The Burgtheater and Austrian Identity

Theatre and Cultural Politics in Vienna, 1918-38

Robert Pyrah

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351196093
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

"The collapse of the Habsburg monarchy in 1918 galvanized discussion about national identity in the new Republic of Austria. As Robert Pyrah shows in this thoroughly documented study, the complex identity politics of interwar Austria were played out in the theatres of Vienna, which enjoyed a cultural prominence rarely matched in other countries. By 1934, productions across the city were being co-opted to serve the newly patriotic cause of the Dollfuss and Schuschnigg regimes, and the Burgtheater, once known as the first German stage, had been transformed into a national theatre for Austria. Using case studies of key productions and a wealth of previously unseen archival material, Pyrah sheds new light on artistic and ideological developments throughout the period, including the neglected earlier years. He documents previously unexplored overlaps in the cultural programmes of Left and Right, and unearths evidence that key institutions were subverted by the Right well before the suspension of parliamentary rule in 1933."

Chapter 1
Heimat in Context: The Cultural Politics of Heimat in the First Republic, 1918–1934

The term ’Heimat’ stands at the centre of a moral and political discussion about ‘place, belonging and identity’ in Germany and Austria that is almost two centuries old.¹ Best known to English-speaking audiences through Edgar Reitz’s long-running film series, Heimat [home; native country or homeland] remains notoriously difficult to translate; it refers both to a literary genre dealing with local themes and concerns, often written in dialect, and a geographically ambiguous definition of identity that was exploited to support different ideological positions. Since the term Heimat concerns questions of national and regional identity, it is directly relevant to cultural policy in the First Republic, and to the wide-ranging debate about how to define and reshape Austria after 1919.

Broadly speaking, dramas written in the Heimat mode are characterized by their concern with traditional social structures, religion, family, and the role of the land; they tend to use stylized dialect forms, and focus exclusively on non-urban (usually rural or otherwise provincial) milieux. The need to support local dramatists and shore up the provinces led politicians of different political stripes to promote such plays, demonstrating the flexible appeal of Heimat as a slogan to both sides of the ‘national’ divide between Pan-Germans and Austrian patriots. This blurring of regional and national identity allowed commentators to promote the Burgtheater, summarily, as the symbol, expression, and even the guarantor of a burgeoning ‘national’ culture in Austria by the late 1920s; but the dimensions of that ‘national’ culture, and whether it was separately ‘Austrian’, or merely a local variant of a ‘Greater Germany’, were left open to interpretation. This ambiguity is related to an ambivalent, often overlapping conception of Heimat within the cultural programmes of the three main parties, which have often been overlooked on account of their highly visible ideological differences.² Some of these overlaps are explored in this chapter, which traces the Austrian discussion of Heimat out of early debates about the political and geographical balance of the new ‘rump state’ of post-Habsburg Austria. In this context, the major concern was how to reconcile the largely rural federal provinces (Länder) that were ethnically German by majority, with the outsized, cosmopolitan, former Imperial capital.

Relevant existing research dealing with the concept of Heimat³ almost completely excludes the First Austrian Republic. It comprises three sorts of study: (1) those that adopt a German perspective and neglect the Austrian context; (2) works that concentrate primarily or exclusively on the literary aspect of the term;⁴ (3) and an otherwise important work by Klaus Amann, which situates the term in the context of ideological overlaps with the Third Reich from the early 1930s.⁵ In the first category, Karlheinz Rossbacher’s sociological survey focuses on the Heimatkunst phenomenon in Germany at the turn of the last century, 6 while in the recent study Heimat: A German Dream, Boa and Palfreyman suggest that in limiting their material to Germany, Bavaria might ‘provide an Alpine note’.⁷ As such, both works are directly relevant to the period after Anschluss in 1938, but overlook the specifics of the Austrian situation in the pre-Nazi era. Similarly, an otherwise broad-ranging theoretical study by Andrea Bastian that considers literary as well as political applications of the term does so within the German context, and is only applicable to Austria where institutional overlaps become apparent from the 1930s.⁸

I have chosen to define three dimensions of Heimat in interwar Austrian politics: geographical, ethnic, and constitutional-legislative. The terms of debate are shaped by the particular circumstances of the new Republic’s birth, following the collapse of the multi-ethnic Habsburg Empire in 1918, and determine the evolution of the concept as a cultural construct. First, Heimat is a geographically ambiguous term, reflected by the difficulty of finding an English translation that covers its full range of meanings. It refers both to a more abstract sense of homeland right up to the national level, or to the ‘local place’, from a whole region such as the Tyrol, a village or even a particular piece of land at the microcosmic level.⁹ It embodies a tension between regional and ‘national’ identity, variously defined, which partly explains how it might appeal to a spectrum of political opinions and ideologies, allowing as it does the inclusion or exclusion of states such as postwar Austria, absorbing them by mythopoeic means. Secondly, the radically more homogeneous ethnic character of the new Austrian state after 1919, consisting of the westerly German-speaking territories of the former Habsburg Empire known collectively as Cisleithania, intensifies the dilemma over how to define the ‘homeland’. With the collapse of Emperor Karl’s initiative of a ‘Danubian Federation’ of the former subject states, as outlined in a ‘People’s Manifesto’ of 16 October 1918, debates about the character of the new state increasingly focused on Anschluss with Germany. 10Accordingly, the declaration of ‘democratic German-Austria’ on 12 November 1918 defined the new Republic to be a ‘Bestandteil der deutschen Republik’ [constitutive part of the German, i.e. Weimar Republic], understood in terms of ethnic and linguistic kinship with Germany.¹¹ In an essay of March 1919, Robert Musil (1880–1942) also declared himself in favour of Anschluss on the basis of the common language:

