Ariadne Press – förlag

In turn-of-the-century Vienna the impoverished, foreign-born Stanislaus Demba, who earns his livelihood as a tutor of children of the professional class, must urgently find two hundred crowns to take his girlfriend to Italy in order to prevent her from going with a well-off law student. In a series of humorous and intricately-connected vignettes, the Czech-born Leo Perutz, himself an immigrant to Vienna, sends the hero cascading through the various social classes of the city in his quest to obtain the needed money even as he tries to conceal a shameful secret. Besides offering a satire of contemporary life in his characterization of the petty bourgeoisie and the upper class university professors and intellectuals, gallants and flirts, gamblers and high-class thieves Between Nine and Nine (1918) also sheds light on the forces that conditioned identity in fin-de-siècle Vienna: industrialization, misogyny, anti-Semitism, classism, and xenophobia. Through the modern, indeterminate narrative stance, the novel, originally entitled Freedom in its serialized version, ultimately depicts the contingency of self-determination and identity in a complex social milieu. On display are the authors skills as storyteller and caricaturist, his subtle and satiric humor, his highly refined aesthetic sensibilities, and his insightful social commentary. Readers will find him and this novel delightfully provocative.

Elfriede Jelinek's wide-ranging literary production has brought her to the forefront of the Austrian literary scene. The fifteen essays collected here demonstrate the significance of this major literary voice, addressing Jelinek as a master of modernist prose, of post-modern critique of literary genres, and of stage and screen. Hers is a strong voice against domestic violence, pornography, oppression of women, and the continuance of the fascist legacy in the everyday world of contemporary Austria and Germany. Jelinek is represented in this volume with an essay on translation and is further introduced by an interview. The remaining fifteen contributions by eminent scholars from both Europe and the United States illuminate Jelinek's writings through discussions of her major works. These critical analyses of her prose and drama and their attendant bibliographies make Jelinek's fascinating and highly relevant literary world available to English-speaking readers for the first time.

Text in English & German. This volume contains the presentations given at the International Stefan Zweig Congress, held in Salzburg in February 1992. The essays are organised in five separate groups, each centring on a topic of concern to Zweig scholarship: war and peace, writing in exile, Jewishness and exile, the biographical writings from exile, and the stations of exile. An appendix contains additional congress-related informational material. Three of the essays are in English, the remainder in German.

The book examines Sigmund Freud's life and work, and sees tragedy as a concept of central importance in both. Politzer shows how for Freud the tragic experience -- later formulated as the Oedipus complex -- was at the root of the development of human civilization. In the light of this idea he examines Freud's interpretation of Sophocles, Shakespeare, and Michelangelo's statue Moses. He also looks at the relationship with Jung in terms of the father-son conflict. A final chapter, designated 'appendix' portrays the younger generation of the 1970's 'flower-power' movement, as a 'post-Oedipal generation'. Politzer's book is also a celebration of Sigmund Freud as a literary author in his own right.

In the first half of the twentieth century, foreign visitors were witnesses to Austria's dramatic history. Political and social issues often overshadowed its traditional attractions. The editors present excerpts from material usually not included in travel anthologies.

Robert Menasse, who was born into a Jewish family in Vienna in 1954, speaks with the voice of the generation known as Nachgeborene ("those born after"). Although fortunate to have escaped the persecution and exile his parents endured, Menasse's stories constantly refract the suffering of the past through the ironic distance of a feeling observer. His critically humorous voice uncovers surprising truths about himself and the past. As the author of over twenty books, which include critical essays on contemporary cultural topics as well as novels and short stories, Menasse's fame as a major figure in contemporary Austrian literature is firmly established. He has received many prestigious literary prizes and divides his time between Vienna and Amsterdam.

The sports journalist Maximilian Reich was arrested on March 17, 1938 in Vienna and sent to the concentration camp in Dachau with the so-called Transport of the Prominent (Prominententransport) on the first of April. Reich was one of 151 men: among them were former ministers of state, judges, two men who later became Federal Chancellors, Jewish journalists, writers and artists. While Reich was struggling to survive the ordeal both in Dachau and later in Buchenwald, his Aryan wife Emilie in Vienna was leading the battle to gain his release as well as to get permission for the family to emigrate. The complementary accounts of Max and Emilie Reich are in all probability the first reports written by Austrian victims of National Socialism. In their capacity to amplify and clarify each other, the dual points of view of husband and wife form a uniquely enriched portrait of the times and events. Henriette Mandl not only rescued the manuscripts of her parents from obscurity but edited them for publication and contributed her own short commentary as well. Also included is a brief history of the first transport of Austrians to Dachau by the historian Wolfgang Neugebauer. With an essay by Wolfgang Neugebauer about the First Transport of Austrians to the Concentration Camp at Dachau.

