6. Remembering Hermynia Zur Mühlen: A Tribute

Lionel Gossman

“Auch sie war unglücklich gewesen, kränklich und zart, aber welche Kraft sprach dennoch aus ihren Werken.” [She too had been unhappy, sickly, and frail, but what strength came through in her writings.]

Hermynia Zur Mühlen on the poet
Annette von Droste-Hülshoff in Unsere Töchter die Nazinen1

Hermynia Zur Mühlen was a contemporary, give or take a few years, of many well-known writers and artists from the last decades of the Austro-Hungarian Empire: Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Oskar Kokoschka, Karl Kraus, Robert Musil, Joseph Roth, Egon Schiele, Stefan Zweig. While not in their league, she once enjoyed a modest but distinctive reputation both in Germany and in her native Austria as a translator from English, French, and Russian into German, as an author in her own right (an autobiographical memoir and six of her novels were published in English translation in the 1930s and 40s), and as a tireless fighter against National Socialism, anti-Semitism, and all forms of social injustice. “She was,” it has been said, “one of the best known women writers of the Weimar Republic.”2 On her sixtieth birthday in 1943, the BBC aired a tribute to her and the occasion was also celebrated at a party given in her honour by the Austrian and Czech PEN clubs in London. Since her death in 1951, however, she has been almost completely forgotten. Twelve years of exile in England and political views unpalatable to much of the Austrian public in the immediate aftermath of Germany’s defeat in World War II did nothing to rescue her from the oblivion to which she had been deliberately consigned by the Nazis in her native land and in Germany, while in the country in which she had found refuge in 1939, she remained a marginal figure. Her books were allowed to go out of print, fell from public view, and were soon no longer read.3 Thanks to her strong left-wing credentials, a few were republished in the 1970s and 1980s by the Aufbau Verlag in the former German Democratic Republic. Some small presses in Austria also took her up again and a handful of dedicated scholars in the field of Exil-Literatur have done their best to revive interest in her. But these efforts have so far failed to produce sustained critical attention and have not resulted in the kind of revival recently enjoyed, for example, by the Russo-French writer Irene Nemirovsky. With the publication of Ailsa Wallace’s Hermynia Zur Mühlen: The Guises of Socialist Fiction (Oxford University Press, 2009), adapted from the author’s insightful and comprehensive Oxford D.Phil. dissertation, the time has come for some, at least, of Zur Mühlen’s translated works to be made available again to English-speaking readers.4

***

Hermine Isabella Maria Victoria, Gräfin Folliot de Crenneville-Poutet, sometimes referred to as the “Red Countess,” was born into a prominent Viennese aristocratic family on December 12, 1883. Her great-grandfather on her father’s side had been a French émigré aristocrat who achieved distinction as a cavalry general in the service of the Austrian Emperor. At the Restoration, Louis XVIII several times pressed him to return to France, promising that he would be well compensated for properties confiscated during the Revolution, but Ludwig, Count Folliot de Crenneville (1765–1840), refused. “I will be poor,” he declared, “but I will remain loyal to my ruler, from whom I have received many honours and marks of favour, and to his house. After the death of my king [i.e. Louis XVI], I became an Austrian and I shall remain one, as will my sons.”5 Her grandfather on her father’s side, Franz, Count Folliot de Crenneville (1815–1888), had had a brilliant career as a high-ranking army officer and later as a prominent official at the court of Emperor Franz Joseph, who held him in high regard. Both ancestors appear to have had the conservative political views of most members of their caste. The Countess’s grandfather on her mother’s side, Ferdinand, Count von Wydenbruck (1816–1878), had had a diplomatic career and had seen service in London, where he met and married Zur Mühlen’s grandmother, and in Washington, where he had been Franz Joseph’s Envoy Extraordinary (1865–1867) at the time of the American Civil War.

