Georg Potyka. A Life's Wager: The Story of a Viennese Civil Servant. Riverside: Ariadne Press, 2004. 164 pp. $16.50 (paper), ISBN 978-1-57241-127-2.

Reviewed by Ian Reifowitz (Historical Studies, SUNY-Empire State College)
Published on H-German (May, 2006)

Honor Among Bureaucrats

Georg Potyka, the author of this novel about the life of an Austrian civil servant, was himself a civil servant and diplomat from 1961 until his retirement. His career highlights included stints as the Austrian ambassador to Iraq and Bulgaria. Clearly, he wrote about something he knew personally.

Todd Hanlin, the translator, in his afterword, juxtaposes Potyka's work with two more famous works of literature that deal with the Austrian bureaucracy, namely Kafka's The Trial (1925) and The Castle (1926). As a career bureaucrat, Potyka wrote from a different perspective than did Kafka, who was clearly an outsider. Kafka also wrote some forty years before Potyka, but Hanlin's comparison offered an appropriate framework for placing Potyka's work within a broader literature focused on the Austrian civil service. Hanlin notes that the novel's main character, Leopold Navratil, is born into Stefan Zweig's World of Yesterday (1943)--the last years of Franz Joseph's reign, a time of security and certainty (at least as it was fondly remembered by those looking backwards during the era of Nazism). The book follows Navratil as he moves through the various phases of twentieth century Austrian history, from that of the Habsburgs to the First Republic, through the Nazi era and into the post-1945 Second Republic.

Elements of nostalgia in Navratil's childhood include his own daydreaming about the heroism of St. Leopold, a noble warrior from centuries ago, and the boy's desire to be a hero himself (p. 8). At the university, in the early 1930s (the exact time is not given), Leopold (a son of the middle class) and his fellow law students discuss politics and reveal strong ethnic, religious and racial prejudices towards (depending on the speaker) Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Croats and a host of other groups (pp. 12-16).

Navratil's professional rival is Philipp Mattauer, a fellow civil servant from a much higher socio-economic background than himself. Mattauer's father served in a conservative paramilitary organization that supported Austrian independence, while Navratil remained outside of military and political organizations. Navratil constantly measures his accomplishments against those of Mattauer, and the book's title refers to a silent wager that he made to himself as a young man about which of the two would first be forced to dishonor himself and "bow before his enemies" (p. 32).

After the Anschluß, Navratil devises ways to ingratiate himself with the new order, with which he clearly disagrees based largely on his Catholicism, his belief in the rule of law and his distaste for Nazism's hyper-nationalism. His friendship with Rosi Lemnitzer, another of his university acquaintances, makes clear he is no rabid antisemite. By cozying up to Engelhofer, the one-time bully of his childhood who is now a loyal Nazi functionary, Navratil manages to hold on to his position, while Mattauer, the real Austrian patriot, is arrested by the new regime (pp. 35-36).

After the Anschluß, he accepts the request of the Lemnitzer family to help them flee Nazi Austria. His discussions with Rosi reveal a deep nostalgia for the security of the early first Republic, a time in which Rosi's father was asked for advice on budgetary matters by Chancellor Ignaz Seipel (pp. 37-45). In this instance, Navratil displays heroism by risking himself to help this Jewish family in their escape to America, which had served as a place of fantasy and escape for Navratil throughout his lifetime (although he also scorned America at times as well).

Mattauer's beatings at the hand of the Nazis and his reflections afterwards about his family's honorable service to Franz Joseph are linked to the novel's nostalgia for the old Empire (pp. 48-50). Mattauer is forced out of his civil service job, and moves with his new wife to his family's estate in the country. He soon becomes involved in anti-Nazi activities, providing food to a Jewish woman being hidden by his friends (pp. 53-54). Finally, after being observed by Neumeister, an opportunistic Nazi informant who later joined the resistance when the tide appeared to have turned (he was the last man killed by the Nazis in the area before the Soviet troops arrived), Mattauer again is arrested as an enemy of the state, and sent this time to Dachau. During this same period, Navratil serves in the Nazi military as part of an anti-aircraft battery.

