Crossing Central Europe

CROSSING CENTRAL EUROPE Continuities and Transformations, 1900 and 2000 Crossing Central Europe Continuities and Transformations, 1900 and 2000 Edited by HELGA MITTERBAUER and CARRIE SMITH-PREI UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London © University of Toronto Press 2017 Toronto Buffalo London www.utorontopress.com Printed in the U.S.A. ISBN 978-1-4426-4914-9 Printed on acid-free, 100% post-consumer recycled paper with vegetable-based inks. Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Crossing Central Europe : continuities and transformations, 1900 and 2000 / edited by Helga Mitterbauer and Carrie Smith-Prei. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4426-4914-9 (hardcover) 1. Europe, Central – Civilization − 20th century. I. Mitterbauer, Helga, editor II. Smith-Prei, Carrie, 1975−, editor DAW1024.C76 2017 943.0009’049 C2017-902387-X CC-BY-NC-ND This work is published subject to a Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial No Derivative License. For permission to publish commercial versions please contact University of Tor onto Press. The editors acknowledge the financial assistance of the Faculty of Arts, University of Alberta; the Wirth Institute for Austrian and Central European Studies, University of Alberta; and Philixte, Centre de recherche de la Faculté de Lettres, Traduction et Communication, Université Libre de Bruxelles. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council, an agency of the Government of Ontario. Funded by the Financé par le Government gouvernement of Canada du Canada Contents Introduction: Crossings and Encounters vii Helga Mitterbauer and Carrie Smith-Prei Part One: 1900 1 Beyond Aesthetic Borders: Theory – Media – Case Study 3 helga mitterbauer 2 The Aesthetics of Change: Women Writers of the Austro- Hungarian Monarchy 27 agatha schwartz and helga thorson 3 Border, Transborder, and Unification: Music and Its Divergent Roles in the Nineteenth-Century Habsburg Territories 50 gregor kokorz 4 History without End(s): The Aesthetics and Politics of the Reading Play 80 imre szeman 5 Kitchen Stories: Literary and Architectural Reflections on Modern Kitchens in Central Europe 100 sarah mcgaughey vi Contents Part Two: 2000 6 Spaces of Unhomeliness: Rereading Post-Imperial Urban Heterotopias in East Central Europe 121 irene sywenky 7 Interdependences: Migration, (Trans-)Cultural Codes and the Writing of Central Europe in Texts by Doron Rabinovici, Julya Rabinowich, and Vladimir Vertlib 148 sandra vlasta 8 Cultures of Memory, Migration, and Masculinity: Dimitré Dinev’s Engelszungen 169 michael boehringer 9 Remixing Central European Culture: The Case of Laibach 196 stefan simonek 10 Bottled Messages for Europe’s Future? The Danube in Contemporary Transnational Cinema 219 matthew d. miller 11 Ilija Trojanow and the Cosmopolitical Public Intellectual 251 carrie smith-prei Contributors 275 Index 279 Helga Mitterbauer and Carrie Smith-Prei Introduction: Crossings and Encounters Introduction: Crossings and Encounters helga mitterbauer and carrie smith-prei Central Europe has experienced strong vicissitudes in politics, geo- graphical borders, and ethnic diversity. Around 1900, large parts of it belonged to the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy or the German Empire; some parts formed the borderlands of the Russian Empire and were territories of transition between the West and the East. In general, the nineteenth century was the time when nation-states evolved – a process that led to radical transformations. After the First World War, instead of a few large empires, the map of Europe showed a great number of smaller states, most of which had been transformed from monarchies into republics with thoroughly changed social structures. The middle class – which had gained economic power over the course of the Indus- trial Revolution – increased its political power and become a strong patron of the arts. As a result of the collapse of established structures, Central Europe found itself locked in a long-term battle among different ideologies – capitalist, fascist, communist, nationalist, and other movements – all of which led to the Second World War. That war, in turn, led to mass genocides and to the region’s sharp division by the “Iron Curtain.” Only the revolutions of 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union reopened this territory to the West. New nation-states appeared on the European map, although the transition did not hap- pen peacefully in all of these countries, as the Yugoslav wars and the conflicts in Ukraine demonstrate. One could read these changes as a unidimensional development towards nationalism. However, this trend is offset by a strong transnational tendency, particularly in literature, art, and music. In