The Karl Bittner archive occupies nearly four feet of shelf space, consisting of three distinct written genres, more than 5,000 pages altogether. There are nine volumes of the personal journal he kept from 1907 until his death; there are five volumes of a journal he maintained for his son from 1915 to 1945; and there are twelve volumes of a chronicle, begun in 1941, ten years before his death, intended to serve as a retrospective account of his life. A remarkable output for a man who apparently never published a single text in his life, except for a single feuilleton in the Prager Tagblatt and the annual reports he produced for the Österreichischer Betonverein, an organization he led—with interruptions—for over 40 years. In Vom k.u.k. Hauptmann zum Kommerzialrat, Mechthild Dubbi draws upon this immense private archive to construct a biographical profile of its fascinating and graphomaniacally touched author.
An officer (1892–1907) and subsequently a businessman (1907–1951), Bittner was a remarkably resilient and moderately successful Austrian man who experienced, recorded, and then looked back upon a decisive phase of European history. Keeping with this trajectory, the book places its subject, first, within the context of the fin-de-siècle Habsburg officer and follows this with a treatment of Bittner as a middle-class citizen (Bürger) pursuing his livelihood in Vienna. A shorter chapter also considers citizen Bittner and the familiar rituals of his class—marriage, fatherhood, family, social life, and travel. Generally speaking, Dubbi finds in Karl Bittner a scholarly object to be disassembled and reassembled. Organized according to sociological categories, Vom k.u.k. Hauptmann zum Kommerzialrat is anything but a traditional academic or political celebrity biography. Devoted to a man whose significance resides principally in his typicality, the book represents the academic B-side to popular biographies of mysterious and dashing figures, such as Verena Moritz, Hannes Leidinger, and Gerhard Jagschitz's study of spy chief Maximilian Ronge, whose life span nearly matches that of Bittner, in Im Zentrum der Macht (St.Pölten-Salzburg, 2007).
Two hearts beat in the warm chest of Karl Bittner. This duality, between officer and citizen, shapes much of Vom k.u.k. Hauptmann zum Kommerzialrat, and Dubbi assigns these two categories special weight, arguing that Bittner traversed two “polarized blueprints for identity” (10). Discharged younger officers, it is true, faced significant challenges in returning to civilian life, and Bittner succeeded better than most of his cohort. But the book's premise that officer and civilian are “polarized identities” remains more a presupposition than a reasoned conclusion. Are these two identity blueprints more “polarized” than, say, citizen and criminal, or any of the other hard-cast fin-de-siècle types? And how does this “polarization” square with the later claim that Bittner can be seen to “reveal increasingly bourgeois (bürgerliche) tendencies toward the end of his military career” (127)? In any case, the initial career choice to become an officer was not an easy one. The son of a physics, mathematics, and Czech language teacher at a Prague gymnasium, Bittner first prevailed against his father's earnest wish that he study mechanical engineering and then succeeded in being admitted to the Theresan Military Academy in Wiener Neustadt.
Dubbi is especially strong in her synthesis of primary sources and recent research on the Habsburg officer around 1900. Through primary sources, she identifies professional benchmarks that situate Bittner among his Academy peers, whereas Dubbi uses his career and his own recollections to supplement existing scholarship on the professional and private life of the Habsburg officer. As one who ranked 72nd out of 129 among the class of 1892, Bittner, like other graduates of the Theresianum, felt predestined for a career with the elite General Staff. But somewhere amid the gonorrhea, the (probable) debts, the investigations by the honor commission, the one-year involuntary leave of absence, and the neurasthenia, the man Karl Bittner could not keep pace with the career Karl Bittner. What happened and why is a question that yields some of the book's most compelling sections, even if a definitive answer proves elusive.
Former officers, as István Deák has rightly observed, were eager memoirists. Curiously, Dubbi does not consider Bittner's writings within this genre—neither as memoir nor anti-memoir. Instead, German-language military memoirs and German-language military fiction largely serve to contextualize the various situations and experiences that Bittner reported. Indeed, the historical context derived from these secondary sources occasionally threatens to obliterate the particularity of the book's subject. Bittner's life is read with—and almost never against—the broad scholarly consensus on military life and bourgeois society. Of the somewhat quirky fellow, whom Ernst Hanisch characterized in his study Männlichkeiten (Vienna, 2005), as a rare type of “caring father,” we see little. Who, anyway, was the Karl Bittner who, as Hanisch notes, described himself as “lord of the bath” (Bademeister) and a “diaper specialist” (Wickelspezialist)?
Likewise, the bohemian Karl Bittner, a man who socialized with an exclusively bohemian group at the Military Academy, whose father taught Czech, and whose first officer's assignment was with the 91st Czech Infantry Regiment based in České Budějovice, passes through Vom k.u.k. Hauptmann zum Kommerzialrat virtually incognito. Dubbi does draw inspiration for imagining Bittner's life as an officer from the Czech classic The Good Soldier Švejk: The fictional soldier Švejk was also assigned to the 91st Infantry Regiment. But given the very different ways that Austrian Germans and Czechs behave in that book, this comparison raises more questions than it answers. Nor does she seem aware, in conceding that Švejk is a fictional character, that his creator, Jaroslav Hašek, like Karl Bittner, also served in the 91st Infantry Regiment.
Bittner gave up the military life and pursued a civilian career, but he never stopped being an officer and a Neustädter. During World War I, Bittner himself was briefly reactivated and promoted. While Director of the Österreichischer Betonverein (from 1907 to 1915, from 1927 to 1938, and from 1946 to 1951), and in the years in between, he remained in social contact with his graduating class, attended regular class reunions, and cultivated his friendship with classmate Archduke Josef Ferdinand, who had agreed to become the godfather of Bittner's son, Josef Ferdinand Karl Bittner. At the same time, however, Karl Bittner never stopped living the life of the Central European fin-de-siècle. An officer with great expectations, his recurring affliction-of-the-age, neurasthenia, seems, more than anything else, to have undone his career prospects. And already as an officer, he became inspired by art, fell in love with painting, and spoke of writing a short history of art.
From this standpoint, Vom k.u.k. Hauptmann zum Kommerzialrat is a solidly researched and presented testament to the extraordinary influence of the fin-de-siècle milieu on virtually anyone in the proximity of the middle class. One can disagree with that conclusion. Then again, there is Karl Bittner, a man very much under the radar, reading from Otto Weininger (!) to his sick father in 1906 and suddenly deciding that he should preserve his own life by writing it. A good soldier and a successful businessman, Karl Bittner fulfilled Freud's command to work as the best cure for life's ills and ended up filling nearly four feet of shelf space with his own work.
