| Title: | Unter Mördern und Schiebern. Die österreichische Nachkriegszeit im Spiegel einheimischer „hardboiled detective novels“ |
| Author: | Wynfrid Kriegleder |
| Publication: | Temeswarer Beiträge zur Germanistik, 15, p. 233-250 |
| p-ISSN: | 1453-7621 |
| Publisher: | Mirton Verlag |
| Place: | Temeswar |
| Year: | 2018 |
| Abstract: | The end of the 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. Of course, 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. For this reason scholarship on the topic is quite scarce. I argue that the critically neglected Austrian crime novels of the late 1940s and early 1950s may 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 the contemporary situation. The American genre allowed an often nihilistic point of view, an “existentialist” insistence on the lonely detective’s responsibility to make decisions based on his own value-system in a world where the traditional values had become problematic. This might have appealed to young writers coping with the physical and moral devastation Austria faced after the Nazi period. Writers I am dealing with are Johannes Mario Simmel, Milo Dor and Reinhard Federmann. |
| Key words: | hard-boiled detective novel, Johannes Mario Simmel, Milo Dor, Reinhard Federmann |
| Language: | German |
| Links: |  pdf |
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