Schonherr in his substance and method everywhere proclaims
himself of the Alps; Schnitzler always shows himself a citizen of
the Viennese capital and a man of the world. Schonherr is a
moralist, Schnitzler a sceptic. Whether in jest or in earnest, both
as a writer of short stories and verse drama, he is principally
preoccupied with the love motive; Anatol, a set of dialogues
representing the world of pleasure and inspired by an exuberant
wit recalling Maupassant, was followed in 1895 by his best
youthful production, Liebelel, and by a series of plays which
discuss in sophisticated dialectic the problems of love and
marriage. In Litteratur der Boh* me and Comtesse Mizzi he
attacks with exuberance and wit the highest Austrian aristocracy.
In the grotesque Der griine Kakadu he shows an avenging doom
ready to break forth boldly over the unconscious ancien regime
from a low drinking-den, on the day of the storming of the Bastille.
The historical piece, Der junge Mcdardus, has its scene laid
during Napoleon's stay at Schonbrunn; it is a picture of the
times, in which he does not fail to include the episode of Napoleon
kicking his hat. Professor Bernhardi is a satirical picture, drawn
by a master hand, of Austrian university and parliamentary life;
it was played hundreds of times in Berlin, but under the.Habs-
burg Monarchy it was forbidden by the censor owing to its only
too true reflection of insignificant ministers and party leaders; it
was not till the republic that the ban was removed from this
comedy. As a story-teller Schnitzler achieved uncommon suc-
cess when most happily inspired (Leutnant Gustl, 1901; Masken
und Wunder, 1912). His novel, Der Weg ins Freie (1908), has the
Jewish question as its subject.
The Jewish problem was also treated, with far deeper penetra- tion, by Schnitzler's friend, Richard Beer-Hofmann, who had been silent since the appearance of his Graf von Charolais half a generation earlier, in his Biblical drama Jadkobs Traum, which both in its form and contents is of lasting value. Another close friend of Schnitzler, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, the much-feted leader of the aesthetic school of lyrical poets, wrote the libretto for Richard Strauss's Elcktra, Der Rosenkavalier (1911), Joseph, Ariadne auf Naxos (1912), Die Frau ohne Schatten and so shared in the world-wide fame of the musician. He gave a new version of Alkcslis and of the mediaeval drama Everyman (Jcdcrmann). Widely read in the literature of the world, he formulates his opinions in refined though sometimes over-elaborate prose: the earlier collections of shorter works were supplemented after the war by several volumes of Rodauner Nachtrdge. The former protagonist of this group, Hermann Bahr, suffered from an excess of versatility. The theatrical success of his much-acted Concert (1909) was not repeated in the case of any of his later pieces. In his Erinnerung an Burckhard (1913), Aufsatze fiir Religion und Philosophic, Invenlur, Expressionismus (1917), and the many volumes of his Tagcbuch he aimed at being an index to all the vicissitudes in art and life. He sprang from one extreme to another; once a follower of Marx, a free-thinker and an anarchist, after the World War he was for the moment preaching reaction in science and uncompromising Catholicism. Hans Miiller (b. 1882) is a writer of verse drama whose downright methods hit the taste of the masses. His drama Konige (1915), which enjoyed the special patronage of the German emperor and dealt ostensibly with the feud between Louis of Bavaria and Frederick of Austria, but in reality with the rivalry of the Hohenzollerns and Habs- burgs, had an enormous popular success. He modelled himself on Sudermann in one piece, Der Schopfer, the hero of which is the self-confident inventor of a serum; a weaker effect was produced by his play Sterne, which explains Galileo's retraction as due to timidity. On the other hand his Flamme (1920-1), which represents on the stage the life of the demi-monde, ran for months in the great theatres of Berlin and Vienna, in spite of all the objections of the critics.
Austrian achievements in lyrical poetry were .no less note- worthy than in the drama. According to the testimony of the German Soergel, the young lyric poets of the time venerated above all others two poets, Dehmel, the poet of will, and Rainer Maria Rilke (b. 1875), the poet of mood. They regard Rilke's bewitching melodies, his delicacy of observation, his mystic
ardour, his absorption in God, as the highest revelation of their kind. Rilke himself, in. his autobiographically-coloured Auf- zeichnungen des Malle Laurids Brigge (1910), thus defines his poetic mission: " Verses are not sensations, as people think they are experiences. For the sake of a single verse one must see many towns, men and things, one must know the animals, one must feel how the birds fly and in what wise the little flowers open in the morning."
