8 - 1918–1945

Summary

ECONOMIC DEPRESSION

As the war drew to its inglorious close, Hofmannsthal was half-way through the composition of Der Schwierige, a comedy rooted in the Burgtheater tradition of the Konversationsstück. He hoped it would be performed in the Burgtheater, ideally by Max Reinhardt's company. The Burgtheater had been directed since April 1917 by the pan-German nationalist Millenkovich; when Hofmannsthal's old friend Leopold von Andrian was appointed Generalintendant in July 1918 (a post that had lain dormant since 1907), his hopes of a new restoration of specifically Austrian traditions rode high. Andrian, a career diplomat, was a convinced Habsburg loyalist; Hofmannsthal shared his scepticism towards the growing power of Germany and glimpsed the possibility that his own works would now establish themselves in the Burgtheater where, he thought, they rightfully belonged. Andrian's success in his new office, his own ‘destiny’ as a dramatist, and his hopes for a ‘rebirth of Austrian theatre from the work of the only creative force in this area’ [that is, Reinhardt], ‘an Austrian with his whole heart and soul’, were, so he wrote to Andrian on 27 August 1918, interlinked.

There had even been talk of Reinhardt's succeeding to the direction of the Burgtheater. When there had been similar rumours in 1917 his appointment had been considered inconceivable ‘for obvious reasons’, so the well-informed Fremden-Blatt reported — alluding possibly to his commitments in Berlin but more probably to the strength of anti-Semitic opinion; within a week the same paper carried a leak about the impending appointment of Millenkovich.