As a child, the Countess herself relates, she received little care or affection from her socially prominent parents and was largely brought up by her widowed maternal grandmother, Isabella Luisa, Countess von Wydenbruck (1829–1900), whom she evokes lovingly not only in her lively autobiographical memoir of 1929 but in various guises in nearly all her fictional writings.6 Countess von Wydenbruck was one of two daughters of St. John Blacker, a member of the Anglo-Irish gentry. Her mother was Welsh and her grandmother half Scottish. She and Ferdinand von Wydenbruck were married in London in 1854 and between 1856 and 1862 she bore him three children — two sons and a daughter.7 As Austrian envoy, Wydenbruck had been charged with maintaining friendly relations between the democratic republic of the United States and the Habsburg Empire. For her part, Countess von Wydenbruck “had the liberal views of English women at that time,” according to her granddaughter. She did not share the contempt for the bourgeois work ethic or for the classic political values of the bourgeoisie that was common among members of the Austrian aristocracy, even among those who, like not a few younger members of Countess Hermine’s own immediate family, had apparently lost confidence in their caste and taken to mocking its pretensions.8 She subscribed to the liberal Viennese newspaper, the Neue Freie Presse, whose publisher and editor was Moritz Benedikt, a converted Jew, and whose Paris correspondent and regular feuilleton-writer in the 1890s was Theodor Herzl, and she was a Dreyfusarde at the time of the affaire — a consequence, perhaps, of her reading of Herzl’s reports. She also supported voting rights for women, her granddaughter relates — albeit with the caveat that it might be wise not to move too fast in Austria, since most women there were likely to use their votes to support rightwing, anti-liberal parties.9 When, at the age of thirteen, inspired by a budding concern with issues of social justice and equality, the little Countess founded a “Society for the Improvement of the World” (into which, as she herself recounts with characteristic irony, she dragooned a couple of her female cousins and a few local middle class girls eager to please the Komtessrl), her grandmother did not scold her, as her mother did, or make fun of her, as her father did. Instead, she accepted nomination as the first honorary member of the so-called Anchor Society and regularly allowed the Anker-Zeitung, the Society’s monthly “publication” to be read aloud to her. Above all, she appears to have taken her moral obligations as a Christian seriously and instilled in her grandchild an unshakable conviction that all human beings are of equal worth in the eyes of God, together with a keen sense of personal responsibility for the welfare of others. The Imperial government’s treatment of her husband can hardly have strengthened Countess von Wydenbruck’s respect for the social and political establishment. Blamed for not having prevented the execution of Emperor Franz Joseph’s brother Maximilian, the so-called “Emperor of Mexico,” Wydenbruck was removed from his post in Washington and, according to another of his grandchildren, “retired from the diplomatic service in high dudgeon and spent the remainder of his life in his country home, a prey to deep despondency.”10

The Countess’s eldest son, Christoph Anton — the lively, cynical, much loved ”Onkel Anton” of Zur Mühlen’s memoir — was a more subversive influence on his young niece. A diplomat like his father and like Zur Mühlen’s own father, Christoph Anton “first went to school in America,” which resulted — in the view of his somewhat estranged daughter, the writer and translator Nora Wydenbruck — in “democratic predilections” and “violent disapproval of Austrian society and its Byzantine class distinctions.” Those predilections and that disapproval were communicated to and shared with his niece.11

Questioning and rebellious from an early age, receptive to her grandmother’s Christian ideals of social justice as well as to Romantic notions — no doubt partly derived from Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, which she read in English with her grandmother — of the knights of old as brave and noble benefactors of humanity, the young Countess Folliot de Crenneville soon began to challenge the social conditions and conventions taken for granted in the world of her parents and strongly supported by her mother. (Her father was distinctly more ambivalent.) “At the age of eight or nine,” she recounts later, with a nice sense of the irony in her words, “I considered the editorials of Herr Benedikt a New Testament, and an unshakable conviction crystallized within me: the government was always wrong.”12 As she grew up, the positive, constructive influence of her grandmother and the negative, corrosive influence of Onkel Anton and, to a lesser degree, of her own father, were supplemented, but never displaced, by the socialist ideas she began to pick up in books and through encounters with exiles from czarist Russia.13 Drawn in early adolescence to idealistic, humanitarian movements and causes, she was soon moving further and further in the direction of the radical political Left. A short and unhappy marriage to Viktor von zur Mühlen, a conservative German landowner from one of the Baltic provinces of the Czar — in itself an act of revolt, inasmuch as, in comparison with the urbane, aristocratic, and Catholic de Crennevilles, many of whom held positions at the court of Emperor Franz Joseph, von zur Mühlen occupied a distinctly lower rung on the social ladder and was a Protestant to boot — ended in separation and divorce. But not before outrage at the exploitation of their native Estonian workers by the ruling German landowners, which the headstrong, high-strung, and sharply critical young woman observed in the course of the five years (1908–1913) she spent on her husband’s remote estate of Eigstfer in southern Estonia, had made a convinced socialist of her. Not coincidentally, these were years of rising tension, in the aftermath of Russia’s defeat in the Russo-Japanese War and the 1905 Revolution, between the czarist authorities together with the German landowners, on the one hand, and local Estonian nationalist and revolutionary movements, on the other.

