‘Immortal Austria'? (Austrians in Exile in Britain)

Immortal Austria was the title of a theatrical pageant devised by Austrian refugees in wartime London, the name summarizing their collective memory of their homeland as a country of mountain scenery, historical grandeur and musical refinement. The reality of the country they had left, and the one to which some of them returned, was very different. This volume contains various studies of the representations of their homeland in the cultural production of Austrian exiles, including those projected by émigrés working in the British film industry, those portrayed in the historical novel and in the literary works of such notable authors as Stefan Zweig, Elias Canetti and Robert Neumann. It opens with a survey of the make-up of the Austrian exile community and concludes with a study of attitudes to returning exiles, as reflected in the post-war literary journals. The volume thus offers students and teachers a vital cultural link between the pre-1934 Austria of the First Republic and the post-1945 Austria of the Second.