Wiener
Gruppe (the Vienna Group)
A
small and loosely-connected group of Austrian poets and writers previously
connected with the postwar activities of artists connected with Art-Club, the
Wiener Gruppe (Vienna Group) formed around 1954 under the influence of Austrian
poet H. C. Artmann (1921-2000), existing in one form or another until 1964,
with the suicide of one its original members, Konrad Bayer.
Interested in Baroque literature as well
as Expressionism, Dadaism, and Surrealism, group members also came to stand for
the linguistic criticism and philosophy of figures such as Hugo van
Hofmannsthal, Fritz Mauthner, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Similarly, the
group—which originally included Artmann, Friedrich Achleitner (1930), Bayer
(1932-1964), Gerhard Rühm, and Oswald Wiener (1935)—recognized language as both
a visual and acoustic medium, and involved their work intensely with readings
and recordings, and in using sound and various Austrian dialects in their
works. They also shared a fascination with developments in Concrete Poetry.
The major book on the group was edited by
Gerhard Rühm, De Wiener Gruppe:
Achleitner, Artmann, Bayer, Rühm, Wiener (Reinbek, Germany: Rowohlt, 1985).
In English, the central anthology was edited and translated by Rosmarie Waldrop
and Harriett Watts, The Vienna Group: 6
Major Austrian Poets (Barrytown, New York: Station Hill Press, 1985). Below
I have reprinted the introduction to Waldrop’s and Watts’ publication.
If
you had been walking through Vienna on the evening of August 22, 1953 you would
have seen a strange procession. It looked like a funeral. A melancholy flute
set the pace for veiled women, men in black with clown-white faces carrying
wreaths, candelabra, chrysanthemums and burning incense. The procession stopped
only to recite macabre passages from Poe, Baudelair, Nerval and Trakl. This Soirée aux amants funèbres was the first
public poetic act of an informal group of friends—a group now recognized for
its radical experimentation and linguistic discoveries which have extended the
expressive potential of language.
Vienna, a center of avant-garde writing?
Vienna, the ultimate backwater capital, still mired in nostalgia for the
Habsburgs and the nineteenth century! Interestingly enough, experimental
movements have cropped up in the most staid and bourgeois urban centers. Dada
first made its appearance in Zurich, the bastion of Swiss respectability.
Schwitters conceived Merz in
Hannover, one of the provincial German cities least likely to spawn a collage
maniac. And the most experimental movement in German emerged, of all places, in
Vienna. It would seem that the very provinciality of a place may trigger the
rebellious energies of its young artists, energies which may be channeled into
intensive experimentation if enough of these potential revolutionaries happen
to meet. In Vienna, five of them did, between 1950 and 1955, and that was
sufficient to create a movement later to be called “die Wiener Gruppe,” a
movement which has initiated a more general renaissance in Austrian writing.
In 1953, Hans Carl Artmann, poet, translator and vagabond, founded a basement theater in Vienna (die kleine schaubühne) for “macabre feats, poetic acts,” and pranks like black masses, an evening “with illuminated birdcages,” or one “in memoriam to a crucified glove.” Much of it was apparently improvised. Artmann had already proclaimed an 8-point-manifesto of the “poetic act…refuses anything secondhand, i.e. any mediation through language, music, or writing.” When the police promptly condemned the theater, it metamorphosed (in late 1954) into a night club, Exil. The theater attracted Oswald Wiener and his jazz trumpet, and when the architect Friedrich Achleitner joined in 1955 he completed the actual “Wiener Gruppe”: H. C. Artmann, Gerhard Rühm, Konrad Bayer, Oswald Wiener, Friedrich Achleitner.
These five writers read and discussed
baroque poetry, the French Surrealists, Gertrude Stein, the German
Expressionists, the Dadas (Arp and Schwitters became heroes), also grammars and
dictionaries was well as linguistic theory, cybernetics, and Wittgenstein. It
was Oswald Wiener who stimulated the interest in theory.
And they experimented.
