Mon Cousin de 'Liernut'

Since the late-1990s, scholarship on Alexander Lernet-Holenia has focused less on his popular work for the theatre or on his poetry and more on novels, novellas and essays that deal directly or indirectly with Austrian social and political developments.¹ His desire for a return to what he deemed to be Austria's true Central European role as a polyglot and elitist Kulturnation - an outlook derived from Hugo von Hofmannsthal's 'Austrian Idea' - was paralleled by his frustrated search for personal identity as either the illegitimate offspring of a Habsburg archduke, or as the son of his father of record, Alexander Lernet, whose claims to descent from French nobility remained unsubstantiated. References to France appear throughout Lernet-Holenia's wide œuvre, particularly in his poetry and adventure novels. But his references to the French ancien régime, in texts that deal specifically with Austrian history or present allegories of Austria's fate in the twentieth century arise from a desire in the 1930s to ground the remnant core of the Danube Monarchy outside of its relationship with Germany and to underscore the country's multi-culturalist and monarchical heritage.

Lernet-Holenia's romanticized images of Hungary and Poland (the latter even in his banned 1941 crypto-resistance novel, Mars im Widder [Mars in Aries], written after his participation in the 1939 German invasion), convey his desire for an increase in post-imperial Austria's cultural and political relationships with former territories of the Empire. These nations represented segments of a lost whole for Lernet-Holenia. Reconnected, they would foster a more benevolent, balanced, and even metaphysically correct, European order. France, however, functions as a prismatic reflection of Austria through its long historico-dynastic relationships and literary or artistic interaction, particularly in the impressionist Jung Wien movement, of which Lernet-Holenia was ostensibly the final exponent. Although France opposed Austria in two World Wars, elements of his novels suggest that Austria might have had a more organic socio-cultural and political relationship with France than with Germany. Importantly, he often indicates a strong and undisputed presence of Catholic monarchical and aristocratic history in the identity of the French republics. France therefore also serves as the author's corrective model for an Austria he believes disposed of its cosmopolitan Habsburg heritage in favour of Germanization and republican provincialism. On a more individual level, the locus of an idealized Austria in and through France also relates to the author's search for his aristocratic personal identiry which he often translated into fiction.

Lernet-Holenia's introduction to French culture was not extraordinary. It came to him as part of a wealthy bourgeois upbringing undertaken by his mother's family, the Holenias, following the divorce of his parents. Aspects of French style, appreciation of French art and the conscious use of French words in speech (beyond the French lexical influence in Austrian Standard German) were, and to some extent still are, appreciated by the upper classes in Austria.² Moreover, a sense of cosmopolitanism was also important for social status, and the young Lernet-Holenia was given an Italian governess who taught him stories and songs in her language.³ Lernet-Holenia would later develop this knowledge and translate or adapt several Italian literary works. As a youth, he was introduced to French literature in his schooling, and the supposition that his father, Alexander Lernet, had French ancestry encouraged him, at a personal level, to mythologize France and its culture.

Lernet-Holenia's correspondence with Rainer Maria Rilke, whose early poetry especially the Neue Gedichte [New Poems], 1907/08, is indebted to Baudelaire and the French Symbolists, is central to his development as a writer.⁴ Lernet-Holenia also considered Hugo von Hofmannsthal among his inspirations, another poet inspired by the Symbolists, and his early poetry and stage work emulated both Hofmannsthal's style and his mood, including the fashionable French references. Lernet-Holenia's experiences in the Great War as a volunteer in the Galician 'Dragoner-regiment Erzherzog Albrecht Nr. 9', and later as a commissioned officer, did more than eventually feed his inter-war literature with images of polyglot military forces, aristocratic traditions and imperial collapse. It fermented a friendship with Cavalry Captain Karl Klammer a teacher of German and French who translated (as 'K. L. Ammer') works by Villon, Rimbaud, Corbiöre, Maeterlinck and Vellaine.⁵ These French and Belgian writers influenced Lernet-Holenia's poetic symbolism and magical realist prose, and he would later also publish his own German translations of French poetry.⁶

Lernet-Holenia's first novel was also his initial attempt at dealing with what would become his literary obsessions - recalling imperial Austria and locating personal identity. In Die Abenteun eines jungen Herrn in Polen [The Adventures of a Young Gentlman in Poland, 1931], he follows a naive and egocentric young officer's absurd attempts to survive the Great War on the Polish front. His regiment is a microcosm of the Empire's ruling caste, a mix of German, French, Italian and Slavic influences, which contrasts and conflicts with the portrayal of the imperial German officer-corps. Among the various subclasses of the Austro-Hungarian elite, the character of Graf Ste-Croix represents the old nobility, whose member families had been foreign nobles (in this case French) who emigrated to the Empire in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The author creates a stereotypical German aristocrat as the exchange officer in the Austro-Hungarian regiment, while the Austrian representative among the Germans is Baron Dieudonné. Lernet-Holenia's 'Austrians' are for the most part as foreign in name, heritage and cultural representation from the Germans as possible, so that there can be no symbolic suggestion of 'absorption' or even nominal cultural unity beyond a shared language.

