Born: Weidlingau, Austria, 5 September 1896. Education: Educated at the Landstrasser Gymnasium, graduated 1914; University of Vienna, 1921-25, Ph.D. in history, 1925. Military Service: Served as a reserve officer, Austrian dragoon regiment, 1915, prisoner of war in Siberia, 1916, repatriated 1920; conscripted to the German Air Force, 1940; examiner of potential Luftwaffe officers, Vienna, 1943; prisoner of war in Norway, 1945, released 1946. Family: Married 1) Gusti Hasterlik in 1930 (divorced 1934); 2) Maria Thoma in 1952. Career: Converted to Roman Catholicism, 1940;Vienna, 1946; banned from publishing works until 1950. Awards: Confederation of German Industry, Novelist’s prize, 1954; Austrian State grand award, 1954; Prikheim medal of Nuremberg, 1958; Raabe prize, 1966; Ring of Honour of the City of Vienna, 1966. Member: Nazi Party, 1933-38; Institute for Research in Austrian History, 1950. Died: 23 December 1966.
Publications
Collections
FrUhe Prosa, edited by Hans Flesch-Brunningen. 1968.
Die Erzahlungen, edited by Wendelin Schmidt-Dengler. 2 vols., 1973-76.
Commentarii: TagebUcher aus dem Nachlass, edited by Wendelin Schmidt-Dengler. 2 vols., 1976-86.
Das Doderer-Buch: Eine Auswahl aus dem Werk Heimito von Doderers, edited by Karl Heinz Kramberg. 1976.
Fiction
Die Bresche: Ein Vorgang in vierundzwanzig Stunden. 1924.
Das Geheimnis des Reichs. 1930; as The Secret of the Empire: A Novel of the Russian Civil War, translated with foreword and afterword by John S. Barrett, 1998.
Ein Mord, den jeder begeht. 1938; as Every Man a Murderer,translated by Richard and Clara Winston, 1964.
Ein Umweg. 1940.
Die erleuchteten Fenster; oder, die Menschwerdung des Amtsrates Julius Zihal. 1950; as The Lighted Windows; or, The Humanization of the Bureaucrat Julius Zihal, translated with afterword by John S. Barrett, 2000.
Die Strudlhofstiege; oder, Melzer und die Tiefe der Jahre. 1951.
Das letzte Abenteuer. 1953.
Die Damonen. 1956; as The Demons, translated by Richard and Clara Winston, 1961.
Die Posaunen von Jericho: Neues Divertimento. 1958; as ”The Trumpets of Jericho,” translated by Vincent Kling, in Chicago Review, 26(2), 1974.
Die Peinigung der Lederbeutelchen (stories). 1959.
Die Merowinger; oder, die totale Familie. 1962. Roman No. 7
Die Wasserfalle von Slunj. 1963; as The Waterfalls of Slunj, translated by Eithne Wilkins and Ernst Kaiser, 1966.
Der Grenzwald (fragment). 1967.
Unter schwarzen Sternen (stories). 1966.
Meine neunzehn Lebenslaufe und neun andere Geschichten. 1966.
Die Wiederkehr der Drachen: Aufsatze, Traktate, Reden, edited by Wendelin Schmidt-Dengler. 1972.
Verse
Gassen und Landschaft. 1923.
Ein Weg im Dunklen: Gedichte und epigrammatische Verse. 1957.
Other
Der Fall GUtersloh: Ein Schicksal und seine Deutung. 1930.
Von der Unschuld des Indirekten. 1947.
Grundlagen und Funktion des Romans. 1959; as ”Principles and Functions of the Novel,” in 30th International Congress of the P.E.N. Clubs, 1959.
Wege und Unwege, edited by Herbert Eisenreich. 1960.
Die Ortung des Kritikers. 1960.
Albert Paris GUtersloh: Autor und Werk, with others. 1962.
Tangenten. Tagebuch eines Schrifstetlers 1940-1950 (correspondence). 1964.
Mit der Sprache leben, with Herbert Meier and Josef MUhlberger. 1965.