Denn die Nation ist ja weder eine mystische Einheit, noch eine ethnische, noch auch geistig wirklich eine Einheit [. . .] — wohl ist sie aber als Sprachgemeinde ein natürlicher Leistungsverband. [. . . Wenn] ein alter, nie unterbrochener Kulturzusammenhang und unmittelbare Nachbarschaft bestehn, wie zwischen Deutsch-Österreich und Deutschland, ist der staatliche Zusammenschluß einfach einer der entscheidenden Schritte auf dem Weg von dem Zustand, den wir das Staatstier nennen durften, zum Menschenstaat.¹²

[For the nation is neither a mystically nor ethnically unified entity, nor is it even really a spiritual one [. . .] — but as a linguistic community, it certainly does form a natural unit of achievement. [...If] an old, uninterrupted cultural connection and immediate physical proximity exist, as they do between Deutsch-Österreich [German-Austria] and Germany, amalgamation into a single state is simply one of the most decisive steps on the way from the condition that we may call the animal body politic to the human one.]

The ban on Anschluss in the Treaty of Saint-Germain (Article 80), signed on 12 September 1919, did not succeed in preventing a large number of political spokesmen on the Left and Right from continuing to advocate Anschluss. The cross-party consensus behind this trend is testified by the constitutional Gesetz über die Staatsform [law defining the form of state] of 21 October 1919, in which the title ‘Deutsch-Österreich’ is pointedly contrasted with the official, un-Germanized state title as decreed by the Entente powers.¹³ Thus in political terms, the notion of Heimat sits ambiguously between a sense of belonging to the German nation or people (‘Volk’) on the one hand, and to an Austrian state on the other.¹⁴ These ambiguous ‘national’ dimensions are aptly demonstrated by the use of terminology in school curricula of the period, which Heinz Wassermann has summarized as follows: ‘Wenn Volk, dann deutsches Volk, wenn Heimat, dann Österreich’ [‘If we say Volk, this means the German Volk, if Heimat, then we mean Austria’].¹⁵

Thirdly, as Edward Timms has demonstrated, the principle of ‘Heimatrecht’ [right of domicile] formed the basis for Austrian citizenship in the First Republic, a model inherited from the Habsburg monarchy and enshrined in the Treaty of Saint-Germain. According to this model, citizenship was granted to those living within the German-speaking territories of Austria administered from Vienna, but with an additional clause (within Article 80) granting citizenship to German-speaking minorities living outside the German heartland by ‘option’, provided the applicant belonged to the same ‘race’, spoke the same language as the majority and eventually took up residence in Austria.¹⁶ Timms shows that despite an increasing tendency to interpret ‘Heimatrecht’ in racial terms in the 1920s, the term nevertheless embodied an alternative to the more nationalistic model of citizenship defined by (non-) membership of a specific racial and ethnic group, and remained the principle of Austrian citizenship until after the Anschluss. For our purposes, this means that the constitution provided scope for the redfinition of the Heimat along purely ‘Austrian’ lines after 1918, first of all as a state, and therefore potentially as a nation, in terms which supersede the purely racial and ethnic definitions of nationhood that prevailed in the wake of the First World War, and which had hastened the collapse of the Habsburg monarchy.

The literary label Heimat similarly covers a wide spectrum of ideological positions. Heimat writing represents a conservative pattern of response to the modern world from a provincial (often rural) perspective, the changes wrought by industrialization in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and questions of regional and national identity. The form is most commonly encountered in dialect poetry and the novel, in which its overwhelming popularity across all social and political groupings is reflected by sales figures and by borrowing statistics from Workers’ Libraries in Vienna established by the Social Democrats.¹⁷ The main Austrian representatives of this rather broadly defined category include among the dialect poets the Styrian Michael Hainisch (1858–1940), who served as President of Austria between 1920 and 1928, and the novelists Peter Rosegger (1843–1918), Maria Grengg (1889–1963), Karl Heinrich Waggerl (1897–1973), and Rudolf Hans Bartsch (1873–1952).¹⁸ Rosegger in particular represented the form in a conservative political incarnation, and was the first to call for a reorientation of the cultural agenda away from a perceived metropolitan bias in his piece ‘Die Entdeckung der Provinz’ [Discovering the Provinces], published in 1899 in the liberal weekly edited by Hermann Bahr, Die Zeit.¹⁹ The socially critical aspects of Heimat writing, which display affinities with Naturalism in the close observation of locale and behaviour,²⁰ made it appealing (or at least acceptable) to Socialists, who consequently promoted writers in the Heimat mode as social critics and favoured the form over German bourgeois realism,²¹ albeit in ways which often conveniently overlooked the more reactionary aspects.²²

Notoriously, the celebration of regional cultural forms also encompasses a specifically right-wing, völkisch [ethno-nationalist] strand, which was adopted both by the Austrian Corporate State from 1934 and by the National Socialist regime in service of their respec...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Heimat in Context: The Cultural Politics of Heimat in the First Republic, 1918-1934
• 2 Heimat on Stage: Karl Schönherr, a Dramatist for all Regimes, 1918-1939
• 3 Expressionism: A Case Study, 1920s
• 4 Catholicism: A Benchmark for 'Austrian' Culture, 1918—1930
• 5 Neo-Historicism and the Rise of the Right: Representations of Austrian History on the Viennese Stage, 1929-1933
• 6 Theatre as Tribunal: Authoritarian Rule and the 'Austrian' Ideology, 1934-1938
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index