Rejecting the pan-German ideology of National Socialism and other Anschluss-minded politics of the period, Lernet-Holenia stresses the polyglot and non-German nature of Catholic Old Austria, recalling the height of its imperial power in the eighteenth century when it attracted foreign nobility and solidified is colonization of Eastern and South-Eastern Europe. The embodiment of this tradition, Empress Maria Theresia, becomes a central figure in his concept of Austrian history and culture. Rejecting convention, Lernet-Holenia would insist that Austria had not two but three historical ruling dynasties: the Houses of Babenberg, Habsburg and Lorraine. While the marriage of the Habsburg Archduchess and future Empress to François, Duc de Lorraine in 1736 did not alter the dynastic name beyond a hyphenate (Habsburg-Loiraine), Lernet-Holenia believed that it altered the very nature of the House, maintaining that the German Habsburgs begin their dilution into an international, mostly Latin-based (French and ltalian) family during this period. Given the fact that the formation of historical Austria derives from a dynastic imprint made on a collection of various regions and ethnicities rather than from the evolution of an ethnically homogeneous or linguistically unified nation, Lernet-Holenia hoped to wrest Austrian identity away from the Germanic with the 'Austrian House of Lorraine' and move it towards the French-Latin.⁷

Lernet-Holenia's early masterpiece, Die Standarte [The Standard, 1934] has often been categorized as among the genre of Austrian imperial collapse or even the jingoistic German Stahlhelm [steel helmet] novels that waxed nostalgic about the lost empire and the heroism of the Central Powers' military forces. But the novel greatly transcends trivialization in its dark psychological and metaphorical examination of a young officer's conflicting obsessions with the imperial standard he must protect and the woman he loves. Once again, polyglot Austro-Hungarian forces are shadowed by a French presence, and the connection suggests a repetition of history. At one point, the central character, Menis, returns to the front to witness the retreat of the 'Royal Allemand', the regiment that attempted to rescue Louis XVI at Varennes.⁸ As a suggestion of an aristocratic-monarchist apocalypse, the evocation of Varennes emphasizes the irreversible failure of the military campaign and the radicalism to come. Menis returns to an anarchic Vienna, whereupon he surrenders the old brocade standard for incineration at Schönbrunn Palace. His subsequent vision of a sea of flags made of fire provides a startling political metaphor. Clearly, a destructive new order and mass culture springs from the ashes of, and runs counter to, the author's concept of a Catholic-Baroque Austrian essence.⁹

In Die Auferstehung des Maltrauers [The Resurrection of Maltravers, 1936], Lernet-Holenia abandons direct reference to the ancien régime, but republican France provides a locus of freedom that neither fragmented Central Europe (starting-point) nor Mussolini's Italy (end-point) will allow. Through the central character, Graf Maltravers, the novel provides an allegory of inter-war Austria as a nominal republic entrenched in class conflict and problematic national identification. Like post-imperial Austria, Maltravers, a representative of the Old Order and the Central European spirit, is not literally resurrected into a new life. He only appears to be dead, and upon awakening, despite the external change of identity, continues his former motivations and desires. Maltravers's subsequent journey takes him from the heart of the former Old Austrian crownlands to the rnodernity of republican Paris, where he formulates his new business venture: the compromising of women's reputations for husbands who desire divorce. This is a wry reversal of the imperial diplomacy of Bella gerant alii, tu felix Austria nube - 'Let others wage war, you, happy Austria, marry!' - and also suggests the post-imperial nation's divorce from its old partners in Central Europe. Briefly put, Austria's new experience is to be found in territorial separation rather than in imperial expansion. In Paris, Maltravers becomes the patron of a young boxer, Edgar Daniel Henrikstein, a civil servant's son from Hanover who was raised by a butcher in Holland. The allegory of inter-war Austria is extended to the problematic Austrian-German relationship through the paradigm of the old Central European nobleman and the young North German proletarian. But it is Maltravers's ultimate acceptance of responsibility for his actions, shortly before his 'second' and true death in ltaly, that functions as the author's most prophetic prose on Austria's doomed sovereignty.

