism. It is also hard to see how the
novel demonstrates the seditious activities of Marxists, unless it is in the
marginal character of Cohen who edits a communist paper owned by the
politically pragmatic Allianz-Konzern, which in turn has been taken over by
the sinister Kammerrat Levielle (n6 Levi). Doderer clearly dislikes both Levielle
and the world presented by the Allianz-Konzern, but unless he is part of some
sinister plot to be revealed in an unwritten part of the novel, it is hard to
conceive of anyone less like a Marxist than Levielle. O n the other hand,
the Allianzis reckoned to be part of an extensive plot to control the information

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DODERER AND NATIONAL SOCIALISM

media, and to the Nazi mind the world consisted of one huge judaeo-marxist
conspiracy:
Und am Ende: die Allianzwar nicht auf diesem Zeitungskonzern oder
Buchverlag beschrankt, wenn mans nur dem eigentlichen Wortsinne nach
nahm! Diese Allianz war heutzutage vielmehr iiberall. Sie konnte einen
schreibenden Menschen totmachen, totschweigen - denn aui3er den ihren
gab es j a kaum mehr wirkliche Sprachrohre in die Offentlichkeit - sie
konnte einen schreibenden Menschen, der gegen sie verstiei3, wahrhaft
lebendig b e g r a b e ~ ~ . ~ ~
Although the earliest remaining version of the novel thus dates back only to
1936, a hint of the tenor of earlier versions can perhaps be found in the novel
Das Geheimnis des Reichs which Doderer published in 1930. In this
Expressionistically-tinged account of the Russian revolution the brutality of
the times finds its most potent manifestation in the figure of Hugo Blau, a
Viennese fashion salesman who switches allegiance from the Kaisers army to
the Czech legion before reverting once more to a legitimist position. This he
then abandons for Bolshevism before justice is eventually meted out to him
by the Red Army. Justice is certainly done, but it is indicative of Doderers
outlook even in the late 1920s that the villain of the piece, a man of total moral
turpitude, should bear the revealingly Jewish surname of Blau. Here already
we surely find the Nazi stereotype of the assimilated Jew as a self-seeking
opportunist without bonds of ethical, ethnic or national allegiance, devoid of
any base which would permit him to transcend immediate self-interest.
Virtually as soon as he had finished Part 1 in 1936 Doderer left his favourite
Viennese suburb of Dobling to make a new life in the Reich. Unable to find
anywhere suitable in Munich, he settled instead in nearby Dachau. Not long
after arriving, he writes to Gutersloh that he has the feeling of living in einem
eminent sozialen Rechts-Staate, . . . und zwar in jener Freiheit, wie sie gemeinhin
verstanden wird. Das sind W ~ h l t a t e n , whilst
~
in his diary for 16.7.1937 he
characterizes Dachau as ein friedliches Stadtchen auf dem Berge. With him
he brought a completed novel entitled Ein Umweg, a compact work finished
in 1934 but written from 1931 onwards in counterpoint to Die Damonen. Set
in the immediate aftermath of the Thirty Years War, the time and ambience
are ostensibly far removed from Die Damonen, even though it shares with that
novel its Viennese and Eastern Austrian setting. O n closer examination,
however, certain parallels do emerge between the two novels. The theme of
sexual obsession so characteristic of Die Damonen is found here, too, in the
reactions of the Spanish grandee Manuel Cuendias to the Carinthian-born
serving-girl Hanna, whilst the novel returns time and again to a Viennese society
split by ethnic divisions. Here the problem is admittedly not that of Jew and
Aryan but of the relationship between the spanische Fremdlinge31and their
host city. As might be expected, the Spaniards are stereotyped in their swarthy
colouring, dark hair and eyes, whilst the Germanic stock is generally blond
and blue-eyed. Although Cuendias is a positively evaluated character, Doderer
describes the way Spanish incomers are taking over certain desirable residential

