VERANSTALTUNGEN

"Heimito von Doderer  ein Lesevergnügen" - einer der größten Autoren des 20. Jh. wiederentdeckt

30. Januar 2020: Kunsthaus Mettmann e.V.

Lesung aus Werken Heimito von Doderers
Gemeinsame Veranstaltung von Kunsthaus Mettmann - Doderer-Treffen-Düsseldorf und Heimito von Doderer-Gesellschaft

Ein Beitrag aus den USA: Prof. Dr. Vincent Kling
(Professor of German and Comparative Literature - La Salle University / Philadelphia: Bekannt als Doderer-Übersetzer sowie Verfasser zahlreicher Veröffentlichungen zu Doderers Werk.)

The Leonhard Kakabsa Effect
 
Among the huge array of characters in Heimito von Doderer’s novel Die Dämonen, few have given rise to more discussion than Leonhard Kakabsa, the young factory worker who attains his full humanity through humanism, as it were. He teaches himself Latin and in that way surmounts the restrictions of his dialect and class, opening out to a richer life of the mind and soul. It is not coincidental that he focuses on Pico della Mirandola, whose ringing defense of humanism he ends up exemplifying—ennobled, enlightened, awakened to the full sense of his human dignity and worth. At no point in his quest for knowledge does Leonhard ever act out of a desire for social climbing or status seeking; the pursuit of knowledge in itself is what impels him.
Some critics, especially Thomas Petutschnig, argue that Doderer was deliberate in placing Leonhard as the central character of the novel, just as he places Pico’s treatise at the center of the text. He is a model of what can be, of the transforming power of the Western cultural tradition. More skeptical observers argue that Leonhard is an unrealistic or quixotic figure whose emergence is too implausible, too romantic, a social and political wish fulfillment concocted by an author whose hierarchical thinking leads him to condescend to his character in paternalistic approval, almost as if the ‘noble savage’—now tamed by Latin—had reappeared in modern times.
The skeptics are missing an important point, however, by overlooking a force that enabled me and many others to undergo a development akin to Leonhard’s. It would be fascinating to trace how many readers had their literary sense awakened and their tastes shaped by book clubs. More than one German acquaintance of mine testifies to the power of the Büchergilde and other such institutions; working-class families were often subscribers, and the children especially gained exposure to works of literary art they might otherwise not have encountered.
For many years, the influential book clubs in the United States—modeled after their successful counterparts in Germany, by the way—were the Book of the Month Club and the Literary Guild. ‘Were’ does not mean that they’re defunct. They remain a strong presence in the digital age, but their emphases and their target audiences have changed in noticeable ways. Up to about 1970, as cultural criteria underwent basic changes, the book clubs, and especially the Literary Guild, were unabashedly highbrow, whereas they now thrive on less lofty fare in the form of self-help books, mystery stories, memoirs, and the like. Before then, when there still existed the concept of a literary canon that could be used as a touchstone, highly respected writers and critics like W. H. Auden and Jacques Barzun served on the boards of these book clubs and purposely marketed prestige, books for the discriminating few. The clubs have since modified the pioneering, almost educational mission they once espoused when they promoted either relatively unknown American writers (few knew J. D. Salinger before the Book of the Month Club selected The Catcher in the Rye in 1951 and created a virtual stampede) or prominent foreign writers, usually European, in English translations.
That admittedly patrician appeal might today be in danger of being thoughtlessly and erroneously labeled elitist, as though it were somehow wrong to have opened minds. It is not likely that Thomas Mann and André Gide would have been known to so many thousands of American readers without their being selected by the clubs, which also introduced Anna Seghers, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Hans Fallada, André Malraux, Arnold and Stefan Zweig, Franz Werfel, and many others. A later generation of writers included voices as diverse as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Giuseppe di Lampedusa, Françoise Sagan—and Heimito von Doderer.
