Doderer, Heimito von (Weidlingau nr. Vienna, 1896-1966, Vienna), served as a reserve officer in an Austrian dragoon regiment, was captured by the Russians in 1916 and repatriated in 1920. His interest in Dostoevsky dates from these years. He studied history at Vienna University, obtaining a doctorate in 1925. Two years previously he had published his first book, the collection of poems Gassen und Landschaft (1923), and a short narrative, Die Bresche, followed a year later. A pronounced individualist, he was a member of no literary circle in Vienna, though he maintained a close friendship with A. P. Gütersloh, whose sixtieth birthday he commemorated with the pseudonymous essay Von der Unschuld des Indirekten by ‘René von Stangeler’ (1947).
The novel Das Geheimnis des Reichs (1930) is based on his Siberian experiences. In 1931 he began the novel Die Dämonen, which was to occupy him on and off for twenty-five years. The novel Ein Mord, den jeder begeht (1938) unravels an unexplained murder in which the ‘detective’ proves to be the ‘criminal’. This psychological thriller was followed in 1940 by the novel Der Umweg, set in the period following the Thirty Years War (see Dreissigjähriger Krieg); its hero, Corporal Brandter, rescued from hanging, comes by a circuitous route to be hanged precisely through the circumstances which earlier had saved him from this fate. Neither of these novels, nor a third, Die erleuchteten Fenster oder Die Menschwerdung des Amtsrates Julius Zihal (1950), attracted serious attention, though this last already shows mastery in the detailed portrayal of the Viennese scene.
Die Strudlhofstiege (1951), forming a prelude to Die Dämonen, had an immediate impact, and Doderer was recognized almost overnight as an important novelist of the mid-century. The presentation of an age and locality in an immense and diverse web of intersecting and parallel lines characterizes also the ‘chronicle’ novel Die Dämonen, finally completed and published in 1956. Die Strudlhofstiege portrays pre-war (1910-11) and post-war (1923-5) Vienna; Die Dämonen presents in extraordinary completeness and complexity the immediately following years (1926-7). For this novel, his first work following his return to Vienna in 1946 after having been called up as an officer during the war, Doderer was awarded the Großer Österreichischer Staatspreis.
In 1959 he published a work on the novel, Grundlagen und Funktion des Romans. In this witty and penetrating three-part essay of some 50 pages he disposes of much theoretical lumber and many learned accretions, and asserts the novelist's task to be one, not of subjective self-indulgence (‘fishing in his own well’, as he puts it with reference to James Joyce) but of the application of technique, using language both as creative material and as an instrument to achieve a true universality which excludes ‘was alles man heute—nicht zu wissen braucht, um universal zu sein!’. This technique he develops by using material composed of many independent strands, which by their intertwining contribute to re-create a ‘lost’, because forgotten, reality.
Die Merowinger oder die totale Familie (1962) is an imaginative and coruscating fantasy, in which the Freiherr Childerich von Bartenbruch marries his own mother and grandmother, and so realizes his ideal of the total family, or ‘la famille c'est moi!’. In this amusing and ambitious piece of persiflage Doderer may be said to mock, without discrediting, his own method and at the same time to direct his satire upon the age. In 1963 appeared Die Wasserfälle von Slunj, the first novel of a tetralogy bearing the neutral collective title Roman Nr. 7. The second volume, Der Grenzwald, remained unfinished and was published posthumously in 1967. These two works constitute a monumental fragment, representing Doderer's attempt to achieve the ‘Totaler Roman’ or ‘Universalroman’ for the period 1880 to 1960. In 1966 appeared a volume of minor prose, Unter schwarzen Sternen, which includes Das letzte Abenteuer (1953) and Die Posaunen von Jericho (1958). The collected stories, including some previously unpublished, appeared posthumously as Die Erzählungen (1973). The volume Frühe Prosa, containing
Doderer's fluent, precise, and often witty prose exhibits a mastery over words which permits fine gradations of irony, innuendo, and understatement; and he possessed the power to organize a stratified yet organically unified novel. He epitomized his own artistic approach in the words facta loquuntur (‘deeds speak’).
The Oxford Companion to German Literature. Copyright © 1976, 1986, 1997, 2005 by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.
