Immortal Austria?

‘IMMORTAL AUSTRIA’? AUSTRIANS IN EXILE IN BRITAIN THE YEARBOOK OF THE RESEARCH CENTRE FOR GERMAN AND AUSTRIAN EXILE STUDIES 8 INSTITUTE OF GERMANIC AND ROMANCE STUDIES UNIVERSITY OF LONDON Editorial Board Charmian Brinson, Richard Dove, Anthony Grenville, Andrea Hammel, Bea Lewkowicz, Marian Malet, Jutta Raab-Hansen, Andrea Reiter, J. M. Ritchie, Jennifer Taylor, Ian Wallace The aim of the Research Centre is to promote research in the field of German-speaking exiles in Great Britain. To this end it organizes conferences and publishes their proceedings, holds research seminars, and publishes its own Yearbook. Its members cooperate in the writing of scholarly studies, including Changing Countries: The Experience and Achievement of German-speaking Exiles from Hitler in Britain from 1933 to Today (London: Libris, 2002) and Wien-London hin und retour (Vienna: Czernin, 2004), a study of the Austrian Centre in London, 1939-1947. Though the Research Centre has primarily concerned itself with the German-speaking refugees from Nazism in Britain, it aims to extend its scope to include German-speaking exiles of other periods and comparable groups of European refugees. Given its location near the heart of the principal centre of settlement of the refugees from Germany, the Research Centre readily provides advice and useful contacts to scholars and postgraduates working in the field. Amsterdam - New York, NY 2007 ‘IMMORTAL AUSTRIA’? AUSTRIANS IN EXILE IN BRITAIN Edited by Charmian Brinson, Richard Dove and Jennifer Taylor Cover Image: The Austrian tenor, Richard Tauber, in a scene from the ﬁlm “Heart’s Desire” (1935), The British Film Institute. ©Canal Plus Images The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of ‘ISO 9706: 1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents - Requirements for permanence’. ISSN: 1388-3720 ISBN-13: 978-90-420-2157-0 ©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2007 Printed in The Netherlands Table of Contents Acknowledgements vii Introduction ix Austrians in Exile The Emigration of Austrians to Britain after 1938 and the Early Years of Settlement: A Survey 3 Anthony Grenville The Propagandists’ Propagandist: Bruno Adler’s ‘Kurt und Willi’ Dialogues as Expression of British Propaganda Objectives 19 Jennifer Taylor ‘Zum Emigranten habe ich kein Talent’: Stefan Zweig’s Exile in London 33 Tatiana Liani Exil, Judentum und Sprache in ausgewählten Nachlass-Aufzeichnungen von Elias Canetti 49 Anne Peiter Exil der Wiener Medizin in Großbritannien 61 Renate Feikes Enduring Exile? Or passing acquaintance? Images of Britain in the Work of Georg Kreisler 75 Colin Beaven Representations of Austria ‘Immortal Austria’: Eva Priester as a Propagandist for Austria in British Exile 93 Charmian Brinson vi Table of Contents Wien-Bilder: Paul L. Stein, Richard Tauber und das britische Kino 105 Christian Cargnelli Fritz Rosenfeld, Filmkritiker 121 Brigitte Mayr & Michael Omasta ‘Kennen wir uns nicht aus Wien?’: Emigré Film- Makers from Austria in London 1928-1945 133 Tobias Hochscherf Imaging the Future through the Past: Austrian Women Exile Writers and the Historical Novel 149 Andrea Hammel Imagining Austria: Kohlröserl, Alpenglühen und Patisserie – the Vision of the Exiled Children 165 Deborah Vietor-Engländer Austria Revisited „Einmal Emigrant, immer Emigrant“: Zur literarischen und publizistischen „Remigration“ Robert Neumanns 1946-1965 181 Maximiliane Jäger Many Happy Returns? Attitudes to Exile in Austria’s Literary and Cultural Journals in the early Post-war Years 197 Anthony Bushell Index 211 Acknowledgements The editors would like to thank both the Leo Baeck Institute (London) and the journal German Life and Letters for their generous financial support for this publication. They are also grateful to David Newton for invaluable technical assistance in the production of this volume. Thanks are due to Michael Roeder for specific advice. Finally, the editors would like to express their thanks to the Austrian Cultural Forum and the Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies for their support of the conference ‘Austria in Exile’, held in September 2005, at which the papers published in this volume were originally given. This page intentionally left blank Introduction The essays contained in this volume were originally given as papers to a conference on ‘Austria in Exile’, held by the Research Centre for German and Austrian Exile Studies in London in September 2005. The volume’s title – ‘Immortal Austria’ – is taken from the name of a ‘British-Austrian Rally and Pageant’, devised and staged by Austrian émigrés in war-time London in March 1943. It was a title which summarized the Austrian refugees’ collective memory of their homeland, evoking an image of mountain pastures, historical grandeur and cultural refinement. It was a picture which bore little relation to the final years of the First Republic, whose death throes were still vivid in the minds of most émigrés – and which bore even less relation to the materially and morally shattered homeland to which some of them would eventually return. Although