WWI links with a focus on Austria-Hungary

From the BBC, 'Music on the brink' -- mostly Viennese music of the time; and a BBC postcard from Vienna by Professor David Wyn Jones, read by Jonathan Pryce.

John Horne reviews Tim Butcher's new book on Gavrilo Princip, and so does Robert Fox.

Review of a book about Archduke Franz Ferdinand and Countess Sophie Chotek. The book is The Assassination of the Archduke.

In WWI, one of Robert Musil's second-cousins, Alois Musil (aka Sheikh Musa al-Rweili), was Austria-Hungary's version of Lawrence of Arabia, except that Alois Musil, unlike Lawrence, had a mastery of many Arabic dialects.

Quoting Colin O'Connor, 'During the First World War, [Alois] Musil was sent to the Middle East to counteract the efforts of the great English Arabist T. E. Lawrence - or Lawrence of Arabia as he is known to many.' Back in Europe, Musil had a career as a theology professor. Some of his documents have been translated into English. Here's a pdf with a bio and photos.

Chris Kelly on her Austro-Hungarian ancestors, including Count Franz Clam-Gallas.

Stefany Anne Golberg quoting from Béla Zombory-Moldován's memoir of the first eight months of WWI in a Hungarian unit:

Nature slumbered … flowed on its course, impervious to the absurd behavior of men … The whole world was manifestly indifferent in the face of the life-and-death struggles of men: it neither took their side nor opposed them, but simply paid no attention.

More about this memoir, The Burning of the World: A Memoir of 1914. Here's an excerpt.

Kafka's diary entry for August 2, 1914: 'Germany has declared war on Russia. Swimming in the afternoon.'

Robert Zaretsky revisits 'Kafka's "The Trial" and World War I'.

English version of a comprehensive survey of WWI from an Austro-Hungarian perspective.

Here's the first item in Spiegel Online International's WWI series.

A gathering of the past -- weekend links

Professors & 4th-year graduates of philosophy at Lviv University (1904)

Source. Antoni Łomnicki is standing 3rd from left. (He was killed by Germans in the Massacre of the Lviv Professors.) Here's an article (pdf) about the people in the pic. Seated at the right is physicist and mathematician Marian Smoluchowski.

Anthea Bell's translation of Friedrich Torberg's Young Gerber is out from Pushkin Press (an excellent publisher whose website is not excellent). Here are two reviews. The book is about a tragedy in an Austrian school.

Speaking of which, Duncan Richter has a couple of posts on Musil's The Confusions of Young Törless. The novel was also the springboard for some reflections on value and culture.

Mr. Waggish has an essay on Musil's Man Without Qualities.

An interview with Susan Bernofsky, conducted while she was translating Gotthelf's Black Spider. David Auerbach (aka Mr. Waggish) says via Twitter that the book's release date is Oct. 8. It's strange that the NYRB site has no info about the book (neither does their Tumblr). The book (as Mr. Auerbach says) is on Amazon. Is it just me, or does the right half of the face on the cover look like Margaret Atwood?

Bookslut's review of Frierich Reck's Diary of a Man in Despair. It's also reviewed at the Guardian, by Common Reader, Futile Preoccupations, and Mookse and Gripes. This time, NYRB does have a site for the book. Reck, aka Friedrich Percival Reck-Malleczewen, died in Dachau. Here's a lengthy piece on him in German.

A review of Eduard Habsburg(-Lothringen)'s novel, Lena in Waldersbach.

Webern is 3rd from right

Source.

From David Wilson's review of Alain Badiou's Wittgenstein's Antiphilosophy: 'Badiou’s bombast finally testifies in defense of Wittgenstein. Not that Badiou admits that Wittgenstein might be right. But this uncharitable and incomprehensible critique shows it. For silence would say so much more.'

Wuthering Expectations has several posts on Austrian writers, on Bernhard, Broch, Hofmannsthal, and Stifter (twice).

On the death of Anton Webern.

On James Joyce in Trieste.

Here are some nice old and new photos of the country houses that Patrick Leigh Fermor came across in Transylvania and Fermor's postcard from Cluj.

Neglected Books Page has an entry on You Still Have Your Head, a book by Franz Schoenberner.

Review of a newly translated French biography of Émile Durkheim.

Llosa on why Proust is important for everyone.

A podcast of John Marenbon on Boethius.

This strikes me as depressing. The Journal of Happiness Studies published this paper, 'Arthur’s advice: comparing Arthur Schopenhauer’s advice on happiness with contemporary research'. According to the Abstract, 'We summarize [Schopenhauer's] recommendations and compare these with conditions for happiness as observed in present day empirical research. Little of the advice appears to fit current research on conditions for happiness. Following Schopenhauer’s advice would probably make us unhappier, even if we had the same neurotic personality.' It's open access.

Central European characters

NPR interviews Richard Rhodes about his new book, Hedy's Folly: The Life and Breakthrough Inventions of Hedy Lamarr, the Most Beautiful Woman in the World.

'Mann's Inhumanity to Mann': Frederic Raphael reviews Evelyn Juers' House of Exile: War, Love and Literature, from Berlin to Los Angeles. Aaron Thier reviews the same book on Heinrich Mann et al.

