ABSTRACT
A Viennese writer of Jewish descent, Richard Beer-Hofmann was one of the most influential of that group of authors associated with the Café Griensteidl and exemplifying ‘Jung Wien’ neo-romanticism. A fastidious craftsman (Karl Kraus lampooned him as a writer who ‘seit Jahren an der dritten Zeile einer Novelle arbeitet, weil er jedes Wort in mehreren Toiletten überlegt’), he published little: two short stories (Camelias and Das Kind (1893)); a slim novel, Der Tod Georgs (1900), whose hero is a typical representative of fin de siècle Viennese decadence with his impeccable taste, refinement and morbid aestheticism; a five-act play Der Graf von Charolais (1904), based on Philip Massinger’s The Fatal Dowry (the critic Alfred Kerr attacked its unequal quality, claiming that half had been written by Beer and the other half by Hofmann); a cycle of biblical dramas, including Jaákobs Traum (1918), Der junge David (1933) and Das Vorspiel auf dem Theater zu König David (1936); a handful of lyric poems, the most famous being ‘Schlaflied für Miriam’; a commemorative piece (Gedenkrede für Wolfgang Amadé Mozart (1906)) and a book of memoirs for his wife, Paula, ein Fragment, published posthumously in 1949. Beer-Hofmann fled Austria after the Anschluβ and settled in New York, where he died in 1945. Der Tod Georgs is his best achievement, generally regarded as the finest Jugendstil novel in the German language; it also contains, in the hero’s final awareness of his Jewish blood, anticipations of BeerHofmann’s later preoccupations. The Gesammelte Werke appeared in 1963, the correspondence with Hofmannsthal in 1972.