DODERER AND NATIONAL SOCIALISM

153

areas of the city in terms not unrecognizable today,32whilst the novel as a

whole shows a recurring interest in the problems of ethnic assimilation.
Reference is even made to an obsession which mid-1 7th-century Austrians had
with their S t a m m b a ~ m and
, ~ ~it is in such instances that certain parallels with
the 1930s emerge with particular clarity. It will be recalled, too, that both
periods had other features in common. The Austrian Counter-Reformation
attempted to re-unify the country in a manner which may well have suggested
parallels with what the Nazis were trying to do in the aftermath of a Great
War even more cataclysmic than the Thirty Years War had been. The rumbling
Peasants Rebellion in Styria which forms a recurring motif in Ein Umweg also
found its modern parallel in the short but bloody Austrian civil war of 1934.
The novel traces the attempts of Cuendias at integration into German life
as a means of coming to terms with the demon within him - his obsession with
Hanna. He even tries, unlike the majority of his fellow countrymen, to learn
the German language and he attempts to find personal salvation in the figure
of the flaxen blond Styrian girl Margret von Randegg. Und es mag am
deutschen Wesen/Einmal noch die Welt genesen seems to be Cuendiass
unspoken motto, but his best efforts at integration come to naught. That alien
corn is bound to remain alien corn is a notion which pervades the novel and
it is given its most sustained theoretical justification by the Viennese student
Ruodl Pieinacher who teaches Cuendias German. In language reminiscent of
some of Hitlers more naively intellectual supporters (such as Doderer and
Giitersloh) he givrs mouth to the notion of a Reichsidee where any overall
unity must above all permit the individual national identity to survive and
flourish. At times, however, Doderer lapses from the cadences of seventeenthcentury speech and has Ruodl express himself in terms which seem simply
volkischin the twentieth-century sense. Ruodl declares, for example, that all
Swedish influence gehort . . . vom deutschen Boden gedrangt, and that each
individual people should remain firmly in seiner Art und seinen Grenzen.*
A journal entry from August 1933 gives further enlightenment on his notion
of the Reich. Although Doderer contends that Der Grundbau deutschen
Wesens der Hervorbringung des nationalen Chauvinismus nicht gunstig [ ist],
he also believes that the German has to defend himself against zersetzende
Gegner and that this is das groi3artige und heldische Schauspiel, das er diesem
Jahrhunderte wieder einmal bietet. As Treml concludes, Wieder wird deutlich,
wie leicht bei solchem Denken ein Ineinanderfliefien von eigenen Ideen und
denen des Hitler-Staates moglich ~ u r d e . ~
One of the major areas of contrast in the novel, that between the city and
the countryside, is a prominent feature in many volkisch works, whilst in
the activities of an unemployed ex-soldier like Paul Brandter, whose life is
saved by Cuendias and Hanna, we may find a further parallel between midseventeenth century and postwar Austria-Germany, where the antics of first
the Freikorps and then the various political armies were such a scourge. The
similarity of certain aspects of Ein Umweg to Lonss paradigmatically volkisch
novel Der Wehrwolfmight also be pointed out here. Written in 1910 but set
also at the time of the Thirty Years War, this novel enjoyed spectacular

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DODERER AND NATIONAL SOCIALISM

