Novel
Unvollendete Symphonie
Not translated into English
Hans Weigel · 1951
Synopsis
Vienna, spring 1946. A young painter who has come from the provinces to study tells, in the first person, of her meeting with Peter Taussig, much older than she is, from a Jewish family that had to emigrate, returned from Switzerland where he spent the war. He hopes to pick up again the time before 1938, and the city welcomes him with open arms; the young woman, inexperienced, yields to his self-assurance.
Context
The author announces in a preface that his subject is Vienna and the return, and that he entrusts the narrative to a female narrator to put distance between himself and his material. It is a roman à clef: he wrote it after his affair with Ingeborg Bachmann, then unknown, who afterwards left for others. For the 1992 reissue, prepared shortly before his death, he named the narrator himself; he was reproached for this as a vanity, and readers of Bachmann have seen in one of her novels a reply to this book.
Who it is for
A short novel, easy to read, but whose interest owes much to what one knows of Viennese literary life in 1946.
Prizes and reception
A document on the Vienna of the immediate post-war period rather than a success: its author knew none as a novelist. Reissued in 1992 and then in 2015.
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