Felix Braun

Born Nov. 4, 1885, in Vienna. Austrian writer and literary historian.

Braun studied the literature and culture of Germany and the history of art. He emigrated to Britain in 1939; he has been living in Vienna since 1951. Braun began writing poems in 1903 under the influence of the impressionists and neoromantics (the collection Poems, 1909). He published the novel The Shadow of Death (1910), the collections of stories Short Stories and Legends (1910) and The Marvelous Clock (1923), the comedy Till Eulenspiegel’s Empire (1911), and the tragedies Tantalus (1917), Esther (1925), Emperor Karl V (1936), and Beatrice Cenci (1936; published, 1955). The novel The Labors of Hercules (1921; new version, 1948) reveals the author’s gravitation towards religious ideas. The novels The Invisible Guest (1924) and Agnes Altkirchner (1927; new version under the title Autumn of the Empire, 1957) depict the moral and political disintegration of the Austrian empire between 1914 and 1918. Braun’s autobiography The Light of the World (1949) portrays Vienna’s cultural life in the early 20th century. A collection of poems, The Carnation Bed, appeared in 1965. Braun is the author of the collections of essays The German Spiritual Leaders (1925), The Land of Muses: A Study of the Austrian Landscape and Poetry (1953), The Troubled Soul (1965), and Contemporaries (1963). Christian and Catholic motifs became more pronounced in his later works.