Journal of Austrian Studies

Sixty years after Richard and Clara Winston's translation of Heimito von Doderer's The Demons and seventy-one after the German publication of its predecessor Die Strudlhofstiege, we at last have Vincent Kling's outstanding translation The Strudlhof Steps or, Melzer and the Depth of the Years. It has been worth the wait. Despite Doderer's seven-year infatuation with National Socialism, one has to count him among the great novelists of the twentieth century and Die Strudlhofstiege as his masterpiece.

The novel teems with dozens of characters, mostly from the upper echelons of Viennese society: army officers, diplomats, government officials, businessmen, lawyers, physicians and their wives, mothers, daughters, sisters, and lovers. Their social activities in a Vienna that knows no winter and almost no rain—tennis matches, boating excursions, outings to country taverns, afternoons in a café—their pairings and separations are minutely chronicled by an indulgent, chatty, studiedly old-fashioned narrator who reads their minds and hearts and conveys what he finds to his "dear reader, O reader wise of whom I fantasize" (77), often in elaborately hypotactic metaphors (what other writer in German uses parentheses as often as Doderer?) and frequent puns.

There is also a smaller but no less important group of lower-level bureaucrats and municipal employees living in the Alsergrund. Despite the prominent mention of Lieutenant—later Major—Melzer in the novel's subtitle, it's hard to say that he is its central character, since for long stretches he is completely absent. But Melzer represents a connection between the two social classes by marrying the "right woman" in the novel's happy end, thereby becoming a mature, self-aware human being, that is, completing his Menschwerdung, for Doderer a central concept.

The "Depth of the Years" of the subtitle communicates the novel's preoccupation with time and memory. The two primary temporal levels are [End Page 88] 1911 and 1925, and while the novel's poetic epigraph celebrates the Strudlhof Steps for having "survived the years between the wars" (5), the novel in fact survives a war between its years. Unlike Der Zauberberg, Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, or Radetzkymarsch, The Strudlhof Steps has no teleological progression toward the catastrophe of war. Quite the opposite, in fact. Although Melzer and others have seen action and the war is occasionally mentioned in passing, it seems to have left little mark on the characters or their milieu. The emphasis is on the recovery of memory and the individual teleology of Menschwerdung. Thinking about Melzer in April 1945, when all the events of the novel lie deep in the past, the narrator muses, "Anyone living through a war […] acquires again and again a sense, not of himself, but of everybody else. Inside the world of legally organized terror, the harvest is not gathered into the core of the individual person but is instead redistributed throughout the collective" (77). The pasts of the middle-class characters from the Alsergrund "lay deep under the waters of the many years that had flowed over them, peaceful waters in spite of the First World War, inflicted in the meantime on these good people, who had nothing whatever to do with it, by a few self-inflated pooh-bahs from Ballhaus Platz" (338–339).

The latter excerpt is one of myriad examples of Vincent Kling's brilliant solutions to the novel's many challenges to the translator: "Wichtigtuer" becomes "self-inflated pooh-bahs." It could have been "know-it-alls" or "blowhards," but W. S. Gilbert's Victorian Pooh-Bah is a pompous government official just like those in the Austrian chancellery. When the narrator describes the futility of trying to advise someone caught in the machinery of an unhappy love affair, he says one has to be satisfied with "einem kleinen Rat … einem Rätchen in bezug auf die Rädchen"—a pun that defies translation. Kling's narrator speaks of "tidbits of advice, advicelets, little jogs about...