ABSTRACT
Eisenreich lived in Vienna and Upper Austria, except for a period of war service, four years as a writer for the newspaper Die Zeit and the radio in the Federal Republic and a stay in France. He wrote numerous short stories assembled in the collections Böse schöne Welt (1957). Sozusagen Liebesgeschichten (1965), Die Freunde meiner Frau (1966, 1978) and Die blaue Distel der Romantik (1976). These and his novels show him to have been the last representative of a tradition of Austrian social fiction which reached its zenith in the work of Joseph Roth and Heimito von Doderer. Auch in ihrer Sünde (1953) relates the trials and tribulations of a widow and her son in the spiritual vacuum left by the collapse of the monarchy after the First World War and turns on doubts concerning the latter’s parentage. Der Urgroβvater (1964) traces a search for ancestry and identity. Die abgelegte Zeit (1985) is the surviving fragment of a novel which originally had the title Sieger und Besiegte and presents from the standpoint of 1958 the efforts of a number of characters to adapt to the situation after the Second World War in the spirit advocated by a resigned and conciliatory Austrian general in the theory of retreat he devises in the last weeks of the war.
