TraumLeben

Reviewed by: TraumLeben: Traumpoetiken der Wiener Moderne by Irma Duraković Vincent Kling Irma Duraković, TraumLeben: Traumpoetiken der Wiener Moderne. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2023. 236 pp. The title of Irma Duraković's TraumLeben may mislead, because it seems to promise a full range of discussion about Traumpoetiken around 1900, implying a comprehensive latitudinal study. The book confines itself to three [End Page 113] writers, however, and figures one might expect, like Arthur Schnitzler, receive discussion only in passing. The author explains her decision by noting (13) how exhaustively Schnitzler has been treated elsewhere by comparison with the authors she focuses on here—Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Richard Beer-Hofmann, and, less predictably, Marie Eugenie delle Grazie. The latter was hailed in her day as equal in craft and vision to Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach (158–59) but is now remembered only through what the author diplomatically calls "die äußerst überschaubare Forschungsliteratur" (162) about her. After 1912, delle Grazie experienced a distinct turn toward Catholicism, which had unwanted consequences: "Durch die Hinwendung zum Katholizismus verliert sie nicht nur ihren Hausverlag [. . .] sondern 'auch die Zustimmung der liberalen Presse und der Literaturgeschichte'" (164–65). We will return to this point, which is relevant indeed to the matter of dreams and their manifestation in literature, but only in a tangential way. After an orienting introduction (7–13), Duraković provides a chapter on "Traumdiskurs in Theorie und Literatur" (14–42), partly a literature review of the kind that is obligatory in dissertations but here is far less predictable because of its comprehensive scope. Besides the usual "Forschungsstand" (14–26), there are provocative discussions of "Das Phänomen des Traums in der Traumforschung und Ästhetik in der zweiten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts" and "Das literarische und psychoanalytische Traumverstehen" (27–42). What emerges strongly is the consistency with which dreams have occupied literary and psychological thinking for centuries; it is not as if Freud had suddenly turned to the topic in isolation, and the author's opening shows how interest in the topic has remained in the forefront; see especially 19–27, but the discussion of Jean Paul and Friedrich Theodor Vischer (18) as prefiguring the early twentieth century is vital. Duraković takes sides right at the beginning of her section of Hofmannsthal (43–120) in the perennial debate over whether he was escaping life through aestheticism (Karl Kraus) or confronting it through mimesis (Richard Alewyn). She writes, "Das Leben, so das Credo Hofmannsthals, soll, auch wenn es unschön ist, gelebt und nicht angeschaut werden" (43), and, like Michael Hamburger, she refers to the actions of Claudio in Der Tod des Tizian (44) as the start of a lifelong concern by Hofmannsthal to use art as a way of living life fully, despite its disappointments and pain. Accordingly, dreams are not an avoidance but a reenactment, a more intense fulfillment. "Gerade den Kult des 'Artifiziellen' [. . .] wird Hofmannsthal als Gefahr [End Page 114] erkennen und ihn ablehnen" (50). Dreaming does not, of course, refer to simply what happens when we are fully asleep; it is a phenomenon with many subtle gradations and a feature of our waking state as well; see "Tagtraum und dichterische Phantasie," 56–68. The concept of the deed, of action, has long occupied Hofmannsthal's critics (51), and it is a key to Duraković's analysis as well. While she ranges across almost the full corpus of the author's work, her main concern is with Das Märchen der 672. Nacht and Soldatengeschichte as well as with Hofmannsthal's many essays and other comments on the subject. By contrast, the author confines herself mainly to one work by Beer-Hofmann, "Traum und Erinnerung in Richard Beer-Hofmanns Der Tod Georgs" (121–57). The tale is often labeled "impressionistic," as if that word said it all, but there is more. "Da in die Wahrnehmung des Helden ebenfalls Erinnerungs- und Traumbilder einfließen, stellt sich die Frage, inwieweit die Erzählung ausschließlich als eine impressionistische zu lesen ist" (12). Beer-Hofmann stands "noch heute in der Forschung der literarischen Wiener Moderne außerhalb des Rampenlichts" largely because—a parallel to delle Grazie—his late work made a turn toward Jewish concerns

German Literature and Culture Studies · Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and Hegel · Philosophy · Philosophy and Historical Thought