Severe respiratory problems, aggravated by the harsh Baltic climate, resulted in the young Countess’s release from what she later portrayed in her autobiographical memoir as the oppressive environment of the German colony in Estonia. In 1913 she was sent for medical treatment to a sanatorium in Davos, Switzerland. Here, with a translation into German of an anti-war novel by the then well known and widely read Russian writer Leonid Andreyev — “the most popular, and next to Tolstoy, the most gifted writer in Russia today,” according to his American translator14  — she took the first significant step on the literary career she had until then been able to pursue only half-seriously.15 The Andreyev translation was immediately followed by a translation — with an Introduction by the respected Danish critic Georg Brandes — of Upton Sinclair’s King Coal (Zurich, 1918). Zur Mühlen went on to translate over seventy full-length books and innumerable shorter texts from English, French, and Russian. These included works by John Galsworthy (a best-selling author in Germany as in the English-speaking world), Harold Nicolson, Max Eastman, Edna Ferber, and the translator’s “much adored” Jerome K. Jerome, for whom she also wrote the obituary in the Frankfurter Zeitung.16 Zur Mühlen was particularly active in promoting the “muckraking” novels of Upton Sinclair, with whose leftwing views she strongly sympathized. She served effectively as Sinclair’s literary agent in Germany and thanks largely to her translations of more than twenty of his novels and plays, succeeded in turning him into a bestseller in Germany in the 1920s. Her translation of Oil!, for instance, sold more copies in Germany in the first two years after its publication in 1927 than the original sold in the U.S. in the same period.17 In addition, both her translations of Sinclair, several of which were illustrated by Georg Grosz, and the internationally popular children’s fairy tales which she began to produce in the early 1920s, with the aim of spreading socialist ideas among the young and ill-educated, contributed to the success of the radical avant-garde Malik Press of Wieland Herzfelde and his better known brother, the Dada photomontage artist John Heartfield, with which she had become closely associated.18

At Davos Zur Mühlen also met her future life’s partner, Stefan Isidore Klein, a Viennese Jew of modest background several years her junior, who had made a small reputation as a translator of literary works from Hungarian into German. In 1919 the couple moved to Frankfurt, then caught up in the revolutionary turmoil that had seized Germany after the defeat of 1918. On their arrival at the main railway station, Zur Mühlen recalled later, they found it bedecked with red flags. Soon the two of them with their dogs were a familiar sight on the streets of the old free Imperial city.19 Zur Mühlen’s career now took off. Despite the health problems that continued to plague her throughout her life, she was astonishingly productive — as she had to be. Having broken with both her husband and her family — though her divorce from Viktor von zur Mühlen was not finalized until March 1923,20 she had already declared her independence by anticipating the post-War Austrian Republic’s constitutional prohibition of titles of nobility and provocatively dropping the “von” in her husband’s name — she could count on no income from either source, and, despite considerable activity as a translator, Klein appears not to have had much literary or financial success. Of the two, she, in all likelihood, was the breadwinner.21

In addition to innumerable translations in the 1920s and 30s and into the 1940s, Zur Mühlen turned out half a dozen detective novels with a socially critical slant under the American-sounding pseudonym of Lawrence H. Desberry, identifying herself as their “translator” — a plausible enough disguise in view of her reputation as the translator of Sinclair and other American writers. She also produced the children’s fairy tales referred to earlier, in which the exploitation of the working class was exposed and interpreted for young readers from a socialist perspective. In the 1920s the fairy tale was viewed by the German Communist Party, which Zur Mühlen had joined some time between 1919 and 1921, as an effective means of promoting the political education of the masses. Illustrated by artists such as George Grosz, John Heartfield, and Heinrich Vogeler, Zur Mühlen’s collections enjoyed considerable success not only in Germany but in Chinese, Czech, English, French, Japanese, Russian, Spanish, and Yiddish translations. There was even a translation into Esperanto. The fairy tales were thus a source of much needed income and a contribution to a cause to which their author was committed. Hundreds of anecdotes and sketches written for magazines and for the feuilleton pages of newspapers — chiefly leftwing — were another important source of income. Some of these generally well crafted pieces were satirical, some were humorous, most were marked by sharp and honest observation and all were critical of both social injustice and individual human cruelty. Zur Mühlen continued to publish short works of this kind, even during the years (1939–1951) she spent in exile in England, when they appeared in the German language newspapers that catered to the refugee community. Two book-length collections of short pieces — Der rote Heiland [The Red Redeemer] in 1924 and Fahrt ins Licht. 66 Stationen. Erzählungen [Journey into the Light. 66 Stations. Short Stories] in 1936 — also attest to a special talent for the short form, as does the largely paratactic structure of many of her longer narratives. On the whole these do not have a strong or intricate plot structure; the organizing pattern tends to be chronological, with interest focused on individual scenes in which the characters are portrayed in their shifting, sometimes perplexingly contradictory relations to each other and to an evolving socio-political environment. The serialized form in which several of Zur Mühlen’s novels first appeared — a common strategy for maximizing royalties at the time — may well have reinforced this tendency.22

