The ACF DC is pleased to host Peter Höyng, professor of German Studies at Emory University, for the presentation of two books he edited and co-translated with Chauncey J. Mellor, professor emeritus at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, from German into English. The Blue Stain: A Novel of a Racial Outcast by Hugo Bettauer and Marylin: A Novel of Passing by Arthur Rundt were both published in the 1920s by Austrian authors, offering insights into the European perspective of racial issues in the US in the early 20th century that still resonate today. Professor Höyng has re-discovered the two Austrian novels and will do a reading from as well as talk about both novels during his presentation.
The event is followed by an Austrian wine reception.
ABOUT PROFESSOR HÖYNG
Peter Höyng [pronounced Hö-ing] is a native of Germany and has been a professor of German studies at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, for the past 18 years. He has published widely on Austrian literature and Austrian-Jewish cultural history in an interdisciplinary fashion, among others on Theodor Herzl as a playwright, Nobel laureate Elfriede Jelinek’s interest in Schubert, or Beethoven as a passionate reader of literature. In addition, he has often co-directed Emory’s summer study abroad program in Vienna, now in its 50th year of existence. There he taught classes on the history of the Ringstrasse, the Burgtheater, or a cultural history of Galicia.
ABOUT THE BOOKS
In The Blue Stain: A Novel of a Racial Outcast, the hero Carlo is a quadroon son of a German professor and a mulatto woman. Carlo was raised from infancy in an upper-middle-class university environment in Vienna. He returns as a young adult to New York City, the city of his birth, to continue his courtship with a Viennese woman who had preceded him to the US to stay with her relatives in Connecticut. Upon his arrival, he is instantly marked with the ‘stain’ of his African heritage, rejected by the woman’s family, and cast out from his accustomed middle-class surroundings into a harrowing series of events in Manhattan, a North Alabama lumber camp, and finally in Atlanta.
Marylin: A Novel of Passing begins in the Chicago Loop, where Phillip is entranced by the attractive young Marylin he first saw leaving the L train on the way to her office on Dearborn Street. He eventually makes her acquaintance, and their relationship begins cordially with strolls in her northwest neighborhood or meetings in the soda shop there. Though their connection grows cordial, she retains a curious distance, then suddenly disappears. Phillip then traces her first to Cleveland and finally to Manhattan, where his courtship of her recommences and ends in marriage. Through Phillip’s New York friend, Charlie, and his French wife Odette, they develop a circle of acquaintances, including notables in the Harlem Renaissance. Overcoming Marylin’s reluctance to childbearing, she bears a daughter revealing the African heritage of her mother. Marylin had been passing, and this revelation destroyed their lives.
Notably, Marylin predates the appearance by one year of Nella Larsen’s novel Passing (1929) of recent renown. Like The Blue Stain, it sheds renewed light on the American experience of race through European eyes in earlier decades.