Heimito von Doderer spent most of his life in Vienna, where he attended the
gymnasium (secondary school) with moderate success. He spent his summers in his family's retreat in
Reichenau an der Rax. The adolescent entered into a
homoerotic romantic affair with his home tutor and gained
bisexual and
sadomasochistic experiences as a frequent brothel visitor. In 1914, he narrowly passed his
matura exams and enrolled to study law at the
University of Vienna; however, in April 1915 he joined the
dragoon regiment No. 3 of the
Austro-Hungarian Army and served in the mounted infantry at the
Eastern Front in
Galicia and
Bukovina. On 12 July 1916 (during the
Brusilov Offensive) he was captured as a
prisoner of war by the
Imperial Russian Army in the area of
Tlumach. A long way from home, in a
Russian Far East camp for officer POWs in Krasnaya Rechka near
Khabarovsk, he decided to become an author and began writing. Upon the
Treaty of Brest-Litovsk he was released by the
Bolshevik government but had to make his way back to Austria through the
Russian Civil War. Stranded in
Samara, Doderer and his comrades again turned to the East, finding refuge in a
Red Cross camp near
Krasnoyarsk, cared for by
Elsa Brändström. Many men had died from
typhoid fever during their flight. Doderer stayed in
Siberia until his eventual return to
Austria in 1920; he finally reached Vienna on 14 August. His first published work, the book of poems
Gassen und Landschaft ("Streets and countryside"), appeared in 1923, followed by the novel
Die Bresche ("The breach") in 1924, both with little success. A second novel,
Das Geheimnis des Reichs ("The secret of the empire"), was published in 1930. In the same year he married
Gusti Hasterlik, but they separated two years later and were divorced in 1938. In 1933 Doderer joined the Austrian section of the
Nazi Party (NSDAP) and published several stories in the
Deutschösterreichische Tages-Zeitung ("German-Austrian Daily"), a newspaper closely linked to the party and promoting racism and the
incorporation of Austria into
Nazi Germany. In 1936 he moved to
Dachau, Germany, where he met
Emma Maria Thoma, who would become his second wife in 1952. In Germany, he renewed his NSDAP membership (the Austrian Nazi Party had been banned since 1933). He returned to Vienna in 1938, sharing a flat with the celebrated painter
Albert Paris Gütersloh. In that year his novel
Ein Mord, den jeder begeht (
Every Man a Murderer) was published. He converted to
Catholicism in 1940 as a result of his reading of
Thomas Aquinas and his alienation from the Nazis, which had been growing for some years. Also in 1940, Doderer was called up to the
Wehrmacht and was later posted to
German-occupied France, where he began work on his most celebrated novel
The Strudlhof Steps (the name refers to the
Strudlhofstiege, an outdoor staircase in Vienna). Due to ill health, he was allowed in 1943 to return from France, serving in the Vienna area, before a final posting to
Oslo at the end of the war. After his return to Austria in early 1946, he was
banned from publishing until 1947. He continued work on
The Strudlhof Steps, but although he completed it in 1948, the still-obscure author was unable to get it published immediately. However, when it did finally appear in 1951, it was a huge success, and Doderer's place in the post-war Austrian literary scene was assured. Doderer subsequently returned to an earlier unfinished project, ''
Die Dämonen ("The demons"), which appeared in 1956 to much acclaim. In 1958 he began work on what was intended to be a four-volume novel under the general title of
Roman Nr. 7 ("Novel No. 7"), to be written as a counterpart to
Beethoven's
Seventh Symphony. The first volume
Die Wasserfälle von Slunj, appeared in 1963; the second volume,
Der Grenzwald, was to be his last work and was published, incomplete and posthumously, in 1967. Doderer died in Vienna of intestinal cancer on 23 December 1966. == Bibliography ==