Austrian Writers Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to Austrian Writers. Here they are! All 14 of them:

The Austrian writer Robert Musil summed up the Fanatic's great rhetorical advantage in just ten words: There is no truth which stupidity can't make use of. Another Austrian, novelist Heimito von Doderer, put this way: Even the most impossible persons who do the most unforgivable things possess substantial reality; from their points of view they are always right – for let them only doubt that and they are no longer such impossible persons. And we must pay close heed to those who play such ungrateful roles, for these roles are indispensable. It is no small thing to be a monster or a spiteful idiot, and in the first case to think oneself beautiful, in the second a highly intelligent person. Such characters must be represented. Some one has to do it.
David James Duncan
As a modern Austrian writer—Sigismund von Radecki—has well said, “It is not art, but rather the archetype towards which art strives to ascend.”2
Christopher Henry Dawson (Formation of Christendom)
The end of the war brought the closing of the borders cutting off Austria’s coal supply from Czechoslovakia, leaving the Austrians at peace but hungry, cold, and vulnerable to tuberculosis and a virulent form of influenza (Grosskurth, 1991, p. 82). Writer Stefan Zweig described postwar Vienna as “an uncertain, gray, and lifeless shadow of the former imperial monarchy” (qtd. in Gay, 1988, p. 380).
Daniel Benveniste (The Interwoven Lives of Sigmund, Anna and W. Ernest Freud: Three Generations of Psychoanalysis)
13 September. Again barely two pages. At first I thought my sorrow over the Austrian defeats and my anxiety for the future (anxiety that appears ridiculous to me at bottom, and base too) would prevent me from doing any writing. But that wasn’t it, it was only an apathy that forever comes back and forever has to be put down again. There is time enough for sorrow when I am not writing. The thoughts provoked in me by the war resemble my old worries over F. in the tormenting way in which they devour me from every direction. I can’t endure worry, and perhaps have been created expressly in order to die of it. When I shall have grown weak enough –it won’t take very long –the most trifling worry will perhaps suffice to rout me. In this prospect I can also see a possibility of postponing the disaster as long as possible.
Franz Kafka (Diaries, 1910-1923)
FLEISCHMANN: Since the days of Sigmund Freud and the advent of psychoanalysis the interpretation of dreams has played a big role in Austria[n life]. What is your attitude to all that? BERNHARD: I’ve never spent enough time reading Freud to say anything intelligent about him. Freud has had no effect whatsoever on dreams, or on the interpretation of dreams. Of course psychoanalysis is nothing new. Freud didn’t discover it; it had of course always been around before. It just wasn’t practiced on such a fashionably huge scale, and in such million-fold, money-grubbing forms, as it has been now for decades, and as it won’t be for much longer. Because even in America, as I know, it’s fallen so far out of fashion that they just lay people out on the celebrated couch and scoop their psychological guts out with a spoon. FLEISCHMANN: I take it then that psychoanalysis is not a means gaining knowledge for you? BERNHARD: Well, no; for me it’s never been that kind of thing. I think of Freud simply as a good writer, and whenever I’ve read something of his, I’ve always gotten the feeling of having read the work of an extraordinary, magnificent writer. I’m no competent judge of his medical qualifications, and as for what’s known as psychoanalysis, I’ve personally always tended to think of it as nonsense or as a middle-aged man’s hobby-horse that turned into an old man’s hobby-horse. But Freud’s fame is well-deserved, because of course he was a genuinely great, extraordinary personality. There’s no denying that. One of the few great personalities who had a beard and was great despite his beardiness. FLEISCHMANN: Do you have something against beards? BERNHARD: No. But the majority of people call people who have a long beard or the longest possible beard great personalities and suppose that the longer one’s beard is, the greater the personality one is. Freud’s beard was relatively long, but too pointy; that was typical of him. Perhaps it was the typical Freudian trait, the pointy beard. It’s possible.
Thomas Bernhard
The choice of 'eastern Europe' as a frame of reference requires a word of explanation. The term is used here in a provisional manner and indeed a rather arbitrary one, with the lower-case form intended to underline this. The travellers set out from places that stretch from Kiev to Rijeka, and from Gdansk to Crete. The eastern Europe that they represent includes the lands that lie between the Baltic in the north and the Mediterranean in the south; between Russia in the east and Italy, Austria and Germany in the west. These boundaries were set in part by the limits of the possible: had resources permitted, accounts by travellers from the Baltic countries or by Austrian Germans, among others, might equally well have been included here. My aim has been to assemble a representative selection of travel writings from this region: the anthology includes accounts from some twenty languages, by more than one hundred authors, written over a period of more than 450 years, beginning in the sixteenth century and finishing with a book published in 2004. The writers travel to Ireland in the west, to Istanbul in the east—and any number of places in between. But why group these particular east European travels through Europe together, in a single volume? The answer lies partly in eastern Europe's relationship to the idea of Europe itself.
Wendy Bracewell (Orientations: An Anthology of European Travel Writing on Europe (East Looks West))
unearthing some of the most disturbing moments in Austrian history. He had made a sort of subspecialty of studying intellectuals persecuted in the pre-Nazi era, and we discussed his fascinating work on the assassination of Hugo Bettauer, the writer and editor whose dystopian 1923 novel, Die Stadt Ohne Juden (The City Without Jews), remains one of the most uncanny predictions of a historic catastrophe ever written.
Tom Reiss (The Orientalist: Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life)
Writing in 1855, church historian Philip Schaff quoted an Austrian writer who observed, “The United States are by far the most religious and Christian country in the world . . . because religion is there most free.