popularity in the 1930s and there are passages in Ein Umweg which in similar
fashion to Der Wehrwolf glorify the relationship of the peasant to the soil:
Und, wie man weifi, ist j a der Bauer nicht nur der sassigste und heimattreueste aller Menschen, sondern zugleich auch der Mann, dem die weite
Erde ganz geh61-t.~~
As with so much of Doderers work in the 1930s, the novel exudes a pessimism
of Schopenhauerian proportions and is dominated by the notion that human
destiny is controlled by totally irrational factors. This of course flies in the face
of the Nazis proclaimed optimism about the future of their country, their people
and their world, but reminds us again that what so greatly appealed to Doderer
about National Socialism was that it demonstrated the triumph of the irrational
and instinctual. Moreover, in the figure of Margret von Randegg, for all that
she is a typical Aryan who plays a large part in the ultimate downfall of the
hero Cuendias, a racial and social outsider who dies an unheroic death, there
is a very clear example of what Doderer in his next novel, Ein Mord den jeder
begeht, describes as a Bruckenmensch:
Es gibt Bruckenmenschen. Das ist die Formel. . . Es gibt Menschen, die
als Briicke zu anderen leiten, und ihre wahre Beziehung an diesen anderen
besteht eben lediglich in dieser ihrer Funktion; dazu gehort, dafi sie am
Ende ubergangen werden, diese pontifices.37
As far back as 1965 an American critic noted perceptively in his examination
of Ein Mord denjeder begeht that it is not hard to find the sources and implications
of such a ruthlessly aristocratic view.38
In 1937 Doderer at last achieved the publishers contract he had so long
coveted, and his first novel to come out with C. H. Beck was Ein Mord den
jeder begeht. Although Doderer returns to the twentieth century for the setting
of this novel, it is not noteworthy for its overly political slant. This is somewhat
surprising, given the strident politicisation of literature at the time and the fact
that the publisher who commissioned the novel was no anti-Nazi. In fact, the
novel is partially cast in the shape of the detective story, a narrative form which
is probably one of the epic moulds least responsive to political manipulation.
What is perhaps even more surprising is that a novel by a Party member
bringing his work out with a publisher sympathetic to the ideals of the New
Germany should start with such an obviously and arrestingly Freudian fanfare:
Jeder bekommt seine Kindheit uber den Kopf gestulpt wie einen Eimer.
Spater erst zeigt sich, was darin war. Aber ein ganzes Leben rinnt das
an uns herunter, da mag einer die Kleider oder auch Kostume wechseln
wie er will.39
This first part of the novel, dealing with Conrad Castiletzs childhood, Doderer
later referred to as an extended personal biography, whilst the remainder of
the novel is seenby Vincent Docherty as probably the first anti-detective novel
in German fiction.4oThis is a genre today best known, of course, in the postwar stories of Friedrich Durrenmatt.

DODERER AND NATIONAL SOCIALISM

155

Whereas in its classic guise the detective story celebrates the triumph of the
sifting, systematic and classifying intellect as the means whereby ultimate
knowledge is acquired, in this novel all such endeavour comes to nothing. In
fact, Castiletz finds that in his search for the killer of his sister-in-law all
meaningful advances come about not through the application of rational deduction but rather through apparent chance and through the promptings of dreams,
memories and the senses. Via the medium of the detective novel, that most
rational of forms, the novel thus celebrates the triumph of the irrational. To
that extent, of course, it chimes in with an intellectual climate of the 20s and
30s in Germany which devalued reason and rejected the optimistic belief in
progress as a reaction against both nineteenth-century values and the experience
of the Great War. National Socialism also devalued the rational and this was
one of its most attractive features for Doderer. O n the other hand, it would
be difficult to make out a case for Ein Mord den jeder begeht being a Nazi novel
on such grounds alone. There even, indeed, appear to be features in the work
which might be construed as a circumspectly negative comment upon certain
aspects of Nazism. For a start, there is nothing especially volkischabout any
aspect of the novel, indeed its chief character, Conrad Castiletz, an archetypal
blond and blue-eyed Aryan, is conspicuously unsuccessful in his life. What
is more, the reason for this painful lack of success is ascribed emphatically to
his obsession with imposing a neat and tidy, and hence spurious, order upon
the chaotically disordered nature of the reality about him. All attempts at
imposing order upon reality are seen as doomed to failure in a novel whose
pessimism is something it certainly has in common with Ein Umweg. After the
war Doderer never made any attempt to use this novel to justify his claims
that his party allegiance was over by 1938, which is strange, given those features
of the novel which seem to point in the direction of at least muted dissatisfaction
with the Thousand Year Reich.
After Ein Mord denjeder begeht Doderer was able to complete one further novel
before the outbreak of war and his subsequent conversion to Catholicism. This
was Die erlmhteten Fenster, finished in 1939 but not published until 1951. A short
satirical novel, it has as the basis for much of its humour the objectively
unsavoury theme of male sexual voyeurism with its inherent degradation of
women. As is the case with Castiletz, the main character, Julius Zihal, is also
an Ordnungsfanatiker consumed by his passionate need to impose order onto
life. His whole working existence has been spent as a tax collector in Imperial
Vienna and much of the satire is directed at the way in which bureaucracy
stifles and perverts its perpetrators, who themselves are also seen to be its
victims. Set in the recent past, the last peacetime days of the former Habsburg
Monarchy which Hitler so detested, the novel is full of absurdist features; it
traces the emancipation of Zihal, who takes up spying upon and recording the
night-time activities of his female neighbours in a warped attempt to fill the
void in his life which opens up after his retirement from the civil service. After
Zihal is caught out in humiliating circumstances, he plunges into a chasm of
uncertainty which, however, also releases him from the grip of his obsession.
At the same time he enters into a new relationship with language - no longer

