There are two central gaps in Doderer’s work: firstly, war as fighting, killing and dying is barely mentioned. There may be two reasons for this. Firstly, the one that Doderer himself mentions in Strudlhofstiege: In the “legally-organised horror […]” what is experienced does not penetrate “into the core of the person”, and this is precisely why so much is told, but in the sense of the anecdotal, not processed. But we must also remember the biographical aspects here: Doderer’s time at the front is short, and he is soon imprisoned. Years of confinement in the privileged officers’ camp in Siberia then became the decisive experience that turned him into a poet. In fact, Doderer became a master of telling the story of being a prisoner in his early novel Geheimnis des Reichs and in his last work, the novel fragment Der Grenzwald. The second blank space in Doderer’s work concerns the equally surprising, but strikingly present in almost all his works, emphasis that the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the reduction of Austria to a European dwarf state with Vienna as an oversized water head is overestimated in its significance. In both Strudlhofstiege and Dämonen, the narrative time jumps back and forth almost seamlessly between the years before 1914 and the interwar period, as if the reader should always be aware of the continuity. As is well known, Doderer worked with great structuring effort. His aim was to allow the content to be completely absorbed into the form, to subject the episodes of the story to a musical order that would tend to designify the fable. Fortunately, he did not succeed in doing this for the reader, and his success is due not least to the colourful detailed depiction of very concrete historical spaces: not least of “one of the most charming civilisations […], of the many sunken ones that our continent has had…”.