'Hochzeit in Wien' by Marianne Philips

The novel Bruiloft in Europa by Dutch author Marianne Philips was published in 1934 and became one of her most popular books. A fourth edition appeared in 1935, and many reprints followed after the war, most of them in the well-known Salamander pocket series published by Querido Publishers. Until the 1980s, Wedding in Europe featured on secondary school reading lists. Philips also attracted a lot of attention for this novel abroad. Translations appeared in Danish, German, English, and Swedish. There were also plans for a film adaptation, but these never came to fruition. In 2023, Urachhaus published a new German translation of the novel by Eva Schweikart, under the title Hochzeit in Wien. Publicist Judith Belinfante, granddaughter of Marianne Philips, wrote a brand new afterword for this German edition.

Marianne Philips

Marianne Philips (1886-1951) made her debut in 1929 with the novel De wonderbare genezing (The miraculous healing). This was followed in 1930 by the acclaimed novel De biecht (The Confession), about a sister murder. This novel was also translated into German in 2021 by Eva Schweikart and also provided with an afterword by Judith Belinfante. Die Beichte einer Nacht was published by Diogenes Publishers in Zurich. After Bruiloft in Europa she published several more essays, novellas and translations. In 1950, she wrote the Dutch Book Week gift, De zaak Beukenoot. After her death in 1951, her husband, Sam Goudeket, established the literary Marianne Philips Prize, which was awarded from 1951 to 1975 to Dutch authors over the age of fifty. Philips was of Jewish descent and survived the persecution of the Jews in 1940-45 in hiding. She was a passionate advocate of social democracy and, as a member of the SDAP (Socialist Party), was one of the first female municipal councilors in the Netherlands.

Bruiloft in Europa

In Bruiloft in Europa, Philips takes the reader to a back street in the Austrian capital Vienna in 1933. On that street, the Luftbadgasse, the elderly Hodl couple are celebrating their golden wedding anniversary. They own the building. The party in the large courtyard of the Hodls' grand house is the main setting in this novel, where the lives of the various characters converge for a brief moment. The novel is a frame story; all the house's tenants are featured with their own stories and represent a social cross-section of Vienna in 1933. For example, there is an aging opera singer basking in her former fame, a neurotic violinist, and a down-on-his-luck countess and her daughter. In this novel, the older residents of the Hodls' house still live in the spirit of bygone Imperial Austria, while the younger ones primarily feel the doom of the fateful 1930s. The old countess cannot accept that the noble privileges have evaporated after 1918, her cousin Otto understands that social relations have shifted and marries department store cashier Rosel, also a tenant of the Hodl house.

Vienna

Marianne Philips drew directly from her own experiences for her novel about Vienna, having lived in the Luftbadgasse in the early 1930s. She had followed her psychiatrist, J.H. de Groot, to Vienna, where he attended seminars by Sigmund Freud. De Groot greatly encouraged Philips in her literary work. During her stay, Philips was able to closely observe Viennese society. She witnessed the strong antisemitism and touched upon it in the early stages of the novel through the character of one of the tenants: the elderly Jewish grandfather, Meyer Jonathan.

Nazis

When Adolf Hitler seized power in Germany in January 1933, Marianne Philips became depressed and put work on the novel aside for a long time. Later, however, she realized that as a fervent SDAP member, she had to show her true colors against the advancing fascism. When she returned to the novel, she embodied this through the character of Daniel Jonathan, the grandson of the elder Meyer, who, within the Viennese communist movement, resisted the rising Nazis. It is especially through the confrontations of the young Jew Daniel Jonathan that it becomes clear how the Nazis were already making themselves heard in Vienna, long before the Anschluss of 1938. Not so much through the concrete stories of the characters, but especially through the threatening atmosphere of the novel, the reader senses that things will go completely wrong in the 1930s.