Dictionary of Literary Biography on Enrica von Handel-Mazzetti
Baroness Enrica von Handel-Mazzetti would be a forgotten author of pious historical works had not her novel Jesse und Mari: Ein Roman aus dem Donaulandea (1906; translated as Jesse and Maria, 1931) become the focal point in the bitter fight between Integralists and Anti-Modernists, the two camps that dominated political and cultural life in the Catholic regions of the German-speaking countries in the early twentieth century. Handel-Mazzetti tried to steer a middle course between the two movements. Her neoromantic historical novels, dealing with confessional war and reconciliation, marked an important stage in the reintegration of Catholic writers into mainstream German literature, from which the Kulturkampf (conflict between the state and the Catholic church) of 1872 to 1878 had excluded them. Handel-Mazzetti was a popular and respected writer who helped open lines of communication by advocating tolerance.
Handel-Mazzetti was the second child of Irene Cshergeö von Handel-Mazzetti, the widow of Heinrich von Handel-Mazzetti, a captain in the Austro-Hungarian army who died four months before Enrica was born. The parents' families were representative of the ethnic mix of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The maternal grandmother was a pious Protestant of Dutch origin, while the maternal grandfather was a Hungarian civil servant and a Catholic who believed in the liberal ideas of Joseph II. The paternal grandmother came from a family of Italian civil servants, while the grandfather was a member of the general staff of the Austrian army. Handel-Mazzetti grew up in Vienna, attended the Institut der Englischen Fräulein in St. Pölten in 1886-1887, then returned to Vienna to care for her mother, who died in 1901. After living with an uncle in Steyr from 1905 to 1911, she spent the rest of her life in Linz. She was a popular writer until after World War I, when she became a venerated symbol of a past era.
Handel-Mazzetti was a moderately successful author of pious stories for Catholic magazines and of devotional plays when she attracted the attention of two powerful publications. The Catholic magazine Die christliche Familie serialized her Meinrad Helmpergers denkwürdiges Jahr: Eine Erzählung (Meinrad Helmperger's Memorable Year; published in book form, 1900) from 1897 to 1899 and her Brüderlein und Schwesterlein: Ein Wiener Roman (Brother and Sister: A Viennese Novel; published in book form, 1913) in 1902-1903. The latter, a story about the social conventions that should be observed when a young girl from a good family is married, provided a lively picture of upper-and middle-class Viennese society, with an array of scheming villains and a heroine who preserves her virtue in the midst of moral and religious conflict. In 1905-1906 Carl Muth published Jesse und Maria: Ein Roman aus dem Donaulande in Hochland, a journal that played a leading role in encouraging Catholic writers to join mainstream literature and in developing a discriminating taste among educated Catholics for good literature. These two works were the first of a series of successful historical novels based on actual episodes during the Counter-Reformation in Austria. Handel-Mazzetti did extensive research for the novels; the authentic tone of her dialogue was considered one of the best features of her fiction. Her novels and stories appealed to an audience that enjoyed her folkloristic and thoroughly conservative depictions of society. The writer Peter Rosegger was an early admirer of her writing, and her innovative use of archival materials for authenticity won her the respect of other established writers, such as Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach. It was Jesse und Maria: Ein Roman aus dem Donaulande, however, that propelled her from mere success to prominence, for it became the battleground of the controversy between the liberals around Muth and the conservative Anti-Modernists such as Richard von Kralik and the Swiss theologian Caspar Decurtins. The latter made Handel-Mazzetti the prime example of what was wrong in ignoring "les principles catholiques" and condemned the false realism, sensuality, and pseudoreligiosity of Jesse und Maria: Ein Roman aus dem Donaulande in two articles in the Monatsschrift für christliche Sozialreform in 1909 and 1910. Decurtins was particularly incensed by the praise she had won from the leading Modernist religious historian of France, Henri Bremond.