Vienna, March 1938. The Nazis are about to seize Austria, and the tottering regime of Chancellor Kurt Schuschnigg is trying to save the country through a hastily arranged referendum about Austrias independence. Just at this time Inspector David Bronstein is called to the scene of a crime. A high-ranking Nazi has been violently murdered. And while Bronstein is attempting to solve this murder and another one as well indications of an imminent annexation, an Anschluss, of Austria to the Third Reich are growing more and more clear. For Bronstein a double battle against time...With Inspector Bronstein and the Anschluss:1938, Pittler has completed the final volume in Pittlers Bronstein Pentalogy, depicting here with a wealth of atmosphere and nuance the last hours of Austria and once again mobilizing the protagonists of his saga about the First Austrian Republic.

Michael Koehlmeier was born in the Vorarlberg region of Austria in 1949. In addition to novels, he has written radio plays, essays and song texts in Vorarlberg dialect for the band Schellinski. He is married to the writer Monika Helfer and lives in Hohenems, Ausatria. The Koehlmeier's daughter Paula, herself an aspiring writer, died in a hiking accident in 2003. David Dollenmayer is a literary translator and emeritus Professor of german at the Worcester Polytehnic Institute in Worcester, Massachusetts. He is recipient of the 2008 Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator's Prize for his translation of Childhood by Moses Rosenkranz, and the 2010 Translation Prize of the Austrian Cultural Forum in New York for Idell with Drawning Dog by Michael Koehlmeier. He lives in Hopkinton, Massachusetts.

Contains 12 brief accounts by Stefan Zweig (1881-1942) of decisive historical moments in which an individual's will to discover, create, and transcend the limits imposed by the temporal and physical environment conflicts with the individual's inability to escape from the realities of their own nature.

"Crime at Mayerling" deals with two of the most sensational crimes committed during the past century. Although separated in time by a hundred years, the two events are inextricably connected. In January 1889 the corpses of Archduke Rudolf, Crown Prince of Austria-Hungary, and the Baroness Mary Vetsera were discovered in the prince's hunting lodge at Mayerling, near Vienna. The circumstances were hushed up and for decades scientists and historians had been trying to solve the mystery of what had happened at Mayerling. An Austrian "Mayerling buff" felt compelled to reach an explanation in his own way: in December 1992 he stole the coffin with the Baroness's remains and had them examined by forensic specialists. Markus describes the remarkable findings which finally resolve the mystery of Mayerling.

Christine Lavant (1915-1973), one of Austria's most famous yet obscure 20th century poets, wrote these memoirs during a voluntary six-week stay in an asylum. Although written in 1946 the memoirs were not published until 2001 because the poet felt that the work was too personal. She records her failed suicide attempt, her sleeplessness, her exhaustion, her eccentric and mad inmates, her daily struggle to survive by writing. The author spent most of her life in a small southern Austrian village, where she was born as the ninth child in a family of miners. Pathologically introverted, she was plagued by poverty and illness and supported herself with knitting. Her poetry is unconventional, filled with neologisms, mysterious and magical. We hear echoes of Rilke, whom she admired. Thomas Bernhard referred to her work as testimony to a "zerstörte Welt/destroyed world". She was honoured with numerous literary awards, among them the Austrian State Prize for Literature in 1970, three years before her death.

Anna O [Bertha Pappenheim] (1859-1936), a friend of Freud's wife in Vienna, is regarded as the first patient of psychoanalysis. It was she who invented the concept of "the talking cure" under the care of Josef Breuer in Vienna, where she was being treated for hysteria, anorexia, paralysis, hallucinations, phantom pregnancy, suicidal thoughts and morphine addiction. Breuer published her case history "Frauleine Anna O". in 1895, and it is considered the first significant document in the history of psychoanalysis. It is the first case of psychoanalytic literature, introducing Breuer and Freud's Studies on Hysteria. In 1888 Bertha Pappenheim published (anonymously) her first book of five fairy tales, "Little Stories for Children". These tales have never been translated before, nor have they appeared in German since their original publication. They reflect on Pappenheim's treatment, dealing with guilt, evil and death. They are not just for children, but also serve as parables for adult visions. They allowed Pappenheim to be reborn, transformed, serving as a kind of "writing cure". In 1890 she published another collection of fairy tales, "In the Junk Shop". In these nine tales, nine domestic objects tell their tales of woe and misery to each other, as if they were engaged in a nocturnal therapy session. After Bertha Pappenheim was "cured" in Vienna, she became a successful social worker, leader of the German-Jewish Women's movement in Frankfurt, an ardent feminist and translator of Mary Wollstonecraft's "A Vindication of the Rights of Woman" (1792). Breuer's treatment of Anna O inspired Freud to write that "on this day (18 November 1882) I first became aware of the power of the unconscious".