In 1929 a charming, sharply observed, and often humorous autobiographical memoir of the years from childhood to the effective end of her marriage to von zur Mühlen was serialized in the respected, liberal Frankfurter Zeitung. By the end of the year it had been taken up and published in book form by S. Fischer Verlag (the publisher of Thomas Mann) under the title Ende und Anfang, ein Lebensbuch. Karl Kraus was one of this book’s early admirers. An English translation, for which a foreword was solicited from Arthur Schnitzler, appeared in New York (Jonathan Cape and Harrison Smith) under the title The Runaway Countess a year later, a Polish and a Spanish translation a year after that.23 The author used her own life experiences, presented in the form of more or less free-standing anecdotes chronologically arranged, to depict the inner moral and cultural decay (but also, to some extent, in the case of the pre-1914 Austrian aristocracy, the charm, wit, and refinement) of a world that she believed had come to a well-deserved end with the Russian Revolution of 1917 — the welcomed Anfang or New Beginning of the German title. The aristocratic Zur Mühlen clearly found no reason to regret the collapse of the bourgeois-capitalist society that had replaced the decadent ancien régime and that was characterized, in her eyes, having lost whatever emancipatory impulses might once have motivated it, by middle-class mediocrity, vulgar ostentation, moral hypocrisy, and the selfish pursuit of gain at the expense of others. At the same time, the author’s literary talent is amply demonstrated by the skill with which she constructs her own persona and transforms the memories of a minor diplomat’s daughter into lively images of a certain turn-of-the-century world.

Several works defined by the author herself as “novels” followed soon after. Two were highly fictionalized narratives of different phases of her own life: Das Riesenrad (Stuttgart: I. Engelhorns Nachfolger, 1932; English translation, The Wheel of Life, London: Barker, and New York: Frederick Stokes, 1933), told in the first person by its fourteen-year old heroine-narrator and concentrating on a short period of about six months, and the more expansive Reise durch ein Leben (Bern and Leipzig: Gotthelf,1933; English translation, A Life’s Journey, London: Jonathan Cape, 1935), told in the third person and extending over a far longer period of time from childhood through adolescence and an unhappy marriage to the threshold of disillusioned middle age. Both novels skillfully exploit the author’s own experiences in order to portray, through their heroines, the evolution of a young girl as she emerges from the sheltered, secure, and privileged space of her childhood, symbolized by the magical garden of her grandmother’s (A Life’s Journey) or her aunts’ (The Wheel of Life) villa in the Alpine resort town of Gmunden, about 130 miles from Vienna, and discovers and engages with the larger social and political world beyond.

Both novels are about passing from a closed paradisiac world, cut off from the “real world” and seemingly innocent not only of class distinctions and social injustice but even of hard and fast boundaries between humans, animals, and plants — the prelapsarian world of the original “we” in the author’s own terms — into a fallen, historical world of social divisions and injustice, egoism, competition, vanity, hypocrisy, and loneliness — the world of the “ugly ‘I’” — and about the heroines’ longing to return to the lost paradise or create a new one. In both novels leaving the garden and discovering the world beyond it are presented as at once painful and essential to the fulfillment of the heroines’ humanity. The basic structure of both novels, in short, is that of the Judeo-Christian story of the Fall and the pursuit of redemption. At the same time, their realism allows both novels to be viewed as belonging to the traditional German genre of the Bildungsroman — except that the leading figure is a woman instead of a man and the focus is on the social world, which the heroine discovers and unmasks, as much as on the heroine herself. Above all, both novels offered a critical response to the conventional literature of the time for girls and young women, the so-called Backfischroman, which presented its readers with an idealized view of the social world and in particular of sex and marriage, and which Zur Mühlen had already subjected to stinging criticism in an article of 1919.24 In her two girls’ “growing-up” novels, Zur Mühlen did not shy away from topics sedulously avoided in the conventional literature: menstruation, childbirth, miscarriage, abortion, and above all, the stresses and strains of living with another person, whether in a legally and religiously sanctioned marriage relationship or in a “free” relationship outside of marriage. All Zur Mühlen’s heroines are naturally independent and seek to make their own way in the world; all reject the Backfischroman ideal of submission to convention and the established order; but the independent life is never presented as painless or trouble free.