Ingeborg Brunkhorst analyses the Maltravers novel as a self-reflective work on the moral responsibility of the artist as creator, an expression of its author's wish to recreate a lost world in his writing.¹⁰ But Lernet-Holenia's point is that the Old World has not been completely lost, it has merely been called something else. In a political sense, the problems arising from such a sub-rosa identity in a new order that has officially dispelled the past while conjuring it up in distorted fragments to validate its own legitimacy (Austro-Fascism), are portrayed as ultimately catastrophic (Anschluss and National Socialism). France provides more latitude for Maltravers because of is relative cultural authenticity; it is not selective, reductive or ideological regarding the myths of its past, in the way that fascist Austria and Italy are. Elitism and historical grandeur are valued as part of the French republic's culture with little antagonism.

Nevertheless, the 'reborn' Maltravers is unable to escape the imperial past and his image as a great aristocratic adventurer, even in the Parisian demi-monde. His famed explois haunt his new identity as 'Fortescue', threatening to compromise his agenda. Like the post-imperial Austria he represents, he has changed little in manner or style from his youth, and this proves to be the ageing Maltravers's (and Austria's) fatal flaw. The plot is interrupted with an interpolated narrative excursion in which Antoine Mercœur, a waiter at the Grand Veneur, relates Maltravers's attempted rescue of the Russian Imperial Family from the Bolshevik revolution.¹¹ Mercœur's convoluted retelling of the adventure in which, as former Imperial Groom of the Chamber, he manages to refer to the Czar numerous times using a different set of the monarch's many titles, is an unexpected look at the ardent monarchism of the Russian émigré colony in Paris during the 1930s. Despite Merccur's comic characterization, his anti-revolutionary stance is not ridiculed by the narrator. Although there is no evidence from correspondence to support it, the influence here of Joseph Roth is likely. Roth wrote his Russian émigré novel, Beichte eines Mörders [The Confession of a Murderer, 1936], in Paris, as Lernet-Holenia worked on Maltravers. Both novels depict the reverence with which exiled aristocrats were treated in certain republican European circles of the time. In Maltrauers, it is communicated by the easy availability of an Almanach de Gotha (the genealogical record of royalty and high nobility) in a French restaurant, which allows Maltravers to prove the waiter's knowledge. Even as he refutes the past, he concludes the story by detailing the Imperial Russian Family's demise with 'unknown' facts. Maltravers's explanation is Lernet-Holenia's parody of his own style: criticism of the Old Order does not inhibit an exact, even lovingly detailed report, nor does the seemingly neutral, or even derisive attitude toward the aristocratic past release the storyteller from wistfulness and resignation.

Unlike Joseph Roth, who under perilous circumstances returned to Vienna from his Paris exile in February 1938 in an isolated attempt to help forestall German annexation and to press for French intervention on behalf of Austria, Lernet-Holenia continued to keep his distance from any political involvement or statements beyond those of his cryptic literary visions. Analogous to his love-hate relationship with the military and the nobility, Lernet-Holenia gave mixed signals about his political orientation after 1938. It is clear that he harboured no desire for the Anschluss or the proletarian mass culture of National Socialism, which ran against the grain of his well-guarded aristocratic individualism and tolerance. Yet, after a brief journey to South America and New York in 1939, Lernet-Holenia returned to be drafted as an officer in the Wehrmacht. His latent admiration for military tradition and honour had been reawakened by active service, and his obvious lack of political conviction did not negate his own medal fetish and view of war-as-adventure. But, as Roman Roček details, the return to annexed Austria was wholly the result of his visit to the destitute Lily Sporer, a close friend from the 1920s who now lived in pathetic circumstances in New York City. Shocked by what he saw, Lernet-Holenia would not accept the risk of rebuilding his life and career without secured means in a foreign land.¹² Following his removal from active service after being wounded in the attack on Poland, the Ullstein publishing house suggested that Lernet-Holenia become head dramaturge of the Berlin military film office, a position he readily accepted. As much of his work had been on the list of those 'unerwünscht' [unwelcome] in Germany since 1933,¹³ Propaganda Minister Goebbels specifically forbade Lernet-Holenia's involvement in the writing of any political films.¹⁴ Although suspect, his talent as a writer and his popularity, compounded by his recent battle injury were nonetheless considered of value to the National Socialist war machine. Among the very few results of this brief position was the completion of the first draft script for the Zarah Leander film, Die große Liebe [The Great Love, 1942] for which Lernet-Holenia received 'idea' credit. As a completed film, it includes occupied Paris among the stops for Leander's tour as the film's star singer but this French reference is meant to demonstrate the breadth and success of Nazi German expansionism.

