Tropics of Vienna

Ulrich E. Bach’s slim book is about writers who lived by the Danube but dreamed of islands in the sea and colonies along tropical rivers or by distant seas. It includes close readings of various works by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Lazar von Hellenbach, Theodor Hertzka and Theodor Herzl, along with a final chapter, constituting a coda, which briefly discusses Robert Mueller and Joseph Roth. The book attempts to intertwine the discourses and scholarship on utopianism, post-colonialism and exoticism, while placing the various themes within the context of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Central Europe. It joins an ever-growing historiography in these fields. His introduction argues for the importance and intrinsic interest of the Austrian colonial imagination and its narratives of utopia in comparison with the more famous dystopian, pessimistic works of the Viennese (and Prague) fin-de-siècle writers. The theoretical framework and discussion of the scholarship could have been laid out in a clearer fashion both here and in the subsequent chapters. The first is devoted to Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, who located many of his stories in the exotic margins of the Empire, especially in Galicia, where colonial fantasies, repressed conflicts and social reinvigoration, according to Sacher-Masoch, surfaced and unfolded. Sacher-Masoch envisaged a pan-Slav telos for the Habsburg monarchy, eventually leading to class and ethnic resolution. A similar optimistic hope informs Lazar von Hellenbach’s book Insel Mellonta, which postulated a mixing of races, increased brotherhood and a redistribution of wealth as a possible future. Yet underlying both Sacher-Masoch’s and Hellenbach’s work is a deep ambivalence towards masculinity and sex. A common trope both in utopian narratives and the general culture of the time was a passive man in thrall to powerful, exotic, free, sexualised women. Since this trope is also evident, to some extent, in Hertzka’s and Herzl’s works, it is surprising that Bach does not investigate this theme in more depth

Ancient history · Archaeology · Art · Art history · Colonialism · Context (archaeology · Empire · Historiography · Scholarship · Utopia · Central European national history · Classics · Comparative and World Literature · German Literature and Culture Studies · History · Law · Philosophy