1933 also saw the serial publication in the Vienna Arbeiter-Zeitung of Vierzehn Nothelfer, a clever detective novel with striking expressionist touches that was also a trenchant and witty social satire, and the appearance of a comic novel, Nora hat eine famose Idee (Bern and Leipzig: Gotthelf; English translation, Guests in the House [London: Frederick Muller, 1947]), which contained many references to the current political situation and which received favorable reviews in newspapers in Berlin, Vienna, Prague, and Basel.25

During the Frankfurt years, Zur Mühlen and Klein had come under intermittent police surveillance because of their Communist affiliations. After the publication of one novella — Schupomann Karl Müller (1924), in which the policeman hero breaks ranks and sides with the revolutionaries his job requires him to oppose — Zur Mühlen was even taken to court on a charge (later dropped for lack of convincing evidence) of high treason. In fact, though Zur Mühlen did give readings to workers in factories around Frankfurt, the gatherings at the couple’s apartment, which the authorities considered highly suspicious, may well have been more leftwing-Bohemian than conspiratorial.26 In any case, around 1931 or 1932, Zur Mühlen left the Communist Party. She appears to have been discouraged by the oppressiveness of the Stalinist regime in the Soviet Union (one of the writers whose work she had translated and who was also a personal friend and admirer — the French socialist, literary critic, and journalist Henri Guilbeaux — was a fervent supporter of Trotsky) and by the authoritarian dogmatism of the German Party itself, which found it more important to combat the Social Democrats than to join with the latter in combatting National Socialism. In her novels of the late 1930s and the 1940s her characters begin to express doubts about the wisdom and goodness of “the masses” and even about the point of political action. However contradictory and imperfect, the individual emerges more and more clearly from these later works as the highest value, and the the emphasis falls increasingly on basic conditions of human existence — the fleetingness of happiness, the difficulty of relationships with others, even those we love, the persistence of malice, the sadness of ageing, and the finality of death. Still, though she later described herself to Hubertus Prince zu Loewenstein as having joined the ranks of the “Left Catholics,”27 Zur Mühlen did not trumpet her withdrawal from the Communist Party. Even the change she made to her 1929 memoir when it was republished in the socialist women’s magazine Die Frau in 1949–1950 — she dropped the original final chapter hailing the Russian Revolution of 1917 and substituted a brief narrative of her life from 1917 to 1949 — stops well short of a repudiation of her lifelong commitment to socialism. Overcoming the pessimism, despair, and sense of isolation that she projected convincingly on to several of her women characters, identifying with the oppressed, and taking an active stand against injustice remained the primary imperative of the lapsed Catholic as well as the former Communist. Not surprisingly, individual Communists remain, along with truly devout Christians, among the most decent and admirable characters in her fiction. In fact, the two — sincere Christians and Communists — make common cause, along with sincere Social Democrats, in Unsere Töchter die Nazinen (1934, 1936) and Als der Fremde kam (1946), against the worst of enemies, the cruelty and inhumanity represented for Zur Mühlen, in her own time, above all by National Socialism. In light of their political orientation and reputation, therefore, as well as Klein’s situation as a Jew, the couple made the decision to leave Germany in 1933, immediately after Hitler’s Machtergreifung, for their native Austria. Short of money, as always, they settled in an extremely modest pension — “a flea-ridden boarding-house,” according to Zur Mühlen28  — in the Alserstrasse in Vienna’s Ninth District.

Outraged by what she saw as the blindness or indifference of her countrymen and women to developments in Germany, Zur Mühlen was especially provoked when a well-meaning local newspaper editor advised her to stay away from politics and provide him instead with entertaining stories and sketches. She responded by turning out one of her most politically engaged novels, Unsere Töchter die Nazinen, in the record time of three weeks. The contemporary situation is illuminated in this polemical and vigorously satirical work by the interlocking first-person narratives of three women from different social classes in a small town in Southern Germany, three mothers whose daughters join the Nazi Party — a working class Social Democrat, a lonely aristocrat who, buffetted by life, has withdrawn into a world of her own, and the resentful, frustrated, and ambitious middle-class wife of a scheming doctor whose practice has lagged far behind that of the popular and respected local Jewish doctor. The appeal of National Socialism — to young women in particular — is explained in psychological, as well as economic and social terms, and the ultimate message of the novel is that all decent people, be they Christians or Communists, working people or aristocrats, conservatives or Social Democrats, must unite in organized resistance, a truly popular front, to a fundamentally evil and inhuman regime.29

