Milo Dor
Milo Dor, born Milutin Doroslovac on March 7, 1923, in Budapest, Hungary, emerged as a significant literary figure primarily in the German language. After his family moved to Belgrade, Yugoslavia, he faced considerable challenges during the Nazi occupation, becoming politically active in the resistance movement. His activism led to his arrest and imprisonment, where he experienced severe hardships, including torture, until the liberation of Vienna in 1945. Choosing to remain in Vienna post-war, Dor forged a writing career that culminated in a renowned autobiographical trilogy, which includes *Tote auf Urlaub* (1952), *Nichts als Erinnerung* (1959), and *Die weisse Stadt* (1969). These works explore themes of alienation, identity, and the impact of political turmoil on personal lives, reflecting Dor's own disillusionment with Marxism. His literary contributions earned him accolades, such as the Austrian State Prize for Literature in 1962. Despite a decline in prominence as newer literary voices emerged, Dor continued to write until his death in 2005, leaving behind a legacy that captures the complexities of identity and culture during one of history's most tumultuous periods.
Milo Dor
Writer
- Born: March 7, 1923
- Birthplace: Budapest, Hungary
- Died: December 5, 2005
- Place of death: Vienna, Austria
Biography
Milutin Doroslovac, who usually published under the pseudonym Milo Dor, was born in Budapest, Hungary, on March 7, 1923. His father, a doctor, settled the family in Belgrade, Yugoslavia (now Serbia), when Doroslovac was ten. Precocious in school and drawn to storytelling, Doroslovac decided early on to be a great writer. After the Nazi occupation of Yugoslavia, however, Doroslovac became politically active in the resistance movement and was expelled from school (although he would complete his course of study in 1941). Arrested and jailed for more than a year, he was sent to Vienna to work as conscripted labor in a furniture factory, where he was again arrested on charges of aiding the resistance and was jailed (and by his own later accounts tortured) until the Russians liberated Vienna in spring of 1945.
Doroslovac stayed in Vienna rather than gamble on what he perceived to be the political turmoil of his Yugoslav home. Now married and adjusting his writing style to his adopted German language, Doroslovac maintained a bare income through occasional pieces and short stories that established his reputation among the literati of the city. By the early 1950’s, Milo Dor (the name under which he published) began work on what would become his defining achievement, the ambitious autobiographical trilogy that would take nearly two decades to complete: Tote auf Urlaub (1952; Dead Men on Leave, 1962), Nichts als Erinnerung (1959; nothing but memory), and Die weisse Stadt (1969; the white city). Tote auf Urlaub, the first volume published but actually the middle volume of the three, traces the wartime experiences centered on the philosophical struggles the central character maintains with his commitment to the Communist Party. (Dor himself had become disillusioned with his own commitment.) The book vividly details the Nazi torture tactics and the difficult conditions endured by political prisoners.
Nichts als Erinnerung examines the central character before the war, falling in love, dreaming of becoming a poet, and negotiating the often tensive responsibilities of his family on the verge of financial peril. In the concluding volume, set in the late 1960’s, the central character has moved to Belgrade and struggles to establish himself as a writer. The emerging theme—alienation and isolation in the face of uncertain roots—casts a pessimistic tone about the narrative.
The trilogy established Dor among the preeminent postwar European writers and brought Dor prestigious literary awards, most notably the 1962 Austrian State Prize for Literature. As the younger generation of brash writers moved Austrian literature into avant-garde narrative experiments, Dor was eased out of the central literary scene, although he continued to publish well into his seventies, turning his attention away from the contemporary environment to set his works in the nineteenth century and its political and military upheavals.
After suffering a massive heart attack in the summer of 2005, Dor died in Vienna on December 5, 2005. A Yugoslav born in Hungary but who lived in Austria and wrote in German, and a disillusioned Marxist, Dor epitomized the difficult struggle with the uncertainties of identity, political and cultural, in the environment of mayhem and brutality defined by World War II.