Regardless of Rilke, Stefan George, or Hofmannsthal, the singers of the older generation continued to write lyrics in the traditional form: for example, the Styrian pastor Ottokar Kern- stock (b. 1878), canon of Vorau, Aus dem Zwhigergdrtlein, and with Rosegger, Stcirischer Waffensegen (1915), Schviertlilien aus dem Zwingergartlein, Kriegsgedichte. In Tirol too there was an ecclesiastic, Brother Williram (Miiller), who wrote patriotic songs during the World War. Arthur von Wallpach (b. 1866) and Franz Karl Ginzkey (b. 1871) also preserved their old skill. A new note was struck both in war and peace by Anton Wildgans (b. 1881), who put forth, in quick successsion to his first work, Herbslfrilhling (1909) and his self-revealing Soiietle an Ead (1913), Infanterie, Mittag, and several dramas with a lyric quality, Armut, Hebe, and Dies Irae, which led to his appointment as director of the Burgtheater.
The greatest talent among the younger poets was Franz Werfel (b. 1890), who in his version of the Trojan Women of Euripides (1917) vividly painted the curse of war, and after- wards, like Albert Ehrenstein (b. 1886), openly confessed himself a violent opponent of militarism. But the most outspoken con- demnation of the war party, military or civil, was pronounced by Karl Jeremias Kraus (b. 1874), editor of the review Die Fackel, a very considerable satirist and an unshrinking adversary of social abuses in his books, Sittlichkeit und Criminalitat (1909), Die chinesische Matter (1910), Pro domo et mundo (1912), Kultur und Presse (1915). In 1919 he displayed, as in a mighty fresco, " the last days of humanity " (Die letzten Tage der Menschheil), a series of scenes arising during the World War, which, changing from wild mockery to awful tragedy, pictures the atrocities and misdeeds of army commanders and diplomatists, the credulity of the masse's, the barbarity of military justice, the brainlessness and heartlessness of those in high places. Exaggerated in some details, and on the whole over-severe to his native land, Die letzten Tage der Menschhcit is none the less, in spite of all reservations, a considerable literary achievement, a picture of the times having the value of a document.
Among the older generation of Austrian novelists we may mention Emilie Mataja (Emil Marriot, b. 1855) for descriptions of ecclesiastical and social life; Adam Miiller-Guttenbrunn ^.1852) for novels dealing with life in the Banat; and Sttiber Gunther (b. 1872), the successor of Potzl and Chiavacci among Viennese humorists. Among the most remarkable artistically are Enrica Handel Mazzetti (b. 1871) and Rudolf Hans Bartsch (b. 1873). Baroness Handel, who had been given a strictly religious educa- tion by the " englische Fraulein " at Sankt Polten, gave in her principal works Meinrad Helm per gers den kwiirdigcs Jahr(i 900) , Jesse und Marie (1906), Die arme Margaret (1910), Stephana Schwerdtner (1913), Ein deutscher Held (1920) propagandist stories in which free-thinkers, Protestants and blasphemers are led by their tragic experiences to become Catholics. The action takes place sometimes in the iSth century, sometimes at the time of the Counter-Reformation, and in Ein Deiilschcr Held in the days of the Archduke Charles. Capacity for drawing convincing historical pictures here goes hand-in-hand with the gift of dramatic intensity. Her Catholic ideas do not make the author- ess unjust to heretics, but she has a fatal taste for spiritual and physical torture, and wallows in scenes of blood and torment. Bartsch, originally an officer, won his first success with Zwiilf aus der Steiermark, which was followed by many others, the greatest of which was Schwammerl, a novel about Franz Schubert. More closely knit in his technique is Jakob Wassermann, born at Fiirth in 1873, a precisian in form and a virtuoso in language^ and richer in ideas is Erwin Guido Kolbenheyer (b. 1878), notably in his novel about Spinoza and Paracelsus.
