ModernGermanLiterature18801950

548 MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE

everything down out of the light into the dark. In such poems as
l&rautlud and Medea (in Der Westwitid) there is sexual symbolism
identical with that of Elisabeth Langgasser: sex or the womb is
Hades. As a writer of fiction F. G. junker began late with the
short stories of Dalmatinischc. X&cht (1950) and Die Pfatten (1952).
Of his essays, Vber das Kowische (1938) is audacious in its negative
approach to all comic elements in literature •- humour, wit, cari-
cature, paradox - as compared with the beautiful; the line of
argument, however, is not so incisive as that of George Meredith
in An Essay on Comedy and the Uses ftf the Comic Spirit. The leading
idea of the essay Gmcblsche Cotter (1943) is that the idea which the
Greek gods represent ~ the ideal of beaut) (Schiller in his poem
"Die Goffer Gmcbenl&nds says the same) has been defaced by modern
science and technology* This idealisation of Greek concepts is
followed up by Titamn (1944) and Criaij/sehc Mr I hen (1947), and
in a more drastic sense by the attack on the * Automatismus* of
today in the essay Die PcrfekthN der Twhuik (1946) and Maschine
mul Eifpnttwi (1949). He brands this frenxied mechanisation as
'demonic impulsion', and argues that it will lead to the anti-State
and inevitably to the self-destruction ot" man. lie sees in this
perfection of technology a modernixaiion of the Greek myth of
Prometheus, who angered the gods by bringing down fire from
heaven. Orient nnd Ok^hknt (2948) is devoted to Klopstock and
Martial together with Persian and other oriental poetry., while
Nitftyche (1949) maintains that the philosopher can only be under-
stood if the whole man and the whole mass of his work is grappled
with.

PAULA VON PRKKADOVIC (iBBy-u^j i) will be remembered as the
author of the new national anthem of the Bundcsrcpublik of
Austria: Land der Btrg, Ltmi tkr XtrSm\ As a lyric songster she
began full-fledged with SUdlicber XQwwtr (1929); this, with Dalma-
thnscbe Sonette (1935), is verse directly inspired by the racial and
landscape poetry of Istria and Daimatia, where, though she was
Viennese born, her youth was passed. Her verse is collected in the
three volumes of Vtrlorem 'Hiwmi (1949; the *lost homeland* is
the coast and the shimmering islands of Dalmatia)* Sehkks&hknd
(1952; mainly lyrics of Austria's lM<k&s%fit from 1934 to 1948,
grim pictures of Vienna in the grip of war - air-raids, dug-outs
and the test), and G#tt mddas HJWJ (195 2, poems kid on the altar
of the Catholic faith as the saving power of her third* her spiritual