Background
Heimito Von Doderer was born on September 5, 1896, in Weidlingau, Vienna, Austria. He was the son of Wilhelm Ritter, an architect and civil engineer, and Luise Wilhelmine (von Huegel) von Doderer.
Universitätsring 1, 1010 Wien, Austria
Heimito Von Doderer received Ph.D. degree in history from the University of Vienna in 1925.
(In his eminence, his iconic status, and his masterful com...)
In his eminence, his iconic status, and his masterful command of enormous fictional realms in several huge novels, Heimito von Doderer (1896-1966) still enjoys legendary status close to forty years after his death.
https://www.amazon.com/Porcelain-Stories-Studies-Austrian-Literature/dp/1572411414/?tag=2022091-20
1972
(English industrialist Robert Clayton and his son, Donald,...)
English industrialist Robert Clayton and his son, Donald, open a branch office of their business in Vienna and pursue their lives and fortunes in the years before World War I
https://www.amazon.com/Waterfalls-Slunj-Eridanos-Library/dp/0941419118/?tag=2022091-20
1987
Heimito Von Doderer was born on September 5, 1896, in Weidlingau, Vienna, Austria. He was the son of Wilhelm Ritter, an architect and civil engineer, and Luise Wilhelmine (von Huegel) von Doderer.
Heimito Von Doderer received Ph.D. degree in history from the University of Vienna in 1925.
Doderer was drafted into military service in 1915, and taken prisoner by Russian troops in 1916. It was during his four years of captivity that he began to write fiction. Years later, he would describe his experience in Siberia in the novel Das Geheimnis des Reichs. Upon his return to Vienna in 1920, he enrolled in the university to study history and psychology, though his desire to be a writer had already taken firm root.
Before receiving his doctorate in history in 1925, Doderer published a book of verse titled Gassen und Landschaft (“Streets and Landscapes”) in 1923, and his first novel, Die Bresche (“The Breach”) in 1924. This was the first of Doderer’s “polygraphic” novels, composed of tiny fragmented stories that eventually, in combination, form a unified whole. This was to become one of Doderer’s trademark styles of writing fiction.
Shortly after his divorce with Gusti Hasterlik, Doderer began work on Die Daemonen (“The Demons”) which he was to work on for the next twenty-five years, concurrently with many other projects. His original working title was Dicke Damen (“Fat Ladies”), alluding to Doderer’s erotic taste for overweight Jewish women. The change in title signified an expansion of his theme, to encompass the glory of a Greater Germany, including Austria, denuded of its Jewish population.
In between beginning and completing Die Daemonen, Doderer published many novels that treated a broad variety of themes. During his Nazi years, he wrote several novels that were profoundly pessimistic about the human capacity for happiness, fulfillment, honor, and wholeness, including Ein Umweg, the story of a man who is spared execution only to proceed into a life of delusion and tragedy.
During these years, Doderer also wrote a great deal of short fiction, much of it surreal and macabre, such as the story “Die Peinigung der Lederbeutelchen” (“A Person Made of Porcelain”) published in 1935. In 1951, he published Die Strudlhofstiege, which depicted pre-Nazi Vienna with some sentimentality and fondness. Doderer’s prolific output continued into the 1960s, much of it in his grotesque, surrealistic style. This is particularly true of Die Merowinger (1962), which came as a somewhat disturbing surprise to the reading public he had acquired with Die Strudlhofstiege and Die Daemonen.
(In his eminence, his iconic status, and his masterful com...)
1972(English industrialist Robert Clayton and his son, Donald,...)
1987From 1933 to 1938, Heimito Von Doderer was a member of Austrian Nazi Party, but he later professed that his membership was to gain admission into the Reichsschrifttumkammer (Association of Writers) and not for political reasons.
After his divorce with Gusti Hasterlik in 1934, Doderer became obsessed with the idea that Jews were the cause of all the world’s problems, and this virulent strain of antisemitism showed itself in his writing during the next several years, and he also joined the Austrian Nazi Party. Doderer had undergone major ideological changes, including a renunciation of Nazism. Therefore, in the end, Die Daemonen was not an antisemitic manifesto, but rather a series of sketchily connected stories describing a politically turbulent Vienna during the years 1926 and 1927.
However, a certain mitigated optimism began to appear in Doderer’s work in the 1940s, after he publicly disavowed the Nazi party and converted to Roman Catholicism.
Doderer’s vision of human nature at this time was in marked contrast to the Nazi myth of the ideal Aryan race. In the autobiographical Ein Mord den jeder hegeht (1938), Doderer offers a wry psychological observation that sounds more like Freud than Hitler.
Quotations:
“Everyone gets his childhood clapped over his head like a bucket. It keeps running us down for the rest of our lives, no matter how often you have a change of clothes or costume.”
“A work of literature is all the more artistic, the less a summary of its contents can give us an idea of what it is about.”
Today, there is some disagreement among critics and scholars as to Doderer’s preeminent status in the canon of twentieth-century European authors. Nonetheless, his work stands as a testimony to a unique and provocative vision that had an undeniably forceful effect on the postwar generation.
Quotes from others about the person
"Doderer’s urge to write, however, was countered by pecuniary uncertainty and familial disapproval; he took to journalism to offset the former and resumed his studies to alleviate the latter, knowing that such a course would both placate his parents and help to plug the gaps in his knowledge.” - Andrew W. Barker
In 1930, Heimito Von Doderer married Gusti Hasterlik, but they divorced in 1934. In 1952, he married Maria Thoma.