Storia e demoni nella Moderne boemo-tedesca: il caso di Auguste Hauschner

The contribution aims to examine some aspects of modernist writing in Bohemian-German literature, especially those related to the Prague context. In order to analyse its peculiarities, the text The Death of the Lion (1916) by the author Auguste Hauschner (1850-1924) is taken as a case study. The text is read according to the characteristics of the Prague Moderne which followed the Jung Prag, movement created around 1900 in alignment with Jung Wien. These traits include the aesthetics of the morbid and the interest in the literature of the uncanny, where neo-romantic atmospheres are of particular importance. These elements interact with a poetics of the city that combines reflections on the modern metropolis and a particular use of myth and legend. The city of Prague appears here, unlike Berlin or Vienna, as a place where the political and cultural past resurfaces as the unconscious. Certain historical moments in the reign of Bohemia take on particular weight: the Hussite wars, the Thirty Years’ War, the reign of Rudolf II of Hapsburg and his relationship with alchemy, science and the Jewish community. Linked to this are the stories of Rabbi Löw and his golem, the strong personality of the knight Albrecht von Wallenstein and the Great Comet that ‘poisoned’ the Prague sky during the reign of Rudolf II. Historical events containing a strong irrational component and a certain relationship to the absurd are the most fascinating to the modernists in this context. At the same time, however, Prague is a territory of encounter between different cultures and languages, and this gives birth to a particular relationship with the idea of ‘encounter with the other’, which goes on to characterize Bohemian- German literature in different declinations: other culture, other from oneself, other in oneself. The contribution shows how these elements emerge in the work The Death of the Lion, in which the re-elaboration of legends relating to Rudolf II interacts with a representation of Prague as an apocalyptic space. What this space reveals is, in Rudolf’s case, not the otherworldly world that the emperor expects, but his own inability to interact in a healthy way with otherness – here represented as the Jewish component of the Prague culture. The crisis of the individual represented in Hauschner’s story corresponds to that of a world in decline, the Habsburg Empire, on which the author reflects in the particular year 1916.