(On the occasion of Erik-Emanuel Schmidt's novel "The Second Life of Adolf H.")
Since figures from the past, even demons of history, return to contemporary lives, thus reaching individual and collective consciousness in different ways, it is understandable that the protagonists of history are often the subject of literary works.
The value of literature, and not only historical novels, in deciphering history does not diminish the primary importance of historiography, which, even with possible new data, confirms the judgments about historical figures, or just in the light of new facts, possibly changes views about them.
Literature and historiography are not rivals, just as individual and social psychology are not, nor are anthropology, geopolitics, ethnology and other disciplines that sometimes together enable the creation of a more reliable judgment about epochs, events, personalities, peoples, society and the destinies of people in different historical and social contexts. .
Among the many variations on significance Balzac's works also includes the sentence: "If the world disappeared, it would be enough to find Balzac's novels to explain it".
It is believed that many, including historians, in an attempt to provide a complete explanation Napoleon's the campaign against Russia and the French defeat in that war, the state of mind and thoughts Kutuzov and Napoleon, they prefer to read Tolstoyov of the novel "War and Peace" rather than, for example, studying the archives of the Battle of Borodino.
By reading another historical novel by Leo Tolstoy, "Hadzhi Murat", we understand a long past time, personalities and events, but the same work helps us preciously to understand the war in Chechnya that took place not so long ago, at the end of the 100th century and the beginning of this century, for almost XNUMX years after Tolstoy's death.
Such reaches of literature are realized above all in a combination of two moments. History repeating itself in some form. And the highly intellectual and literary reach of the writer, whose works encompass wider time horizons. When a writer looks at the past and describes some future moment.
In a way, the time component thus becomes secondary, in any case relative, so he is right Marcel Proust, the author of the famous "Searching for Vanished Time" when he writes about the fragment of time as a "timeless" phenomenon: "memory introduces the past into the present, and precisely abolishes that great dimension of Time, according to which life is realized".
The Golden Age of Vienna
In our topic about an Austrian named Adolf who will not pass the entrance exam at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna with all the possible consequences of that, we should first recall that brilliant city and the state of mind in it at the beginning of the 20th century, especially on the eve of the First World War. It is difficult to understand Vienna without the brilliant literary works of that time, the coincidentally called "golden age of Austrian literature", more precisely, novels Robert Musil, Karl Klaus, Josef Roth, Hugo von Hofmannsthal...
The causes of the coming fall of the great Austro-Hungarian Empire are clearly recognized in them. At the same time, the vast majority does not see that accelerated end, knowing then about another imperial patient, the one on the Bosphorus.
It is the period of Vienna when the state elite is late in understanding at least two dangers. From the latent German paternalism over Austria and from the domination over the Balkan area, which easily spread its virus of chaotic instability, not only to itself, but also to its managers.
These dangers, after the shooting in Sarajevo in 1914, will lead the Austro-Hungarian Empire into uncontrolled campaigns, in any case losing, which will lead to a heavy historical defeat that will be completed a little later with the annexation of Austria by Germany.
But the fascination of life in Vienna on the eve of the First World War, a city in a state of growing decadence as a prelude to the end of an enormous power, especially cultural, and the gradual decline of the inimitable Mitteleuropa, whose decadence was also marked by the high reaches of art, especially literature.
Along with the culture in Vienna, there was a strong pluralism of ideas, of course those that were deeply opposed. Let's say conservative monarchism and revolutionary ideas. Among these others, true in the reform variant, theorists were active in Vienna at that time Otto Bauer and his Austro-Marxist school. Monarchist Vienna is the center, on the one hand, of strong clerical impulses, a fortress of Catholicism, at that moment possibly even stronger than the Vatican, while on the other hand, it is the environment of science, among other things, the birthplace of modern psychoanalysis. Its founder Sigmund Freud was forced to leave Vienna before the onslaught of Nazism.
The Zionist movement was established in Vienna, among other things, through the actions of one of its founders Theodor Herzl, a journalist from a Viennese newspaper, a Jew of Hungarian origin. Herzl's book "Judenstaat" ("State of the Jews"), in which he raises the great and dramatic theme of the establishment of the Jewish state, was written primarily in a political, but to some extent also in a literary-theatrical style. And with elements of journalism serials, in the fashion of Middle Europe and France at that time. It is a work that will soon arouse enormous interest, not only in political circles. This prompted Herzl to write the second part, also in the political-literal form of "Altneuland" ("Old New Land").
At the same time, the ideas of anti-Semitism spread in Vienna, leading to Nazism. Among the progenitors is a young Austrian Adolf Hitler. His favorite reading is each other; "The Wise Men of Zion", an anti-Semitic pamphlet, a poisonous book that spread rapidly, first in Russia and Europe, then throughout the world.
A French writer will deal with Adolf Hitler, a person of artistic ambitions in Vienna in his youth Erik-Emanuel Schmidt in the novel "Adolf H.".
(End in the next issue of ART)
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