In 1878 Richard Wagner published an essay posing the deceptively simple question “Was ist deutsch?” (What is German?). It was a question whose complex, ultimately murderous, ramifications reverberated through much of the twentieth century. It was indisputably a pivotal question at the inception of the small and vulnerable Austrian republic, born out of the rubble of a great empire, that originally elected to name itself “DeutschÖsterreich.” The often overlooked literary reflections of what transpired there in those two short decades before the “German Question” was seemingly put to rest by Hitler's annexation of the First Austrian Republic into the “Thousand Year Reich” have formed the stuff of this book.

To an innocent observer coming from a tradition comfortable with disjunctions between mother tongue and civic identity — self-evidently, to speak English does not implicitly suggest that one is English — it can seem odd that the “German Question” could have cast such a long shadow over Austria's development as an autonomous state. After all, apart from speaking a unique language, the country had possessed all the attributes relating to statehood (and a national literature) long before independence was restored in 1945. As we have seen in this book, the cultural manifestations of Austria's obstinate hesitancy in acknowledging its cultural and political autonomy related time and again to the central concept of “Germanness” (and, sadly, its often attendant antisemitism) for a people who were not citizens of the German state, but whose medium of expression was the German language.