Literary Exchanges from Vienna to Brussels 1880-1920. Incomplete Reciprocity and Networking Processes

Roland, Hubert
(2022) Brussels 1900 Vienna. Networks in Literature, Visual and Performing Arts, and Other Cultural Practices — ISBN: [978-90-04-45997-7], p. 113-139, published

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Recent research on cultural transfers has demonstrated the necessity to make the bilateral framework of cultural exchanges more complex, among others by specifying the actual, sometimes indirect contribution of mediating individuals and instances and by highlighting the multilateral aspects in transfer processes, enlarging those to networking phenomena. The analysis of literary exchanges Vienna-Brussels between the 1880’s and the 1920’s clearly shows how the idea of a binary model must indeed be put into question because of following observations: - If Austrian intellectuals and reviews clearly see in a specific Belgian modernity the opportunity to regenerate arts, literature and theatre around 1900, there is no reciprocity going on within a Belgian Modernist movement which rather validates English influences when it comes to search and integrate its own originality within the model of modern French culture. Austrian specificities are just partially perceived, Hugo von Hofmannsthal for instance only as a member of Stefan George’s Blätter für die Kunst. - This phenomenon of incomplete reciprocity is partially compensated by individual affinities (e.g. between the Flemish writer Pol de Mont and Rainer Maria Rilke) and the growing collaborations between German-speaking and French-speaking authors within the intellectual network around Anton Kippenberg’s publishing house Insel-Verlag. Kippenberg’s literary advisor Stefan Zweig will actively organize the translation and reception of Émile Verhaeren’s literary work, willing to do so even after the outbreak of World War I and Verhaeren’s propagandistic anti-German poetry. Unpublished correspondence between Zweig and Kippenberg shows how this bilateral exchange also involves other actors of artistic and intellectual life like Belgian architect Henry van de Velde and Zweigs’ colleague and friend Romain Rolland.
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Roland, H. (2022). Literary Exchanges from Vienna to Brussels 1880-1920. Incomplete Reciprocity and Networking Processes. In Piet Defraeye, Helga Mitterbauer and Chris Reyns-Chikuma (ed.) (ed.), Brussels 1900 Vienna. Networks in Literature, Visual and Performing Arts, and Other Cultural Practices (p. p. 113-139). Brill/Rodopi. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/224373