World War I marked the close of an era for the vast, powerful and diverse Austro-Hungarian empire. By the end of the war, a population of nearly fifty million people had been reduced to fewer than eight million. Writers of the early postwar period tended to be nostalgic for Austrias former imperial greatness. Then, when Hitler unified Austria and Germany in 1938, many Austrian writers were driven into exile. And as Austria rose from defeat to become a prosperous nonaligned nation following the war, many of its younger writers spoke out against their countrys Nazi past. The literary voices whose fictional works have had historical and sociological importance from each of these post-WWI periods are represented in this volume.