During this period, Lernet-Holenia composed his most controversial novel, Mars im Widder, which on the surface appears to be in keeping with his earlier military novels, but actually subverts National Socialism between the lines, traces the countdown to the premeditated Polish invasion and suggests Austrian resistance to the regime. Mars irn Widder first appeared uncensored and in serialized form in Ullstein's magazine Die Dame in 1940. But on the day of its release, distribution of the 15.000 copies of the novel printed by S. Fischer Verlag in 1940 was forbidden by the propaganda ministry which even confiscated the customary author's copies. The entire stock was destroyed in an Allied air-raid in the winter of 1943, but Lernet-Holenia managed to republish the novel from a proof copy found at Bermann-Fischer in Stockholm in 1947.

The less than heroic central character and respect for the Poles and their misery were the primary reasons leading to the censorship of Mars im Widder. It is also clear that Lernet-Holenia's early fascination with military action, which resurfaced so enthusiastically after almost two decades of growing criticisrn of war in his novels and novellas, had been crushed by the horrors of the war against Poland and by the destruction of Central Europe. The two distinct halves of the novel, the home front (Vienna) and the battlefront (Poland), mirror each other in the threat to and alienation of the central character, Wallmoden, an Austrian aristocrat called up for duty as an officer in the Wehrmacht. In addition to the realistic portrayal of the invasion, the novel's suggestion that there is no enthusiasm for the war at home undermines Nazi propaganda of a satisfied Aryan world and popular support for its military action. One overt element of resistance to the German New Order in the novel is the specific Austrian nature of the characters, for the most part Viennese aristocrats who do not even pay lip-service to the German control of their city. With the introduction of the mysterious circle of Herr von Örtel and Baron Drska, it is impossible not to surmise that some form of organized Austrian or Central European irredentism against German National Socialism is at work in the novel.¹⁵

Two references to the French ancien régime surface among the many subtle clues and allusions that give the work its cryptic-subversive quality. Cuba von Pistohlkors, Wallmoden's love interest and a possible resistance figure, is introduced through a French-coded description: her hair is described as being swept back 'wie die Frisuren französischer Damen aus der Zeit vor der Großen Revolution' [like the coiffures of French ladies in the time before the Revolution].¹⁶ Here, identification with Bourbon France provides a stand-in for the forbidden indication of her possible loyalty to the concept of a sovereign Catholic-conservative Austria. Later, as Wallmoden helps occupy a Polish town and discovers a pile of books in a vacated house, the author creates a symbolic indictment of German barbarism against European culture, one which recalls book burnings and anticipates the banning of this very novel:

Wallmoden hob eines davon auf. Es war, wie auch die meisten übrigen Bände, in rotes Leder gebunden und mit der Lilie gepreßt, diesem eigentümlichen Symbol, das aus dem Dreizack eines Meeresgottes hervorgegangen. Wallmoden war erstaunt, man hätte meinen können, das Ganze sei ein Teil einer Bibliothek von einem Gut, vielleicht sogar einer der Reste der berühmten Bibliothek, welche die Gattin des Königs Stanislaus Lesczynski aus Frankreich mitgebracht.¹⁷

[Wallmoden picked up one of them. It was like most of the other volumes, bound in red leather and pressed with the lily, that peculiar symbol that originated from the trident of a god of the seas. Wallmoden was astonished. One might believe that the whole was part of an estate library perhaps even the remainder of the famous library that the wife of King Stanislaus Lesczynski had brought from France.]

In addition to being the symbol of the Bourbon ancien régime, the fleur-de-lys device Wallmoden describes is also a Polish heraldic symbol known as Gozdawa.¹⁸ A limited number of ancient Polish heraldic symbols are used inter alia for the coats-of-arms of the nobility, and thus a reference to a single symbol relates to a number of families. In this metaphor for a 'mass' aristocratic culture, Lernet-Holenia rejects the official German denigration of Polish civilization. The connection of the ancien régime with Poland through King Stanislaus, the father of Queen Marie of France (through marriage with Louis XV in 1725), who was created Duke of Lorraine, recalls not only the significance of the Polish civilization and the entire Catholic monarchical world but, through the author's code of Lorraine, Austrian cultural and political identity.