An excerpt from Umberto Eco's The Prague Cemetery. A review of Eco's book by Scott Kelly in the Scotsman, and one by Benjamin Balin in Haaretz: 'Conspiracy theories and intense historical settings are Umberto Eco’s forte, and here he turns his attention to one of history’s most persuasive and destructive false texts - with mixed results.'

'[Rosa] Mayreder’s title alone reads as a challenge to [Otto] Weininger’s ... woman-hating bestseller Geschlecht und Character (1903), a title rendered as Sex and Character in English but that should really be translated as Gender and Character. Mayreder took a position against Weininger in her earlier A Survey of the Woman Problem [c. 1913] as well, a position she developed further in Gender and Culture [1923] to explain misogyny in Western culture as a historical phenomenon which she based on an abhorrence of the body and sexuality that had grown out of Christianity.'

Jiri Travnicek on Brno's literary history (mostly Czech literature post WWII) -- he mentions two stories about his home town by Milan Kundera.

'Had [Czeslaw] Milosz been there, said [Artur Sebastian] Rosman, he might have repeated his claim that his readers don’t “take into account a particular, quite fundamental fact: all my intellectual impulses are religious and in that sense my poetry is religious”.'

From Astra Scheib's interview with Thomas Bernhard: 'I also cannot bear people applauding. Applause - actors are paid in such a way. They earn their money in such a way. I like it when the money from my publisher arrives on my account. But marching music, hosts of applauding people in the theater or in the concert -- I can't bear that. Nothing but disaster follows from applause.'

Thomas Bernhard as a sorcerer in Klaus Gmeiner’s Enchanted Forest (1956)

A great piece on Bernhard from last January by Richard Crary.

No great fan of Bernhard's, Peter Handke is interviewed by Cecilia Dreymüller. (I hadn't realized that Handke converted to the Orthodox Church.)

Iain Bamforth reviews a German biography of Kleist: 'Having locked himself up for a week with Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, he despaired of the self’s inscrutability – it could only be seen “through green glasses”.'

'The Beastly Péter Nádas: Why you need to read the massive novels of this NSFW Hungarian writer'.

'Angelo Soliman is probably best known in his fictional incarnation as the disgraced African servant boy in The Man Without Qualities, Robert Musil’s novel about the end of the Austrian monarchy. Soliman ... arrived in Austria as a slave from western Africa, where he was born in 1721. ... He acted as a soldier and adviser in one princely household and then came to Vienna in 1753 to serve as a valet and tutor in another.'

Franz Cede compares the fall of the Habsburgs to that of the Soviets.

Austro-Hungarian subjects

Mia Slavenska

Otto von Habsburg's obituary: 'He died a happy man, right about almost everything, if usually too early.'

'“Only silence is innocent”: Zagajewski on Rilke, irony, and the future of poetry'

Brett Foster reviews Edward Snow's new translation of some Rilke poems (here's an excerpt from Zagajewski's introduction to Snow's translations)

Mark Harman's translation of Kafka's 'Message From the Emperor'

Isotropic Films is making a film of Kafka's Metamorphosis (the father's packin' heat -- I wonder if the bug will shoot electric rays from its antennae)

At Three Percent, Bill Marx goes to bat for Ernst Weiss's novel, Georg Letham, and Brady Evan Walker reviews Joseph Roth's Job, and Chad W. Post introduces Gregor von Rezzori's Ermine of Czernopol

Tom Nairn reviews a new biography of Ernest Gellner 

Otto Preminger one-ups Letterman:



Freud's cocaine thing. Here's a pdf about Freud's cocaine thing (and the much worse drug habits of renegade psychoanalyst Otto Gross, who had radical ideas about sex and free love, and who had an affair with Frieda von Richtofen, who later married D. H. Lawrence and might've presented to him [Lawrence] Gross' ideas about sex and free love ...).

A longish piece in Haaretz called 'Monk, Mystic, Mechanic' -- on a recent Berlin exhibit devoted to Wittgenstein

Alan Saunders' and Gavin Kitching's podcast on Wittgenstein's puzzlement

Wittgenstein's photos, and a 'Lost archive shows Wittgenstein in a new light'

Dave Maier on Wittgenstein and meaning: "Can I say 'bububu' and mean 'If it doesn't rain I shall go for a walk'?" 

Humpty Dumpty

Fergus Johnston reviews the new translation of Jens Malte Fischer's 2003 biography of Mahler, and here's Rupert Christiansen's review

And M. Werbowski reviews Norman Lebrecht's Why Mahler?

Bob Duggan reviews a Neue Galerie show on fin-de-siècle Vienna: 'How Vienna in 1900 gave birth to modernity' -- '“In his life, Klimt clearly divided women into those he respected, even exalted, and those he slept with,” [Jill] Lloyd acknowledges, but also “Klimt’s images of women are acknowledged as complex representations with a symbolic force; as such, they embody allusions to the ‘women question’ that are far from straightforward".'

Mattel's new 'Gustav Klimt Barbie doll echoes the artist's portrait, Adele Bloch-Bauer I, reflecting the painting's Byzantine mosaics and Egyptian motifs. She wears a halter gown with silvery trim, draped chiffon sleeves and bustle .... She is a magnificent muse.'

The world's first mobile internal combustion engine was made in Vienna

Mahler, with Glenn Gould conducting, Maureen Forrester singing: