Austrian Literature in a Trans-Cultural Context

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Austrian Literature in a Trans-cultural Context

1. Austrian Literature: A Never-Ending Debate

There are many substantial insecurities and disagreements about the question whether there is such a thing as Austrian literature and what its characteristics in contrast with German literature are. This is striking, especially when one relin- quishes the traditional essentialist idea of identity that goes hand in hand with an affirmative and consensual nationalism. In contrast, contemporary theoretical positions in cultural analysis point out that collective identity underlies historical and cultural change. Following this argument, one might claim that Austrian literature, a symbolic product of self-consciousness and obstinacy, was written, along with the systematic research and reflection about it, over a short period during the process of nation building between 1945 and 1989/1994, after which Austria joined the European Union. Left- and right-wing critics alike criticised Austria’s integration into the European Union, polemically calling it a second Anschluss. The ambitious project of Austrian literature could thus be said to have been a product of the post-war period, a project that lost its cultural energy after 1989 or 1994. Claims about the disappearance of Austria’s own literature in the ocean of a German literature belongs to the central rhetoric within this specific symbolic framework, a rhetoric that is inscribed in Austria with the gesture of grievance. (Cf. Scheichl and Stieg 1986, 25–40) And it is true that there are representative collections in Germany such as Deutschland erzählt that carry the subtitles “Von Arthur Schnitzler bis Uwe Johnson” and “Von Rainer Maria Rilke bis Peter Handke” (von Wiese 1991/1993). Likewise, the cultural neutralisation of Austrian literature in German university libraries is remarkable: Authors such as Franz Kafka, Robert Musil, Ödön von Horváth or Heimito von Doderer are fading behind categories of a very specific history of German literature such as Expressionism or Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity). In contrast, our library for Romance Studies is politically and scientifically correct in its division into different sections.¹ Nobody would look for the Argentinian author Jorge Louis Borges, one of the most promi- nent heirs of Franz Kafka, under the subdivision “Spanish Literature”. What Goethe has called world literature, is, to use an image of Walther Benjamin’s, like

1 I am referring here to the Fachbibliothek of the Justus-Liebig-Universität, Gießen.

Authenticated | [email protected] Download Date | 6/16/14 5:43 PM Austrian Literature in a Trans-cultural Context 249 a broken vessel that exists only in fragments.² The whole can be reconstructed through thought and reflection. The unity of world literature is always imaginary. When cultural particularity is destroyed in such a complete and all-encom- passing way, it is not altogether surprising that one searches in vain in Germany for a representative monograph on Austrian literature in the field of German Studies.³ From such a trans-national perspective the specificity of Austrian literature becomes visible; it emerges as a literature that is not a regional variant of a pan-German literature, but is a “small literature” (Deleuze/ Guattari) of its own. Austrian literature can be understood as a very specific and curious national literature that is at the same time a non-national one. It makes use of a very specific understanding of German and is at the same time familiar with other small non- German literatures. (Müller-Funk 2009, 8–17) Austrian literature as an object of scientific investigation does exist, especially in Austria, where it is the area of expertise of a handful of specialists; yet even there the notion of a specific national literature seems to be a model that is being phased out. Pars pro toto one has to mention Wendelin Schmidt-Dengler, Karl Wagner, Friedbert Aspetsberger, Walther Weiss, Klaus Zeyringer, Christa Gürtler, Daniela Strigl, Konstanze Fliedl and a whole generation of Austrian academics after 1968 whose research addresses the question of an Austrian literature.⁴ In my opinion, it is significant that many influential overviews of the history of Austrian literature and culture are written by scholars who are so-called Auslandsgermanisten, above all Jaques Le Rider, Claudio Magris, or the cultural historian Carl Schorske. Also, there are many English, American and Central- European academics who have had the courage to deal with specific topics within the framework of Austrian literature and culture. Apparently, it is a perspective from outside that generates a focus which makes the specific differences between German and Austrian literature visible. The lingering sense of insecurity regarding whether or not there is an Austrian literature is probably connected with the fact that even today language is seen as the central category of cultural difference. From that perspective, Austrian literature can, of course, only be interpreted as a regional phenomenon. This is aston- ishing insofar as modern cultural analysis insists on the idea that there are many

2 Cf. Walter Benjamin, Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers, 18; and Jacobs, The Monstrosity of Translation (1975, 763). 3 The linguistically brilliant essays of the writer and literary theorist W.G. Sebald are not a counter-argument to my thesis, as the author of Austerlitz lived, worked and wrote for a long time in a non-German context in the UK. 4 It may be interesting to note that Schmidt – Dengler had a Croatian and Old Austrian family background, while Zeyringer has been teaching in France for many years.

