Victimhood through a Creaturely Lens: Creatureliness, Trauma and Victimhood in Austrian and Italian Literature after 1945. Alexandra Julie Hills University College London PhD Thesis ‘ I, ALEXANDRA HILLS confirm that the work presented in this thesis is my own. Where information has been derived from other sources, I confirm that this has been indicated in the thesis.' 1 Acknowledgements I am extremely grateful to the Arts and Humanities Research Council for their continual support of my research thanks to a Research Preparation Award in 2009 and a Collaborative Doctoral Award in the context of the “Reverberations of War” project under the direction of Prof Mary Fulbrook and Dr Stephanie Bird. I also wish to thank the UCL Graduate School for funding two research trips to Vienna and Florence where I conducted archival and institutional research, providing essential material for the body of the thesis. I would like to acknowledge the libraries and archives which hosted me and aided me in my research: particularly, the Literaturarchiv der Österreichischen Nationalbibliothek, Dr. Volker Kaukoreit at the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek who facilitated access to manuscript material, the Wienbibliothek, the Centro Internazionale di Studi Primo Levi in Turin and Florence’s Biblioteca Nazionale. For their constant patience, resourcefulness and assistance, I wish to express my gratitude to staff at UCL and the British libraries, without whom my research would not have been possible. My utmost thanks go to my supervisors, Dr Stephanie Bird and Dr Florian Mussgnug, for their encouragement and enthusiasm throughout my research. Their untiring support helped me develop as a thinker; their helpful responses made me improve as a writer, and I am extremely grateful for their patience. Warm thanks are also due to Prof Mary Fulbrook without whom I would not have had the privilege of working with incredibly inspiring women throughout the course of my doctoral research in the context of the AHRC Collaborative Project “Reverberations of War in Europe since 1945.” Dr Julia Wagner, Dr Christiane Wienand and Gaëlle Fisher, my colleagues from the project, deserve special recognition for the astonishing energy, intellectual rigour and resourcefulness they injected into the project and I thank them for four fantastic years of collaboration. I wish to thank Professor Pierpaolo Antonello and Dr Deborah Holmes, my examiners, for their stimulating discussions throughout the viva and their supportive, meticulous and invaluable feedback on the thesis. This thesis features extracts from my article published in Thinking Italian Animals, ed. by Deborah Amberson and Elena Past (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2014), and I am grateful to the publishers for allowing me to reproduce some of the material here. Admiration and gratitude is due to Dr Elena Past and Dr Deborah Amberson for their hard work on this volume. Thanks also to Sara Mohi von Känel and Christoph Steier for their encouraging and scrupulous editing of my article ‘Ist das ein Mensch? Nachkriegskreatürlichkeit bei Ilse Aichinger und Primo 2 Levi’ in the volume Nachkriegskörper: Prekäre Korporealitäten in der deutschsprachigen Literatur des 20. Jahrhunderts (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2014). Dr Christiane Wienand’s help with my written German in preparation for this article was invaluable and I am very thankful for the time she dedicated to editing my writing. Thanks also to Dr Susana Araujo and Dr Marta Pacheco Pinto for their meticulous revision of my article ‘Viennese Fantasies, Austrian Histories: Space, Fantasy and Fascism in Ingeborg Bachmann’s Malina and Liliana Cavani’s The Night Porter’ in Fear and Fantasy in a Global World (Boston: Brill, 2015). For their support as I was orienting my career toward teaching, I wish to thank Dr Geraldine Horan and Dr Judith Beniston for giving me the opportunity to work as a faculty undergraduate tutor, and again to Dr Florian Mussgnug for enabling me to participate in his lecture series on Metamorphoses in modern Italian literature. I am also most grateful to my colleagues at Harrow School, particularly Mr Nick Page and Mr Will Turner, for their continued encouragement and advice about teaching Modern Languages. For their fierce encouragement, loyal support and continual sense of humour I am overwhelmed with thanks for Francesca Barrie, Dr Joanne Brueton, Dr Harriet Hulme and Alice Podkolinski. I dedicate this thesis to my family: my deep gratitude goes to my parents and sister for such tireless optimism and emotional support throughout my life, and to J, without whom none of this would be possible. 