ABSTRACT
IN CONTRAST TO postwar indirection, our perception of the 1930s is sharp. Politics is important and literature foregrounded; the output of political fiction higher than it would be for another couple of decades; the literary historiography dense. Yet a closer inspection of the period is less reassuring: a survey of a territory subjected to an almost totalitarian Anschluss, resulting in a rewriting of history and a new chronology. The problem is Auden.