Serialized in a leftwing Saarbrücken newspaper in the summer of 1934, a year before the Saar voted to rejoin the new German Reich,30 this novel could not find a publisher in Austria willing to take it on, Zur Mühlen’s outspoken denunciations of National Socialism having made her persona non grata in the Third Reich. One episode in particular had branded her as an enemy of the Reich. In 1933 the highly respected S. Fischer Verlag, under extreme pressure because of its Jewish ownership, asked three of its most prominent authors, Alfred Döblin, René Schickele, and Thomas Mann — all of whom were generally known to be opposed to National Socialism and all of whom had been approached by Thomas Mann’s son Klaus about contributing to his newly-founded, Amsterdam-based, anti-fascist review Die Sammlung — to make an unequivocal statement of their intention to refrain from publishing in émigré magazines. For various reasons, including concern for Samuel Fischer, who was ailing, and for the future of his firm, which at the time was still pursuing an accommodation with the Nazis, all three complied with their publisher’s request and sent telegrams explaining that they had mistakenly understood Klaus Mann’s review to be purely literary and non-political. Stefan Zweig responded in the same way to an identical request from the Insel-Verlag. The Engelhorn Verlag, the Stuttgart publisher of Das Riesenrad, wrote to Zur Mühlen in similar vein, assuring her that, if she complied with the firm’s request, she would find herself “in the best of company.” Zur Mühlen’s cutting reply of 25 October 1933, a scathing rejoinder to the statements of Döblin, Schickele, Mann, and Zweig, was immediately made public both in Wieland Herzfelde’s Prague-based Neue Deutsche Blätter (no. 3, 1933), and in the leftwing Vienna Arbeiter-Zeitung (26 October 1933). “As I do not share your view that the Third Reich is identical with Germany and that the ‘leaders’ [Führer] of the Third Reich are identical with the German people,” Zur Mühlen declared,

it would be incompatible both with my convictions and with my sense of personal integrity for me to follow the unworthy example of the four gentlemen you refer to. Apparently it is more important to them that their work be printed in the newspapers and their books sold in the bookshops of the Third Reich than that they remain true to their past and to their convictions. To this ”best of company” I prefer solidarity with those who, in the Third Reich, are persecuted because of their convictions, shut up in concentration camps, or “shot while attempting to escape.” One cannot serve Germany and the German people better than by joining in the struggle against the horror tale become reality that is the Third Reich. That struggle cannot therefore logically be described as hostile to Germany by anyone truly connected with the German people and German culture. As for the accusation of betrayal of the homeland, I should point out, if that emotion-laden term must be used, that in view of the way the Third Reich has treated Austria, I, as an Austrian, would be guilty of betraying my homeland if I did not oppose the Third Reich with all the modest means at my disposal.31

With such public attacks on National Socialism Zur Mühlen had burned her boats as far as publishing or even selling any of her work in Germany was concerned. In addition, as most publishers in the smaller German-speaking lands were dependent on the German market, they were loth to alienate the German authorities by bringing out overtly anti-Nazi books. This was especially the case in Austria, where National Socialism already cast a long shadow. The most prominent publishing houses in Vienna, even when owned by Jews, Zur Mühlen told the Jewish-American novelist Nathan Asch, four of whose books she had translated into German, were unwilling to publish Jewish writers or, for that matter “gojim,” as she put it, who, like herself, were on the Nazis’ black list, for fear of being excluded from the German market.32

Unsere Töchter die Nazinen was finally brought out in 1936 by the Gsur Verlag, the director of which was the strongly anti-Nazi Catholic Vice-Mayor of Vienna, and which had an explicit policy of publishing anti-Nazi works,33 only to be immediately banned by the authorities under pressure from the German Ambassador to Austria, Franz von Papen, on the grounds that it was offensive to a neighboring power, insulting to its leaders, and filled with “Communist propaganda.”34 It was not published again until the Aufbau Verlag brought it out in 1983 in the former German Democratic Republic.

Even in a less overtly polemical work from this period, the novel Ein Jahr im Schatten, which appeared in 1935 in Zurich with the émigré Büchergilde Gutenberg (a book club founded in 1924 with the aim of publishing culturally edifying books at prices the proletariat could afford) and in English translation soon after (A Year under a Cloud [London: Selwyn and Blount, 1937]), the personal dramas of the heroine and other members of her aristocratic but in the post-War Austrian Republic no longer wealthy or influential family are increasingly overshadowed by events “up there,” i.e. in Germany. Still, with the couple’s finances as fragile as ever and the German market closed to her, Zur Mühlen had to find alternate sources of income. Resourceful and hardworking as always, she appears to have won a contract to supply Belgian radio with documentaries on prominent historical figures. No fewer than eleven such documentaries by her were broadcast in Flemish in 1937 and 1938 — on Queen Isabella of Spain, Christopher Columbus, Louis XIV, Cardinal Richelieu, Frederick the Great, Joseph Fouché, Metternich, Florence Nightingale, Woodrow Wilson, Bethmann-Hollweg, and Lord Edward Grey.

