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Journal of European Studies

 http://jes.sagepub.com/content/39/3/394.citationThe online version of this article can be found at:

DOI: 10.1177/00472441090390030906

2009 39: 394Journal of European Studies Ritchie Robertson

Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2008. Pp. ix + 254. £50.00in the Writings of Musil, Roth and Bachmann. By Malcolm Spencer.

Book Review: In the Shadow of Empire: Austrian Experiences of Modernity

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394  JOURNAL OF EUROPEAN STUDIES 39(3)

Carlotta Sorba’s piece on ‘Novel, Drama, and Music in Mazzini’s Work’,an approach that would be worth pursuing for other writers.

 JEREMY BLACK

In the Shadow of Empire: Austrian Experiences of Modernity in the Writingsof Musil, Roth and Bachmann. By Malcolm Spencer. Rochester, NY:Camden House, 2008. Pp. ix + 254. £50.00.

The author’s core definition of modernity, explained in the introductory

chapter, includes a crisis of patriarchal authority; a spiritual voidresulting from the collapse of belief systems; nostalgia for a supposedlymore ordered past; and a sense of homelessness in the modern world.It was specific to Austria, he argues (following Edward Crankshaw),that an essentially eighteenth-century ancien régime collided with thetwentieth century. This forms the prelude to a detailed account of theperception of Austria by three major writers. For Musil, symbols of anintact pre-modern Austria, such as the Hofburg, formed a highly visiblecontrast to the fragmentation apparent from his experience, while the

memory of the multi-ethnic state represented a lost totality. JosephRoth’s nostalgia accompanies a tendency to demonize modernity, moststrikingly in his treatise Der Antichrist (1934). Ingeborg Bachmann, bornin 1926, experienced the Third Reich as a teenager: her awareness thatNazism, while regressive, also promoted such aspects of modernityas immigration to cities and radio ownership, gave her a profoundlyambivalent view of modernity.

Spencer concentrates on three interlinked texts which use the re-lationship between parents and children as a focus for historical

change. Ulrich’s relation to his father in Musil’s Der Mann ohneEigenschaften is compared with the relation between Carl Joseph andthe Bezirkshauptmann in Radetzkymarsch. The encyclopaedic form of Musil’s novel illustrates his acceptance of modernity, while Roth’sretention of narrative closure signifies his rejection of it. Bachmann inDrei Wege zum See responds to Roth but criticizes his nostalgia; HerrMatrei, Elisabeth’s father, is based on the Bezirkshauptmann. Theaccount of Ulrich and his father, and of Musil’s non-fictional writingson Austria, can especially be recommended. Less so, perhaps, the

chapter examining how three of Musil’s ‘pseudo-thinkers’, examplesof modernity gone wrong, absorb and distort aspects of Nietzsche,

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BOOK REVIEWS 395

for of these characters, two – Feuermaul and Schmeisser – are toomarginal to the narrative. (The third, Hans Sepp, is irritatingly called

‘Sepp’, as though that were his surname.)The framing argument is debatable, for the modernization of Austria begun under Maria Theresa and forcefully continued under Joseph IIcreated a responsible civil service which survived the political reactionthat followed Joseph’s untimely death. Nineteenth-century Austriatoo saw its full share of economic expansion. Spencer fairly presentshow Musil and his colleagues viewed Austria’s recent history, buttheir view is almost certainly biased by two factors. One is the successof conservative Habsburg propaganda. The other is the perception

of Austria, since its defeat in the Austro-Prussian War of 1866, as a backward nation left behind by the thrusting energies of Germany.If this is so, one needs to investigate how these authors’ perceptionsof recent Austrian history came to be distorted.

This study is conspicuously well written; the author is sensitive andperceptive in his handling of literature; the comparisons he makesare illuminating. There is too little reference to the state of research tomake clear what is original in his approach, and little sense of dialoguewith other scholars, particularly with historians. Nevertheless, hischapters mostly form excellent introductions to the texts discussed.His book would be a rewarding and stimulating companion to a courseof seminars on modern Austrian literature.

RITCHIE ROBERTSON

The Women’s Movement in Wartime. International Perspectives, 1914–19.Edited by Alison S. Fell and Ingrid Sharp. Basingstoke: PalgraveMacmillan, 2007. Pp xi + 272. £50.00.

Fifteen chapters ‘explore the responses of the women’s movementsto the war in all of the major belligerent nations’ (p. 1). The repetitiveuse of the plural form is important. It signals the variety of reactionsto WWI among feminist organizations, and serves as a powerfulreminder that feminism is a pluralistic reality, equally enriched andthwarted by the political, social and cultural conditions in whichit emerges.

As the editors’ introduction shows, feminist movements across na-

tions shared a common interest in access to education, the improve-ment of working conditions and legal reforms. Yet, they were often

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