Authenticated | [email protected] Download Date | 6/16/14 5:43 PM 250 Part 3: The Heritage of Classical Modernism: Broch, Canetti, Musil, Kafka more factors that contribute to cultural differences, such as mentality, history, and the whole way of life. These and other elements are relevant for the small difference between German and Austrian literature. In a stimulating and self-critical essay from 1987 (two years before German unification), the Austrian philosopher and essayist Franz Schuh brought this issue into sharp focus when he wrote: “Die Sprache, die wir führen, ist leider wenig geeignet, die wirklichen Dimensionen unseres Landes auszusprechen. Im Vergleich zur Realität wird ihr, der Sprache, alles leicht zum Mythos, zum Fetisch. Eine Infinitesimalrhetorik höchster Lang- samkeit im Rahmen unendlicher Beschränkungen wäre vonnöten“.⁵ It is helpful to read these essays and commentaries from the late 1980s to understand the very specific and hidden cultural references and nuances of Austrian literature. The questions remain whether or not there is such a thing as an Austrian literature at all, and whether it must be considered a short-lived phenomenon that was effected by the “invention” of modern post-war Austria. After the aggressive attempts in Austrian German Studies (especially in the 1970s and early 1980s) to institute a genuine national literature by such varied means as Austro-centric research projects, series dedicated to Austrian literature in the academic press, and the establishment of an Austrian literary canon, these efforts have increasingly abated since the 1990s. But there are exceptions, such as the foundation of “Austrian libraries” in the Central European neighbouring states and the subven- tions that accompanied them. It has been quiet in Austrian literature since the turn of the millennium. There are many reasons for this, above all a sea-change in the overall media and in cultural reception. Austrian film, represented by such well-known figures as Michael Haneke, Ulrich Seidl, or Barbara Albert, has received much greater atten- tion than its literature. Besides, the critical generation of 1968 and post-1968 that dominated relevant sections of politics, education, culture and science, has aged. When one keeps in mind the integration of the former communist neighbouring countries into the European Union and the effects of internationalisation (“glo- balisation”), an insistence on the idea of a uniquely Austrian literature tends to look old-fashioned, narrow-minded and somewhat provincial.⁶

5 “The language we are using is not suitable to express the real dimensions of our country. Compared with reality, language transforms all too easily into myth and fetish. An infinitesimal rhetoric of utmost slowness in the framework of infinite restrictions would be necessary” (Schuh 1987, 20); see also Müller-Funk, Ein Koffer namens Österreich (2011). All translations from the German are mine unless indicated otherwise. 6 This point is especially significant if we keep in mind that Josef Nadler, the founder of an essentialist ethnic and racial concept of the literary history of German tribes (which was quickly

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Such a national concept may be regarded as what Milan Kundera has called the “terror of the narrow context”, “Terror des engen Kontexts” (Kundera 1991, 12). Herbert Zeman’s Geschichte der Literatur in Österreich circumvents this problem in quite an elegant manner by defining Austria as a symbolic container. (Zeman 1999) This seems to me a compromise between the concept of a uniquely Austrian literature and that neo-Pan-German version as proposed by, among others, Horst Albert Glaser and Wilfried Barner, one that Klaus Zeyringer has sarcastically described as a “pat on the back”, “das Schulterklopfen der Definitionsmacht” (Zeyringer 2008, 24). In contrast, Zeman understands Austrian literature on the one hand as a regionally specific literature with changing real and symbolical borders and on the other as a discursive phenomenon. It is characteristic of such a position that it is nearly impossible to differentiate between German and Aus- trian literature. Wendelin Schmidt-Dengler too (who has been more diplomatic than his colleague Zeyringer) has always missed fairness and evenhanded sensi- bility in German literary historians, stating that the debate about Austrian literature has to be conducted in the field of literary history. I find Schmidt-Dengler’s assertion that Austrian literature does not fit in the scheme of German literary history plausible. As Schmidt-Dengler has pointed out, nearly all Austrian authors become awkward stopgaps of the German history of literature, because Grillparzer is not a genuine Classical author, Raimund is not really a Romantic, Lenau is somehow different from the German Vormärz authors, Stifter is not a Realist and Anzengruber is not a Naturalist. Following Schmidt-Dengler, one can say that Austrian literature displays temporal inequalities that cannot be resolved in the sense of dialectics and that do not disappear. (Schmidt-Dengler 1995, 14) Considered within a cultural approach in which literature is understood as a specific aesthetic medium, as a symbol formation in a certain national or regional culture, this seemingly small Freudian difference between German and Austrian literature, which has to some extent supported a problematic, sometimes even aggressive nationalist resentment, can be deconstructed. As such, Austrian literature and other aesthetic formations – film, music, popular culture – can be considered to have created and indeed invented the small neutral Austria after 1945: without Austrian literature and culture no Austrian nation. This does not over- look the fact that authors such as Hermann Broch, Robert Musil und Joseph Roth, Peter Handke, Thomas Bernhard, Ingeborg Bachmann and Elfriede Jelinek play a distinct, but different role in other cultural contexts, for example in Germany,

caught up in National Socialism) was also the inventor of the idea of an Austrian national literature. See Nadler, Literaturgeschichte Österreichs (1951).

Authenticated | [email protected] Download Date | 6/16/14 5:43 PM 252 Part 3: The Heritage of Classical Modernism: Broch, Canetti, Musil, Kafka because Germany and Austria represent different narrative communities. (Cf. Müller-Funk 2008) Austrian anti-Heimatliteratur, whose beginnings can be located either in Hermann Broch’s Die Verzauberung or in Hans Lebert’s Wolfshaut and which probably ends with Thomas Bernhard’s Auslöschung, makes the specific difference between Austrian and German literature significant.⁷ Likewise, the delayed avant-garde in Austria (Wiener Gruppe, Wiener Aktionisten, Valie Export) does not have a real West German counterpart. This kind of literature and cultural production can be seen as highly paradoxical symbolic formations that made very specific contributions to the creation of an Austrian identity that is completely different from the German. This approach further includes the idea that Austria is linked to a specific heterogeneity, long before multiculturalism and cultural studies, because of the imperial heritage of the country. Anti-Heimatliteratur is a critical Heimatliteratur, a Heimatliteratur followed by a question mark. In a very sophisticated way, this baroque performance of love- hate speech combines two moments of Austrian reality and its symbolic state. Referring to rural places and peripheries (such as the Alps), it criticises the Aus- trian collaboration with the Third Reich in extraordinarily concrete and demon- strative ways. Ever since Lebert, it is the countryside that is presented as the Aus- trian “heart of darkness”, as the place of the symbiosis between Austrian identity and National Socialism. Many authors, such as Jelinek, Bernhard, Handke, and Josef Winkler, who cannot be described (only) as anti-regional writers, come from the background of the Austrian province that is so often depicted as a place of pseudo-familiar insidiousness. (Schmidt-Dengler 1995, 207–211; 369–375) The aesthetic and political power of this literature, which was mainstream literature in Austria in the 1970s and 1980s, was the result not only of a bottom-up perspective, as Zeyringer argues (2008, 134–135), but also of the effectiveness of the traditional regional literature with its concrete details, with its strong reference to social reality, and with its preference for a small world.⁸ As Bachmann, Lebert, Bernhard and Gerhard Fritsch have already done, authors such as Franz Innerhofer, Marianne Gruber, Gernot Wolfgruber, Felix Mitterer and others have now also changed the backdrop, “die Kulissen gewen- det”, to use an expression of Zeyringer’s. The regional home, which is smaller than the national home, now refers to an “anti-community”, as Zeyringer notes, to a “Gemeinschaft” that is a “soziales Gefängnis, in dem die Unterdrückten hoff-

7 See Schmidt-Dengler (1995, 288–289) and Zeyringer (2008, 133–138). 8 I think Gerhardt Roth’s Die Archive des Schweigens is a very good example for that kind of writing.

Authenticated | [email protected] Download Date | 6/16/14 5:43 PM Austrian Literature in a Trans-cultural Context 253 nungslos in der von Geburt an festgesetzten Rolle gefangen sind”.⁹ From a socio- logical perspective, these findings go hand in hand with the aforementioned fact that the overwhelming majority of Austrian authors between 1968 and 1989 come from the rural areas of the country, not from Vienna. This is an interesting parallel and at the same time a lurid contrast to the national sensitivities and to the self-image of the country as beautiful provincial countryside around the Alps, in which the former centre of Central Europe has become the periphery of the periphery. As Robert Menasse (1992) argued quite polemically, the rural auto-stereotype is written into the text of the Austrian national anthem after 1945, which praises the countryside, the rivers and the mountains, the innocence of nature. This scenery does not fit well with the urban space of Vienna, which was rediscovered in the 1990s. To come back to anti-Heimat literature, this type of literature, which refers polemically to the Austrian countryside, has worn thin. The best pieces, such as Bernhard’s Auslöschung, will doubtless survive, Bernhard’s novel not least of all because of its black humour and its rhetorical hypertrophy. In this sense, the Nobel Prize for Elfriede Jelinek (2004) does not mark the beginning but the end of a literary period that was extremely influential and important for the symbolic anatomy of the country. New topics such as migration and heterogeneous cultural spaces are increasingly coming into play. For a long time, there was a fascination with Austrian backwoods areas. This was the exotic, strange element in this particular German-speaking culture, an element that corresponded especially in Germany with the hetero-image of Austria as a backward farming country. For about fifteen years now, Austria has been a richer, more expensive, and arguably more developed country than the unified Germany. In a tacit acknowledgement of this development, thousands of Germans emigrate year after year to Austria, so many that the majority of new immigrants to Austria are now Germans. Austria has become more and more Ger- many’s second Switzerland. Yet in Austria, this need for Alpine and non-Alpine peripheries is no longer central to the cultural discourse; indeed there is some exhaustion concerning this topic. The anti-Heimat literature, like the discussions about the Third Reich, both of which went hand-in-hand, has fulfilled its task. Moreover, today the rural spaces are no longer representative in view of the global changes of a hyper-modern culture. In retrospect, the anti-Heimat novel or the anti-Heimat play had the function of a literature that can be described as a (more or less) patriotic construction of

9 “a social prison, in which the oppressed are caught from birth and without any hope in their unchangeable roles” (Zeyringer 2008, 135).

Authenticated | [email protected] Download Date | 6/16/14 5:43 PM 254 Part 3: The Heritage of Classical Modernism: Broch, Canetti, Musil, Kafka identity. Bernhard can be said to have invented Austria through a negative hypertrophy underlain by melancholia. As Robert Menasse points out in his essay “Das Land ohne Eigenschaften” (the intertextual allusion to Musil is evident), there is a strong link between the anti-Heimat literature and the complex symbolic “con- stitution” of post-imperial and post-National Socialist Austria (Menasse 1992, 94–109). If domestic and rural areas and regions can no longer be considered central to Austrian literature and culture, and if, more than fifty years after Heimito von Doderer’s urban area of the city, cities, especially Vienna, become so central as heterogeneous and polyphonic spaces, the question is obvious: what kind of consequences may these changes imply? One could argue that with the end of anti-Heimat literature a decisive moment for the literatura austriaca has disap- peared. Another more optimistic thesis might be that Austria has become more and more of a normal European nation-state, in which obsessive self-assessment is no longer a compulsory rite. I think it is necessary to give the debate on Austrian identity a cultural turn. What has been labelled as typical Austrian literature is not the “expression” of a setting of timeless, essential qualities and identities; rather, it is the result of history and its symbolic configuration in literature, arts and media that have produced and continue to produce Austria day after day. It may also be worthwhile mentioning, in favour of the concept of a specific Austrian literature, that it involves specific cultural issues, in addition to the two well-known arguments regarding the linguistic idiom and the different history of state and policy.¹⁰ As Zeyringer has convincingly argued, specific national variations are self-evident in other linguistic spaces (such as the Spanish, English, French, Portuguese- speaking ones). Nobody would even entertain the idea of identifying Brazilian literature as Portuguese, or US-American or South African as English literature. (Zeyringer 2008, 23) Considered within the parameters of modern cultural analysis, it becomes clear that the play of cultural differences is no longer exclusively based on language, on its written and oral use, as was characteristic of an understanding of culture following in the footsteps of Herder. Today, other “strong” cultural phenomena, for example mediality, collective memory, cultural transfer, region, the construction of everyday life, and symbolic forms, have become more and more central. With regard to these phenomena, the differences between Austrian and German sensibilities are striking, just as the similarities with Austria’s non-German-speaking neighbours become visible: a gesture of irony and scepticism, a feeling for the unreal, experiences of ethnic

10 For these lines of argumentation, see Schmidt-Dengler’s Bruchlinien (1995).

Authenticated | [email protected] Download Date | 6/16/14 5:43 PM Austrian Literature in a Trans-cultural Context 255 heterogeneity and strife, a disposition towards provincialism that goes hand in hand with an overestimation of one’s own capabilities. These and other qualities are more or less part of a post-imperial heritage. It is possible to picture a history of Central European literature in which there would be a place for authors such as Péter Esterházy, Kálmán Mikszáth, Ferdinand von Saar, Marie Ebner-Eschen- bach, Thomas Bernhard, Joseph Roth, Bohumil Hrabal, Danilo Kiš, and Miroslav Krleža – and this is only a rather arbitrary beginning of what would constitute a growing list. With regard to the literature of the last decades one could mention Libuše Monikova, Terezia Mora, Peter Esterházy, Irena Brežná or Jáchym Topol. These authors represent literary actors of a common heterogeneous symbolic space in which – in contrast with earlier times – translation is obligatory. But it also proves to be a symbolic space in which the individual sub-spaces have more similarities with each other than with Cologne or Bern. Using Wittgenstein’s idea of family resemblance (1983, 57) one could say that a lot of important relatives, uncles and aunts, nephews and nieces are missing in the family photo of Austrian literature. Paulus Blokker has circumscribed the Austrian relatives by these characteristics: anti-politics, scepticism, anti-essentialism, and multiplicity, cultural diversity, dissent. (Blokker 2010) Undoubtedly, language is still a central element for the general context of cultural connection and bonding, but it is not the only one. From that perspective, Austria differs from Germany as Portugal does from Spain. If considered with a narratological concept of cultural analysis, Austria constitutes an autonomous ensemble of various collective small and great narratives. If there is a very specific “trauma” at the centre of the Austrian narrative material, this could be a specific question of a symptomatic analysis. I think the Dutch cultural theorist Mieke Bal is right when she warns us against using the term “trauma” in an inflationary manner (Bal 2002b, 11). Trauma, she argues, is not identical with grief, nor with shock. But her definition of “trauma” as a phenomenon that is closely connected to mourning (and, as such, strongly influenced by Freud) can be adapted for Austrian literature, such as for Elfriede Jelinek’s Die Kinder der Toten or Ingeborg Bachmann’s story Drei Wege zum See. In both texts, personal pain corresponds to political pain, and in both cases, the terms “hurting” or “wounding” express too little while the term “trauma” in the classical sense of victimisation is too much. Following the Lacanian psychoanalysts Jean Laplanche und Jean-Bertrand Pon- talis, it is easy to understand the speechlessness in these texts as a fixation (in a polyvalent sense) and as an inhibition which refer to a structured totality of partially or completely unconscious phantasies and recollections that are highly occupied by affective moments. (Laplanche and Pontalis 1973, 252) Although the nostalgic and imperial term of the Habsburg myth may not suffice, the larger framework of Austrian literature must still be kept in mind. With

Authenticated | [email protected] Download Date | 6/16/14 5:43 PM 256 Part 3: The Heritage of Classical Modernism: Broch, Canetti, Musil, Kafka regard to that frame, one kind of Austrian literature seems to me to be the most powerful in terms of its influence on the construction of the country’s identity and on the production of auto- and hetero-images. This literature revolves around the centre of the complex structure that is Austria; it entails the experiences of modernity and fragmentation, of post-imperialism and nation building, and the traces of the historical catastrophes that make it impossible to create a national narrative as the heroic and optimistic collective story of the Austrians. This literature remains an exciting possibility, insofar as Austria’s fractured national narratives can make a relevant and positive contribution to more differentiated post- national narratives. These narratives no longer follow the binary pattern of inside and outside; they praise a homogeneous “own” space, and they do not exclude all those moments of history that do not fit into the flattering image of a small nation. There are not only ruptures but also continuities with regard to authors such as Grillparzer, Musil, Roth, Kafka and Bernhard. These continuities make it possible to explain the history of modern Austrian literature from a larger cultural perspective. In the same vein, Zeyringer, whose account of Austrian literary history undermines the despotic imperative of a linear narrative, quotes from an inter- view with Bernhard in which the author defines the difference between German and Austrian literature and culture with regard to language (the pronunciation of the German) and history. “Take the pronunciation, the language melody. There is a considerable difference. My diction would be unthinkable for a German author; by the way, I have a real aversion to the Germans. Do not forget the burden of history either. […] The past of the Habsburg Empire shapes us. […] It is manifest in a genuine love-hatred for Austria; in the end, it is the key to all that I write” (Rambures, “Aus zwei Interviews”, 16.)¹¹ This “genuine love-hatred”, which can be found long before Bernhard in Joseph Roth’s pan-Austrian rhetorical performance, can also be interpreted in a cultural sense. There are not only the political events, not only the Austrian linguistic obstinacy that separating Germans and Austrians, but also different rhetorical strategies of narration and symbol formation. Bernhard’s invective against the German of the Germans is instructive insofar as he discusses two acoustic phenomena: pronunciation and melody. The author of Heldenplatz refers to the

11 “Nehmen Sie die Aussprache, die Sprachmelodie. Da gibt es schon einen wesentlichen Unterschied. Meine Schreibweise wäre bei einem deutschen Schriftsteller undenkbar, und ich habe im übrigen eine echte Abneigung gegen die Deutschen. Vergessen Sie auch nicht das Gewicht der Gechichte. Die Vergangenheit des Habsburgerreichs prägt uns. […] Es manifestiert sich in einer Art echter Haßliebe zu Österreich, sie ist letztlich der Schlüssel zu allem, was ich schreibe.”

Authenticated | [email protected] Download Date | 6/16/14 5:43 PM Austrian Literature in a Trans-cultural Context 257 oral system, to the parole, to the performance of language, not to the written system of the langue, and to the fixed and defined system of German writing: The old contrast between Protestant writing and learning culture on the one hand and Catholic Baroque theatrical culture on the other is still relevant. In this interpretation, the rhetorical overkill, the art of the hyperbolic in Bernhard, would be an effect of the mimesis of an oral gesture, an effect that is evident in pieces such as Gehen and Auslöschung. The second point of emphasis in Bernhard’s answer also goes beyond the historical fact as such. Rather, it is about collective sensitivities and self-styliza- tion. It was W.G. Sebald, the German immigrant, professor in the United Kingdom and writer, who today is central and peripheral at the same time, who gave the concept of Heimat a new meaning. Sebald mentions the specific, often traumatic development Austria has passed through: from the expansive Habsburg Empire to the diminutive Alpine Republic; from the monarchy to the corporate state, followed by the annexation to disastrous Pan-Germany, and, finally, the founding of the Second Republic in the post-war years. (Sebald 1991, 11) Even if one should be more careful with the word “trauma”, it can be shown that there are many immensely irritating experiences in this history, such as a series of military and political defeats, an enormous marginalisation, dictatorship, and moral guilt, moments that are an explicit or implicit part of the narrative structure of the imagined community called Austria. (Cf. Anderson 1991, 5–7) Sebald describes literature as a symbolic format that works out irritating experiences; it goes hand in hand with the presence of disaster and misfortune, and with a deeply embod- ied sense of shame.¹² The very notion of Austrian literature can neither rest exclusively in the anti- Heimat literature nor be informed exclusively by a perspective in which, as Zey- ringer formulates polemically, Austrian literature becomes completely subsumed into the Pan-Germanic context. (Zeyringer 2008, 25) It becomes evident in an

12 In a different context, I have had to express my reservations about Sebald’s methodology, especially his Marxist critique of ideology which erases the polyvalence of literature (see Komplex Österreich 15). Nevertheless, his two collections of essays on Austrian literature are, because of their productive external perspective and their sensitive empathy, among the most competent reflections on the topic; in this respect, they can only be compared with Franz Schuh’s inside perspective and insight into the symbolic architecture of the Austrian case. From that point of view, it may be worthwhile reading anew Claudio Magris’s often criticised book on the Habsburg myth, which finds itself in opposition to the mainstream Austrian leftist discourse once again. It is not, as is often stated, a work that transfigures the history of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Instead, Magris tries to read the literary traces of the impossible home called Austria or Austro-Hungary.

Authenticated | [email protected] Download Date | 6/16/14 5:43 PM 258 Part 3: The Heritage of Classical Modernism: Broch, Canetti, Musil, Kafka external focalisation which is not German, but English, French, Italian or, for example, Hungarian or Croatian. The specific particularity of Austrian literature is based on a “hybrid” condition humaine that is the result de longue duree. The various languages in the neighbourhood are written into the German language of Austria. They represent the strange element of its very core, of das Eigene. In contrast with the German use of German language, one can say that Austrian literature can be understood to some extent as a small literature, akin to Czech, Slovak, Hungarian, Croatian or Slovene literature.¹³ If one uses the plural “Austrian literatures”, then this could refer not only to the plurality of Austrian literature in a narrow sense but could also describe the cultural und linguistic variety sur- rounding the German-speaking remains of the monarchy. In that trans-national sense, Austrian is written into our neighbouring cultures, which goes a long way to explaining the intellectual distance of Miroslav Krleža’s or Tomáš Masaryk’s project of de-Austrification in the first Czechoslovak republic. This interdepend- ence and trans-cultural situation is much older than the immigration of workers from Yugoslavia in the 1970s, or the virtual intensification of symbolic spaces which modern communication and new media have made possible. Historically, the Austrian issue, this space-in-between that National Social- ism tried to create anew as the German “Ostmark”, has undergone various changes, ups and downs. After the breaking up of the Holy Roman Empire in 1806 there was a clear need for a unique collective Austrian profile. Josef von Hormayr’s Österreichischer Plutarch is a symptomatic response. This specific Austrian identity, which did not automatically exclude the German, faced a crisis after 1859 and 1867–1871, when the Prussian king created the Prussian-German Empire. Friedrich Heer has described in detail the subsequent Germanification and German-nationalistic infiltration of the Habsburg Empire that took place after the military defeat and long before Hitler. (Heer 1996, 262–321) After 1918 there were some conservative attempts at inventing Austria anew, such as Anton Wild- gans’s famous speech “Rede über Österreich” (1929) and Joseph Roth’s oeuvre since Radetzkymarsch (1932), which establish clear symbolic borders between both German-speaking countries. In contrast, it was the programmatic goal of National Socialism to separate all Austrian particularities from the geographic and symbolic area of Austria, with the exceptions of regional folklore and dialect.

13 There are many foreign words in Viennese German, and one can find a similar kind of heterogeneity in the Slavic and Hungarian neighbouring cultures, which are marked by a specific use of German. This bilingualism was characterised by the quasi-imperial condition, by the fact that German was for a long time the dominant language in the region, the language of the elite in politics, economics and culture.

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After 1945, a new chapter began in the long history of constructing Austria as a symbolic item, and it was not by chance that literature was called upon to create a strong difference between German and Austrian. As mentioned above, this period came to an end in 1994 when Austria joined the European Union. Since then a new dynamic has taken place in the dialectic of the “other”. The German influence has increased considerably in nearly all relevant fields of modern society, such as media, economics, and science. Yet the last fifteen years have also seen the return of more intensive relations with those countries which are sometimes referred to in Austria somewhat patronisingly as “successor states“. There is also a growing influence of global tendencies which creates a strange linguistic mixture between Austrian German and American English. The erstwhile Austrian goal of constructing a neutral island in splendid isolation has become obsolete. In this fluid cultural situation and the rapid evolution of social media, a new generation will create a new type of literature, a literature with differences from and similarities to previous periods of Austrian literature.

2. Once Again: Musil, or Austria as a Heterogeneous Space

It is well-known that the problematic term “hybridity”, which is regularly used in cultural studies, goes back to Michael Bakhtin (1981, 358). The Russian literary and cultural theorist made use of this ambiguous term hybrid – in the world of Greek mythology and a product of biological breeding – with regard to the “impossible” hyper-genre of the modern novel. In his analysis, Bakhtin refers to aesthetic and linguistic phenomena such as multilingualism, the mixture and integration of different genres (drama, lyric, letter), multi-perspectivism, pluralism and the diversity of speech-acts. From that point of view, the modern novel can be understood as a mimesis of form that has been so characteristic of the globalising modernity since the beginning of the twentieth century. It is the modern novel that has given modernity its representative form. That Bakhtin’s theory is to some extent unique has to do with the fact that it interprets the pluralism in modern societies, in contrast with traditional Marxism, in a positive way. Implicitly it entails a cultural theory which connects two aspects that play an extraordinarily important role in contemporary discourses in cultural theory, namely political dissent as the precondition of the possibility of post-authoritar- ian civil societies, and the existence and presence of cultural differences as they become evident in the variety of languages, genders, beliefs and religions. It is the modern novel that is formatting all these kinds of pluralistic issues. It is able to do this symbolic work because of its hybridity, that is, because it is a composed genre and a mixture.

