The Control Centre Hans Weigel

The critic and author Hans Weigel (19081991) was a control centre in the literary life of Austria after 1945., He is accredited with a huge impact on culture and politics and on discovering and promoting young authors is accredited to him. Thise research project wants intends to close the gap of a lacking examination of Weigel`s position, impact and networks. The project promises essential insights about the functionality of literary life in the scientifically still dusky post-war period, which has been given too little scholarly attention, as well as about processes of canonisation. The project furthermore wants to differentiate the conventional dichotomisation of traditional and avantgarde literature in this era. Two constitutional elements of Austrian post-war society, where a lot ofmany scholarly desiderata are statednoted, will be illuminated: remigration and anticommunism. Weigel`s return from his Swiss exile to Austria in 1945 was, in his own words, a storybook remigration. Analyzing the processes of this rapid and successful integration will be one of the project`s focal points an analysis based on Bourdieu`s terms of power, capital, habitus and assimilation. Between 1952 and 1963 there were no performances of plays by Bert Brecht on Vienna`s main stages, and Hans Weigel is attributed regarded as having made an important contribution to this so called Brecht-boycott. The project wants to specify Weigel`s partrole, clarify the functionality of this `boycott` and trace the development, the motivations and manifestations of his anticommunism. Though Weigel presented himself as a lone warrior against communism (and a lotmany of his contemporaries saw him in this role),: aAnticommunism was a social consensus and is a suppressed "basic constituent of Austria`s relatively stable postwar society" (Oliver Rathkolb). The suggested research project will operate with Bordieu`s analysis of fields and networks and will create a synthesis of methods from cultural science studies and philology, as the theory of biography proposes. The project`s outcome is the missing synopsis of the functionalities of the literary field in Austria`s post-war period. Tthis synopsis will result in a published monograph.

The critic and writer Hans Weigel (19081991) was a crucial control centre in the literary life of Austria after 1945. He is accredited with a huge impact on culture and politics as well as the discovery and promotion of other authors. This research project contributed substantially to filling the gaps in the scholarly examination of Weigels position, impact and networks. Central to this research was the question of the preconditions and functionality of Weigels successful and rapid remigration and reintegration after his exile in Switzerland. The most import results of this project can be viewed on the web site (www.hans-weigel.at), though the three book-?length publications should be especially emphasized: an anthology of essays I edited on Weigels life and work (2014); a volume with contributions on remigration (2017), and the monograph on Weigels networks (2016). Important catalysts for the work and its results arose from the research on networks. On the one hand, it was shown that Weigel maintained contact with the cultural scene in the Third Reich through intermediaries, which facilitated his Bilderbuch-Rückkehr (storybook homecoming; Weigel). On the other hand, the diffuse perspective of the project steered the focus away from the traditional concentration on the men and especially the women who aided Weigels integration into the cultural sphere of postwar Vienna. Thus it could be proven that at no point did Weigel carry out the editing of the yearbook Stimmen der Gegenwart (Voices of the Present; 19511954)which is always mentioned in literary histories as his most important promotional activityby himself, but that he worked with an editorial collective (which, however, was not named). The most important source and the foundation for this research was the large collection of Weigels posthumous papers in the Vienna Library, including his comprehensive correspondence. In the course of the project, numerous national and international archives (in Zurich, Marbach, Munich, Innsbruck, and elsewhere) were visited, and materials were also requested from libraries in the United States.