Die Dämonen (The Demons) / orientation: we are relatives

HEIMITO VON DODERER / Die Dämonen (The Demons)

The action is squeezed between the autumn of 1926 and the summer of 1927 and, from the first moment on, the events lead up to the burning down of the Ministry of Justice, to which Doderer refers as a “crushing blow for Austrian freedom”…

http://cambridgeforecast.wordpress.com/2006/10/16/

On the cover flaps of his great work Die Dämonen (The Demons) the

following text appears:

“The Demons is one of the most important novels about city life to be

written in this century. Figures from the Viennese upper middle class and the nobility,

workers and intellectuals, mingle with characters from the demi-monde and the underworld

and are woven into an ambivalent social web. Behind the elegant charms of tea parties and

tennis tournaments lurk insecurity, political instability and sexual dissoluteness. The

action is squeezed between the autumn of 1926 and the summer of 1927 and, from the first

moment on, the events lead up to the burning down of the Ministry of Justice, to which

Doderer refers as a “crushing blow for Austrian freedom”…Although the

destinies of the individual characters are connected mostly indirectly with this historic

event, it is part of Doderer’s creative composition that several of their live’s problems

are solved on this day.

Doderer himself regarded The Demons, on which he worked from 1931 to 1940 and

then again from 1951 to 1956, as his main work and constructed Die Strudlhofstiege

(1951) especially to serve as a “ramp” for it.

In The Demons we meet many characters from the Strudlhofstiege again but

the novel also describes the fire at the Ministry of Justice, which marked the beginning

of an increasingly serious conflict between the Conservative and Socialist parties of the time, culminating in the civil war of 1934 and the ensuing authoritarianism of the corporate state. Alongside the gripping story a creative web of multiple strands which are

then unravelled Doderer,as in all his novels, weaves in a second layer of philosophical,

astonishingly direct reflections.

For his own orientation through the complicated network

of the plot, he prepared “blueprints” on a piece of paper, which he then fixed

onto a wooden board.