Novel
The Demons
Die Dämonen
Heimito von Doderer · 1956
Synopsis
Vienna, from 1926 to the summer of 1927. A retired section counselor, Geyrenhoff, gathers into a chronicle his own notes and those of two friends about a small society: the upper middle class and the aristocracy, workers and intellectuals, people of the demi-monde and the underworld. Behind the tea dances and tennis tournaments, anxiety, political ambiguities and disorders of the senses show through, and everything converges on a single day of riot.
Context
The book took more than twenty years: begun around 1930 under another title, it had a first part completed in 1936, and the following volumes, conceived to represent a separation of the Jews and the other Austrians, were abandoned during a revision in 1939 and 1940. The author did not take it up again until 1951 and published it in Munich in 1956. The narrative is ordered towards the burning of the Vienna Palace of Justice, on 15 July 1927, which he called the Cannae of Austrian liberty, and in which many of the lives he follows are resolved.
Who it is for
More than thirteen hundred pages and more than a hundred characters. Its length and density make it one of the most demanding Austrian books.
Prizes and reception
Regarded by its author as his principal work, and placed by critics in the line of Musil and Broch as a great Viennese novel of the century.
Sources for this page 10
The pages consulted to check this page.