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This concept of mixture and heterogeneity has been transferred by cultural and postcolonial studies from artefacts to actors and authors, to immigrants, to diasporas, and to minorities as such. There is, as Terry Eagleton has shown, a certain cultural restriction in that use of hybridity. (Eagleton 2000, 15) Hetero- geneity is seen here (as, for example, in Bhabha) as a paradoxical identity/ non- identity referred to as a cultural in-between, as a threshold, defined by two different parallel cultures. De- and re-constructing Benjamin’s theory of translation, one may risk the thesis that the translator can be understood as a guardian of and at the threshold. From that perspective, Austria can be understood as a poten- tial, if not intentional, station for translation and transfer, a fragile third space (all those so-called third spaces are unstable; as they have a dynamic temporal aspect, they also represent transit stations in the category of time). Austria is a collective point of diverse, overlapping contexts. In contrast with European countries like Belgium and Switzerland that host three or four separate internal literatures that are linked with larger cultural and linguistic spaces, Austria represents more or less only one space, which has, however, a multi-dimensional aspect. This is already true for Nestroy’s polyphone language in the first part of the nine- teenth century. This is relevant also in Grillparzer’s and Stifter’s interest in Hun- garian and Czech history, which is treated as part of the unique symbolic space. This also comes to light in Ferdinand von Saar’s and Marie Ebner-Eschenbach’s critical stories about Austrian masters and Czech servants, as well as in Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Karl Emil Franzos, Jakob Julius David, and Anastasius Grün. In contrast with many other national cultures, Austrian literature stands out because of a very specific and obvious heterogeneity, especially if takes into con- sideration the biographical background of many authors. Even if one refrains from resorting to biographical interpretation, this does not mean that one has to dis- count personal and political experiences that are manifested in literary production. This aspect is obvious in famous authors such as Franz Kafka, Robert Musil, Elias Canetti, Joseph Roth and Ödön von Horváth. But there are also moments of heterogeneity in other authors with a Jewish background: Hermann Broch, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Arthur Schnitzler, Theodor Herzl, Franz Werfel, Stefan Zweig. Quite often these authors got into the crossfire of contested national, ethnic and political cultures, and they were facing the alternatives of assimilation, integration or disassociation. More to the point, Kafka is not an exceptional example of Austrian literature; he is part of the symbolic core. This is also true for his com- panions from the Prague circle (such as Ernst Weiss, Ludwig Winder, Max Brod), as well as for Manès Sperber, Paul Celan and other authors from Galicia and Buk- ovina, or for the bilingual Slovene-Austrian authors Gustav Janus, Florjan Lipuš and, to a certain degree, Peter Handke. The dynamic of the transient, which was so powerful in the Habsburg Empire, is still at work. Authors such as Milo Dor or

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Pavel Kohout have quite evidently a double symbolic marking. After 1989, Vienna has become an urban space for a polyphone literature. It is, for example, represented by Radek Knapp, Julya Rabinowich and Dimitré Dinev. Further, the renewed presence of Jewish identities needs to be mentioned here, pars pro toto Doron Rabinovici, Robert Menasse, Eva Menasse, and Robert Schindel. Schindel’s novel Gebürtig decribes the ambivalent “in-between” of a group of Jewish intellectuals in Vienna in the late 1980s with great feeling and empathy. Schindel’s figures are at the same time home and not at home. They fear to leave the urban area of Vienna and enter the countryside, the symbolic space of the anti-Heimat novels. Schindel’s protagonists occupy a distinctive symbolic space, which is always structured heterogeneously. Conversely, other parts of the population, for example the pauperised supporters of right-wing populism, react to this phenomenon with aggressive xenophobia. In Freudian terminology, this constitues a very problematic aspect of discontent in urban culture that is defined by mixture and hybridity. There is a direct connection between a specific heterogeneity in Austrian culture and an aggressive longing for a homogeneous closed space called Heimat in politics. In my view, this is a classical struggle for symbolic meaning and hegemony in a Gramscian sense. To some extent, this struggle is a new version of an old conflict that took place in Vienna around 1900. To support this thesis, a look at Musil’s famous novel, especially the eighth chapter, entitled “Kakanien”, may be helpful. With respect to what I have called above the complexity of what is Austrian, the emphasis on retardation and the interest in diversity, instability and dissent is remarkable. The essayistic voice in the chapter understands these moments as a characteristic phenomenon of modernity. This modernity antici- pates, as Jacques Le Rider has shown, the gesture of post-modernism, which arises for the first time from the complexity of what is Austria and which is also seen as a symbolic space for experiences and experiments. (Le Rider 1990, 419–420) The essayistic voice of “Kakanien” starts with an overwhelming tableau of modernity, the magnificent machinery of a hyper-American town with the hundred thousand windows of their skyscrapers to refer to Kafka’s fragmentary America novel. Musil’s novel uses the technique of stringing together linguistic material. It proves to be mimetic to its topic, a space in terrific and lightning movement but without any direction. Nobody knows what route will be taken. Quite obviously, the metaphors of speed and acceleration dominate. The tableau of the town, some sort of a hyper-New York, owes to the early silent film or a novel like Manhattan Transfer. If one looks rather more intensively at the basic plot of this chapter, it is about a bold outdoing of the great narrative of progress (in Lyotard’s sense using Nietzsche’s master narrative of the uncertain departure of occidental, “post-Columbian” mankind). This chronotopos is characterised

