“Mitteleuropa” As a Transnational Memory Discourse in Austrian and Yugoslav Postwar Literature
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Between Geopolitics and Geopoetics – “Mitteleuropa” as a Transnational Memory Discourse in Austrian and Yugoslav Postwar Literature. Yvonne Zivkovic Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2015 © 2015 Yvonne Zivkovic All rights reserved ABSTRACT Between Geopolitics and Geopoetics – “Mitteleuropa” as a Transnational Memory Discourse in Austrian and Yugoslav Postwar Literature. Yvonne Zivkovic Between Geopolitics and Geopoetics – “Mitteleuropa” as a Transnational Memory Discourse in Austrian and Yugoslav Postwar Literature examines how the German idea of Central Europe inspired a new poetics of memory in Austrian and South Slavic literary texts during the Cold War period (1945 – 1989). As early as the 19th century, German and Austrian political thinkers (Fürst von Metternich, Friedrich Liszt, Friedrich Naumann) have framed ideas of Germanic cultural and economic eastward expansion under the term Mitteleuropa. This was countered by a wave of post-imperial Austrian literature after 1918 that nostalgically evoked what had once been the largest multiethnic and multilingual political entity on the continent as Mitteleuropa. Even though these writings offered far from a unifying vision of old Austria, literary scholarship in the 1960s interpreted them as creating a retrospective utopia or “Habsburg myth.” Decades later, a group of Eastern European dissidents resuscitated that same literary idea to attack the Cold War division of Europe. The dialectics inherent in the Mitteleuropa debate from the beginning (east versus west, Germans versus Slavs, center versus periphery) have continued to shape postwar public discourses on memory, loss and justice. Challenging both expansionist and nostalgic visions of a larger Europe, my dissertation argues that with the radical geo-political shifts after World War II, an alternate memory discourse of Mitteleuropa emerged in the work of writers who questioned previous notions of geographic identity and national allegiance. By looking at the way that iconic writers like Ingeborg Bachmann, Peter Handke, Danilo Kiš and Dubravka Ugrešić utilize the legacy of Habsburg nostalgia in the postwar period to develop their own poetics of memory, I show how they establish a new form of engaged writing, which transgresses the ideological divide that has defined the continent. I reveal deep ties between the Federal Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia and the second Austrian Republic of 1955, dating back to a common imperial past, the persistent ideal of a multiethnic community and an uneasy relationship to dogmatic political ideologies. Both the second Austrian Republic and the Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia found themselves in what seemed to be a historical vacuum after the end of the Second World War: Though under completely different political premises, both countries elided uncomfortable aspects of their recent pasts and replaced them with a highly edited version of historical ‘truth.’ In Austria, this meant a self-fashioning as the first victim of Nazi-Germany, and a denial of widespread collaboration in Holocaust atrocities. In the newly founded federative republic of Yugoslavia, Socialist ideology promoted the image of the partisan hero, but kept silent about crimes committed by the ‘liberators’ themselves. While Austria sought to distance itself from postwar Germany through a nostalgic reference to the Habsburg Empire, the Yugoslav Socialists’ official rhetoric of progress, plurality and unity left no room for inconvenient truths that might ignite conflicts between its numerous ethnicities. For lack of a public debate, the role of critical memory in both countries was consequently taken over by postwar authors and artists offering a different ‘engaged’ literature without succumbing to the pitfalls of ideology. Unlike previous interpretations, which focus on the historical ruptures created by Nazi Fascism and the Iron Curtain, my dissertation shows that Central Europe persists both as a literary network and a cultural community (Kulturgemeinschaft) defined by political debate and civic engagement. Table of Contents Preface: Mitteleuropa as a Transnational Memory Discourse ......................................... v Chapter 1: The Legacy of Mitteleuropa: Between Geopolitics and Geopoetics ........... 1 Germany and Mitteleuropa ............................................................................................................................ 5 The Habsburg Myth ...................................................................................................................................... 17 The Jews of Central Europe ........................................................................................................................ 36 Chapter 2: Ingeborg Bachmann and Peter Handke – The Austrian Periphery and Mitteleuropa .............................................................................................................................. 60 Historical Overview ...................................................................................................................................... 60 Ingeborg Bachmann – “Mitteleuropa” of the Margins, Between Memory and “Heimat” .... 69 Peter Handke –Topographical Mysticism Against “Mitteleuropa” ............................................. 116 Chapter 3: Mitteleuropa as a Conflicted Community in Danilo Kiš and Aleksandar Tišma ....................................................................................................................................... 154 Historical Overview .................................................................................................................................... 154 Danilo Kiš – Central Europe as Cultural Network and Collage of Memories ........................ 162 Aleksandar Tišma – Realist Fractures of a Forsaken Central Europe ........................................ 213 Chapter 4: Mitteleuropa after 1989. New Memory Challenges in Christoph Ransmayr and Dubravka Ugrešić ..................................................................................... 241 Historical Overview .................................................................................................................................... 241 Christoph Ransmayr – Mitteleuropa as the Debris of Austrian History .................................... 253 Dubravka Ugrešić – Yugoslavia as Central Europe’s Nightmare ................................................ 280 Concluding Remarks ........................................................................................................... 312 Works Cited ........................................................................................................................... 326 i Acknowledgements It takes a village to raise a child: this dissertation could not have been completed without the continuous support of my academic community, friends and family over the course of many years. I am particularly indebted to my advisor Andreas Huyssen, who believed in this project from the beginning and whose astute insights, ongoing enthusiasm and patience allowed me to develop my initial curiosity about the literature of Mitteleuropa into a fully fleshed-out academic argument. I am also deeply grateful for the stimulating, conscientious and generous guidance of Marianne Hirsch, whose scholarship on transgenerational memory has taken my thinking about Mitteleuropa to a whole new level. I would further like to thank Mark M. Anderson, who inspired me to situate my topic within the context of postwar Austrian and Jewish literature; his expertise on Ingeborg Bachmann has been particularly helpful in this respect. I am grateful to Tomislav Z. Longinović for joining my dissertation committee at such a late stage, and for providing generous feedback on my third chapter on Danilo Kiš and Aleksandar Tišma, as well as to Oliver Simons for his multifold support and kindness as Director of Graduate Studies at the Department of Germanic Languages. Furthermore, I wish to thank: Radmila Gorup, who has been an invaluable mentor during my years at Columbia, Annette Werberger (Frankfurt, Oder), whose seminar Geopoetiken Mitteleuropas at the University of Tübingen in the fall of 2007 sparked my interest in the topic, Barbara Agnese (Montreal) for her interest and support during my research stay in Vienna in October 2012, Mirjana Miočinović who welcomed me so graciously in Belgrade, as well as Pascale Delpech in Paris, Ruth Betlheim in Zagreb, the most brilliant networker; the staff at Matica Srpska in Novi Sad, as well as Peg Quisenberry and Bill Dellinger at the Department of Germanic Languages, who helped weather the big and small challenges of ii life. I have benefitted greatly from the intellectual exchange and friendship of many colleagues at Columbia and beyond, some of whom I would like to acknowledge here: Irina Denischenko, who co-organized the ACLA seminar on Mitteleuropa with me in March 2014, and all those who took part in it; Johanna Urzedowski and Christoph Schaub, who provided continued encouragement and read different drafts of this dissertation; and finally Alyssa Greene, whose personal and academic support has been invaluable in the final stretch of my project. I am grateful for the generous summer fellowships provided by the Institute of Comparative Literature and Society (ICLS) between 2009 and 2012, and a travel fellowship from the Graduate School of