Raoul Auernheimer was an Austrian jurist and writer. He was the author of works in various genres.
Background
Raoul Auernheimer was born on April 15, 1876, to the German businessman Johannes W. Auemheimer and his wife, Charlotte Buechler Auemheimer, a Jewish woman of Hungarian descent. In his autobiography, he describes his father as a pioneering soul from whom he gained a respect for the dedication and hard work, while his mother was the product of society and education from whom he developed a passion for drama and literature.
Education
While he graduated from the University of Vienna in 1900 with a degree in law, he apprenticed in the courts but never actually practiced. Instead, he followed his passion to write. In 1899, a year before his graduation, he received an honorarium for Talent: Eine Komoedie in drei Akten.
Career
Financial considerations compelled Auemheimer to work both as a creative writer and as a journalist. He wrote over a thousand columns, from book and theater reviews to social criticism for the Neue Freie Presse between the years of 1906 and 1933.
In 1906, Auernheimer published eight books, most under the imprint of the Viennese publisher Wiener Verlag. In the same year, his cousin Theodor Herzl’s recommendation led to a position at the Neue Freie Presse, for which Herzl was a Paris correspondent. Herlz was an expert feuilletonist and later founded the Zionist movement. However, Auernheimer was uniformly attentive to his entertaining commentaries on Viennese life, and generally disregarded Herzl’s interest in politics and religion.
Auernheimer was particularly proud of his novella “Der Leichenbestaetter von Ebenbrunn,” published in his 1911 collection Der gusseiserne Herrgott.
In 1924, Auernheime wrote one of his best plays Casanova in Wien. Two years after its publication, Auernheimer was elected as the first chairman of the Austrian PEN Club, a position that solidified his standing as an important writer of the time.
Although Auernheimer was strongly opposed to Hitler and the war, he nevertheless returned to Vienna from Switzerland, where he was celebrating the successful performance of his adaptation of Moliere’s comedy Le Misanthrope. He thought that the Nuremberg Laws, which protected individuals with one German parent from the severe new regulations against Jews, would keep him safe from the Nazis. Nevertheless, he was arrested in 1938 and sent to the Dachau concentration camp. Through the intervention of his translator Prentiss Gilbert, who was the American attache in Berlin, and the German writer Emil Ludwig, Auernheimer was released five months later. His release was made under the condition that he leave the country, so he fled to New York, where he was aided by other Austrian exiles and the American writer Dorothy Parker. The event of his arrest and subsequent exile marked the beginning of the decline in his career.
Auernheimer’s exile was an extremely difficult period. The distance he was forced to maintain from the Viennese culture on which he focussed his energy weakened his career. In addition, a public concentrating on World War II had no interest in his light comedies. His inability to modify his style to suit American tastes also contributed to the decline in his productivity during his years of exile.
Auernheimer was able to garner initial success abroad with 1940, publication of the English translation of his biography Prince Metternich: Statesman and Lover.
The recounting of his experiences at Dachau failed to interest a publisher due to its surprising timidity; his project to start and maintain a German-speaking theater in New York was abandoned after three performances due to financial uncertainty.
Auernheimer and his wife moved to California in 1941, staying in Los Angeles and Berkeley before settling in Oakland. Few of his works from this period were published, due to the facts that his embellished style did not translate well to English and that there was no American market for his fascination with pre-war Austrian life.
His idea to write a biography of Franz Grillparzer, considered to be Austria’s greatest writer, was rejected by Simon and Schuster. However, Auernheimer wrote it anyway, and Franz Grillparzer, der Dichter Oesterreichs: Licht und Dunkel eines Lebens was completed and published posthumously in Vienna in 1948.
Auernheimer died from a long-term heart condition on January 7, 1948.
Raoul's resignation came about as a protest to the paper’s pro-Nazi political bent. However, this decidedly political decision did not characterize his artistic output: throughout the war, his writings still focused on aesthetic concerns.
Auernheimer’s objection to Hitler’s Nazi policy eventually led him to trouble with the new Germany. In 1938, he dedicated Wien: Bild und Schicksal, his cultural history of Vienna, to Chancellor Kurt von Schuschnigg, one week before the Anschluss was announced. Schuschnigg had given a radio address in which he protested the annexation of Austria by Germany. In addition to this public support of Austria’s independence, Auernheimer signed the PEN Club’s 1934, protest against German book burning. His interest in the changing political climate grew, and he delivered lectures before the Viennese Kulturbund, rallying against the German control of this organization that supported distinguished speakers. These lectures were published in 1932, as “Intellect and Community”, and demonstrate Auernheimer’s belief in humanistic morality.
Views
Raoul's life in Vienna during the turn of the century was not focused on politics; rather, it was a city of decadent aesthetes, full of artists, musicians, dramatists, and actors. This self-indulgent climate fostered in Auernheimer a desire for fame that often accompanied the artistic talent of the time. He was not an originator of new literary ideas. Instead, he plumbed the depths of past forms and embraced the current literary trends of his day. Modeling much of his style on that of Jung Wien member Arthur Schnitzler, Auemheimer published his first stories in literary journals, including Liebelei and Moderne Rundschau.
Membership
Austrian PEN Club
1926 - 1927
Personality
Raoul was a friend of all of the members of the Jung Wien (Young Vienna) group. However, some critics have felt that his polished prose, interesting plot twists and command of language were not enough to give real depth to his works.
Auernheimer’s witty, lighthearted writing possessed the refined tone common to the eighteenth century. It was this style that became awkward to readers following the radical transformation of culture and society after World War I. Only one book, his novel Die linke und die rechte Hand, remains in print, and he is largely unknown today. However, his work remains an excellent study of upper-class life in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Vienna. Aware that his strengths lay in his humorous journalistic observations, he never inflated his ability as a writer. Critics have used the term liebenswuerding (charming) to describe his work.
Auemheimer’s sharp perception of Viennese life coupled with his potent narrative skill gave birth to a few serious works that critics have judged to be among the better prose writings of the period.
While many of his fellow exiles were driven to depression and suicide, Auernheimer maintained optimism that carried him through to the end of his life, even in the face of continual rejection in his later years. Though he did not push the form of writing to new levels of expression, Auernheimer’s works remain accomplished and refined examples of a generation of aesthetes.