Hilde Spiel

Youth in Vienna

Hilde Spiel was born in Vienna in October 1911, into an upper-class Jewish family. Her paternal grandfather lived in the 1st district of the capital, where he worked as a clerk. Her parents were Hugo F. Spiel, an engineering research chemist and an officer in the Austro-Hungarian army during World War I, and Marie Spiel, née Gutfeld. For the first ten years of her life she lived in a garden apartment in Probusgasse in Heiligenstadt, in the 19th district, where her mother’s family had lived for generations, and then between Arenbergpark and Fasangasse in the 3rd district.

Studies and emigration

After passing her school-leaving examination at the famous Schwarzwald School, she studied philosophy at the University of Vienna, under Moritz Schlick among others. From 1933 to 1935 she worked at the Industrial Psychological Research Centre at the University of Vienna; in 1933 she joined the Social Democratic Workers’ Party (which was banned in 1934) and wrote her first two novels, Kati auf der Brücke and Verwirrung am Wolfgangsee. In 1936 she married the German writer Peter de Mendelssohn, who, like her, had emigrated to London that same year as a result of the rise of Nazism in their respective countries. The couple had met in Vienna and planned to marry in London, but Hilde Spiel delayed her departure until she had gained her doctorate in philosophy. Her final decision to leave her native city was reinforced by the politically motivated murder of Moritz Schlick by a former student.

On settling in London they had two children, Christine (later Shuttleworth), now a translator and indexer, and Felix de Mendelssohn, who became a psychoanalyst practising in Vienna and Berlin. In 1941, Hilde Spiel became a British subject, and from 1944 she contributed regularly to the New Statesman magazine.

Postwar years

On 30/31 January 1946, wearing British army uniform, she flew to Vienna in a military aircraft, as war correspondent for the New Statesman. Her declared intention was to 'compare my present life with my past, test my loyalty, and subject my powers of emotion to an experiment'. In Vienna she met, among others, the Czech painter Josef Dobrowsky, the Communist city councillor in charge of cultural affairs Viktor Matejka, and the young cultural critic Hans Weigel, who had returned from exile, and sought out the legendary intellectuals’ coffee house Café Herrenhof. She also visited refugee camps in Carinthia, and the Italian town of Udine, at that time also under British occupation.

On 7 March 1946 she returned to London and wrote up the notes she had made on her observations in Vienna as a travel report. It was not until the late 1960s that she translated her English-language report into German, editing and expanding it substantially; it was published in 1968 under the title Rückkehr nach Wien (Return to Vienna). The report, according to one review, was a 'self-examination as well as an examination of a city, a mixture of personal and historical snapshots. All written in the crystal-clear, straightforward style of poetical and analytical precision already so typical of Spiel.' In 1946 she returned a further three times to 'the Continent' – (Paris, Budapest, Brixen, Nuremberg), and soon afterwards settled in Berlin with her family until 1948. Here she was active as a drama critic for Die Welt as well as the New Statesman, La France Libre, the Berlin Tagesspiegel and the weekly magazine sie.

On her return to Britain, Spiel worked as a cultural correspondent for the Neue Zeitung, the Süddeutsche Zeitung, the Tagesspiegel, the Weltwoche, The Guardian and Theater heute, and also as a broadcaster. In the postwar years she was one of the most important literary critics in the German-speaking world, and promoted the breakthrough of the Austrian writer Heimito von Doderer among others. Over several decades she repeatedly found herself in ideological conflict with the writers Elias Canetti and Friedrich Torberg. Conversely, she counted many outstanding writers among her close friends, particularly the playwright and novelist Thomas Bernhard.

Return to Austria

From 1955 she had a second home in St Wolfgang in Upper Austria. In 1963 she finally returned to Austria, where she continued to work as a cultural correspondent for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) and published several volumes of essays and her memoirs.

After her separation from Peter de Mendelssohn in 1963 and her divorce in 1970, she was married, from 1972 until his death in 1981, to the writer and retired BBC employee Hans Flesch von Brunningen. In the 1980s she spent another year in London as FAZ correspondent.

Hilde Spiel was a member of the Austrian PEN Centre, and its general secretary from 1966 to 1971. In 1971 she took on the post of vice-president, and after the resignation of Alexander Lernet-Holenia in 1972, and at his suggestion, stood for election as president. However, her election was blocked by an initiative mainly conducted by Friedrich Torberg, who tried to persuade some of his friends to publish attacks on Hilde Spiel. After resigning from the Austrian PEN Centre in protest, she joined the German centre and remained active in International PEN, in particular, together with Heinrich Böll, in its Writers in Prison Committee. In addition she joined the Grazer Autorenversammlung, today the largest writers’ association in Austria, where she became a defender and mentor of controversial younger writers, such as Wolfgang Bauer and Peter Turrini. She also became an active member of the German Academy for Language and Literature in Darmstadt.

Hilde Spiel died in Vienna in 1990. Like her parents and her second husband, Hans Flesch von Brunningen, she was buried in the cemetery at Bad Ischl. Her tombstone records her name as Hilde Maria Flesch-Brunningen.

Career

Apart from her journalistic work, Hilde Spiel was the author of novels, stories and works of cultural history. The biography Fanny von Arnstein oder die Emanzipation (Fanny von Arnstein: A Daughter of the Enlightenment, 1758–1818), her favourite among her own books, was described as ‘a remarkable historical document ... the portrait, not only of one of the most brilliant and charming women of her time, but of a whole era of European culture and history’. Spiel was also a distinguished translator into German of English-language novels and dramas.