the late nineteenth century, Central Europe was on the periphery of a broad network of relations in European arts, with Paris as an important viii Helga Mitterbauer and Carrie Smith-Prei centre. Scholars such as French sociologist Pascale Casanova view that metropolis as having been the world capital of literature – a perspective that ignores the fact that London, Scandinavian cities, Vienna, and Berlin also played pivotal roles in this “république mondiale de lettres” (Casanova). This perspective also overlooks the importance of Russian literature, art, and music (St. Petersburg) and of Central European cities (Prague, Budapest, Zagreb, Warsow, Lviv, Chernivtsi, and so on), whose artists, writers, and musicians formed regional networks and also engaged in transnational encounters. Some of these people were highly successful in Western Europe. At the same time, the audiences in Central European cities showed great interest in new trends from the region as well as from other parts of Europe. Crossing Central Europe focuses on these transcultural connections. It concentrates first on transnational and transcultural relations around 1900 and then on how these relations were re-created and new ones formed after 1989. It is based on the thesis that the Central European networks of artists, writers, and musicians were shaken by the world wars and then wracked by the Cold War, but that after the fall of the Iron Curtain, memories of the nineteenth century formed a solid base for re-establishing transnational relations. This volume does not claim to be exhaustive; it approaches its goal through case studies from the mid-nineteenth to the early twenty-first century. In this volume, we accept that many different notions of Central Europe have developed historically and that different disciplines and scholars in various countries continue to hold divergent notions of this place (Feichtinger and Cohen). As it is not our goal to add a new defini- tion to the already existing ones, but rather to emphasize the transnational and transcultural encounters, we engage with Central Europe as an imaginary landscape rather than a geographic territory. However, the articles place a strong emphasis on the former Austro-Hungarian Monarchy and the mythologized memory of it. Focusing on transnational relations requires us to take into account the relations reaching beyond the Habsburg Empire when analysing the network of Central European arts, literature, and music. This fluid notion of the space allows us to accommodate the diverse ideas about Central Europe found in the chapters of this volume. The multi-ethnic condition of Central Europe has persisted since the nineteenth century despite all the historical upheavals.1 After the First World War, Viennese writer Alfred Polgar emphasized that just as the Danube River has never conformed to the blue colour evoked in the Introduction: Crossings and Encounters ix famous waltz by Johann Strauss, Austria has never been an exclusively German-speaking country (209).2 This statement can also be applied to Austria in the twenty-first century – as of 2014, 12 per cent of the people living in Austria held foreign citizenship.3 In the 1900s the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy did not find enthusi- asm for the idea of a modern nation-state based on linguistic and ethnic unity. From the present perspective, we understand empire as a lab- oratory for a proto-globalized human condition, with all its conflicts and contradictions (Czaky). Such continuities and transformations are found at the heart of this volume, which sets out to uncover the political, historical, and social developments in transcultural relations among writers, artists, and musicians, and their works. The chapters identify motifs, topics, and modes of artistic creation characteristic of the region, such as the instability of national borders and the perme- ability of transcultural identity. They locate such developments in the late nineteenth century and then explore the resonance of that transcultural legacy today, since the fall of the Iron Curtain, thereby engaging the notion of a “longue durée” (Braudel) in these interrelations. In the nineteenth century, industrialization, migration, and advances in health care led to the accelerating growth of cities like Vienna, Prague, and Budapest.4 Increasing wealth and rising education among the middle class fostered a cosmopolitan stratum of intellectuals, writers, artists, and musicians, who generated modernist movements in the Central European cities that would gain international recognition – movements in areas such as psychoanalysis (Sigmund Freud, Alfred Adler), medicine (Theodor Billroth), political philosophy (Hans Kelsen), philosophy

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