Artmann discovered the possibilities of
using dialect—not in order to mimic speech or render local color, but as a
reservoir of sounds and expressions which can be submitted to formal
manipulation. The dialect poems of Artmann, Rühm and Achleitner exploit the
tension between the spoken immediacy and the outlandish look of the dialect
words when spelled out on the page. This startling effect calls our attention
to the speech mechanisms (and those of thought and perception, necessarily) in
much the same way as the sound poems do, and, indeed, most of these authors
writings. It was the dialect poems, the “vowels of Vienna,” which first attracted
general attention to the group and made Artmann particularly famous.
Early on Rühm had become interested in
visual poems; an interest which sprang up at the same time in places as remote
from Vienna as Brazil and Scotland. These poems replace the sentence and its
hierarchy with a spatial “constellation,” a non-linear relation of elements
which may be words, syllables, or even letters.
Wiener worked toward different, linear
alternatives to the sentence and collected formulas, lists, business signs.
All of them worked on montages of “given”
material. These montages are verbal expressions of the principle of collage.
Inherent in the process of montage is the possibility of making language
abstract: sentences from newspapers, from grade school primers, from catalogues
and technical manuals become “non-referential” when lifted intact from the
natural habitats and remounted into new combinations. The montage technique
also provided an opportunity for collaboration by several artists on one text.
Bayer saw these collective works as the main justification of the group which
made the group more than an economic organization: “a laboratory and a
test-bench.”
All of them also experimented with
reduction, especially once Artmann, with his irrepressible baroque
inventiveness, began to drift away from the group. They worked, for instance,
with restricted vocabularies (Rühm used cross-word puzzles), sometimes with
single words, which then were subjected to various kinds of manipulations,
optical, serial, associative, etc.
1957 marked a widening of the circle. The
magazine Neue Wege published Ernst
Jandl’s “sprechgedichte” along with
work by the group. Although neither Ernst Jandl nor Friederike Mayröcker became
part of the nucleus—they did not become involved in the collaborations or the
cabaret—the group welcomed kindred spirits. In fact, as the original group
began to disintegrate, these newcomers carried the impetus of the movement to
an even more provincial center: Graz, the capital of Styria. There, in 1960,
the Grazer Stadtpark Forum came into existence. Its monthly journal, Manuskripte, continues to be the
principal organ for artists once associated with the “Wiener Gruppe,” along
with a new generation of major Austrian writers: Peter Handke, Gerhard Roth,
Barbara Frischmuth, G. F. Jonke.
1957 also marked a widening of the
audience in Vienna. There began an unending series of performances halfway
between cabaret and happening, often with stormy audience reactions. The name
“Wiener Gruppe” began to appear in reviews. The first dialect poems had
appeared in 1956 as a special issue of the magazine alpha and found favorable echoes. Artmann’s med ana schwoazzn dintn, published in 1958, was an impressive
success. Hosn rosn haa by
Artmann, Rühm and Achleitner followed in 1959.
The success, however, also marked the
beginning of the end. Artmann drifted off, and others followed. In 1962, the
group tried to rally once more around its own magazine, edition 62, edited by Bayer. Only two issues came out. When Bayer
wrote a short article on the “Vienna Group” in The Times Literary Supplement of September 3, 1964, it was a
retrospective. The working collective had dissolved back into loose contacts
between friends scattered between Vienna, Berlin, and Malmö. A month later,
Konrad Byaer killed himself.
The work of these writers does not travel
easily. Even when they do not write dialect their texts are very much “in” the
language. They take the structures and mechanisms of language itself as their
subject matter. One might say this is the common basis of all their different
styles and methods. What distinguishes them from other experimental poets to
whom this might equally apply (Heissenbüttel, Gomringer, to name just two) is
their greater exuberance and humor.
We have not attempted to translated the
dialect poems or the cabaret collaborations. We have tried to give a
characteristic sampling of those short texts by individual authors which seemed
translatable.
Oswald Wiener is not represented in this
volume. He has disowned his work from the period (with the result that it is
inaccessible, unincluded even in the group anthology). His novel, Die Verbesserung Mitteleuropas (Rowohlt,
1969) is available, but does not excerpt well in spite of (because of?) its
aphoristic texture.
__________
Essay
copyright ©1985 by Rosmarie Waldrop and Harriett Watts. Reprinted from The Vienna Group: 6 Major Austrian Poets (Barrytown,
New York: Station Hill Press, 1985). Reprinted by permission of Green Integer.
