A Note on "Der Oger", the play by Veza Canneti

English-speaking students of German literature who have not encountered works on the last years of Vienna and its empire, may miss a connection in the play.

This is a mention, in the 1st scene of the 3rd act, of a "Kinderblindenheim".

In our day, neonatal blindness is largely prevented by preventing neonatal jaundice and is a world health concern.

But blind children in Vienna have another connection: brothels and syphilis.

Later in the same scene, references shift to Waisenkinder.

The play is not set in Vienna, but there can be no doubt that it is the work of a progressive Viennese writer.

There is also the the mention of "betteln".  The blinding of children to produce beggars is one of the more disturbing urban aberrations recorded.

I would suggest that the view that there are always the blind, always orphans, always beggars as there are always the desperately impoverished is one of the urbane views to which Veza Canetti held a life-long visceral opposition.

That there is "of course" a need for a "home" for the blind children and a "home' for the orphans and that our task is to fund these by appealing to the very perpetrators of these ills - this should strike the reader.

There will be no "Plakat" at the brothel, no titled notice of who spent more than whom at any given brothel.

Draga, in the home of Iger, finds herself in an inversion of sorts: those who arrive at the door ask for money rather than paying their money.  The play closes with the key element of the Bankbuch: money in, money out, rather as the play opened.

Another key element in the play, is the state of Draga when not on view, and the demand that Draga come out on view, and that where she is living is not, in fact, a "Haus".

Some readers will doubtless be dissatisfied by the end of the play: Veza Canetti was committed to social change and the need for persons to speak and to act.  The young Anglo-American reader may not be aware of the extent of the plague of syphilis in the world before the Great World War and after.

A walk in the Green Mountains of Vermont to the remnants of a colony, a settlement for syphilitic Union Civil War veterans and their families, may give another clue to this "Kolonie" in Der Oger and an alternate village with a "bridge" to an "Apotheker".

For a different reading of "Kinderblindenheim" - this one by a scholar - see "Sozialismus und Psychoanalyse: Quellen von Veza Canettis literarischen Utopien" by Angelika Schedel with its much richer reading of the references in the play to a Viennese audience.

But in my defense, I would only note that at various points in the opening scene of the play, there are references to a woman alone at a bridge or "Bazar" as being viewed as a prostitute - and the obvious Haus to which a prostitute is destined.

Elias Canetti must surely figure in both the father and the husband: while Simone de Beauvoir may have accepted Sartre, cash in pocket, and his "putes", Veza Canetti may have been conflicted - in that Elias, averse to having money on his person, frequented women she knew even as early as the time of her writing "Der Oger".

Given the parallel in the openings of "Die Gelbe Strasse" and Musil's "Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften", it would be interesting to look for a connection [Rettungswagen, Sanitätswagen and Lastwagen, Kraftwagen] in when Elias Canetti or Hermann Broch first heard Musil read from his work.

related: dissertation of Lois Zweck.