The Waterfalls of Slunj by Heimito von Doderer

First published:Die Wasserfalle von Slunj, 1963 (English translation, 1966)

Type of work: Historical realism

Time of work: The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries

Locale: Vienna and environs

Principal Characters:

• Robert Clayton, a British machinery manufacturer who establishes a factory in Vienna
• Harriet Clayton, Robert’s wife
• Donald Clayton, Robert and Harriet’s son, who meets a tragic death at the waterfalls of Slunj
• Monica Bachler, Donald’s lover and the second wife of Robert Clayton
• Chwostik, a financial wizard who is employed by the Claytons
• Zdenko, a young student

The Novel

In The Waterfalls of Slunj, Heimito von Doderer traces the fortunes and misfortunes of two generations of a British manufacturing family who set up a business enterprise in pre-World War I Austria. The work is a “total novel,” designed to capture the customs and manners of Europeans living during the height of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. A love song to a bygone era, this epic work describes in great detail the social fabric, landscapes, atmospheric conditions, and even the sounds and odors of antebellum Vienna and its environs. Sympathetic but not overly sentimental, the novel re-creates a panoramic view of everyday life among the rich and middling sorts who lived along the gaslit, cobbled streets of old Vienna.

The story opens in the late 1870’s with the marriage of Robert and Harriet Clayton. Robert, the son of a well-to-do machinery manufacturer from southwest England, and his bride, Harriet, spend their honeymoon in the vicinity of Vienna, near the beautiful falls of the Slunjcica River. Precisely nine months later, their first and only child, Donald, is born.

Upon returning to Great Britain, Robert learns of his father’s decision to establish a subsidiary firm in the southeastern provinces of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Having been given responsibility for opening the new factory, Robert returns to Vienna, seeks personnel recommendations from Andreas Milohnic (a hotel clerk whom the Claytons met while they were on their honeymoon in Austria) and hires a man named Chwostik as the office manager. Under Chwostik’s able direction, the Claytons’ factory becomes an efficient and profitable business enterprise, and Robert achieves social and economic prominence. In time, Donald, who spends much of his youth in England with his grandfather, completing his education, returns to Vienna to assist his father in the family business.

The novel centers on the relationships between young Donald and his family, friends, and associates. Although remarkably similar to his father in physical appearance (acquaintances refer to the father-son pair as the “English brothers”), Donald lacks the confidence and individuality of the other Claytons. Donald’s life is a series of frustrations and disappointments. A self-centered bachelor, he lacks the courage even to consummate his love for Monica Bachler, the one woman who adores him.

While on an extended business trip to England, Donald realizes that he loves Monica. Upon returning to Vienna, however, he receives a cool reception from his former admirer. Confused and exasperated, Donald leaves on another business trip. While in Budapest, he is duped into seducing Margot Putnik, the unhappily married wife of a business client. Typical of other experiences in Donald’s unfulfilled life, the intended affair is foiled by the timely arrival of Margot’s husband, Laszlo Putnik. Donald, embarrassed and broken by yet another rejection, determines to make a belated plea for Monica’s affections. Yet, before he can reach Vienna, Donald learns the surprising news that his father, now a widower of several years, and Monica are announcing their own engagement.

Failing as a lover, a friend, and a businessman, Donald loses his will to live. He visits the waterfalls of Slunj, not knowing that he is returning to the site of his conception. There he meets his tragic end. While Donald is walking over the cataracts, the railing snaps, and he stumbles over the narrow wooden bridge. Nearby rocks halt the fall of his body, but not his fears. Donald dies of fright, even though he drops only a few feet, onto a ledge and not into the falls.

The Characters

In some ways, Doderer’s The Waterfalls of Slunj resembles the three-decker novels of the late nineteenth century. His leisurely prose, his use of long, descriptive passages flooded with color and imagery, and his cast of hundreds of characters who are intricately, almost mechanically, interrelated—these are the conventions of the Victorian novel. On several occasions, Doderer also uses the Victorian novelist’s habit of addressing the “gentle reader,” intruding upon the narrative with personal comments of affection or denigration regarding his characters and even explicitly banishing characters from the book. For example, after a minor character serves her purpose, Doderer writes:

The moment has come when it has become possible for us to eject Frau Wewerka from our composition.... Grant it, O reader, to this thy entreating author! Grant him the exquisite delight of bestowing two positively whacking boxes on the ears, by means of which Frau Wewerka is catapulted out of this book and shot off to the horizon, where she bursts and scatters in disgusting spray.

