Versuch gegen Heimito von Doderer

Reviewed by: Versuch gegen Heimito von Doderer: Über “Ordnungspein” und Faschismus by Stefan Winterstein Vincent Kling Stefan Winterstein, Versuch gegen Heimito von Doderer: Über “Ordnungspein” und Faschismus. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2014. 224 pp. Some of the most astute critical studies arise from seemingly incidental observations that take a central place when examined more closely. Winterstein’s key principle originates with a comment by Doderer made many years ago to Dietrich Weber: “Könnte mein Buch [Die Dämonen] überhaupt thematisch benannt werden [ . . . ] dann hieße es vielleicht Die Ordnung” (qtd. in [End Page 118] Winterstein 19, under “Ziel dieser Arbeit”), an observation borne out by examples like Jan Hetzka’s “Genauigkeit, Peinlichkeit und Vorsicht” (Die Dämonen), Amtsrat Zihal’s entrapment in “totalen Ordnungspein” (Die erleuchteten Fenster), and Kajetan von Schlaggenberg’s extreme fanatiscism for order (again Die Dämonen). Doderer’s observation “harrt [ . . . ] bis heute einer grundlegenden Untersuchung” (19), a need Winterstein now meets by this exceptionally well researched and clearly writ en study. An essential element of Winterstein’s process, however, reflected at once in the title, is to deny Doderer himself the central function of setting the critical agenda by subjecting the author’s own statements to critical scrutiny. Not to work against Doderer in the sense he means would entail for Winterstein “einmal mehr die Doderer-Exegese blind von ästhetischen Programmaussagen des Autors abhängig zu machen und interpretativ den vom Schriftsteller abgesteckten Horizont nicht zu verlassen” (186, n. 499). Winterstein’s thesis opens to view the extent to which Doderer’s life and art converge on the effort to create and uphold total order. Indeed, the reader would be well advised to turn right away to the long note 381 (143–44), which, in the course of a brilliantly close reading of the essay “Sexualität und totaler Staat” (121–50), traces the many meanings of the word field around “total” in Doderer’s work. Winterstein shows how seemingly outlying phenomena actually occupy the same center. The drawing boards on which Doderer minutely plotted his novels; his elaborate letters in five or six colors of ink; his devotion to Thomas Aquinas’s universal (“total”) and extremely regimented vision of reality; his tendency to be guided by authoritative father figures and cultural leaders (105)—all these at est to his own “Ordnungspein.” The characters mentioned above (Herzka, Zihal, Schlaggenberg) combine with René to trace a series of figures based on the author’s own personal dynamics; Winterstein in a “Methodische Zwischenbemerkung” (69–73) amply justifies the conflation of author with characters by citing the many testimonies from firsthand observers to Doderer’s own manic circumstantiality and pedantry. And this judicious examination of the life and the art in reciprocity comes fully into its own in the very illuminating chapter titled “Ordnungsmächte im Leben eines Schriftstellers: Nationalsozialismus, Kirche, Thomas von Aquin” (97–120). However unimaginably divergent from one another, it becomes obvious by the naming in order that the Catholic Church did indeed—by and [End Page 119] large—endorse National Socialism as a compatible parallel vision of order and that the Church in turn had fashioned a universal system of theology from Aquinas. Earlier, in his second chapter (“Eine Verdächtigung” 53–76), Winterstein traces the history of pedantry—the fundamental culprit—as a psychic malady enabled by literate societies. Pedantry is a form of overcompensation that leads to divorcement from the contingencies of life in favor of rigid schematics. The narrator of “Divertimento No VII: Die Posaunen von Jericho,” reflects some of Doderer’s own struggles when he speaks of a “schon bis zum Übel entwickelte[n] Pedanterie” (Doderer, Erzählungen 179) that had hobbled his art and paralyzed his emotional life. It is characteristic of Winterstein’s astute insight that his insight can cause an apparently passing detail like that to take on immanently thematic meaning and compel a more sensitive rereading. And if at first glance National Socialism and Thomism would appear categorically different, it is precisely in the category of all-embracing order that they are alike, as Winterstein shows. Similarly, it is hard to see what could unite the hapless, bemused Julius Zihal (Die erleuchteten Fenster), Adolf Eichmann

Art · Art history · Humanities · Political science · Writ · German History and Society · German Literature and Culture Studies · Law · Literature and Cultural Memory · Philosophy