Cherrypicker
Sitting on the powder keg

A farmhand, a mathematics students and a young aristocrat are teetering through war-drunk Vienna. A plot line spanning just 24 glittering hours in August 1914 is all that Raphaela Edelbauer needs to portray a country on the brink of an abyss that threatens to devour not only the young.

By Benedikt Arnold

© Klett-Cotta It is the evening before the start of the First World War. We find ourselves in Vienna in the year 1914. Europe is on the brink of an abyss. Austria-Hungary has declared war on Serbia. Russia has ordered mobilization. Germany sets the Russian Empire an ultimatum for withdrawing its general mobilization. The world is facing the biggest catastrophe in human history, and the masses on the streets, sure of their victory, are electrified, intoxicated and borne by a patriotic euphoria.

Champions of emancipation

This is the setting for Raphaela Edelbauer’s novel Die Inkommensurablen (The Incommensurables). It revolves around the three teenagers Hans, Klara and Adam – three youngsters who could hardly be more different. The novel begins with Hans Ranftler’s arrival in the pulsating Habsburg metropolis. It is the first time that the 17-year-old farmhand has left his home village in Tyrol; he has come to Vienna to be treated by the psychoanalyst Helene Cheresch. Hans stumbles dreamlike from one encounter to the next, and before he knows it becomes acquainted with Klara Nemec and Adam Graf Jesensky, who take him under their wings and at whose side he will spend the next 24 hours.

His new-found friends have already been patients of Helene Cheresch for some time; she has established what she calls a dream cluster in her practice. Cheresch is reminiscent at first of the feminist pioneers of her time: she is self-confident and successful in the still nascent and mainly male-dominated field of psychoanalysis. Klara is another undauntedly self-confident young woman who has turned her back on her humble origins and is working alongside Helene Cheresch. She is reading mathematics at the university, where she is studying the incommensurability – which lends the novel its title – of irrational numbers.

Suspenseful locales

It is certainly no accident that the narrative structure of the novel reminds one of Arthur Schnitzler’s Dream Story. It is the flowing and almost film-like way it is told that sets the novel apart. Raphaela Edelbauer captures the tense atmosphere that characterizes Vienna at that time between war and peace by continuously panning the narrative spotlight from one scene to the next. One moment we are attending one of Adam’s rehearsals of Arnold Schönberg’s String Quartet No. 2, Op. 10., which a short time later breaks down and gives way to a brawl between the young music students. Shortly afterwards Hans, Adam and Klara are guests at a soiree taking place in the upper class home of Adam’s aristocratic family. The scenes that evening are like a piece of intimate theatre in which the ethnic and political heterogeneity of the multiethnic Austria-Hungary is reflected in the various guises in which the guests appear.

Unknown underworld

The way she shines the spotlight on those insalubrious unknown locales that virtually never feature in novels about the Habsburg metropolis in the early twentieth century is particularly appealing. Thus the novel also offers a glimpse through the keyhole at the queer Vienna of the time. The three protagonists spend their nights hanging around in dive bars of dodgy repute and take part in an occult-like seance in an underground establishment.

Raphaela Edelbauer’s novel Die Inkommensurablen takes us on an intoxicating foray through Vienna at the turning-point of history. In it, the Austrian author depicts different societal strata and urban lifestyles, some very familiar, others new – and does so at all times in a linguistic and narrative style that is as ingenious as it is intrinsically her own.