3 Victimhood through a Creaturely Lens: Creatureliness, Trauma and Victimhood in Austrian and Italian Literature after 1945. (abstract) The thesis compares the representation of the Second World War, fascism and the Holocaust in Italian and Austrian literature and film. In Austria, the national myth of ‘Hitler’s first victim’ echoes with the prevalent Italian cultural narrative of the ‘good Italian’, which forecloses uncomfortable reckonings with toxic historical legacies and their traumatic aftermaths. By drawing on a range of theoretical writers such as Benjamin, Weil, Santner and Agamben, I argue that the ‘creature’ is a privileged lens through which victimhood can be examined as it represents the dehumanisation of the human being through traumatic exposure to violence. The notion of the creaturely theorises the ubiquity of animal imagery to represent wartime violence and is a barometer for attitudes towards suffering and victimhood where traumatic experience paradoxically either affirms the value of the victim’s suffering as a guarantor of humanity, or rejects the dehumanising impact of trauma as undesirable. By focussing on embodiment as a primary signifier of the salience of history, I begin my thesis with an analysis of historical consciousness and creaturely embodiment in Carlo Levi’s Cristo si è fermato a Eboli (1945) and Thomas Bernhard’s Frost (1963). The second part of the thesis examines Morante’s La Storia (1974) to evaluate the role of non-human animals, children and wartime spaces and assess the impact of suffering and trauma on the elaboration of a messianic interpretation of history’s victims. The third chapter deals with the transmission of a legacy of victimhood through generation and orality, and the necessity of developing an ethics of attention to competing narratives of history and national identity in Elisabeth Reichart’s Februarschatten (1984) and Anna Waltraud Mitgutsch’s Die Züchtigung (1985). The second part of my thesis problematises how the study of the Holocaust mobilises the notion of humanity while relying on the ubiquity of creaturely representation in Primo Levi and Ilse Aichinger. I conclude with a brief examination of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò (1975) and Liliana Cavani’s Il Portiere di Notte (1974) in which I explore how filmic explorations of the textual trope of the creaturely, non-human, body imply problematic issues relating to the economy and politics of consumerism via an eroticisation of suffering. The thesis aims to retain a mindfulness of the precarity of a monolithically human definition of embodiment in the aftermath of violent historical events, and interrogate the viability of resting unambiguous narratives of personal and national identity on a troubled embodiment with the aim of accommodating readings that engage historical agency, reflect on the multiplicity of identities and maintain an ethical imperative towards the suffering other. 4 Table of Contents: Acknowledgements 2 Abstract 4 Introduction: 7 Victimhood through a Creaturely Lens: Creatureliness, Trauma and Victimhood in Austrian and Italian Literature after 1945. Italian and Austrian national identity after 1945 9 History and trauma 22 The innocence of creatures: Redemptive victimhood in and through the body 28 The vicissitudes of victimhood 35 Literature review 39 Chapter outline 41 Chapter One: 44 Hinterländer, historical consciousness and humanism in Carlo Levi’s Cristo si è fermato a Eboli (1945) and Thomas Bernhard’s Frost (1963). The humanistic reception of Carlo Levi’s Cristo si è fermato a Eboli 47 Animalised bodies in Cristo si è fermato a Eboli 51 The creaturely drama of the Lucanians 56 The gendered violence of the creator 60 The creaturely as subaltern 65 The negation of history 67 ‘Brutal humanism’ and the paradoxes of creatureliness 68 Thomas Bernhard’s Frost: Unsettled in history 74 The impasse of creatureliness: passivity, agency and representation 77 Austrians as Homines Sacri 84 Reconstruction and myths of national identity 85 Power and gender: Disavowed complicities 88 The distortions of humanitarianism and the failure of humanism 90 Conclusion 96 Chapter Two: 98 Elsa Morante’s creaturely universe: Space, History and Animality in La Storia (1974) Introduction 98 The creaturely innocence of animals and children in La Storia 105 The witness as victim, the body as register: the ‘signifying stresses’ of the past 110 Real histories, real victims 113 Adaptations, nesting, habitats: Creaturely refigurations of the home 120 5 Conclusion: Morante’s Creatural Realism 128 Chapter Three: 130 The Transmission of History: Generations, Bodies, Texts in Elisabeth Reichart’s Februarschatten (1984) and Anna Mitgutsch’s Die Züchtigung (1985) Introduction: Generation and Transmission 130 Women and mothers in the German Reich 134 The body’s receptivity to historical violence 136 Die Züchtigung: Formative violence 138 Orality and the boundaries of