Clemens Peck

Deborah Holmes

Volume 28 of Austrian Studies investigates literary imaginings and cultural constructions of the Habsburg Empire. Th e retrospective phenomenon referred to by Claudio Magris as the 'Habsburg myth' plays an inevitable role, but the Habsburg imaginary spans a far greater range. Existing studies often give the impression of a fragile, backward-looking utopia or else the merry apocalypse and overwrought 'Nervenkunst' of a predominantly male, German-language elite. The reality is more various, in a historical, geographical and discursive sense, than has previously been acknowledged. An important focus of our volume lies on imperial plurality in imaginations and institutions before 1918. Reflections of Habsburg diversity can be found in modernist attitudes and techniques in the arts, science and popular culture. We bring together fi n-de-siècle cultural practice with analysis of the post-1918 era to examine negotiations between the whole and the particular, the large and the small, the historical momentum of the bigger picture and the fleeting moment. The volume also investigates transatlantic translations of the Habsburg imaginary after 1933, showing how relevant it is to the exile experience - for example, in the case of Zweig or Broch - but also up to the present day, as demonstrated to tragicomic effect in Wes Anderson's Grand Budapest Hotel (2014).

Fragments of Empire: Austrian Modernisms and the Habsburg Imaginary

Austrian Studies Vol. 28

Wolfgang Mieder

Teaching Proverbial Wisdom to Fourth Graders

"Children and Proverbs Speak the Truth"

Lisa Silverman

New essays providing a wide-ranging cultural, social, and political picture of volatile between-the-wars Vienna.

Culture Between Tradition and Modernity

Interwar Vienna

Italian writer and political activist Ignazio Silone spent fifteen years from 1929 to 1944 as a political exile in Switzerland. Focusing on this period, this book throws new light on Silone's complex biography and shows how his literary production influenced and was influenced by fellow antifascist German émigrés and the Swiss socialist intelligentsia. Using previously unknown archival materials, letters, and diaries, and following a flexible chronological structure, the book examines the developing role Silone played in the intellectual life of Zurich. Its analysis of Silone's links with 'Bauhaus' circles, disciples of C.J. Jung, and Zurich's socialist city council offers an interdisciplinary and comparative perspective on Silone's exile that both questions and celebrates his status as an 'un-Italian' Italian author. Holmes also considers wider topics such as the functions of the engagé writer in times of crisis, the dynamics of cultural transfer through translation, and the phenomenon of exile literature. Italian antifascist exile writing is an area of Italian literature that has never been explored as an entity. With its painstaking archival research and critical approach to the pioneering methods and results of German 'Exilforschung,' Ignazio Silone in Exile opens the way for further studies on this little known aspect of Italian emigration culture.

Writing and Antifascism in Switzerland 1929–1944

Ignazio Silone in Exile

Deborah Holmes

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