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DODERER AND NATIONAL SOCIALISM

does he express himself in the impersonal and stereotyped cadences of the tax
manuals but rather in personally authentic utterances. What is more, the
pessimism of the earlier novels finds no place here, for Zihal is granted contentment and conjugal bliss in the evening of his life.
Thus at the same time as Doderer rejected National Socialist ideology and
embraced the tenets of Roman Catholicism (decisions ironically accelerated
by the Anschluss of 1938) a new and refreshing optimism enters his work, utterly
different from the tone of the previous two novels. Certainly, if Ein Mord den
jeder begeht was already beginning to show signs of a disengagement from Nazism,
only a year later these are much more manifest in Die erleuchteten Fenster. That
the book did not see the light of day in the Third Reich is hardly surprising,
given not only its slightly risquC sexual content (it will be recalled that Fascism
in Germany was noticeably puritanical) but also the fact that, like its immediate
predecessor, it is devoid of volkischelements. In addition, however, there is
the virtually seditious nature of a novel which looks back with warmth and
detached humour on the days of the independent Austrian Empire, a state
where, for all its obvious imperfections, not the least of them being its
bureaucracy, human fulfilment was none the less possible. Clearly, a novel
completed only one year after the Anschluss which thus lovingly, albeit ironically,
evokes a state which dared not speak its name, one which was destined to lose
its identity for ever in the Thousand Year Reich, was hardly going to find
much favour with the Reichsschrifttumskammer. Neither was a novel which
through the medium of humour highlighted the socially and linguistically
perverting tendencies of an all-pervasive and prying state apparatus, even when
that state was Austria-Hungary rather than Nazi Germany. As Kajetan von
Schlaggenberg had earlier remarked in the first version of Die Diimonen, als
ausgelernter Osterreicher will man mit Behorden moglichst wenig zu tun haben,
man erblickt in jeder Amtsperson von vornherein einen Feind.41Thus when
Doderer did publish a novel in 1940 it was not his latest piece, but rather Ein
Umweg, completed six years earlier without finding a publisher. The evidence
of Die erleuchteten Fenster shows clearly enough, however, that by 1939 the Nazi
Doderer of 1936 was already well on the road which would eventually lead
him to a place of distinction in a consciously Austrian as well as a generally
German literary tradition.
NOTES

Wendelin Schmidt-Dengler, Ruckzug auf die Sprache, in Osterreichische Liferutur der Dregzger
Juhre, ed. K. Amann and A. Berger, Vienna/Cologne/Graz 1985, p. 297.