John Fea (Was America Founded As a Christian Nation?: A Historical Introduction)
Elfriede Jelinek’s The Piano Teacher is also a must. It’s story about a rigid middle-aged Piano Teacher who lives with her mother and grapples with her perverse desire, and it’s various captures—love and the promise of the couple, for example. I think she’s able to capture the most abject moments of a feminist antagonism. And in spite of all the problems with the purely negative, her critiques and exposé are so fucking sharp. Jelinek is one of the only fiction writer’s I follow. Her perversity and coldness is unmatched, and while rooted in an Austrian sort of post-war experience, she is still quite contemporary.
Anonymous
She appreciated that the entire Bulgarian Jewish choir had come on a boat together and that Bulgarians were playing in the new Israeli philharmonic. She loved to read Tolstoy and Chekhov, Victor Hugo, Thomas Mann, and Jack London. Most of all, she adored Austrian writer Stefan Zweig, her beloved, kindred soul whose work she considered profoundly sensitive and who, during the war, had lost faith in humanity and cut open his veins.
Sandy Tolan (The Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East)
Because they write ‘harbor’ instead of ‘harbour’? Then one would have to attribute a language of their own to the Austrians for saying ‘Sessel’ when they mean ‘Stuhl’ [for chair] or turn ‘Januar’ [January] into ‘Janner.’ Because American slang is spoken differently from British slang? That’s true, but in both countries the standard languages are about as identical as ‘Austrian’ and German.”27 What is “American” supposed to communicate to German readers? An accent? But then writings by an author from Glasgow would have to be titled “from the Glaswegian” or those by a writer living in Manchester as “from the Mancunian.” John Lennon’s books would have to be graced with the formulation “from the Liverpudlian” and those by Woody Allen with “from New Yorkish” or, to be more precise, “from the Brooklynese.” If it’s not about accent, is the criterion perhaps geography? Then Germans would have to use “from the Canadian” or “from the New Zealander
Andrei S. Markovits (Uncouth Nation: Why Europe Dislikes America (The Public Square Book 5))
The news continues, informing us that English writer Christopher Isherwood, an Austrian citizen named Clarimal Stein, and Lucy Harker, the daughter of Dracula’s slayer, perished tragically in a single-vehicle accident in rural Prussia.
Cynthia Ward (The Adventure of the Golden Woman (Blood-Thirsty Agent, #4))
Mises and Hayek Beginning with Ludwig von Mises and F.A. Hayek, the links between liberalism and the Austrian School become intense and pervasive, since these two scholars were themselves at once the outstanding Austrian economists and the most distinguished liberal thinkers of the twentieth century. The American academic world, however, deemed none of this sufficient for them to be accorded the kind of positions to which they were clearly entitled.50 They, and in particular Mises, were also responsible to a greater degree than is generally appreciated for the upsurge of the free-market philosophy in the second half of the century.51 But since the views of the two great men are so often amalgamated, it should be emphasized that not only did they differ to an extent on economic theory (Salerno 1993; see also Kirzner 1992c: 119–36), but, more pertinently to the theme of this essay, they exhibited a sharp distinction in the degree of their liberalism. What follows refers to Hayek’s political attitudes, not to his contributions to economic science. These were highly significant and valuable in the earlier part of his career, as he together with Mises built the theoretical foundations of the modern Austrian school.52 While Mises was a staunch advocate of the laissez-faire market economy (Mises 1978a; Rothbard 1988: 40; Hoppe 1993; Klein 1999), Hayek was always more open to what he saw as the useful possibilities of state action. He had been a student of Wieser’s, and, as he conceded, he was “attracted to him . . . because unlike most of the other members of the Austrian School [Wieser] had a good deal of sympathy with [the] mild Fabian Socialism to which I was inclined as a young man. He in fact prided himself that his theory of marginal utility had provided the basis of progressive taxation . . .” (Hayek 1983: 17). Early in his career, Hayek stated that the lessons of economics will create a presumption against state interference, adding: However, this by no means does away with the positive part of the economist’s task, the delimitation of the field within which collective action is not only unobjectionable but actually a useful means of obtaining the desired ends. . .the classical writers very much neglected the positive part of the task and thereby allowed the impression to gain ground that laissez-faire was their ultimate and only conclusion . . . (1933: 133–34) This remained Hayek’s standpoint throughout his long and richly productive scholarly life. It is regrettable, but typical, that a great many confused commentators continue to characterize him as a advocate of laissez-faire.53 In fact, he
Ralph Raico (Classical Liberalism and the Austrian School)
The first psychiatrist to look closely at the more extreme forms of sadistic behavior was the eminent German physician Richard von Krafft-Ebing. Besides coining the term “masochism” (named after the Austrian writer Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, whose famous novel, Venus in Furs, deals with a man who craves humiliation), Krafft-Ebing made a major contribution to the literature of morbid psychology with his classic book, Psychopathia Sexualis—a massive compendium of every known perversion, illustrated with hundreds of detailed case histories. At the time of its initial publication in 1886, the book was considered so shocking that its author was nearly expelled from the prestigious British Medico-Psychological Association. Even today, it makes for deeply disturbing reading. Still, it is a significant work, one that clearly demonstrates there’s nothing new about serial murder. Of course, Krafft-Ebing doesn’t use the term “serial murder,” which wouldn’t enter the language for another hundred years. The term he uses is the German word lustmord or “lust-murder.” The essence of this crime is extreme sadistic violence against the victim. The lust-murderer doesn’t just kill his victims. His ultimate pleasure comes from savaging their bodies: disemboweling them, cutting out their genitals, etc. For such blood-crazed sadists, violence is a substitute for sex.
Harold Schechter (The Serial Killer Files: The Who, What, Where, How, and Why of the World's Most Terrifying Murderers)