An intertextual analysis of Richard Beer-Hofmann's "Klassiker"-reception

This project focuses on the Austrian-Jewish author Richard Beer-Hofmann (1866-1945), one of the most influential members of the literary group known as "Young Vienna", yet an often neglected author in the study of the literary Moderne. Being the author of a relatively "small" body of works, Richard Beer-Hofmann had nonetheless a profound and far-reaching influence on many turn-of-the-century Viennese writers, including his good friends and colleagues, Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Arthur Schnitzler. The aim of this project is a detailed and systematic intertextual analysis of Beer-Hofmann's work through the perspective of his "Klassiker"-reception. His fictional and his directorial work refers extensively to a complex network of classical themes, motives and intertexts as well as to canonized authors, playwrights and literary works (in casu Goethe, Shakespeare, Dante and the Bible). The homage Beer-Hofmann paid to these cultural "icons" on an intra-, para- and extratextual level also raises important questions about (Beer-Hofmann's vision of) authorship and his "posture" as a (Jewish) "Prophet" and "Exculpator Dei" during the Wiener Moderne and the years leading up to his exile in the United States (1939-1945).