Elisabetta Bolla considers the gentle elegiac quality of Lernet-Holenia's following novel, Beide Sizilien [The Two Sicilies, 1942], to be his most accomplished meditation on the nature of life and death.¹⁹ The salon mystery was set in 1925 Vienna seemingly to escape the censorship of the previous work, but the memory of a sovereign inter-war Austria and its imperial history is evoked even more directly in the intentional complexity of the plot. Bolla analyses the novel's numerous 'red herrings' and its central character's multiple identity changes as a game of illusion traceable to Lernet-Holenia's novella, Der Herr von Paris [The Parisian Gentleman, 1935], which deals with the collapse of the ancien régime and its value system.²⁰ She also considers Der Herr von Paris to be the author's commentary on a Reign of Terror awaiting the post-imperial central European revolution.²¹ Rüdiger Wischenbart has also analysed aspects of the novella's images of the French Revolution as suggestive of National Socialism,²² but Thomas Hübel finds Lernet-Holenia's interpretation selective and the connection with Nazism unique since National Socialism understood itself as the enemy of the Revolution and its results. Indeed, Goebbels maintained that with Hitler's assumption of power 'wird das Jahr 1789 aus der Geschichte gestrichen' [the year 1789 will be struck from history].²³

The perception of what post-war Austrian identity would entail was not of immediate concern to Austrian writers after 1945. Unlike the West Germans, who were motivated towards an active Vergangenheitsbewältigung [coming to terms with the past], similar reflection on Austrian involvement in the ideology of National Socialism, the war and genocide was rare in the early Second Republic. Alexander Lernet-Holenia stands with those few post-war writers who attempted to address the question of Ausrrian Nazism and to deal with Austrian guilt. As early as 1946, his prose writing considered the Anschluss, the Nazi sympathizer and even the concentration camps. It is apparent that the Habsburg era continued to feed Lernet-Holenia's literary sensibilities in the Second Republic. Yet no one who has read Mars im Widder or Beide Sizilien could possibly agree with his unconvincing insistence that the inter-war literary thread would be easily, completely or willingly recaptured. Moreover, Lernet-Holenia's post-war fiction repudiates his peculiar 1946 statement that suggests literary evaluation of Nazism would be unessential: 'Man darf den unkünstlerischen Einfluß, den Deutschland in den letzten Jahren auf uns geübt hat, in seiner Wirkung nicht überschätzen' [one should not overvalue the inartistic influence Germany has had over us in recent years].²⁴ The war undeniably politicized Lernet-Holenia, who, much like Thomas Mann in his Doktor Faustus (1947), discovered that where the survival of nations and ultimately humanity is at risk, 'Kunst wird Kritik' [art becomes critique].²⁵

Der Graf von Saint-Germain [The Count of St Germain, 1948] has been called Alexander Lernet-Holenia's most modern novel due to its form, which disrupts and transcends the linear narrative via excursi, leitmotifs and 'internal echoes which establish analogies between nominally discrete experiences or situations, now linked by associations of which at times only the reader can be aware'.²⁶ Complete with a foreword by Lernet-Holenia, it is presented as a 'found' personal journal, although the narrative often returns to conventional novel style. Lernet-Holenia's insistence on continuity between First and Second Republic literature is conveyed in the fictional 'rediscovery' of this pre-Anschluss text after the war. From the outset, he constructs a framework for the questioning of the concept of history and the exploration of the recording of history as a creation of fiction. The central character Philipp Branis, asserts 'daß die Geschichte der Welt dem Mythos folgt und nicht der Logik!' [that the history of the world follows myth and not logic!],²⁷ and the immortal eighteenth-century French Count Saint-Germain who surfaces in his saga represents a secret, mystical force in world events, a power that subverts the understood causality and accuracy of recorded history.

The narrative suggests a connection between the historical Treaty of Saint-Germain-en-Laye (1919), which officially ended the Empire, and the Count of the same name who predicted the end of Austria two centuries earlier. Added to this intriguing concept of a secret agenda that direcs history is Lernet-Holenia's understanding that the collapse of Austria did not occur in 1918/19, but with the Anschluss, which preceded a Central European apocalypse, an idea he first suggested in Mars im Widder. Saint-Germain's centuries-old prediction that the fictional des Esseintes family²⁸ will outlast Austria horrifies Branis because, despite his attempts to circumvent the prophesy at the conclusion of the Great War, the des Esseintes line has continued and its survival communicates 'extinction' beyond 1918/19.

Both Saint-Germain and Der Graf Luna [Count Luna, 1955] are novels about guilt and its profound effect on the lives of their characters. Moreover, Der Graf von Saint-Germain is in agreement with Lernet-Holenia's wartime novels through the inference that a seemingly independent will may unknowingly be in the service of some grand design. With this philosophy, the author traces the guilt of Austria's Nazi involvement to its self-destructive impulse in 1914, suggesting that Austria's destruction may have been metaphysically preordained. He asserts that it was encouraged by the apathy of the upper classes and shadows it with references to France's squandered monarchy and its 'apocalyptic' revolution. Austria's guilt is embodied by Branis, who has brutally murdered the roués, Karl des Esseintes, to avenge his seduction of the Gräfin Marie von Rzeplinsky, the great love of Branis's life. Branis believes this has disrupted the prophecy of Saint-Germain, as this last member of the des Esseintes family was killed prior to the declaration of the Republic, on 12 November 1918. Shortly thereafter, Branis achieves his goal of marrying Marie, but discovers that she is carrying des Esseintes's child, thus negating his attempt to alter the fate of Austria. Having given birth to a son in August 1919, Marie retreats from Branis and eventually life, ultimately rejecting God on her deathbed.

