European University Institute Library

Red Vienna, white socialism, and the blues, Ann Tizia Leitich's America, Rob McFarland

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non fiction

Red Vienna, white socialism, and the blues

electronic resource

dictionaries

Rob McFarland

Studies in German literature, linguistics, and cultureCambridge Social Sciences eBooks

Ann Tizia Leitich's America

After the First World War, Vienna was overrun by jazz, Hollywood movies, and Fordism; its citizens were both fascinated and appalled by the waves of American ideas and products. To make sense of the American phenomenon, readers turned to Ann Tizia Leitich, the New York-based correspondent for Vienna's prominent daily <I>Neue Freie Presse</I> and other newspapers. Rob McFarland tells the story of Leitich's escape, occasioned by a personal crisis, from Austria to America in 1921, and of her rise as a journalist, cultural historian, and novelist. By the early 1930s, she had met President Coolidge, Senator Sol Bloom, the writer Upton Sinclair, and the critic H. L. Mencken. Her devoted readers - including the novelist Stefan Zweig and the Austrian chancellor Ignatz Seipl - sought in her witty,insightful descriptions of the United States some American vitality to invigorate their own moribund culture and economy. Chronicling Leitich's career as a journalist, cultural historian, and novelist and providing close readings of her writings about America, this book reveals her as an important cultural mediator between Austria and America.<BR><BR> Rob McFarland is Associate Professor of German at Brigham Young University.<BR><BR>--, Provided by publisher

Introduction: Amerika in Wien -- Ancient people on new ground : European culture meets American civilization -- New movies and neue Menschen : from Red Vienna to "Anatol on the Missouri" -- Stefan Zweig's "Giant wave of uniformity" : colonization, class, and the polemics of American mass culture -- Babbitt's wives and lovers : white socialism, gender, and the poetry of the machine -- Hymns to Chicago : progress, myth, and the music of the metropolis -- The Danube blues : from American mass culture to Austrian culture for the masses -- Epilogue: Delightful facts and convenient fictions : reconsidering Ann Tizia Leitich's Austria in the context of her American writings -- Chronology -- Ann Tizia Leitich : a selected bibliography