Die Strudlhofstiege Reading Order

Die Strudlhofstiege (The Strudlhof Steps, 1951) by Heimito von Doderer is the great Austrian novel of Vienna — a vast, deeply plotted work of 900 pages set in Vienna across two periods (1910–12 and 1923–25), in which a baroque network of characters from different social classes intersect around the baroque outdoor staircase of the title in the 9th district of Vienna. René Stangeler, a young intellectual and historian who has returned from Russian captivity after WWI, is the central figure, but the novel's true subject is Vienna itself — the texture of life in the city before and after the catastrophe of the war, the way the same places change their meaning, the way different lives intersect at shared spaces without knowing each other. Doderer was the great Austrian heir to the Viennese realist tradition — to Stifter and Grillparzer and the world of imperial Vienna — and Die Strudlhofstiege is his attempt to write the Austrian equivalent of Proust: a vast formal structure in which the relationship between the two time periods reveals something about the nature of time, memory, and the transformation of experience. Unlike Proust, Doderer does not proceed by pure interior monologue; his narration is detached, ironic, and deeply alert to the social comedy of the city. The novel is difficult to find in translation and difficult to summarize, but among Austrian literary scholars it is considered one of the great achievements of twentieth-century German-language prose.