Cultural memory and intellectual history: locating Austrian literature

Studies in Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature, Wntr, 2007 by David S. Luft

"Cultural Memory and Intellectual History: Locating Austrian Literature" is an essay about the way intellectuals contributed to reshaping cultural memory in Austria after the Second World War. By cultural memory I mean collective memory of the cultural past, of the creative achievements of a society, in this case the achievements of writers. At the center of my story are five intellectuals trying to make sense of the significance of Austrian literature and the Austrian cultural past, usually in a mode of advocacy, both recalling and creating a cultural past for the tiny postwar republic. Cultural memory of this kind is both collective, in the sense of repeating what is known and accepted, and individual, in the sense of being actively selective and inventive. I am concerned here primarily with five cultural commentators who helped to shape understandings of Austrian literature in the early years of the Second Republic: Heimito von Doderer (1896-1966), Friedrich Heer (1916-1983), Ivar Ivask (1927-1992), Herbert Eisenreich (1925-1986), and Herbert Seidler (1905-). These intellectuals developed a view of Austrian literature that contributed to discourse about Austrian national identity by both expressing and refining Austrian understandings of their cultural past. In my discussion of their work, I concentrate on five texts that defined the concept of Austrian literature between 1955 and 1970.

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Anyone who writes about tradition is inevitably drawn into a process that includes a mixture of objective knowledge, memory, projection, and invention. Maurice Halbwachs argued that memory is "a collective function" and that we use reason "to introduce greater coherence" into our image of the past (53). He emphasized that this is true even for personal experience, but still more conspicuous in discussing the historical experience of a group: "One cannot in fact think about the events of one's past without discoursing upon them. But to discourse upon something means to connect within a single system of ideas, our opinions as well as those of our circle." (2) An account of the origins of the concept of Austrian literature helps to show how cultural narratives become established as official discourses of public memory and how they originate in academic fields.

This is an essay about the way intellectuals contributed to reshaping cultural memory in Austria after the Second World War. By cultural memory I mean collective memory of the cultural past, of the creative achievements of a society, in this case the achievements of writers. At the center of my story are five intellectuals trying to make sense of the significance of Austrian literature and the Austrian cultural past, usually in a mode of advocacy, both recalling and creating a cultural past for the tiny postwar republic. Cultural memory of this kind is both collective, in the sense of repeating what is known and accepted, and individual, in the sense of being actively selective and inventive. (3) I am concerned here primarily with five cultural commentators who helped to shape understandings of Austrian literature in the early years of the Second Republic: Heimito von Doderer (1896-1966), Friedrich Heer (1916-83), Ivar Ivask (1927-92), Herbert Eisenreich (1925-86), and Herbert Seidler (b. 1905). These intellectuals developed a view of Austrian literature that contributed to discourse about Austrian national identity by both expressing and refining Austrian understandings of their cultural past. In my discussion of their work, I concentrate on five texts that defined the concept of Austrian literature between 1955 and 1970. I write as an intellectual historian, trying to clarify postwar understandings of Austrian literature. I want to locate both the theorists and the stories they tell, to work for more understanding of the concept of Austrian literature--both its historical origins and its geographical and institutional limits. (4)

Recent historical scholarship has encouraged us to think of national identity and historical traditions in terms of their retrospective invention by modern writers and theorists. In the case of the Second Austrian Republic, national identity became a preoccupation for intellectuals in ways that unmistakably indicated the invention of national traditions by political and intellectual elites. (5) Peter Thaler makes clear in The Ambivalence of Identity that in the postwar years Austrian elites were hard at work convincing their fellow Austrians that they were, and always had been, quite different from Germans. An important dimension of this rhetorical endeavor was the development and clarification of the idea of a distinctively Austrian literature. It would be tempting to argue that the concepts of national identity and Austrian literature were both created in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. But the most important work on Austrian national identity appeared in the 1980s--as the yield of a long public discussion that did not win broad support for the idea of an Austrian national identity until the 1970s--while the works that crystallized the concept of Austrian literature appeared between the end of Allied occupation and 1970. (6)