The description of Austrian historical phenomena after 1918 requires a concept of identity that originated in the eighteenth century and acquired its more contentious edge in the nineteenth century. As some of the Habsburg lands formed an integral part of the Holy Roman Empire, the Austrian concept of identity is inherently marked by an affinity to German historical tradition. At the same time, Austria's place in Central Europe and its political, cultural, and literary peculiarity remained constant themes of intellectual discourse (see Lucjan Puchalski, Imaginärer Name Österreich. Der literarische Österreich-Begriff an der Wende vom 18. zum 19. Jahrhundert [Vienna: Böhlau, 2000]). These conditions resulted in a coexistence of multiple identities, even in the shaping of a polyvalent identity that survived the disruption of the monarchy and acted as an important cultural factor in the postwar Austrian state.

In The Burgtheater and Austrian Identity, Robert Pyrah grasps this phenomenon quite accurately when he speaks of a “blurring of regional and national identity.” What is lacking, however, is a reflection on the basic causes of this very multilayered complexity of identity politics. Pyrah rightly insists that a constitutive ambiguity “allowed [the cultural] commentators to promote the Burgtheater, summarily, as the symbol, expression, and even the guarantor of burgeoning ‘national’ culture in Austria by the late 1920s; but the dimensions of the ‘national’ culture, and whether it is separately ‘Austrian’, or merely a local variant of a ‘Greater Germany’, were left open to interpretation” (11). This ambiguity mirrors the pluralist condition of Austrian identity, a bankruptcy asset from the Habsburg bequest, which was increasingly seen as indicating the absence of Austrian public spirit, Gemeinsinn. This dearth of a common sense of belonging was to be compensated by means of an imagined reality. Pyrah follows the theater's function in the construction of this imagined reality in three sections on Heimat, Catholicism, and historical drama (Historiendrama).

Two case studies are devoted to the implications of the concept Heimat, which oscillated between the poles of German nation and Austrian state—another ambiguity that permitted cultural manifestations to be recast in retrospect, after the Anschluss of 1938, as “local manifestations” of an overarching German cultural mission. Pyrah explores the fluctuating traces in the work of Max Mell and Karl Schönherr.

The plays of the Tirolean Heimatdichter, Grillparzer and Bauernfeld laureate Karl Schönherr, whose pieces were among the most frequently performed between 1918 and 1939, covered the broad spectrum of ideological and political positions of his time, whereas the author chose to remain apolitical. Pyrah describes the reception of Schönherr's oeuvre as “a means of redefining national culture through the reconstruction of local theatrical traditions” (36). Schönherr himself, living in Vienna, saw the imagery of Heimat in his oeuvre as an artificial literary construct, detached from ascriptions of a “blood and soil” (Blut und Boden) ideology that he rejected. Although the author characterizes Schönherr's trajectory as developing from “being a thorn in the Catholic side, to [becoming] an officially sanctioned promoter of Catholic values,” Pyrah maintains that he adhered to a concept of identity along purely racial lines that was compatible with the National Socialist program (45). The Catholic renunciation of Schönherr's work foiled the staging of his Glaube und Heimat at the Burgtheater in 1919. Schönherr's later drama Passionsspiel, on the contrary, was officially sanctioned and recommended by Cardinal Innitzer in a letter from 15 July 1933—scarcely surprising as these passion plays had constituted an important kernel of Catholic popular culture for centuries, especially in the Tirol. This continuation of an anti-Semitic medieval tradition—one that identified the Jews with derogatory racial attributes—presents another case in point for the compatibility of Schönherr's portrayal of Heimat with Nazi ideology (see Edith Wenzel, Do wurden die Judden alle geschant. Rolle und Funktion der Juden im spätmittelalterlichen Spielen [Munich: W. Fink, 1992]). Religion no longer acts as a theological denominator, but rather as an index of cultural and racial difference (46)—the concept Heimat serves as an instrument of exclusion. In Pyrah's account, the theatre has adopted the cultural position of Catholicism and has thereby aligned with the political mainstream.

Catholicism neatly accompanied Heimat, playing a pivotal role as unifying force in culture and “as a cultural point of reference of all political persuasions, as part of Austrians' wider intellectual heritage” (63). Initially Catholic drama was promoted by various groups as a signifier of local culture and tradition; but from the late 1920s onwards, political and ideological Catholicism created an exceedingly conservative cultural atmosphere. Pyrah identifies Wildgans, Werfel, and Mell, but also Hofmannsthal and Kralik, as key figures in this process. As far as the “Catholic” dramas of Jewish authors like Werfel's Paulus unter den Juden and Beer-Hofmann's Jaakobs Traum are concerned, the identification of clear-cut allegiances and cultural preoccupations is thwarted by these very authors' multiple identities. This applies also to the dramaturgical work of Beer-Hofmann. There is a glaring discrepancy between a culturally conservative Catholicism with unequivocal party affiliation and a broader sense of Catholicism as cultural-historical category.

Historical dramas, enjoying unabated popularity between 1929 and 1933, communicated “specific messages about Austrian identity through Habsburg history” (122). They hence “helped contribute to the construction or projection of a specifically Austrian cultural identity” (123). It should be noted, however, that these dramas came to be seen as embodying “Österreich-Ideologie” by a broader audience only after 1945.

Certain inaccuracies arise from Pyrah's cavalier attitude toward performance dates and places. When examining the cuts made in the text of Schönherr's classic Erde, on stage in the Burgtheater from 1908 to 1920 and, in a new production, 1926–1927, the author emphasizes the cuts excising biological determinism from the 1908 version. This earlier version tells much more about the intellectual situation of the year that saw the jubilee of Emperor Francis Joseph's sixty-year-old rule than about Pyrah's period of interest, the interwar decades. Consequently, the book fails to explore the preparation of the 1926 production of Erde. Similarly, the reviews of the Josefstadt debut performance of Werfel's Juarez und Maximilian, which had taken place in 1925, are extrapolated on the Burgtheater premiere of the piece four years later. The book hence fails to offer incontrovertible conclusions on the Burgtheater and Austrian identity, but it yields substantial observations on the field indicated in the subtitle, theatre and cultural politics in Vienna.

The author's rendering of “Volksbildung” as “national education” produces a serious misunderstanding. The concept of “Volksbildung” is derived from the context of eighteenth-century German Aufklärung. When Joseph II “founded” the Burgtheater as “deutsches Nationaltheater” in 1776 and stipulated that most of the performances should be in German, this was not the result of narrow nationalist parochialism. Rather, it aimed at opening the hitherto aristocratic theatre to the people. In contriving to compile a repertoire of the best pieces of his time, Joseph II situated his theatre in a clearly educational context—it should enable the common people to go the theatre daily to be enlightened and educated. “Volksbildung” was and is an Enlightenment agenda transcending nationalist pretensions.

Several identity-constituting narratives coexisted and interacted in the interwar years. When dealing with Austrian identity, we need to constantly reflect this basic condition in order to make sense of the “inherent flexibility and ambiguity” of speech acts and cultural agendas (104) as a problem and as a challenge. Pyrah's book is densely layered with sources and strong on incisive discussions, but it remains conceptually imprisoned in interwar Austrian networks of identity. The book's subdivision into case studies permits the reader to single out a separate chapter and to consult it with benefit. Pyrah's study contains a substantial bibliography with the relevant English and German secondary literature, conveniently complemented by an index of persons and pieces discussed.