Repertorium: Ein Begreifbuch von hoheren und niederen Lebens-Sachen, edited by Dietrich Weber. 1969.
Briefwechsel 1928-1962, with Albert Paris GUtersloh, edited by Reinhold Treml. 1986.
Editor, Gewaltig staunt der Mensch, by Albert Paris GUtersloh. 1963.
Critical Studies:
From Prophecy to Exorcism: The Premises of Modern German Literature by Michael Hamburger, 1965; ”Heimito von Doderer’s Demons and the Modern Kakanian Novel by Engelbert Pfeiffer,” in The Contemporary Novel in German edited by Robert H. Heitner, 1967; ”A Commentary on Heimito von Doderer” by Dietrich Weber, translated by Brian L. Harris, in Dimension, (1), 1968; Heimito von Doderer by Michael Bachem, 1981; Twentieth-Century Odyssey: A Study of Heimito von Doderer’s Die Damonen by Elizabeth C. Hesson, 1982; Doderer and the Politics of Marriage: Personal and Social History in Die Damonen by Bruce Irvin Turner, 1982; Begegnung mit Heimito von Doderer edited by Michael Horowitz, 1983; Heimito von Doderer by Dietrich Weber, 1987; ”Heimito von Doderer and National Socialism” by Andrew W. Barker, in German Life and Letters, 41(2), 1988; The Writer’s Place: Heimito von Doderer and the Alsergrund District of Vienna by Engelbert Pfeiffer, translated by Vincent Kling, 2001.
Friedrich Torberg contended that Heimito von Doderer would have enjoyed the reputation of being the most Austrian of Austrian authors. Few authors’ works are so intimately linked with locations and milieux as his. Vienna’s third district, the site of his former school between the ”diplomats’ quarter” and the Prater as well as the Alsergrund, are his preferred settings, for example Die Wasserfalle von Slunj (The Waterfalls of Slunj) and Die Strudlhofstiege [The Strudlhof Steps]. Doderer describes not only streets, but also houses in such detail that they are easily identifiable. His actual protagonist is Vienna as the former capital of the Austro-Hungarian empire and the multicultural metropolis which he loved: his family’s aristocratic and bourgeois circles and his own bohemian environment. In his portrayal of urban life, Doderer displays his familiarity with various social groups: the coffee house culture, ladies of leisure, civil servants, state officials, and workers. He is no stranger to the Viennese underworld and their transactions in the canal and sewer systems. The monumental novels, Die Strudlhofstiege and Die Damonen (The Demons), like romans a clef, frequently refer to historical persons and events.
Doderer’s depiction of the anxiety of the Austrian bourgeoisie is unmatched, because he shared their general lack of interest in democracy and resented the newly-formed republic despite the fact that in the 1920s Vienna was a model of social progress. His perspective is that of an upper-class man and a World War I officer of a dragoon elite unit, who was not even stripped of his privileges in a Siberian prison camp. As a prisoner of war he wrote, studied, and encountered the work of the novelist Albert Paris Gutersloh, his ”venerated master” and friend, whose concept of the total novel shaped his own theories. This Russian experience, his captivity and escape, defined to a large extent his view of reality. For example, in The Demons a hands-on fight delivers Imre Gyurkicz, a character caught up in military reveries, from the twilight-zone of alienation. Dying as a fighter, he realizes his human potential. Other protagonists, like the socially awkward Rene Stangeler, a reflection of Doderer as a young man, and his fiancee Grete Siebenschein, mirror Doderer’s exacting courtship and unsuccessful marriage to Gusti Hasterlik, the daughter of a Jewish surgeon, from whom Doderer was divorced in 1938 when the Hasterliks went into exile.