Anton Reininger, Die Erlosung des Burgers; eine ideologiekritische Studie, Bonn 1975; Hans Joachim
Schroder, Appmeption und Vorurfeil. Unfersuchungm zur Reflexion Heimito uon Dodmers, Heidelberg 1976.
Heimito von DoderedAlbert Paris Gutersloh, Briejwechsel, ed. Reinhold Treml, Munich 1986,
p. 72.
W. Schmidt-Dengler, p. 291.
Malcolm McInnes, Osterreich - Osterreicher - Am Osterreichischsten. Heimito von Doderer
and Austria, Colloquia Germanica, 18 (1985), 20.

DODERER AND NATIONAL SOCIALISM

157

Quoted from Treml, p. 38

Quoted from E. C . Hesson, Twentieth-Century Odyssey. A Study o j Heimito van Doderers Die
Damonen, Columbia S . C . 1982, p. 86.

* For full details of translations of Doderers works see Vincent J. Docherty, The Reception of
Heimito von Doderer as exemplified by the Critics Response to Ein Mord denjeder begeht and Die
Merowinge3, Ph.D. thesis, Glasgow 1984.

Letter to Gerhard Aichinger, 21.7.1936

lo

Quoted from Treml, p. 133

Hans Weigel, In Memoriam, Graz 1979, p. 12.

George Clare, Last Waltz in Vienna. The Destruclion ofa Family 1842-1942, London 1982, p. 188.

l 3 Allen Janik, in a review of Ludwig Wittgensteins Vermischte Bemerkungen ( = Culture and Value).
Modern Austrian Literature, 13 (1980), 132. See also David Bloor, Wittgenstein: A Social Theory o j
Knowledge, London 1983, pp. 162-68.

Jaques Le Rider, Der Fall Otto Weininger. Wurzeln des Antifeminismus und Antisemitismus, Vienna
1985, p. 216.
Michael Bachem, Heimito van Doderer, Boston 1981, p. 49

Heimito von Doderer, Damonen. Studien l, Ser. n. 14.238, p. 210. I wish here to record my
debt of thanks to Professor Wendelin Schmidt-Dengler who kindly made a copy of this typescript
available to me in Vienna.
l7

Ernest Gellner, Words and Things,revised edition, London 1979, p. 1.

This essay was later revised in 1951 and first published in this form in Die Wiederkehr der Drachen.
Arijiutze, 7raktate, Reden, ed. W. Schmidt-Dengler with a foreword hy Wolfgang H. Fleischer, Munich
1970, pp. 275-98.
I

Quoted from E. C . Hesson, p. 21

I

Ibid., p. 23.

T o be found in Doderers unpublished manuscript, located in the Haiidschriftensamrnlungof

the Austrian National Library, Vienna, under Ser. n. 14.071-72.

22

See note 21, above.

23

Letter to Gerhard Aichinger, 21.7.1936.

Ibid.
j

W. Schmidt-Dengler, Heimito von Doderer: Riickzug auf die Sprache, p. 296.

26

Heimito von Doderer, Darnonen. Studien l, Ser. n. 14.238, p. 213

27

Ihid., p. 50
Heimito von Doderer, Damonen. Studien ll, Ser. n. 14.239, p. 419

Ibid., pp. 400 and 440f.

30

Quoted from Treml.

Heimito von Doderer,

32

Ibid., pp. 31f.

33

Ibid., p. 33.

J4

Ihid., p. 118.

35

Treml, p. 33

Ein
J7

Ein Umweg, Munich 1940, p. 31

Umweg, p. 236.

Heimito yon Doderer, E i n Mord den jeder begeht, Munich 1938, pp. 188f

Michael Shaw, An Interpretation of Doderers novel Ein Mord denjeder hegeht, Symposium, 19
(1965), 154.

38

158
39

DODERER AND NATIONAL SOCIALISM

Ein Mord den jeder befeht, p. 5.

See the chapter on Ein Mord den jeder begeht in Vincent J. Docherty, op. cit
Heimito von Doderer, Damonen. Studien l, p. 53.