“Sometimes it seems to me that what is close and real is more difficult to describe than what is far away imagined,” says Brita Steinwendtner in the third installment of her “Poet Landscapes”, which she gave herself as a present for her eightieth birthday. “It is easier to think of Mechtilde Lichnowsky, for example, buying a bouquet of mimosas at the flower market in Cap d’Ail” than to tell “of an afternoon on the Schwarzgrabenweg”, HC Artmann’s address in Salzburg, “that was too close to me was to want to reveal him”. These sentences contain the essential virtues of the Salzburg author, director and long-time director of the Rauris Literature Days in a nutshell: discretion, a precisely sweeping imagination and self-reflection as a writer. Steinwendtner, who recently received a great deal of praise for a pacifist war novel from Old Austria (“The Face in the Blind Mirror”), and her husband crisscrossed Europe in search of the desks of almost all prominent figures in literary history.
In ten chapters, twelve memorable portraits were created, which always also depict the respective landscape. A double portrait shows Stefan and Friderike Zweig in their Salzburg villa on the Kapuzinerberg, which the author was granted access to. Another applies to Walter Benjamin and the much less well-known Mechtilde Lichnowsky – Benjamin’s fateful place was Banyuls-sur-Mer at the foot of the Pyrenees, which he successfully crossed in 1940, suffering from heart disease, only to die after his arrival in Spain for fear of the Gestapo walk. Lichnowsky, meanwhile, found her refuge in Cap d’Ail on the Côte d’Azur. Born Countess Arco-Zinneberg in 1879, she was married to the much older, extremely wealthy Prince Karl Max von Lichnowsky, a clairvoyant and diplomatic diplomat, ran a glamorous salon and made a name for herself as a novelist – the former bestsellers were only just being reissued.
Lichnowsky composed incidental music for Karl Kraus, with whom she had, as one would say today, a friendship plus, even if Steinwendtner banishes this to the realm of conjecture and denies posterity any right to such speculation – which perhaps means taking discretion too far. Steinwendtner pays tribute to the extremely emancipated princess and Moravian lady of the castle, who in her confidently ironic literature unmasked “the stereotypes and false morality of the aristocratic and upper-class society to which she herself belonged”. Lichnowsky’s essay “The Struggle with the Specialist” (1924) is a reckoning with “mansplaining” before the letter. After the prince’s death, she moves to Cap d’Ail, the Nazis ban her books. She makes the mistake of going to the German Reich, where she, who after almost forty years has married her childhood sweetheart, an English officer, is not allowed to leave the country and is placed under police surveillance. She will not see her husband again.