Doderer’s literary cosmos evolved organically. The protagonists from earlier texts are followed up in later ones, aging and changing with time. Doderer writes in a ”realistic” and a ”grotesque” mode. The former is assigned to the inner world of the civilized Sektionsrat Geyrenhoff, an image of the mature Doderer, the latter to the ”horrible” Dr. Doblinger, alias Kajetan von Schlaggenberg, reminiscent of the middle-age author in his Nazi phase—the name Doblinger alludes to Doderer’s residence in the suburb of Dobling between 1928 and 1936. This compartmentalization of texts suggests a Jekyll-and-Hyde disposition, which Doderer ascribes to the world, coining the concept of a ”dual reality.” The ”Doblinger” texts introduce the readers to extreme, sadistic relationships, taking them on excursions into psychological aberrations and perversions, for example Die Posaunen von Jericho (”The Trumpets of Jericho”) and Die Merowinger; oder, die totale Familie [The Merovingians, or the Total Family]. The ”Geyrenhoff” texts present society from a rational and benevolent point of view—Geyrenhoff is the chronicler of The Demons, a detached insightful spectator. In larger works the rational and the bizarre spheres overlap. The result is an extreme narrative tension. In the short story ”Eine Person aus Porzellan” [A Porcelain Person] one character combines both aspects: a young women who hides her vampire-like nature under a perfect facade. In The Demons the digressions about late medieval witch hunts written in archaic German—an offshoot of Doderer’s historical studies—reveal the dual reality in terms of culture. The poetry in Gassen und Landschaft [Alleys and Landscape] represents yet another literary sensibility, that of a perceptive observer of nature and urban atmospheres.
Doderer’s inability to cope with diversity goes hand in hand with a passionate rejection of ”ideology” and a yearning for authenticity. While his work abounds with idiosyncratic characters intended to produce the effect of universality, it is precisely this narrow focus on the unique and private which undermines the author’s intent. It fosters the notion that nothing in this hermetic cosmos happens by accident: all characters interconnect in causally related plots, by lineage, or through mutual acquaintances. The desire, if not for uniformity, at least for a group spirit—the protagonists in The Demons call their intimate circle ”Our People”—reveals an all-pervasive suspicion, particularly of Socialist politics, which is bolstered by Doderer’s portrayal of the proletarian masses as rabble as well as his revisionist assessment of the 1927 riots. His texts propose that it takes personal initiative rather than political involvement to overcome the crippling bewilderment supposedly caused by too much indoctrination. Any passionate activity commensurate with one’s character may lead to fulfilling one’s destiny. While Doderer’s concept of character echoes German idealism, it also has a fascist ring to it. His acute awareness of otherness based on gender and ethnicity corresponds with the views held by his psychology professor Hermann Swoboda who, like himself, advocated the principles of one of the most virulent proponents of anti-semitism and misogyny, Otto Weininger.
In Doderer’s post-war publications, the inflammatory pronouncements, the prejudice against groups and individuals, but most of all the anti-semitism, are toned down—the later was most prevalent in his projects of the 1930s, following the estrangement from his wife. He had actually planned the first, lost version of The Demons as a celebration of anti-semitism. However, some of these tendencies survived, explaining Doderer’s attraction to National Socialism. The novel Ein Mord, den jeder begeht (Every Man a Murderer), written during his Nazi phase, refutes the concept of individual responsibility as a young man realizes his involvement in his sister-in-law’s murder. Die erleuchteten Fenster; oder, die Menschwerdung des Amtsrates Julius Zihal (The Lighted Windows; or, The Humanization of the Bureaucrat Julius Zihal) submits that objective structures support any kind of activity: Zihal changes from a devoted, punctual civil servant to an equally serious voyeur. Only love can deliver him from his obsession. Despite their admirable stylistic qualities, the same problematic tendencies persist in Doderer’s postwar novels. Purporting to present a critical literary survey of the inter-war years, they do not discuss the events following the burning of the Palace of Justice in 1927. The protagonists of The Demons disband and go into exile, including Mary K., a Jewish woman who has found her true self in a relationship with a working-class man, who, in turn, became a ”better” person through his intellectual pursuits. Even after 1945, marriage and assimilation to the gentile middle-classes represent Doderer’s ultimate vision of hope to offset the collapse of the civilized world as he perceived it.