Tormented by his guilt and the subsequent death of his wife, Branis sets out on a quest for proof of God's existence. The narrative of the novel is interrupted by two digressions relating to this search: the enactment of a fictional Pontius Pilate trial and Branis's retelling of Hofmannsthal's 'Das Märchen der 672. Nacht' [The Tale of the 672nd Night, 1895] These two interpolated short stories not only symbolize Branis's guilt, but also lend expression to Lernet-Holenia's conception of the Austrian situation in the waning days of inter-war sovereignty. Pilate's act against Jesus is interpreted as God's will and is thus a fated act. Similarly, Branis's search for autonomy in his own existence fails. His murder of des Esseintes has changed nothing with regard to the Saint-Germain prophecy, but guilt haunts him, and his mad attempt to escape Austria leads to his own death at the Anschluss.

The often referred to 'modern structure' of the novel, with its poetic and short-story excursions, is actually a revision of the genre-crossing novel of the Romantic era. This structural experiment includes two lyrical inserts: Agathon's 'Omphale Chorgesang', which considers the possibility of the absence of God; and the mock French Thdophile Gautier poem, 'Amphion'.²⁹ Both anticipate the future and provide warning for a rabidly atheistic world, in which the truth of poetry must not be abused in the service of the new destructive demi-gods. The end of free creativity is thus also the end of life: 'Denn wer es nicht mehr erfinden kann, kann auch nicht mehr schreiben noch leben' [For he who can no longer invent it (life), can no longer write or even live]'³⁰ By this rule, Lernet-Holenia clearly indicates that post-imperial Austria's inability to (re)create itself and ensure the terms of its existence doomed the First Republic.

Der Graf von Saint-Germain questions the very concept of history and offers genealogy as an accurate source to enlighten Branis on the relationship between Saint-Germain and des Esseintes. Previously, genealogy had been utilized by Lernet-Holenia to accomplish precisely the opposite - to indicate the impossibility of accurate historical reportage and the role of fiction and myth in history. Here, however, it offers facts that provide a glimpse into the 'riesiges Uhrwerk des Schicksals' [giant clockwork of destiny]³¹ and reveal the fate of Austria to be hinged on a mythic battle between the two royal lines for control of the Duchy of Lorraine. The connection of post-imperial Austria's status to the supposed ancient battle for Lorraine intimates the author's concept of Austrian identity one that cannot be altered by the collapse of the Empire. Anchoring Austria in the Lorraine (Habsburg) dynasty and the Catholic/Central European culture it represents distancing the Austrians irrevocably from the pan-Germans. The country could therefore only be 'German' through the total destruction of its nature.

Even in satire, Lernet-Holenia would include references to the French ancien régime as a basis for discussion of Austrian and European nobility as he does in his 1958 novel, Die vertauschten Briefe [The Switched Letters]. The novel, set in contemporary Vienna, concerns a young man named Beaumetz (whose name evokes the city of Metz in the province of Lorraine) and his feverish attempt to prove his noble ancestry to the princely parents of the woman he desires to wed. Lernet-Holenia's attack on the mores and values of the historical nobility has never been as vitriolic, yet his enjoyment in writing about the milieu is obvious, as is the reflection of his own social insecurity, given the vacillating attempt to prove either his father's distant noble roots, or his illegitimate Habsburg birth. Lernet-Holenia also takes on the hypocrisy of the Second Republic and its avoidance of the imperial past in all but trivial associations by underscoring the bourgeois desire for forbidden titles and class hierarchy. The embodiment of this is the social-climbing surgeon Dudasch, who panders to members of the historic nobility and declares that the Bourbon dynasty had a physiological distinction from all other humans because the intestines of Louis XIV were twice the length of those of an average person.³² Beaumetz's sarcastic suggestion that this mutation may have been due to his royal station is met with an even more absurd hypothesis regarding the possible varied lengths of intestines for different noble ranks.

