“Some people having approached me seeking permission to write my biography. A very strange notion. The anecdotes – the places I have stayed at – the encounters – the influences. Incapacity to grasp the purely intellectual adventure”, observed Hugo von Hofmannsthal in November 1926, and gave pause for thought with the following conclusion: “Whoever makes your biography assumes that he is your equal.”

Almost eighty years on, no-one has been prepared to risk being accused of such audacity, as Ulrich Weinzierl, a foremost expert on Viennese modernism, has remarked. There is as yet no biography of Hofmannsthal in the strict sense of the word. Hans-Albrecht Koch, who has written a ‘portrait’ of the Austrian poet and playwright, suggests that Hofmannsthal’s comment of 1926 has obstructed approaches to a written biography. This situation is all the more unsatisfactory given the exceptionally wide-ranging and multifaceted research that has been carried out on Hofmannsthal, research which is in urgent need of synthesis.

© Freies Deutsches Hochstift, Frankfurt/M.

The Institute’s projected scholarly biography of Hofmannsthal will strive for such a synthesis. Yet more important is a thorough engagement with the seemingly endless primary sources: the critical edition of Hofmannsthal’s collected works runs to 30,000 pages; some 10,000 letters have been published; and there is as yet no accurate estimate of the volume of unpublished letters, which are dispersed throughout various archival collections. In his younger years, the poet wrote several thousand letters to his parents alone.

These numerous biographical documents are characterised by discretion, even by a fear of self-exposure, as Hermann Broch once noted. Likewise, the many memories and appreciations written by Hofmannsthal’s friends and contemporaries leave us with no clear or consistent perception of the poet, tending rather to suggest through their diversity the complex and multifaceted nature of his personality and thereby adding to the biography’s challenge of doing justice to its subject.

The projected biography will incorporate current research on numerous aspects of Hofmannsthal’s context, including: Viennese modernism; historicism; the world of the theatre; the poet’s artistic and personal relationships with other writers such as George, Rilke, Schnitzler and Wassermann; his collaboration with Richard Strauss and Max Reinhardt. Only through such a comprehensive and contextual approach will it be possible to read Hofmannsthal’s biography as a ‘living book’ (an expression he himself used to refer to human beings), as a narrative that reveals, in the prescient words of his contemporary Felix Salten, ‘a poet’s tragedy of incomparable intensity’.

Contact: Wilhelm Hemecker

See also:
Tobias Heinrich
Wolfgang Kreutzer
Caitríona Ní Dhúill (until July 2009)