While in Dachau, Mattauer reflects on what Austria means to him. His Austrian identity is based on largely on a version of high culture, from Grillparzer to Beethoven, that disdains Hitlerian Germanism as thuggish. He also criticizes Hegel and Nietzsche as intellectually unsound props for Nazism. For him, Austria is beauty, truth and humanity, compared to Nazi brutality (pp. 68-69).[1]

In many ways, A Life's Wager explores how individuals deal with choices to resist or collaborate with totalitarian regimes. After the war, Mattauer returned a hero for having resisted, and earned a high position in the government. Navratil, who himself quietly worked to undermine the worst Nazi edicts while remaining in his official position throughout the war (p. 87), also moved up in the bureaucracy after its conclusion, remaining, however, below the rank of Mattauer.

On this point, the translator's afterword seems slightly off, in that he describes Navratil as having been "too unimaginative to resist" during the war (p. 164). Navratil did resist, most specifically by helping Rosi Lemnitzer's family escape, but also in other ways throughout the war, even if in a less public and perhaps less heroic fashion than Mattauer. In some ways, the comparison of the two men's wartime resistance brings to light their rivalry more effectively. It is not that one resisted and one did not; they both did, but Mattauer's resistance was more dangerous and thus more honorable (at least to Navratil), and earned him greater respect and a higher position after the war. It remains unclear, however, who actually helped more people.

In the novel's final section, Mattauer and Navratil have settled into their post-war careers in the bureaucracy, both having achieved high positions, but the former possesses the authority to overrule the latter. Their rivalry is complicated by a widowed single mother, Dr. Ildiko Bakos, who seeks administrative relief for her situation and aid for her child. Navratil turns her down, while Mattauer finds a legal justification to approve the request. The two men debate the decision afterwards, with Navratil arguing in favor of the strict application of the law, and Mattauer for compassion. At the end of the debate, Navratil again must bow to his superior (pp. 105-115).

Later on, Navratil decides to speak to his old adversary Engelhofer, the one-time Nazi turned socialist after 1945, on behalf of Mattauer's son, who seeks a position that Engelhofer could help him achieve. However, Navratil's daughter Maria is in love with another young man, Horst Sekeli, who wants the same position. When Mattauer's son receives the position (thanks at least in part to Navratil and Engelhofer), Maria announces that she is leaving with Sekeli for Düsseldorf, which was her fiancé's fallback if he did not get the position he and the young Mattauer both sought.

Navratil has driven his daughter away as well as finally and fully having alienated his wife; he has failed as a father and a husband. Furthermore, he has done so all as part of a half-thought-out scheme to embarrass Philipp Mattauer somehow, by helping his rival's son into a career that he incorrectly diagnosed as a leftist career, which he thought would be offensive to the father. Upon realizing the impact of what he has done, Navratil ends his own life.

The irony of the story grows out of the issue of honor. Both Mattauer and Navratil display strong feelings of nostalgia for the past, including recent and medieval times. This is certainly reasonable, considering the comparison to the Nazi period. However, it is a misguided notion of honor, a sentiment also rooted in that past, that ultimately destroys the main character.

Nostalgia in Austrian literature--in particular nostalgia for the pre-1938 and especially the pre-1918 period, is nothing new. As the author was born in 1938, the nostalgia expressed here is less acute and more linked to the characters' own developments than to the author, as opposed to other authors such as Joseph Roth. The post-1945 period appears in the novel to be a time worth living in, at least for most of the characters (the younger ones in particular), and thus the longing for the past largely disappears with the end of the Nazi regime. In that sense, this novel ought not be placed in the same category as those of Roth and Zweig, although it appears in the early chapters that such a characterization might be appropriate. This novel serves as a commentary on the life of a bureaucrat and on twentieth-century Austria, but above all it stands out as a character study of a man with misguided priorities who meets with an terrible, yet perhaps somewhat deserved fate.

Note

[1]. Interestingly, Mattauer's conception conflicts with that described by Peter Thaler, who argues that Austrian identity emerged largely after 1945 thanks to the efforts of political and intellectual leaders. See Peter Thaler, The Ambivalence of Identity: The Austrian Experience of Nation-Building in a Modern Society (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 2001).

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Citation: Ian Reifowitz. Review of Potyka, Georg, A Life's Wager: The Story of a Viennese Civil Servant. H-German, H-Net Reviews. May, 2006.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=11806

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