Changes wrought by the dissolution of Austria-Hungary reflected particulary forcefully on the status of Austrian Germans: their hopes in connection to the Anschluss with Germany soon evaporated and the until then dominant ethnic group of the great Central European empire found itself squeezed within the boundaries of a small state. Challenges facing the Republic founded on the ruins of the sunk Empire, their numerous political, social and economic repercussions had already in the immediate postimperial period marked a new Austrian culture and literature in manifold ways. The emphasis was often on the Habsburg Monarchy complex, whether to disparage its legacy in a satiric or ironic tone, or to represent it – in the face of the emerging obvously authoritarian systems of national states – as a kind of retrospective utopia.
The Anschluss of 1938 and the Austrian collaboration in the crimes of the Nazi Germany in the Second Republic, a country of astounding economic prosperity and a high level of democracy, were tabooized for a long time. Only in the 1980s did Austrian society, now as a consolidated nation, manage to overcome its own national-socialist legacy, albeit some Austrian authors confronted even earlier this aspect of a more recent Austrian history; still, in the post-war period the dominant authors attempted to establish a continuity between the imperial Austria with the small Alpine republic, simultaneously bypassing the Austrian involvement in the crimes of the Third Reich. This is what Claudio Magris, pointing to the works of Austrian authors of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries termes „the Habsburg Myth“, a phenomenon which primarily – though not exclusively – manifested itself in the act of idealizing the Danube Monarchy.
As an insight into the array of possibilities featured in this context, this essay uses the four paradigmatic works of Austrian literature, two each from the First and the Second Republic, the works whose high level of aesthetic relevance in many ways draws precisely on the overlapping of the performance of history, viewed principally from a critical or, rather, nostalgic perspective, with the presentation of cultural, political and social conditions at the time of their emergence: Die letzten Tage der Menschheit (The Last Days of Mankind, 1922) by Karl Krauss, a dramatic text offering the ruthless showdown with the K.u.K.-universe on the backdrop of the war apocalypse; Radetzkymarsch (The Radetzky March, 1932) by Joseph Roth, a novel which is considered the pattern for the positive retrospective connotation of the Danube Monarchy; Die Wasserfälle von Slunj (The Waterfalls of Slunj, 1963) by Heimit von Doderer, a novel representing the Austro-Hungarian world in a nostalgic vein, while the references to the Third Riech are completely sidestepped; and the drama Heldenplatz (Heroes Square, 1989) by Thomas Bernhard which is a radical critical break with the ambivalent Austrian relationship towards the national-socialist past and the Holocaust