Lernet-Holenia would approach the ancien régime directly in his works during the 1960s, specifically in his translation of Stanley Loomis's Du Barry (1959), in the biography of the man who claimed to be the lost son of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, Naundorff (1961), and in his historical novel Das Halsband der Königin [The Queen's Nechlace,1962]. But it is his 1969 novel, Die Hexen [The Witches], that provides the most transparent use of France as a code for Old Austria and for the author's own identity crisis. Lernet-Holenia's fascination with the crown jewels of the Holy Roman Empire and the question of their rightful ownership, a topic that dominates the novel, allows him yet another venue for Habsburg discussion, as well as subtle references to contemporary French monarchism and character constructions based on the apparent French heritage of the Lernet family.

The precursor to Die Hexen was the mysterious publication by Lernet-Holenia's customary publisher, Zsolnay Verlag, of Vitrine XIII: Geschichte und Schichsal der österreichischen Kronjuwelen [Display Case XIII: Story and Fate of the Austrian Crown Jewels, 1966], supposedly authored by Alphonse de Sondheimer and edited anonymously. This pseudo-historical/autobiographical book is richly annotated with documents of the post-1919 Habsburg relationship with Austria and is complete with photographs of the imperial couple and other august figures. It purports to include the memoirs of Sondheimer, a 'witness' to Emperor Karl's removal of the crown jewels at the time of his exile. Although the book is a pure fabrication, Lernet-Holenia apparently decided that his own addition to the Habsburg Myth would not be reprehensible, since he postulated that history is myth and the recording of it is highly unreliable.³³ He had already demonstrated this approach in his previous novels with the imaginary mutiny of Austro-Hungarian troops on the Belgrade bridge in Die Standarte and the fictional Gautier poem in Der Graf von Saint-Germain. Moreover, Lernet-Holenia's growing spiritual valuation of an apostolic monarchy and empire is at the root of his impulse to mythologize even that which is already mythic - to create a metamyth on Old Austrian civilization.

The reduction of Lernet-Holenia's search for Austrian identity to the symbol of a great lost diamond, a part of which is found but then proven to be a worthless counterfeit, conveys the author's dashed hope for a return to the order of an imperial Mitteleuropa. The fatalism and the supernatural quality of Die Hexen transforms Lernet-Holenia's quest into a metaphor for the limits of human knowledge. It is his post-modernist defeat of reason, where 'order' is lost but irrational faith in the Habsburg Myth can reign supreme.³⁴ Once again, the Austrian protagonist who comprehends the importance of the imperial past bears a French name, Noville. Hartmut Scheible believes Noville's journey to locate the Florentiner diamond, once part of the Austrian crown jewels and now cut into three stones, to be the author's attempt to reconstruct his own ever more elusive, fading identity and identification with the Old Order, something that the author approaches directly in the 'Auto-biographische Notizen' appendix to the novel.³⁵ Certainly, the endeavour to find the three missing pieces is also an indication of the loss of the (Christian) belief in the Trinity, which Lernet-Holenia would claim resulted in Nazi paganism, Soviet atheism and the destructive Austrian Socialist materialism that he berates in his essay 'Zwischen Groß- und Kleinbürgertum' [Between Haute and Petite Bourgeoisie].³⁶

The descendants of the diamond-cutting Aschenfeld clan are revealed to hold information by which Noville can unlock the mystery of the missing jewel. In Paris, Noville meets with an Aschenfeld's daughter, a fervent French monarchist who questions Noville's intentions. Her knowledge about the sections of the Florentiner sets Noville on a journey to Belgium and Italy. En route, Noville's ruminations on royal and imperial houses allow for a literary digression on the nature of the royal bastard, on François Weygand, and on the rumour that Emperor Franz Joseph submerged this supposed son of the Habsburg Emperor Maximilian of Mexico in a bourgeois existence in order to reduce the number of imperial heirs.³⁷ This can be read as Lernet-Holenia's rationalization for his own lack of recognition as an illegitimate Habsburg, even though the novel and is odd autobiographical appendage seem to favour his Lernet heritage.

