Some Remarks on Konrad Bayer: Dark Romanticism and Surrealism in Postwar Vienna

In “Some Remarks on Konrad Bayer” Oswald Wiener reflects on his deceased friend and collaborator. Arguing that Bayer's personal presence was more influential than his literary work, Wiener focuses on experiments Bayer conducted in his milieu, which aimed at predicting and manipulating the behavior of others. If the other proved hard enough to predict, according to Wiener, such experiments could complicate the participants' representations of the situation to such an extent that they would induce ecstatic states. Wiener connects these experiments to epistemological questions and relates them to different literary and artistic traditions including Dark Romanticism, Surrealism, and dandyism.