Review article
Among Murderers and Bootleggers: Post-1945 Austria in the contemporary hard boiled detective novels
Wynfrid Kriegleder
; University of Vienna
Abstract
The end of the Second World War and the American occupation resulted in a big influx of American popular culture into Austria. One of the literary genres introduced to the reading public and imitated by Austrian writers was the so-called hard-boiled detective novel that had flourished in the USA during the 1930s and 1940s. Crime fiction was still considered lowbrow in Austria; writers who published this kind of literature did so chiefly in order to earn enough money to be able to write “serious” literature.
This article analyzes two lesser known novels by Johannes Mario Simmel (The Murderer Does Not Drink Milk and You Only Live Twice) and two novels written in collaboration by Milo Dor and Reinhard Federmann (International Zone and And One Follows the Other). I argue that these books, by dealing with the physical and moral devastation Austria faced after the Nazi period, provide us with a more accurate picture of the post-war-situation than many of the highly regarded “serious” attempts to come to terms with post-1945 life. Still, Simmel, while providing some insight into post-1945 Vienna, basically wrote insignificant crime stories whereas Dor and Federmann managed to deal with the political and moral complexities of the era.
Keywords
Austrian literature after 1945; (hard boiled) detective novels; Johannes Mario Simmel; Milo Dor; Reinhard Federmann
Hrčak ID:
210861
URI
Publication date:
4.12.2018.
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