Jesse und Maria: Ein Roman aus dem Donaulande has lost much of its appeal for the modern reader. The Catholic forester Schinnagel comes under the influence of a liberal Lutheran nobleman, Jesse von Velderndorffer, who wants Schinnagel to hand over a votive table of St. Mary. The object is to be destroyed because, for the Lutheran, it is the epitome of Catholic superstition. Schinnagel's wife Maria defeats the plan by procuring money and ending her husband's financial dependence on the nobleman. Velderndorffer, who has been denounced by Maria before a church official, is challenged by an inquisitorial commission, acts imprudently, and is beheaded. Maria recognizes that her fanatical religious zeal is sinful and engages in an act of repentance. There is a wide range of minor characters. Handel-Mazzetti uses a neoromantic style borrowed from German writers who used Sir Walter Scott as a model.
Handel-Mazzetti's next successful novel, Die arme Margaret: Ein Volksroman aus dem alten Steyr (Poor Margaret, 1910), was serialized in the Berlin literary magazine Deutsche Rundschau, thus reaching a broad readership for a clearly sectarian work. Die arme Margaret: Ein Volksroman aus dem alten Steyr is the story of a poor widow who successfully resists the sexual advances of an Austrian army officer and, through her exemplary persistence, converts the whole region back to true Christianity. Conservatives were irked by her sympathetic depiction of Protestants and her inclusion of unattractive features in the portrayal of figures adhering to the "right" faith. The controversy became so intense that Handel-Mazzetti felt obliged to publish a declaration of orthodoxy in the Allgemeine Rundschau and many other publications in September 1910.
During World War I Handel-Mazzetti visited wounded soldiers in the Linz hospital and published an enormous body of ephemeral patriotic stories, poems, and reflections. She also began detailing the development of Rita, the heroine of Brüderlein und Schwesterlein: Ein Wiener Roman , in a series of novels set in modern times and addressed to an adolescent audience: the five-volume Ritas Briefe (Rita's Letters, 1915-1921) and Ritas Vermächtnis: Roman (Rita's Legacy, 1922). She also returned to the genre of the historical novel: Der deutsche Held (The German Hero, 1920) shows the young nobleman Tessenburg as an unworthy hero during the Napoleonic Wars; Das Rosenwunder: Ein deutscher Roman (The Miracle of the Roses, 1924) is a romantic tale of the idealistic revolutionary Karl Ludwig Sand, who assassinated the reactionary playwright and spy August von Kotzebue in 1819; her portrayal in Johann Christian Günther (1927) of the baroque poet who died in 1723 suffers from overbearing sentimental descriptions which tone down the robust eroticism of the historical figure. In her later years she became extremely verbose, as can be seen in the trilogy Frau Maria: Ein Roman aus der Zeit August des Starken (1929-1931). Graf Reichard der Held vom eisernen Tor: Roman aus dem deutschen Siegesjahr 1691 (Count Reichard, the Hero of the Iron Gate, 1939) is an interminable tale of Vienna's crusade against the Turks in the late seventeenth century. An exception to this series of tedious works is Die Waxenbergerin: Ein Roman aus dem Kampfjahr 1683 (The Woman of Waxenberg, 1934), written to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the great Turkish defeat of 1683. The heroine, a servant who eventually becomes a nun, is painted in fresh and lively colors in a novel that blends history with a picturesque folkloristic background.
She became a firm part of the Catholic literary establishment. There were attempts to nominate her for the Nobel Prize, and even her former enemy Kralik compared her favorably to such "chroniclers of degeneration" as Thomas Mann. Her works were banned by the Nazis.
Until her death a decade after World War II Handel-Mazzetti played the role of the tolerant conservative writer. She once admitted to Ebner-Eschenbach: "Mir liegt, glaube ich, das Moderne nicht" (I think modernity is not for me). She returned a few times to her successful historical formula but never won a new audience; she had become a supplier of thinly veiled devout educational reading material for the "Christian family." She was neither a major writer nor a genius; her merit lies in her opening the doors of religiously segregated literature for the benefit of future writers and audiences. She was a pioneer against her will. An important reason for her return to obscurity is that during her life a host of Austrian writers, including Franz Werfel and Stefan Zweig, elevated her primary genre, the historical novel, to levels of brilliance that she could not remotely attain. But she opened the way for Catholic writers of a more innovative disposition than hers, such as Gertrud von Le Fort, Reinhold Schneider, and Edzard Schaper.
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