Accounts of Austrian modernism tend to exhibit two contextual trends. Some seek the unique features of Austrian modernity; others argue that Austria stood squarely within European trends. Malcolm Spencer's new book adopts both these perspectives. Although its ostensive timeframe, 1920–1970, follows the demise of empire, the book primarily examines the Habsburg “shadow” looming over modern Austria and evoked in its literature.

Spencer analyzes the chefs d'oeuvre of three well-known writers—Robert Musil's Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, Joseph Roth's Radetzkymarsch, and Ingeborg Bachmann's “Drei Wege zum See”—in order to trace evolving Austrian attitudes toward the imperial past. His introduction and first chapter contend that modern Austria's cultural distinction lay in its acute accentuation of wider continental instabilities. The characteristics of this modernity—weakened value systems, a growing generational gulf, the rise of fractious and intolerant ideologies, and a deepening ambivalence toward home and tradition—are of course pan-European; and Spencer's cultural historical lens, despite the laudable effort to frame Austria's microcosmic significance, remains a bit unfocused.

But the book must be judged on its central aim of specifying Austrian modernity through the analysis of major literary texts, and in this the work acquits itself well. The primary discussions come in four chapters on three modernist authors. The two on Musil, Spencer's touchstone and his most sensitive thinker, introduce a perspective that informs all of the book's interpretations. Musil's unfinished masterpiece is read as a retrospective appraisal of modern Austria's relation to its imperial predecessor, and it is a novel fraught with the author's interwar preoccupations. Spencer offers an intriguing analysis of the filiations between an unloved modern republic and its imperial fatherland.

Musil's Kakania, writes Spencer, cultivated grace and tolerance alongside its outmoded customs and absurd rigidities. The empire could not have lasted, but some of its values—including a refusal of the “pseudoreligions” (143) that seduced interwar youth—might help to combat modern despair and diremption. Reading modernist fiction as intellectual autobiography, Spencer's account of the ways that Mann ohne Eigenschaften captured Musil's shifting attitudes between 1920 and 1942 is particularly fascinating. Indeed, Spencer reads the main characters of his three focal works—Musil's Ulrich, Roth's von Trotta, and Bachmann's Elisabeth—as partial embodiments of post-1918 Austria, rootless, homeless, their imperial past a source of both longing and disdain.

Although Musil feared contemporary degeneration, Joseph Roth deplored modernity tout court. Radetzkymarsch, Spencer argues, was “a fable about the end of an empire that signifies the end of an era” (164). The Jewish Roth, sensing imminent disaster in the 1930s, inscribed into his famous novel a deep nostalgia for the premodern Habsburg hinterlands of his youth. A Conrad of remote Galicia, Roth told a story of military scions who administered the eastern marches even as their traditional world quaked. Yet Roth's semifictional empire—a kingdom of order, temperance, and humane values—was a utopia manqué, a no-place that helped to shield its author from the debased brutalities of his time. For he knew, avers Spencer, that the Habsburgertum—even in his imagined version—could not have survived an encroaching modernity or centrifugal nationalism.

Spencer concludes his volume by considering Bachmann's 1972 “Drei Wege zum See.” If for Roth an imaginary past offered partial consolation for an unhappy present, Bachmann's “Haus Österreich” was merely a Geisterreich, a realm of the spirit that provided no escape from Austria's “embalmed culture” (200), dismembered in 1918, gutted by Fascism, and stuffed for tourists. The Bachmann chapter cinches the book's argument about a lengthening Habsburg shadow, stretched from 1918 deep into the modern century, growing more ghostly with years.

Spencer's book would provide a good introduction to Austrian modernity but for the editorial decision to leave quotations untranslated. The consequent restriction on readership means the volume will appeal mainly to experts, who will want to know how it fits into the considerable literature in the subfield. In this regard, Spencer falls short. All of the themes he examines—generational value conflict, ephemeral identities, the pseudo-consolation of populist ideologies, the loss of an imagined community—have received substantial treatment among English-language commentators on Austrian literature (not to mention other languages), including David Luft, Michael Steinberg, Jacques Le Rider, C. E. Williams, and of course Carl Schorske. Spencer notes these forbears, but he engages them in desultory fashion, leaving the reader to question the newness of his claims. Nonetheless, In the Shadow of Empire offers a thoughtful account of Austria's modern transition and the literary evolution of a Habsburg imaginary in the remaindered Austria of the last century.