Noville is arrested in Namur and eventually released by the police prefect, an amateur genealogist whose name is also Noville. On the basis of Alexander Noville's signet ring, the prefect maintains their relationship and their shared nobility: 'Mon Cousin de Noville, de Longchamp et de Liernut!'³⁸ The involved recounting of a family tree traced back to the Emperors of Constantinople recalls the hunt for noble ancestors in Die vertauschten Briefe and its attack on snobbism. Scheible correctly doubts the sincerity of this scene: '[es] verbirgt hinter dem Spott sich ein durchaus freudiges Erschrecken' [a thoroughly joyful shock is hidden behind the derision].³⁹ The mention of the name 'Liernut' allows Lernet-Holenia a fantasy of finally obtaining proof of his own paternal nobility. But the sadness of realizing that it is only a fantasy is also played out: 'Nur von meinem Cousin de Noville, de Longchamp et de Liernut hörte ich nichts mehr' [I never again heard anything from my Cousin de Noville, de Longchamp et de Liernut].⁴⁰ The 'Autobiographische Notiz' [Autobiographical Note] appended to the novel dryly informs the reader of the possible ancestors of the Lernet family who served in the military of the Austrian Empire since their assumed arrival from France during the Thirty Years War. Here also is the complex dualism that is Lernet-Holenia: the anti-war realist who rejects nostalgia in favour of progress despite a continued belief in the near-sacred nature of the Habsburg Empire's elitist ethnic and cultural union. Towards the end of his literary career, Lernet-Holenia would often criticize the Habsburgs, and in particular, the imperial heir Otto von Habsburg, in order to reflect on his own cause and to stimulate discussion of monarchism in Austria. When this antagonism was at its height, the author confused the situation by denying his Habsburg claim and insisting that he was descended from 'das Haus Namur [...], von welchem wir, wenngleich inzwischen arg heruntergekommen, seit 1400 eine Bastardlinie sind' [the House of Namur, of which we have been, since 1400, a bastard line, albeit severely in decline in the meantime.⁴¹ Although Lernet-Holenia's acceptance of what he believed was the Lernet heritage may also function as a form of protest against his ignored claim of Habsburg origin, either way - as Habsburg/Lorraine or Lernet/Namur - the author could claim royal French ancestry.

This highly personal and national/political relationship with France is also found in Lernet-Holenia's final, almost unknown novel, Die Beschwörung [The Spectre, 1974]. Long ignored by standard bibliographies, it was written under the pseudonym of G. T. Dampierre, with 'introduction and translation' by Lernet-Holenia.⁴² The use of a pseudonym is not, however, the result of the negative criticism given the author's final works. The text is created as an 'autobiographical' account by Dampierre, and Lernet-Holenia's distance as the 'editor' allows him effectively to split his persona into two distinct voices, as he had attempted to do with less success in Sondheimer's Vitrine XIII. In Die Beschwörung, Lernet-Holenia does not create a schism between his love-hate attitude toward Old Austria and the Habsburgs, but rather divides himself along the fissure of his intellectual nature: the mystic and the critic. Dampierre's meditations and visions are suffused with the gnosis Lernet-Holenia touches on in Der Graf von Saint-Germain and Die Hexen, and come complete with the historical and genealogical excursions found in his other novels.

Die Beschwörung crystallizes the religious aspect of Lernet-Holenia's longing to reclaim the past. Instead of desiring (and losing) a materialistic or symbolic relic of the apostolic monarchy - a standard flag or a diamond - this novel relates an attempt to conjure Christ. While Dampierre recounts his mysticism, spiritual doubt and ultimate epiphany, Lernet-Holenia, with the assured voice of an informed critic, examines Dampierre's heretical fantasy and his inaccuracies; he clarifies Dampierre's vagueness and criticizes his emotionalism. Moreover, the work unites the author's main themes on a final, spiritual level. Lernet-Holenia's obsession with relocating the Empire and securing an identity - his protest against history debates on the value of history, genealogy and myth, and his characters' quest for transcendence - has ultimately been translated into a search for God. The fictional author's French surname collapses all of Lernet-Holenia's French codes - the Habsburg/Lorraine 'Old Austria' and his own Lernet,/Namur construction. Dampierre might well refer to the fourteenth-century Count Jean I de Dampierre, who was also known as the Margrave of Namur. His family had briefly been known in the twelfth century as the House of Lorraine-de Dampierre and married into the House of Bourbon in the thirteenth century. Parallel to the spiritualization of the author's cultural,/political desires, his self-reflection in royal French genealogy here amounts to the intertwining of all his perceptions surrounding his ancestry.⁴³

Thomas Eicher asks if the formulas conveying the problems of the returning soldier in Austrian inter-war literature are significantly different from counterparts in other national literatures, or if there is a universality that might be extracted. Certainly, as Eicher points out, the Austrian genre often delivered a form of mourning for and mythologizing of the lost Empire that is specific to Austrian writing.⁴⁴ In the case of Lernet-Holenia, a disillusioned or, more precisely, an incomplete 'homecoming' and a critical sympathy for the past underpinned so much of his work into the Second World War and beyond that it shifted the identification of his characters away from existing Austria(s) to associations with extraterritorial and historical or mythic loci. Although he came to accept the Austrian republic in principle during his rejection of the Anschluss at the time of writing Mars im Widder, Lernet-Holenia's understanding of Austrian national and cultural identity remained unique among his contemporaries, particularly for what he believed to be the strong French antecedents and their influences, factors that he believed he too embodied.