Books About Austria: 5 Classics Worth Reading

Five books explain Austria better than any packing list: a memoir by the real Maria von Trapp, Joseph Roth’s novel of the empire coming apart, Stefan Zweig’s account of the Vienna that vanished with it, Elfriede Jelinek’s portrait of a Viennese music teacher, and Irvin D. Yalom’s novel about Nietzsche and the birth of the talking cure. All five are in print in English today. All five are set in, or written out of, Austria.

A guidebook tells you when the museum opens. These books do the thing a guidebook cannot, which is tell you what it felt like to live in the country the museum is about. Read one before you go, or keep one for the flight home, when the trip is still close enough to argue with.

Books about Austria at a glance

The 5 books are compared below by author, type and current English edition.

1. The Story of the Trapp Family Singers

The Story of the Trapp Family Singers is Maria Augusta Trapp’s own memoir of the family behind The Sound of Music. The Story of the Trapp Family Singers appeared in 1949, 16 years before Hollywood reached it, and the escape from Nazi-occupied Austria fills far fewer pages than the decades that came after it in the United States: the concert tours, the money worries, the slow business of becoming American.

Readers who know the musical notice how much was written for the screen. The romance with Georg von Trapp gets a few pages rather than a whole act. The family left Austria by train rather than over the mountains.

This memoir suits you if you are heading for Salzburg and want the story underneath the tour. Harper keeps it in print at 377 pages, and the Harper edition of The Story of the Trapp Family Singers is the one to order, since the original hardbacks now change hands second-hand at collector prices.

2. The Radetzky March

The Radetzky March follows three generations of the Trotta family as the Habsburg empire that made them comes apart around them. The Radetzky March opens at the Battle of Solferino, where the infantryman Joseph Trotta pushes Emperor Franz Joseph out of the path of a bullet and is ennobled for it. Trotta’s son becomes a district commissioner. His grandson Carl Joseph becomes a lieutenant who is not much good at being one.

Joseph Roth published the novel in 1932 and wrote the big historical events sideways. The empire’s decline reaches the reader through a garrison town’s card games, an unpaid debt, a father and son who cannot talk to each other. Nothing is announced. Everything erodes.

Read it if you want to understand why Austrians still argue about the monarchy. The Overlook Press edition of 352 pages, in Joachim Neugroschel’s translation, is the standard English text, and The Radetzky March from Overlook Press remains in print.

3. The World of Yesterday

The World of Yesterday is Stefan Zweig’s memoir of the Vienna he grew up in and the Europe that destroyed it. The World of Yesterday describes the years before 1914 as an age of security, which is exactly what everyone living inside it assumed would last. Zweig was one of the most widely read writers alive in the 1920s and 1930s, and he wrote the book in exile.

Zweig left Austria for England in 1934 and took British citizenship in 1940. He moved on to New York and then to Petrópolis in Brazil, where he and his second wife Lotte died by suicide in February 1942, one day after he posted the manuscript to his publisher. That ending sits over every page about the golden Vienna of his youth.

Read this one if your trip is mostly Vienna, because Zweig walks you through the cafés, the concert halls and the newspapers that the surviving architecture still belongs to. Anthea Bell’s translation is the current English text, published by the University of Nebraska Press at 472 pages, and The World of Yesterday in Anthea Bell’s translation is the version to check for, since older and much cheaper translations still circulate and read nothing like it.

Zweig is the writer Wes Anderson credited as a source for The Grand Budapest Hotel, which is a gentler way in if the memoir sounds heavy. The collections he describes are still open, and many of them appear in our guide to Vienna’s museums.

4. The Piano Teacher

The Piano Teacher is Elfriede Jelinek’s novel about Erika Kohut, a piano teacher at the Vienna Conservatory who still lives with her controlling mother. The Piano Teacher turns destructive once Erika’s relationship with her student Walter Klemmer begins, and Jelinek wrote it as an attack on Vienna’s self-image rather than a love letter to the city.

Be warned that this is a hard book. It is cold, sexually explicit and deliberately unpleasant in places, and it divides readers more sharply than anything else on this list. Michael Haneke’s 2001 film with Isabelle Huppert softens very little of it.

One correction is worth carrying into a bookshop: the 2004 Nobel Prize in Literature went to Elfriede Jelinek for her body of work, cited by the Swedish Academy for the flow of voices and counter-voices in her novels and plays, and not for this single title. Grove Press keeps the book in print at 288 pages in Joachim Neugroschel’s translation, so The Piano Teacher from Grove Press is the edition you will find.

5. When Nietzsche Wept

When Nietzsche Wept invents a meeting that never happened, in which Josef Breuer treats a suicidal Friedrich Nietzsche and the two men end up treating each other. When Nietzsche Wept is set in Vienna in 1882, not the 1982 that some write-ups still repeat, and the date carries the whole idea, because psychoanalysis has not been invented yet when the novel opens. Irvin D. Yalom, an emeritus professor of psychiatry at Stanford, published it in 1992.

The setup comes from Lou Salomé, who asks Breuer to help the friend she has just refused. Nietzsche will not accept help, so Breuer tells him he needs Nietzsche’s help instead, with an obsession of his own. The sessions then run both ways.

Take this one if you want to know how Vienna became the city where psychoanalysis started. Real people and real arguments fill the book even though the encounter is fiction, and Harper Perennial Modern Classics keeps it in print at 352 pages, which makes When Nietzsche Wept from Harper Perennial easy to find alongside Yalom’s other philosophical novels.

The three historical figures behind the story, Josef Breuer, Sigmund Freud and Friedrich Nietzsche, all lived within a few years and a few streets of one another. Irvin D. Yalom simply put two of them in a room.

Which book about Austria to read first

Start with the book that matches your trip rather than the one with the highest rating. The 3 starting points are listed below.

1. Salzburg and the lakes: The Story of the Trapp Family Singers. It is the shortest, the warmest, and the one your guide will assume you have not read.
2. Vienna: The World of Yesterday. It covers the cafés, concert halls and newspapers of the city before 1914, which is the Vienna most of the surviving architecture belongs to.
3. Anywhere in Austria: The Radetzky March. It spans the widest stretch of the country’s history and it is the novel Austrian readers themselves keep returning to.

Jelinek and Yalom work better as second books. The Piano Teacher is too bleak to be anyone’s introduction to a country, and When Nietzsche Wept makes more sense once you have seen Vienna and understood what Zweig was mourning.

WonderfulWanderings Pro Tips

Four things are worth knowing before you order any of these, based on which editions are currently in print.

1. Check the translator on The World of Yesterday before you buy. Anthea Bell’s translation for the University of Nebraska Press is the current one, and older translations are still sold cheaply alongside it.
2. Skip any listing that credits The Piano Teacher with a Nobel Prize. The 2004 Nobel Prize in Literature went to Elfriede Jelinek for her body of work, so no single title carries it.
3. Order The Story of the Trapp Family Singers in the current Harper edition. Early hardbacks are scarce and priced accordingly, and the text is the same one Maria wrote in 1949.
4. Read The Radetzky March last if you are reading several. It assumes some feel for the Habsburg monarchy already, which the Zweig memoir supplies in a much easier form.

About the author. This reading list is written and maintained by the Wonderful Wanderings editorial team. Wonderful Wanderings was founded in 2012 by Sofie Couwenbergh, who has travelled Austria for the site from the Vorarlberg valleys to the Zillertal Alps. The team covers Austria for independent travellers, including the books, museums, hotels and tours worth your time, and checks this page when an edition goes out of print or a new translation appears.