Viennese Modernism and No End

Viennese Modernism and No EndThe Year in Austria Wilhelm Hemecker (bio) and David Österle (bio) Biographical writing is often stimulated by memorial years for prominent figures, or for the milestone anniversaries of institutions and cultural events—the successes and receptions of which are in turn closely linked to the work of these significant, sometimes controversial cultural figures. Such motivations lie behind Sibylle Zehle's biography of Max Reinhardt, who along with Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Richard Strauss was one of the founding fathers of the Salzburg Festival (Salzburger Festspiele). Marking its 100th anniversary in 2020, the Salzburg Festival was originally founded as a counterpart to Richard Wagner's Bayreuth Festival. With Hofmannsthal's Jedermann as its trademark and with almost 250,000 annual visitors, it has developed into a high-culture highlight of the summer festival season in Europe. The lavishly illustrated volume Max Reinhardt: Ein Leben als Festspiel—which is already available in English and retails for an impressive 50 Euros—is just as much intended for a well-to-do festival-going audience as it is for the more modest theater aficionado. Indeed, one could argue the book is as lavish as Reinhardt's life was. He worked his way from simple bank apprentice to small-time actor, and on to become one of the most influential theater directors of his time, known for his sensory lighting experiments and gigantic open-plan stages. As an entrepreneur, he eventually built a veritable theater empire between Vienna, Berlin, and Salzburg. Despite ultimately failing in his ambitions to succeed in Hollywood, his life until 1933 was a true success story. However, with the beginning of the National Socialist terror, Reinhardt fled into exile in the US. Sibylle Zehle though, an experienced journalist, uncovers the contradictions of Reinhart's character and draws out the fault lines of his career, smartly undermining the teleological model of his life's successes. Some passages of the book, however, clearly illustrate how difficult it can be for biographers to tackle a member of high society while keeping their distance from sensationalized celebrity reporting with regards to style and content. The enthusiasm of the author to imagine Max Reinhardt at home in Schloss Leopoldskron in Salzburg, which he acquired in [End Page 20] 1918 and lived in until forced exile, at the side of Winston Churchill, Cole Porter, William Somerset Maugham, or Eleanor Roosevelt, raises the question of sales-stimulating mythmaking, which is generally closely linked to biographical practice. This is all more so the case as the magnificent illustrations in biographies, regardless of the epistemological value they add, often bolster the iconic status of biographical subjects. Reinhardt is not the only artist of Viennese modernism that was brought back into public discourse in 2020. Germanist Jens Malte Fischer dedicates a knowledgeable and context-rich biography to one of Reinhardt's continuous critics, Karl Kraus, in Karl Kraus: Der Widersprecher. Fischer succeeds in drawing attention to this exceptional Viennese satirist's painfully topical diagnoses of this time. With his satirical magazine Die Fackel, published from 1899 to 1936 and almost entirely filled with his own work, Kraus was a contentious lateral thinker and the most important champion against inflammatory journalism and the general neglect of language. The best-selling German-Austrian author Daniel Kehlmann describes Jens Malte Fischer's biography as the "ultimate standard work." Kehlmann himself was involved as an advisor in regards to particularities of the Austrian language in Jonathan Franzen's translation of Kraus's essays in The Kraus Project from 2013 (the German version was published in 2014). Writer, journalist, and screenwriter Felix Salten, a roommate of Karl Kraus when he was young and ultimately his archenemy, has been the subject of a biographical exhibition in the Vienna Museum since October 2020, based on the reevaluation of his estate on the seventy-fifth anniversary of his death. As the creator of the classic animal story Bambi, adapted into a film by Walt Disney in 1942, Salten ultimately achieved international fame. The exhibition Im Schatten von Bambi: Felix Salten entdeckt die Wiener Moderne has been extended until September 19, 2021. Towards a Biography of Richard Beer-Hofmann We'd like to conclude with

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