Baron Bagge
by Alexander Lernet-Holenia
The Austrian writer Alexander Lernet-Holenia was born on this day in 1897. I highly recommend his mysterious, unforgettable and extremely slim novella, Baron Bagge.
Lernet-Holenia was born in Vienna in 1897. He served in the Austro-Hungarian army in the First World War and became a protégé of the poet Rainer Maria Rilke. He began writing poetry, novels and plays between the wars; his books were included on the first Nazi blacklist and subsequently burned. After the Second World War, he became a vital figure in Austrian cultural life again, winning numerous literary awards. He died in Vienna in 1976.
Baron Bagge (1936), his masterpiece, is about a cavalry officer stationed in Eastern Europe during the First World War, who receives orders to ride directly into a platoon of Russian machine guns. Instead of meeting certain death, however, he and his brigade pass, remarkably unscathed, into a bizarrely peaceful land where festivities are in full swing. He meets Charlotte Szent-Kiraly and finds himself enchanted by her. He falls in love, despite the imminent threat of the enemy and the peculiar fragility of this country’s otherworldly peace . . .
The Times calls it ‘a rare sort of book; more like a romantic, snowbound fever dream’.
And if you enjoy Baron Bagge then I also love another of Lernet-Holenia’s novellas, Count Luna (1955), a similarly fantastical story, of postwar guilt this time, which Patti Smith immediately reread after finishing it, ‘fearful it might disappear’.
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