Doctoral Dissertations

Date of Award

5-1992

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Major

German

Major Professor

Henry Kratz

Committee Members

John Osbome, David Lee, Carolyn Hodges, Susan Martin

Abstract

German popular literature has long faced the criticism that it contains no detective story tradition to compete with those of France, Britain, and America. Theories about this alleged dearth range from the political to the philosophical. Even Germanists, when discussing German-language crime literature, erroneously focus on a few works from the accepted German literary canon--Heinrich von Kleist's Der Zweikampf, E. T. A. Hoffmann's Das Fräulein von Scuderi, and Annette von Droste-Hülshoff's Die Judenbuche, for example--and overlook the varied and rich detective story offerings of the popular German and Austrian presses of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

This study examines the detective-fiction oeuvre of the Viennese journalist, editor, folklorist, juvenile fiction writer and schoolteacher Auguste Groner (1850-1929), who published thirty-odd detective tales, novellas, and novels between 1889 and 1924. In particular, contrary to the intellectual detachment often considered necessary to this genre, Groner's writing always reveals her own social idealism. This is made manifest throughout her detective fiction in her characterization, her use of sub-plots, her omniscient narrator's commentaries, and the moral messages which accompany the solutions of the puzzles. Often she constructs a world in which the criminal is morally inexorable and the victim deserving of his fate, in order to assure idealistically useful outcomes. Additionally, she casts her detectives as the antithesis of the coldly scientific Sherlock Holmes model: though their techniques rely in the same way on keen observation and deductive powers, they cannot remain emotionally aloof from the cases they solve.

While Groner's detective fiction is soundly plotted and well written, it is not classic. Groner's commitment to a well-rounded story consistently takes precedence over the crafting of the intellectual puzzle per se, and the social messages are too firmly rooted in iv her fin-de-siècle Viennese milieu to permit of abstraction. Although she wrote through the first quarter of the twentieth century, Groner's work remains essentially nineteenth-century in character. Within popular literature it should be grouped with the work of those detective novelists like Charles Dickens and Dorothy Leigh Sayers who attempt to combine the crime puzzle with other literary elements.

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