Authenticated | [email protected] Download Date | 6/16/14 5:43 PM 262 Part 3: The Heritage of Classical Modernism: Broch, Canetti, Musil, Kafka by the fact that travel has become automatic; there is no hand or parking brake and no stop-button. It is conceivable, even probable, that the participants of this expedition will never return from their departure. Every technical accident in our globalised world participates in this catastrophic mega-narrative. The image of a busy and living space that is cut by streets, cars and metro systems serves as a contrast to the all-Austrian space-time, which is character- ized by retardation, restraint and mediocrity. And it contained – the text con- sciously uses the past tense – the possibility of leaving the train while traveling, as is common for journeys by train. It would be attractive to use a term from Carl Schmitt’s apocalyptic narrative: Austria is seen as a Katechon, a historical element that checks or even halts the end of the world. Integrating the temporal level of narrating; it is decisive in the apocalyptic drama of John from Patmos, the station before the terminus, the period before the end of time. Musil’s ending leaves open whether this holding moment is an integral part of a moving modernity, an internal counterpart, as it were, or if is a symptom of a dying “nomos” (Schmitt 1981, 71–74). Undoubtedly, the distinctive heterogeneity of the complex structures that combine to make “Austria” with all its in-betweens and its time structure is genuinely modern, including the distrust and the individualistic hate for each other, as the essayistic voice points out at the end of the chapter: “Denn nicht nur die Abneigung gegen den Mitbürger war dort bis zum Gemeinschaftsgefühl gesteigert, sondern es nahm auch das Mißtrauen gegen die eigene Person und deren Schicksal den Charakter tiefer Selbstgewißheit an. Man handelte in diesem Land […] immer anders, als man dachte, oder dachte anders, als man handelte”.¹⁴ In this paragraph the diagnosis of the loss of identity and character is linked with that kind of distrust. The protagonist Ulrich is conceived beyond all ethnic particularity, a hero of the heterogeneous, the marginalized and the unreal, a man not only without qualities, but also without identities. What makes him different from the other inhabitants of this specific symbolic space is his heroic and at the same time indifferent consciousness, the gesture of a man who is free from any illusion. His identity dissolves in the particular. Of the ten different identities the text mentions (nation, region, gender, social position, profession etc.), the tenth is the most mysterious one. It is an imaginary empty and invisible space that is based on passive fantasy, a space similar to a child’s building block town, “nichts

14 Robert Musil (1978, 34): “For it was not only dislike of one’s fellow-citizens that was intensified into a strong sense of community, even mistrust of oneself and of one’s own destiny here assumed the character of profound self-certainty. In this country one acted […] differentely from the way one thought, or one thought differently from the way one acted”.

Authenticated | [email protected] Download Date | 6/16/14 5:43 PM Austrian Literature in a Trans-cultural Context 263 als die passive Phantasie unausgefüllter Räume […] eben ein leerer, unsichtbarer Raum, in dem die Wirklichkeit darin steht wie eine von der Phantasie verlassene kleine Steinbaukastenstadt” (Musil 1978, 34). Austria is here, above all, improvi- sation and mixture kat’ exochen: People have nothing to do which each other any longer. What they have in common is the experience with an uncanny vacuum. This is also true on a manifestly ethnic level. What holds together the complex structure that is Austria is the conflict between the ethnic groups or the nationalist camps. Everybody needs somebody to hate. In this respect, nationalism can be seen as a symptom and a promise, the promise of healing. It is the empty space which is to be filled with symbolic bubbles. This attempt at healing is, as the plot of the novel suggests, in vain. In Musil’s novel, two results are connected: on the one hand, modernity with its specific forms of individualism and egotism and with its uncomfortable cold- ness; on the other hand the hotspots of national conflicts that interestingly are interpreted as an effect of modern individualism. It is culture that creates these differences that allow conflicts to be sustaining in a more or less peaceful way. The Parallelaktion in the novel is a metonymy for the work of culture as such. At the end, war is the logical consequence of this very strange form of emptiness. There can be no doubt that Musil’s protagonist is an unstable figure in a space in which all the ethnic, ideological and sexual conflicts rage. Even if one keeps in mind the ambivalence of literary texts, the explicit plot structure in the novel suggests that the principle of scepticism has neutralised and overcome the principle of hope. In contrast to contemporary debates, the novel does not portray the heterogeneous as a political candidate for hope, neither in the form of a Romantic communitarism (multi-culturalism) nor in the version of a Romantic individualism which defines identity as non-identity. On the contrary, the empty space, which theoretically entails the possibility of creative acts, produces panic and supports all those political movements that are sustained by the elementary individual social and cultural ear. Heterogeneity becomes a vanishing point for aggressive strategies of national identity politics. Like Broch, the other Austrian literary mastermind of that period, Musil could not imagine a form of culture that is not based on common values. What can be described as the agonal pluralism of modern and post-modern cultures today, a peaceful symbolic war in which everybody respects their counterparts in a highly paradoxical way, was not an option for Broch and Musil. In this respect, the (all-)Austrian complexity remains a current and relevant topic.

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