The Dark and the Bright: Memoirs 1911–1989 By Hilde Spiel

In the first part of the memoirs of Hilde Spiel, lauded by the guru of German journalism Marcel Reich-Ranicki as the grande dame of German-speaking literature, a personal existence is placed in the context of the cataclysmic events of European history between 1911 and 1946. While, in the course of her early years, Paris, Rome and London open up new worlds to the author, her self-portrait is inseparable from the backdrop of her native city, her beloved and hated Vienna. But throughout the work a nostalgia for the imperial past is challenged by a burning sense of the present.
Her Jewish antecedents at odds with the rituals of her assimilated Catholic girlhood, Hilde Spiel grows up in the Vienna of the Twenties and Thirties, of Karl Kraus and Sigmund Freud, of the actors, musicians, artists and journalists with whom, as a young student, she mingles in the lecture halls, the theaters and the coffee-houses. Premonitions of the terrors to come are as familiar to her as the poetry of first love. A student of philosophy, she surrenders to the emotion of personal relationships (such as her brief affair on Capri with the Italian novelist Alberto Moravia) with the same intensity that she brings to her developing political attitudes. Among her friends are a circle of British visitors who include Hugh Gaitskell and Elwyn Jones. It becomes a matter of character and of principle for her to turn her back on the Fascism of the new Austria. She lives through the war years in London as a young wife, mother and struggling journalist and author – years of exile, which lead her to profound insights into the paradoxes of the English national character. The émigré becomes for her the prototype of modern humanity. In postwar Berlin, where the second part of her memoirs opens, she experiences the richest, most thrilling time of her life, during which she feels closest to the reality of political events. Driven restlessly from one home to another, it is impossible for her to find complete fulfillment and peace in any of them. In London she misses the familiar comforts of Vienna; in the often stifling intimacy of Vienna she longs for the discretion and discipline of English social life. Finally old loyalties draw her back to her roots and to the pastoral idyll of St Wolfgang – which itself is to be rudely destroyed for her, as she relates towards the close of her story, in a moving account of man’s inhumanity towards nature.
Hilde Spiel, the Austrian journalist, novelist, critic and historian, was born in Vienna in 1911; in 1936 she emigrated to London, returning to Vienna in 1963, where she died in 1990. She was the recipient of several prestigious literary prizes. Her memoirs were first published in two parts in 1989 and 1990 by List Verlag, Munich, under the titles Die hellen und die finsteren Zeiten (The bright and the dark times) and Welche Welt ist meine Welt? (Which world is my world?) and became best-sellers. The English version, is by her British-born and educated daughter, who lives and works in London, and has previously translated Hilde Spiel, Fanny von Arnstein: A Daughter of the Enlightenment 1758-1818 (Berg, 1991).