On another occasion, Doderer ejects from his pages two redeemed prostitutes, Finy and Feverl, only to readmit them at a later time when the plot thickens.

A historian in his own right, Doderer purposely introduces a rich variety of characters in order to portray Vienna in its grand diversity. The range of his sympathies is wide, for most of his characters—engineers, business-men, “nice” Viennese ladies, and prostitutes—possess admirable or at least tolerable qualities. Doderer, however, shows no compassion for Frau Wewerka and her little duplicate, Frau Wenidoppler, unredeemable servants of mammon—the one Viennese type Doderer loathes.

Doderer excels in his portrayal of characters who are neither sophisticated nor highly articulate. Several of his minor characters, such as the aforementioned prostitutes Finy and Feverl, evoke more sympathy and appear more lifelike than the principal characters. As the narrator, Doderer himself becomes bored with Donald, his protagonist, whom on several occasions he dismisses as a “paperweight,” an insignificant nobody. At times, Doderer even digresses from the central plot to give sudden prominence for a few pages to the concerns of his supporting cast, only then to eject them “with a hearty kick in the behind.” Other minor characters, however, such as the five Harbach girls, are hardly more than names, identified with generalized attributes (the Harbach girls are “tall”) that have little to do with the time, the setting, or the plot. Keeping track of such marginal characters (who often are linked, sometimes by coincidence, with other figures later in the narrative) requires attentive reading.

Doderer’s narrative voice is distant and dispassionate. The reader is like a social spectator who views the flow of events but does not participate emotionally in them. Even Donald’s tragic death evokes only minimal sympathy. Some readers also find Doderer’s characters too obviously manipulated and predictable. From the beginning, it is clear that Chwostik will succeed and that Donald is doomed. Doderer’s principal characters in The Waterfalls of Slunj, like those in his other works, rarely surprise the reader; instead, they consistently follow the course their creator meticulously charted for them before he wrote the book.

Critical Context

The Waterfalls of Slunj was the first part of a planned tetralogy, an ambitious project intended to be as large in scope and scale as Doderer’s masterpiece, Die Damonen (1956; The Demons, 1961). Doderer’s death in December, 1966, however, deprived readers of the completed work. Fortunately, The Waterfalls of Slunj can be read as an autonomous unit.

A soldier and captured prisoner in two world wars and a scholar with a doctorate in Austrian history, Doderer distrusted the panaceas for social ills that were offered from both the political Right and the Left. To Doderer, such ideologies simply clouded one’s perception of truth, forever keeping one in an illusory and false world of “second realities.” Thus, as a novelist, Doderer avoided creating characters as the embodiments of ideas. He refused to cultivate the dream at the expense of reality.

With the trained eye of a historian, Doderer instead dutifully recorded the manners of the people and the scenery of the countryside during the height of his country’s glory. Convinced that “the novel is a perpetual quest for reality” and that the task of the novelist is “the reconquest of the external world,” Doderer became Austria’s greatest poet of the sights and sounds of old Vienna. In reading his prose, sympathetic students cannot help but become Viennese themselves.

Bibliography

Bachem, Michael. Heimito von Doderer, 1981.

Haberl, Franz P. “Water Imagery in Doderer’s Novels,” in Books Abroad. XLII (Summer, 1968), pp. 348-353.

Hamburger, Michael. From Prophecy to Exorcism, 1965.

Hatfield, Henry. “The Human Tragicomedy: Doderer’s Die Wasserfalle von Slunj,” in Books Abroad. XLII (Summer, 1968), pp. 354-357.

Ivask, Ivar. “Heimito von Doderer: An Introduction,” in Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature. VIII (Autumn, 1967), pp. 528-547.

Swales, M.W. “The Narrator in the Novels of Heimito von Doderer,” in The Modern Language Review. LXI (January, 1966), pp. 85-95.