The Anschluß in 1938 obliged Zur Mühlen and Klein to uproot once more. This time they headed for nearby Bratislava, in Slovakia, where they decided to get married. Just before they left Vienna, Hermynia came into some money from her mother’s estate. To collect it in post-Anschluß Austria, however, she was required to sign an affidavit affirming that she was of pure Aryan descent. Though the couple needed the money badly, Zur Mühlen refused. With the German occupation of Bohemia and the establishment of an independent Slovak puppet state under Father Tiso in 1939, she and Klein fled to England, where they lived a penurious existence until their deaths a few years after the end of the Second World War. The small income Hermynia derived from the short pieces she wrote for the exile press, from some radio broadcasts for the BBC,35 and from a couple of longer works published in wartime England had to be supplemented by intermittent financial assistance from refugee agencies in Britain and the U.S. In addition, she suffered greatly from poor health and a lack of regular medical attention. The English climate aggravated her respiratory problems; and in the last months of her life, she rarely left the modest dwelling she occupied with Klein in the small suburban town of Radlett, Hertfordshire, some twenty miles north of London. Zur Mühlen died there, seemingly of a heart attack, in 1951, without ever having returned to Austria. Klein died nine years later in nearby St. Albans. In the local church records the woman who had once been the spoiled “Komtesserl” of a high-ranking Austrian aristocratic family and who had achieved some celebrity as the writer Hermynia Zur Mühlen is identified, no doubt in accordance with her Slovak marriage certificate, simply as “Hermyna Kleinova.”

The two longer works that date from this last and most difficult stage in Zur Mühlen’s career are in some ways her most ambitious. They appear to have been intended as parts of a planned trilogy in which the social, political, and cultural history of Europe, and in particular of Austria and Central Europe, would be analyzed and represented by following the fortunes of the Herdegens, an old Austrian aristocratic family, through many generations and many individual fates, from the Congress of Vienna and the final defeat of Napoleon to the rise of Hitler and the end of Austrian independence. Zur Mühlen may have been inspired by the success of “family novels” such as Mann’s Buddenbrooks (1901) or Galsworthy’s Forsyte Saga (1906–1921), but these last works, while they may be “cast in what is perhaps an unoriginal mould” (in the words of an otherwise very favorable contemporary review in the TLS36), are more richly informed historically than Galsworthy’s, and Zur Mühlen’s canvas is wider and more complex. Though the central scenes of the action are the ancestral Herdegen estate not far from Vienna (“Wohan” in Moravia in the first novel, “Korompa” in Slovakia in the second)37 and the family palaces in Vienna, some of the principal characters are foreigners (French, Polish, Prussian, Spanish, Swiss) who either married into the family or found refuge and employment in it. On their side, some Herdegens marry foreigners and go off to live in the land of their spouse; others marry out of their social class. The “exile” who has attachments to two or more countries — or social classes — but no longer feels completely at home in any one thus plays a pivotal role in the family saga, as well as among the secondary characters, reflecting no doubt the experience of the author herself, but at the same time multiplying the historical perspectives of the novels and presenting a paradigm of humanity as inescapably hybrid. It is “Because we are patchwork” — seemingly the title of a presumed missing component of the planned trilogy38  — that we are all both disconnected from an imagined “home” and potentially connected with each other, sharing the same destiny as parts of a single patchwork humanity. A cosmopolitanism rooted in the condition of the aristocracy of the Habsburg Empire opens here on to a global humanism that is no less relevant today than in the dark decade of the mid-30s to mid-40s when Zur Mühlen conceived, wrote, and published her family saga.

