Wolfgang Bauer

Reviewed by: Wolfgang Bauer: Werk, Leben, Nachlass, Wirkung by Thomas Antonic Robert Dassanowsky Thomas Antonic, Wolfgang Bauer: Werk, Leben, Nachlass, Wirkung. Klagenfurt: Ritter Verlag, 2018. 605 pp. Austria's experience of the 1960s is oft en indicated by a youth-based counterculture that never managed to take on what was a self-consciously traditionalist, identity-anxious nation. Moreover, the truly radical performance art of the Viennese Actionists alienated onlookers to the point of inhibiting other new wave artistic expression and popular reception as emerged elsewhere in Western Europe and the Americas. Nevertheless, the work of Austrian playwright, poet, author, journalist, and screenwriter Wolfgang Bauer (1941– 2005), the subject of a critical magnum opus by Austrian literary critic, author, and musician Thomas Antonic may well be one of the few world-class exceptions to this era and beyond. Bauer was born in Graz, as a close relation of Catholic Styrian Heimatdichter Peter Rosegger (1843–1918), and as Antonic clearly puts it, it was "mehr als skurril dass Bauer den [1970] Rosegger-Preis verliehen bekam" (22), at the height of his early fame based on his anti-traditionalist, provocatively critical, and absurdist theater works of the late 1960s such as Party for Six (1964), Magic Afternoon (1967), and Change (1968). Perhaps receiving the Franz-Theodor-Csokor-Preis that same year, which was named aft er the Austrian expressionist writer, anti-NS activist and exile, and postwar president of the Austrian PEN-Club, proved to be a conflict of ideals that ensured Bauer's fame in the tradition of great Austrian art/ist scandals. According to Antonic's meticulous research and erudite approach to the complex life and times of Bauer, he might well have been one of the few Austrian personas of the 1960s [End Page 113] and 1970s other than the Actionists that can be compared to the era's more globally known Austrian artistic iconoclasts. Today, Bauer's theater works are praised by Elfriede Jelinek, whose own work is obviously influenced by him; she also considers Bauer to have been, beyond Handke and Bernhard, the most important dramatist in mid-to late twentieth-century modern Austrian theater. His early fame leveled off slowly following the 1970s due to being labeled a revolutionary artist and an avant-gardist, which Marlene Streeruwitz considers a problem of literary criticism: "So wird einer zu einem Frühverbrannten gemacht" (12). Perhaps more dangerous to his star status than his annihilation of bourgeois norms in his works, which suggest the 1960s improvisational "Happening" without the excesses of the Actionists, is his own unwillingness to be considered a representative of any particular movement or style. Other truly important Austrian authors have suffered critical apathy as an eventual result of such self-conscious sovereignty: Alexander Lernet-Holenia, Jura Soyfer, Leo Perutz, Albert Drach, and even Ödön von Horvath, with whom Bauer is oft en compared. Among the more intriguing chapters in Antonic's remarkable presentation of Bauer is the international phase of the author's life following the early stage success and his eventual move into film and television, where his participation has yet to be acknowledged by media studies. Antonic manages an illuminating exposé of Bauer's relationship with these media and how they might have influenced his playwriting from the start. While the plan to film Magic Afternoon in 1970 with Viennese director Wolfgang Glück at the helm would have certainly charged the embryonic attempts at creating an Austrian new wave, it was relegated to a television treatment and only achieved cinematic status in the United States in 2000 as The Young Unknowns. Underscoring the strong metatextual aspects of Bauer's work, the original Austrian televised play encouraged his experimentation in television and the result was the controversial ORF presentation of Die Edeggerfamilie, his sharp satirical take on the traditional family series, written and directed by Bauer in 1972. The influence of the piece "das sich abermals einer konventionellen Form bedient und die für sie kennzeichnenden Inhalte persifliert, überhöht und verfremdet und dabei 'ganze Vernichtungsarbeit' leistet" (228) is obvious in later television landmarks as the final surrealist seasons of the longrunning and popular Austrian detective tragicomedy Kottan Ermittelt (1976–1983) and in

Art · Art history · Club · Counterculture · Literature · Magnum opus · Arts, Culture, and Music Studies · Eastern European Communism and Reforms