The book on Vienna is the forth volume of a comprehensive series that presents all provinces
of Austria during the period under consideration, the country was subdivided into seven
German Reich Districts in the form of a blanket coverage survey of the manual type. By
analogy to the previously published volumes on Styria (2008), Carinthia (2011) and Upper
Austria (2014), it is the first time-limited literature dictionary of a province, understood as a
regional literary subsystem described in terms of the interaction of authors and literary
institutions. Accordingly, its institutions (organization chart of culture, promotion and
censorship, literary associations, theatre, radio, publishing houses, periodicals and
anthologies) and its authors are shown as interlinked players in the style of a manual. As
National Socialism was a dictatorship and as the centres of power were outside the region,
this account goes beyond the bounds of their relative autonomy by describing interactions,
interventions by and dependencies from the centres. Therefore, the book can be regarded as
an attempt to create an empirical and analytical basis for the portrayal of the Field of
Literature in the sense of Pierre Bourdieu.
Methodologically, the aim is to provide a complete overview in that the process does not
resort to a restricting, judgemental reliance on canonisations, thus avoiding the risk of a
preferential treatment of certain subfactors (e.g. of the most important institutions and
personalities, of the selective perception of groups of texts such as the so-called high literature
and light fiction, childrens and youth literature, popular science publications, of propaganda
literature, esoteric, occult and religious works, of so-called folk literature etc.). Due to the
density of the information based on the wide range of source materials (materials from the
archives and printed matter) it is possible to substitute formal criteria for qualitative criteria.
In order to lay bare continuities and fracture lines, special consideration is given to the
dynamism of historical caesuras in case of biographies, for instance, both what went before
and what happened after are partially included. Of significance are the inclusion of the
denazification files and the prohibition lists after 1945 as well as the literature awards and
distinctions, which illustrate the integration of a writer in the various systems, from the
Monarchy to the post-World War Two republic, in Germany and Austria.