July 15, 2021
Evocative novel of manners set in the 1920s Vienna of the shattered Habsburg Empire, originally published in 1951 and now translated into English for the first time. "Much is now past and gone, to our dismay / And beauty shows the frailest power to stay." So writes von Doderer in a poem that opens his sprawling novel--and that adorns the actual Strudlhof Steps, as central to Vienna as the Spanish Steps are to Rome. The protagonist is a former lieutenant named Melzer who might have been happier being a brewer--nomen est omen, writes von Doderer, the name is a sign, Melz being German for malt--than as a soldier tucked away in the Balkans. Returning to Vienna, Melzer falls into a circle of shattered souls: From the first sentence, we know that one woman is going to walk into a streetcar and lose one of her legs. Others chase after chimerical affairs, still others die by suicide. Melzer becomes increasingly entranced by those belle epoque steps, walking them, sitting at their feet, a passive observer of his own life. Von Doderer's novel is both neurasthenic and darkly humorous, with some fine philosophical passages: "So it is that the organic fluidity of our physical existence will always detour around schemes hatched by every conclusive, now-and-forever organizer or visionary, implementation-to-the-last-detail politico, whose ambitions would long since...have brought the world to a standstill." He is foreshadowing the rise of a different politics, one that, though only hinted at, will find Melzer on the Russian front in another couple of decades. Von Doderer himself was a member of the Nazi Party, and while he became disillusioned while serving in the Wehrmacht, there are a few uncomfortable passages that reveal a sometimes-disapproving fascination with the many non-German peoples who inhabited Vienna: the Romanians and Bulgarians with "their fondness for always living in the choicest residential neighborhoods," for instance. Still, von Doderer ably captures a lost world in a book that belongs alongside the works of Stefan Zweig and Karl Kraus. A swirl of complicated characters and plot turns makes this a rewarding if sometimes demanding read.
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