In 1961, as an eager young subscriber to the Literary Guild, I forgot to follow standard procedure and ended up receiving through my neglect a copy of a mammoth two-volume novel titled The Demons. It was the monthly selection, but I forgot to send in the post card saying I wanted to choose a different title from the newsletter’s list. Let me freeze the moment at which I opened the package and saw this deluxe offering from Alfred A. Knopf publishers. I was an unsystematic and sporadically informed reader and music lover, mainly following instinct and enthusiasm, fascinated above all by the songs of Franz Schubert and Hugo Wolf and the operas of Richard Strauss that had libretti by Hugo von Hofmannsthal. This meant Elektra and Der Rosenkavalier only; the others lay in the future. I had some not very realistic concept of Vienna, perhaps just one level above Strauss waltzes, Schlagobers, and touristy imperial splendor. The sudden burst of general interest in Vienna 1900 would not emerge in the United States until years later, and it would be more than three decades later that I first traveled to the ‘city of my dreams,’ gaining a more nuanced and realistic perspective. Everything about my taste was instinctive and impulsive, waiting to be formed and shaped. Call it Leonhard stumbling through the ablative absolute.
The least I could have done when I opened the Literary Guild’s offering was to note the quality of the Knopf edition as an example of outstanding book-making, with the slip case, the graphic design, the font, the jacket covers, the sturdy binding, the generous margins, the sheer love that had gone into presenting The Demons for the then unheard-of price of $13.50, truly an investment. Any such positive reaction got momentarily lost in my narrow petulance at being confronted with an author I’d never heard of. (Two very short stories by Doderer had been published at the same time in Astrid Ivask’s English translations in an obscure journal, though I would not find that out until years later.) I was irked with myself, especially since the author had such a funny name, but it flashed across my mind that sending the package back would be too much trouble, so I settled in to read.
At that time I knew practically no German and wasn’t thinking I would ever learn. My passion, like Leonhard’s, had been Latin, then an intense, visceral involvement with French, focusing on Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Apollinaire, and other poets. By the time I finished the “Overture” to The Demons, however, my life, my mind, my interests had undergone a shaking of the foundations. I was always a keen reader, but only a few times in my life—I think of David Copperfield and of the Sherlock Holmes stories, of The Ambassadors and of Absalom! Absalom!, of Les faux-monnayeurs and HHhH—did I become so engrossed in a novel that its world became far more vivid and real than the one I live in. Critics praise over and over Doderer’s masterful evocation of scene, creating a Vienna as real as Alfred Döblin’s Berlin or James Joyce’s Dublin. I’m astonished now at how little I grasped, especially about the need for Geyrenhoff to fall from his hobby horse (what does a nineteen-year-old know about the shaping power of such painful necessities) or about the whole historical background of the Schattendorf incident and the subsequent burning of the Palace of Justice in July 1925. Yet the whole vast setting, from the Graben to the Vienna Woods, from the House of the Blue Unicorn to Castle Neudegg, and the huge cast of characters were virtually my dwelling places and companions over weeks of reading that held me spellbound.
On finishing—though I know some sixty years later I’ll never ‘finish’—I knew I was going to have to learn German if I wanted to read more of this author or to savor not The Demons (accolades here to Richard and Clara Winston, the translators) but the real thing, Die Dämonen. It took one more experience of equal intensity for me to act fully on the matter, and that was seeing Strauss and Hofmannsthal’s Die Frau ohne Schatten a couple of years later at what was then the new Metropolitan Opera House in its opening season. Only one other time (seeing Judy Dench as Paulina in The Winter’s Tale) have I been as bowled over as I was by this overwhelming opera, especially seeing and hearing Leonie Rysanek as the Empress (another Viennese connection; Rysanek grew up in the Third District). Still, if someone had told me as I left the theater that I would persist enough in German not only to read Doderer but to translate him, I would not have been able to believe it. Yet my translation of Die Strudlhofstiege will appear with New York Review Books in July of 2021.
How that came about is a story for another time, as is the complete failure of The Demons to make its way in the United States. I have written elsewhere (https://www.doderer-gesellschaft.org/pdf/Inhalt_Schriften_7.pdf) about the series of bad decisions that led to a miscalculated debut, one from which Doderer has yet to recover in the English-speaking world. Yet he has his admirers, even zealots, in this country, one of whom is a Philadelphia boy, a child of factory workers whose life was revolutionized by forgetting to send that postcard back to the Literary Guild.