2023-12-31 20:06:01
The great literary history of jazz is still to be written, and there still seems to be a lot to be (newly) discovered, especially in the early days. One naturally first thinks of the American “Jazz Age” proclaimed by F. Scott Fitzgerald, but there was also a productive, programmatic engagement with new music in literature in Europe and in German. Hans Janowitz published the novel “Jazz” in 1927, René Schickele published the novel “Symphony for Jazz” in 1929 – and now Felix Dörmann’s novel, also simply titled “Jazz”, is being republished by a small Viennese publisher and dates back to 1925.
Dörmann has an adventurous work history: Born in 1870, he made his debut as a poet (“Neurotica”) in 1891 and soon associated with protagonists of Viennese modernism such as Bahr, Hofmannsthal and Schnitzler. Karl Kraus would later write about Dörmann that he “would have liked to become a Viennese Baudelaire and would have strangled anyone who would have predicted that he would end up in the operetta.” In fact, after writing other poems, plays and novels, Dörmann primarily wrote libretti (“A Waltz Dream”). And, as Alexander Kluy’s clever and pointed afterword to this book makes clear, he became a pioneer of Austrian film who founded a production company in 1912, but which soon “could no longer survive even with explicit erotica such as bathroom and undressing films.”
The cinematic aspect is also inscribed in the novel “Jazz”; It begins like a script: “A gray November evening. The lights flicker dimly through the heavy fog. The paving stones shine wetly.” And then: “Invisible burdens lie heavy on all souls.” Dark November of the soul: One has the impression that Dörmann is quoting from Melville’s “Moby-Dick”, but his work is not as literary advanced as this work : “Jazz” is a rumor novel that has little depth but a lot of bright surface; the narrative sometimes seems staid.
First I missed it with sadness, then with resentment
Inscribed in his memory is the sadness over a faded “world of yesterday”, as Stefan Zweig conjured up again before his death. The old Vienna before the First World War is missed here first with melancholy, then with resentment. The narrator of this novel not only mourns this Vienna, in which the “Café Imperial” was still “the meeting place of a distinguished selection of Viennese society,” but he also reviles the new Vienna of the “grease and jam pushers,” to the point of aggressive xenophobia : “Vienna is being balkanized and gypsyized,” he states.
The cover of Felix Dormann’s novel “Jazz”: Image: Edition Atelier
The protagonist Marianne, daughter of a baron who died bitterly and was stripped of his noble title, has been “stolen of youth” by the war, but now she wants to have fun. She meets the revolutionary Ernö Kalmar, who fled Hungary – a name that speaks well for his greed, as he grabs everything in the world like the arms of an octopus in a time of need. He becomes a crook, fence, cocaine dealer and reporter. He recognizes Baroness Marianne as a “stunning woman” whom he wants to conquer. She is reluctant for a moment, but is soon “lost to him”. You don’t have a choice either, because in the Vienna of inflation it’s about survival. Marianne becomes a dancer in the Ronacher variety show, Ernö becomes a successful speculator and banker. But it ends badly for both of them. He will hit her and shout at her: “Beast, you will dance.” And that’s not the worst in this story of crises and crashes.
Jazz as a central metaphor
One cannot claim that the novel deals in depth with jazz. But he does make this his central metaphor. When Marianne celebrates her first big success on stage, it is said: “It was a rush of blood – a dance of obsession, with an eerie, inciting magnificence that tugged at the nerves and crushed the hearts. The greatness and horror of the time lay in this dance. The desperation and the glaring joy of despair danced in shimmy time. Bright brass, whining violins, shrill pipes – everything was combined into a cancan of destruction – into a jazz band of desperation, playing tricks with their own misery. Mood of the times! Terror!”
Wolfgang Sandner Published/Updated: Recommendations: 4
Without mistake, jazz is equated here (as it is colloquially in English) with chaos, decline, even terror. Once there is talk of the “inevitable jazz band,” then it says: “The salon orchestra is shouted over and silenced by the jazz band.” Jazz is the synonym for modernity in an ultimately anti-modern novel. At the end, Marianne is tired of modern life and concludes: “It’s jazzed out.”
Felix Dörmann: „Jazz“. Roman.
With notes and afterword by Alexander Kluy. Edition Atelier, Vienna 2023. 288 pages, born €26.
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