The first work in the trilogy — Ewiges Schattenspiel — which covers the period from the Congress of Vienna to the 1848 Revolutions, was probably written shortly before Zur Mühlen and Klein left Vienna for Bratislava, for, though it was not published in German as a book until 1996, it appeared in serialized form in the Bern newspaper Der Bund between November 1938 and March 1939. An English version, entitled We Poor Shadows, was published by Free Austrian Books in London in 1943 and again that same year by the London publisher Frederick Muller, with a second printing the following year. As the title page of this English version gives the name of the author as “Countess Hermynia Zur Mühlen” and as there is no indication anywhere that it is a translation, it has sometimes been assumed that Zur Mühlen wrote the novel in English. This is manifestly not the case. It is very likely, however, that she took an active part in translating it into English and in adapting it to the taste and interests of the English reading public. (The English version is shorter than the German one and some of the detail that gives the rich and wide-ranging original, with its vast cast of characters, its historical vividness and density has been cut.)

The second major part of the presumed trilogy to be published after the departure from Vienna — Als der Fremde kam — is an insightful portrait of the period from 1937 (i.e. just before the Anschluß) to the end of Austrian independence, the secession of Slovakia from the Republic of Czechoslovakia and its establishment as a fascist puppet state, and the occupation of Bohemia and Moravia by German troops in March 1939. Even if earlier parts of it were written in Bratislava, therefore, it seems virtually certain that most of it was written after Zur Mühlen and Klein arrived in England. Notwithstanding that in this case the English version — Came the Stranger (London: Frederick Muller, 1946) — preceded the German version (Vienna: Globus Verlag, 194739) and again bore no indication that it was a translation (the author is identified here too simply as “Countess Hermynia Zur Mühlen”), it is most likely that it too was originally written in German and translated — perhaps by Zur Mühlen herself — from German into English, rather than the other way round, as was at one time believed. At least one further novel, it is assumed, was intended to fill in the story of the Herdegens between 1814 and 1939. In her correspondence Zur Mühlen mentions a work to which she refers by an English title, “Because we are Patchwork” — but that, once again, in no way implies that the text itself was written in English. How far along she got with this novel is not known, and no trace of it has been found.40

***

It is my hope that the present republication by Open Book Publishers of Zur Mühlen’s autobiographical memoir will encourage readers to explore this courageous and talented author’s other writings. Equally, it is hoped that other publishers will be encouraged to follow the lead of openbookpublishers.com by reissuing the now virtually inaccessible English translations of her novels of the 1930s and 1940s. Though fairly traditional in technique — she was no Virginia Woolf or Gertrude Stein or even Marieluise Fleisser — Zur Mühlen was an accomplished writer who succeeded in combining passionate political commitment with a strikingly broad and rich historical sweep, sharp Marxist-influenced insight into the dynamics of social and political change, a keen eye and ear for individual and class characteristics and speech, humor, ironical self-awareness, and an undogmatic (perhaps especially feminine) sensitivity to the complexity of individual character and human relations and to the irremediable sadness of loss and death. Among many women writers of novels and short stories of her time in German — Anna Seghers, Princess Mechthilde Lichnowsky, Gina Kaus, to say nothing of the stupendously successful Vicki Baum — hers is a distinctive voice. Above all, she stands out as an insightful witness and portraitist of a crucially important period in modern history, as the creator of convincing and emancipating narratives of girls growing up, and as a fearlessly outspoken champion of human rights at a time when there were not a great many of these. I close this brief tribute to her by citing an earlier tribute that appeared shortly, after the publication of Ende und Anfang, in Die Weltbühne, a leftist weekly featuring work by many well-known figures in German letters in the Weimar period — among them Erich Kästner, Else Lasker-Schüler, Arnold Zweig, and Erich Mühsam — until it was shut down by the Nazis in March, 1933. Though the author of the tribute, the French communist Henri Guilbeaux, a friend of Lenin and Trotsky, was less consistent in his politics than Zur Mühlen (he defected from the Party and subsequently became an admirer of Mussolini), his words convey something of the appeal of Zur Mühlen’s writing and personality:

Klugheit, lebhafter Geist, Empfindsamkeit, Geschmack und Charme machen sie in der Tat zu einer guten Fee. Ohne Unterschied nimmt sie sich eines verlassenen Hundes, eines armen Teufels ohne Dach und Geld, eines Verirrten an. Sie hat nichts gemein mit kommunistischen Funktionären, die mechanisch und bureaukratisch ihr tägliche — achtstündige — Pflicht erfüllen. Obwohl sie noch ihre Illusionen, was die Parteiführer betrifft, hat, so ist sie doch von einer grossen geistigen Unabhängigkeit, und ihr Horizont ist nicht begrenzt.[…] Alle die wissen, dass revolutionäre Kunst nicht Phraseologie… ist, alle die auf der Suche nach einem fruchtbaren, frohen Talent sind, haben die herzlichsten Gefühle für die grossen schriftstellerischen Gaben und den frischen Geist der Hermynia zur Mühlen.41