Intercultural Reciprocy between Paris and Vienna

It is the objective of this research study to analyze the intercultural reciprocity between Paris and Vienna during the years 1890 to 1930. We know about numerous personal contacts between writers, artists, musicians and journalists who lived in these two capitals of modernity. This suggests a closer look at the thesis - generally accepted within the literary studies - that the transfer was one-sided going from Paris to Vienna. The objective here, however, is to come to a more differentiated interpretation of the literary-cultural networks and how they present themselves on a textual level. Contributions in literary papers and journals published in Paris and Vienna between 1890 and 1930, references in correspondence and diaries by writers and journalists, but also theater programs, literary texts and their translations are important sources for this study. These publications permit an analysis of the reciprocal takeovers, how they proceeded and became apparent on a contextual level. The important question is when and how which authors and new publications were noticed in the respective city, which texts were reviewed and translated, and which plays were shown where. Furthermore, we must look at the way these processes of intercultural transfer played out and who the people were who took part in them as mediators and to what extent they did so. An analysis of selected literary case studies will show how these transfers have affected literary texts and what changes in content and form they have effected. As regards methodology and theory, the planned research study does not only turn to approaches such as reception theory, intertextual theory or findings from the research of stereotypes but it includes current cultural studies approaches such as the analysis of cultural transfers as it has been developed within the French German studies (Espagne, Werner) during the second half of the 1980`s and is increasingly being acknowledged in the German- speaking countries.