1930s Austria - A Time and Place of Compelling Writing

As Europe collapsed in the late 1930s Austrian writers were producing compelling and visionary work says George Prochnik on the Daily Beast. He introduces readers to some of these unjustly overlooked writers—perfect for the dark nights of winter.

From the piece...

Today, after decades of neglect in the United States, a host of re-publications and new translations enables us to explore the incisive social analysis, acid wit, and acrid yet agile erotics of this remarkable group. The incendiary Austrian satirist Karl Kraus, once quipped, "There are two kinds of writers, those who are and those who aren't." Picking up these books we always know we’re in the grip of the former.

Here are five works with which to begin sampling the kaffeehaus canon.

Joseph Roth’s The Radetzky March examines the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s collapse through the lens of one family's interface with Habsburg power. Spanning several generations of the Trotta's ascent into imperial favor after a single act of martial pluck—and the putrification of the entire imperium conferring such favors—the novel tracks history with cinematic rush and microscopic attentiveness. Battles, drinking parties, card games, and pathologically overwrought ceremonials segue into meditations on the psychological resonance of epochal change. In one of the multiple tour-de-force summaries of vast transformations, Roth writes, “In the years before the Great War, at the time the events chronicled in these pages took place, it was not yet a matter of indifference whether a man lived or died. When someone was expunged from the lists of the living, someone else did not immediately step up to take his place, but a gap was left to show where he had been, and those who knew the man had died or disappeared, well or even less well, fell silent whenever they saw the gap…That’s how it was then!...Everything that existed left behind traces of itself, and people then lived by their memories, just as we nowadays live by our capacity to forget, quickly and comprehensively.” Down a flagon of slivovitz to Roth’s memory! And when the world has stopped spinning plunge into the full array of his novels and essays.