A Slight Case of Elephantiasis
The Demons. By Heimito von Doderer. Trans- lated by Richard and Clara Winston. (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 63s.) THIS massive novel (more than 1,300 pages of it) certainly is a book of some importance. Not be- cause of its quality as a novel perhaps, but because of its significance as a symptom of the times, the cultural situation in the German-speak- ing world in particular. For The Demons, which first appeared in German six years ago, has, in some quarters, been hailed as a masterpiece. Moreover, in spite of its bulk and price, it became a bestseller in German. Does the book justify its reputation?
The author's pretension is as formidable as the book's bulk. Die Daemonen is the title by which Dostoievsky's The Possessed is known in Ger- many. The parallel is thus boldly invited and in its construction The Demons shows a very deep- going correspondence with Dostoievsky's great novel: one could write a thesis on which char- acter matches which character, what passage corresponds to what passage in either book. And as Dostoievsky tried to concentrate his diagnosis of the sickness of his time in one violent incident, so does Heimito von Doderer.
The event in question is the burning by demon- strators of the Ministry of Justice in Vienna on July 15, 1927. Some months earlier a number of Socialists had been murdered in a political clash in the easternmost part of Austria. the Burgen- land. The court acquitted the right-wing extrem- ists charged with the killings. In reply the Social Democrats in Vienna called a general strike; vast crowds marched to the Ministry of Justice to demonstrate their indignation. They penetrated into the building and set fire to piles of papers. The police were called out to establish order and as a result about one hundred people were killed. (If a reviewer may be allowed to introduce a per- sonal note : I happened to be an eyewitness of these events. I was nine years old. My mother was out of town; and my father, who worked for a newspaper, took me along when he was called out to cover what he thought was a minor fire : I remember the water spouting from the fire hoses, cut by the demonstrators who wanted the Ministry to burn; and the wild cry of panic with which the crowd fled as the bullets tore info it; the sudden change from boldness and impudence to abject fear, from defiant violence to cringing cowardice in a mass of thousands was an un- forgettable object-lesson in human nature.)
I agree with Heimito von Doderer that these events were more important than they seemed at the time; they were a foretaste of violence to come, a symptom of the break-up of a civilisation. And if, as I believe, Austria, and Vienna in par- ticular. can be regarded as the political and cul- tural focus, the breeding ground, of so much that is decisive in our times- -from the origins of the First World War to Freud, Kafka, Wittgenstein— and to anti-Semitism and Hider—then this single event can be said to have carried an immense concentration of significance; it becomes the focal point from which the forces of our lives and times radiate.
If, therefore, a novelist could succeed in en- compassing the motivations, the background, the origins of that one event in a single panoramic novel, he might feel justified in claiming to stand beside Dostoievsky, who did just that with The Possessed for his own time. I regret to say, how- ever, that I don't think Herr von Doderer has succeeded. Quite the contrary: if anything, he
has obscured rather than laid bare the true moti- vations of our epoch.
The Demons tells the story of a large number of people in the Vienna of that time; the trouble however is that, in glaring contrast to Dostoievsky's novel, there is very little connection between the central characters and the climactic event at the centre of the book. One of the chief characters is an historian who unearths a fifteenth-century manuscript dealing with the sadistic tortures inflicted on suspected witches at that period and holds forth on the parallels be- tween those practices and twentieth-century ideo- logies of violence. The heroine is an innocent girl cheated of her inheritance by a wicked financier of uncertain, but probably Jewish, origins, and one or two marginal figures get killed in the riot. Apart from that there is no organic link between the characters and the central event. As a result the reader is left with a largely spurious impres- sion of having been given a deep insight into the roots of the troubles of our time somehow, he will think, it was all due to primeval demons in human nature which erupt in violence from time to time. And this, it seems to me, explains the great success of the book in Germany and Austria; it shows to the comfortable, well-to-do present-day beneficiary of the Wirtschaftswunder that the past which still at times troubles his good digestion was not really due to Hitler or to his own support of the Nazis; no, the origins of all that violence can here be seen traced back to Vienna, years before Hitler was a serious prob- lem. And at that time the real culprits were not Nazis but Viennese Social Democrats and Hun- garian extremists; and even they, after all, were only giving vent to primeval demons in human nature, those sadistic impulses that pursue us all and were prevalent in other epochs as well . . . what comfortable half-truths!
Apart from its pretensions to analyse the times The Demons is an exceedingly cleverly plotted novel of a very pleasant traditional type a Vic- torian three-decker which is basically about the high-born heroine, cheated of her inheritance, growing up unaware of her noble origins, who finally, with the help of a dear old family friend, recovers her domains and marries an equally noble young man—after her rascally lover has been conveniently killed in the riots. But here again the trouble is that the philosophical and literary pretensions in which this clever and amusing story is wrapped up lead to an inflation of the style which is trying even in the original German, but becomes exceedingly irritating in a translation into American which combines ex- treme literalness with a high degree of inaccur- acy. Apart from Dostoievsky, Thomas Mann (who really did give a diagnosis of the sickness of his time in Doctor Faustus) and Robert Musil (who really wrote the great novel on Austria as the paradigm of the twentieth century) have served as models to Herr von Doderer-- with the unfortunate result that the Victorian three-decker story is interlarded with philosophical digres- sions, Thomas Mann-like ironies and. Musilian epigrams.
Again -- these also are factors which may ex- plain the great success of the book in Germany. After a good meal and a fat cigar, a fat book with solid philosophical pretensions which is yet easy to take in must be a great comfort to the present- day German who can afford to spend thirty-eight D-marks on a book of 1,300 pages. So, in fact, The Demons is not so much the poor man's Dostoievsky or Thomas Mann as, rather, the nouveau riche's Robert Musil.
MARTIN ESSLIN
Previous page