reliable figures are hard to find, there were probably around 30,000 Austrian refugees from National Socialism in Britain at the outbreak of war, of whom some 10-15 % were political or intellectual exiles and some 85-90% were of Jewish origin, though there was naturally a degree of overlap between these two groups. There were in fact three successive waves of Austrian refugees who arrived in Britain, corresponding to the course of political events in Germany and in Austria itself. The first came in 1933, after Hitler’s seizure of power in Germany. The second wave arrived in the wake of the Austrian civil war in 1934, when the Dollfuß government had used troops to crush Socialist and Communist opposition, forcing many party activists into exile. However, it was the Anschluss, Hitler’s annexation of Austria on 11 March 1938, followed a few months later by the ‘Reichskristallnacht’, which caused the greatest number of Austrian refugees to seek sanctuary in Britain, a flow continuing unabated until the outbreak of war. Austrians in Exile Studies of German-speaking exile have frequently failed to make any distinction between Germans and Austrians or to consider the experience of emigration from an Austrian-specific standpoint. Anthony Grenville, in his survey of Austrian emigration to Britain, sets out to remedy this deficiency. He examines, inter alia, the way in which British immigration policy and practice determined the composition of the Austrian emigration to Britain, as well as the self-image of the body of Austrian refugees that was to prove x Introduction central to the development of their collective identity and of their wartime and post-war community. Austrian exiles in London included such well-known literary figures as Stefan Zweig and Elias Canetti: Zweig from 1933, Canetti from 1938. Tatiani Liani considers the case of Stefan Zweig, an unwilling émigré who nonetheless preferred the anonymity of London to the threat of impending Fascism in his home country. Her article records Zweig’s extraordinary literary productivity in London, and shows how the course of historical events transformed him from an émigré into a refugee and finally into an ‘enemy alien’. Anne Peiter examines Elias Canetti’s ambivalent attitude to some of the key themes of his work - exile, Jewishness and the German language. Her article contrasts various reflections contained in his unpublished notebooks with those appearing in later published works such as Masse und Macht and Die Provinz des Menschen. The Austrian author Bruno Adler, who in exile specialized in creating typical Berliners to star in his radio features, is the subject of Jennifer Taylor’s study of the ‘Kurt und Willi’ radio series. By examining a selection of the roughly two hundred scripts which were prepared, the paper shows how Adler, then working for the Political Intelligence Department of the Foreign Office, successfully incorporated Government propaganda into these scenes for broadcast to Germany. While most of the Austrians seeking refuge in Britain went on to settle here, the Viennese cabaret artist and writer Georg Kreisler had only the briefest taste of life in wartime Britain, arriving in 1944 not primarily as an exile but as a soldier serving in the American army. His is a situation which Colin Beaven defines as ‘multiple exile’. Beaven investigates Kreisler’s experience of British life, and considers his image of Britain as well as its significance for his later British-based novel Der Schattenspieler. Renate Feikes considers the fate of the Jewish medical practitioners who fled to Great Britain after the Anschluss. She examines the difficulties they faced in becoming accepted in their profession, including the inferior status accorded to dentists in Britain in comparison with Austria, and concludes by noting the lukewarm reception afforded to those who wished to return to Austria after the war. Representations of Austria During the years of exile, Austria frequently assumed a near-mythical form in the cultural output of Austrian émigrés. Charmian Brinson considers the work of the journalist and writer Eva Priester in which, true to the tenets of the Communist-influenced Austrian Centre, of which she was a key member, and the Free Austrian Movement, she promoted the idea of Austria as a Introduction xi nation culturally and historically separate from Germany and indeed as Germany’s ‘victim’, well before the Moscow Declaration of November 1943 gave Austrian ‘victimhood’ its official Allied backing. The mythologizing of Austria was particularly notable in the film industry. Tobias Hochscherf’s study examines the substantial contribution made by German-speaking film-makers from central Europe to the British film industry before and after 1933. Hochscherf illustrates the cosmopolitan nature of film-making by reference to film-makers such as Paul Czinner, Alexander Korda and Josef Somlo and examines the extent to which it was possible to counteract the mythical representation of Austria as a Ruritanian idyll in films funded by an international film industry.

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