Salvaged Depth. The Other Modernism in Austrian Literature

The German-studies research project Salvaged Depth: The Other Modernism in Austrian Literature 19301960 follows up on more recent studies about the relationship of National Socialism and modernism. Revised premises led to a realization that the former had modern traits, whereas the latter began to be investigated for antimodern and totalitarian potentials. One question this entailed was whether the decades from 1925/30 to 1955/60 involved any masked continuities and whether a different literary modernism may have existed and fallen into oblivion. This field of discussion is precisely where the project comes in, shifting the focus onto a literary endeavor that is politically explosive but has never been explored. Five renowned Austrian writers are analyzed: Hermann Broch, George Saiko, Heimito von Doderer, Alexander Lernet-Holenia, and Hans Lebert. Between 1930 and 1960, all five of these were striving to recode depth with a view to salvaging depth for modernity, working hard toward a modernism that runs deeper by being more real. In this effort, they confronted the Nazi stratagems of exploiting depth (blood, soil, `racial fate`), but, in an esthetically and politically high-risk undertaking, they also resorted to anti- and premodern techniques. The explosive nature of their endeavor becomes clear from the fact that renowned German sociologists, philosophers, and cultural analysts like Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer, and Theodor W. Adorno, during the same time, also pursue a quest for a modern salvaging of deptha quest for depth turned inside out. This disclosure of a previously unexplored relationship sheds a new light on the Austrian literature of the time. The project has three goals: (1) to reconstruct, along the histories of their oeuvres, the significantly different paths taken by the five Austrian writers toward a modern esthetics of depth; (2) to make these writers recognizable, by comprehensively reevaluating their oeuvres and their international relevance and topicality, as a coherent group within the literary history of Austria and to identify their position within the context of international literary modernism; as well as (3) to fit this Austrian literature of salvaged depth into a cultural history of depth, which is based on the assumption that, around 1800, a radical change took place: the invention of the modern individual and the modern nation. This change brought in its wake debates of strong social impact about the relationship between superficiality and depth, or between authenticity and artificiality, which were exploited in the early 20th century and prepared the ground for the success of fascist movements throughout Europe. Depth, by oscillating between safe foundation and dangerous abyss, between shelter and peril, has been one of the strongest metaphors in cultural history and political discourse (fundamentalism/ nationalism). The results of this project are expected to hone our perspective on current desires for depth and Eigentlichkeitand on ways to respond, as these Austrian writers were trying to provide a successful response to these desires.