Konservative Transkulturalität oder Paradoxien der Moderne?

Abstract

The genre of the novel of the future is usually reduced to a few canonised texts in diachronic longitudinal sections. This article, instead, attempts to explore the synchronic dynamics of the genre in the interwar period using the example of the future novels by the Austrian author Walther Eidlitz, who, after his expressionist beginnings, wrote religious-mythical texts in which a counterweight is sought against the irregularly differentiating modernity. On the eve of the Third Reich, the novels Zodiak (1930) and Das Licht der Welt (1932) outline a tableau of possibilities in which the ambivalences of modernity are named and productively integrated into a future concept of leadership based on the protagonist's search for identity, a Greek-Turkish migrant, and his negotiation processes between religion and technology as well as archaic and modern living environments.¹