Cultural memory and intellectual history: locating Austrian literature

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

These essays present the elements of a coherent view of Austrian literature, but not in a way that provides a clear framework and a sufficiently explicit argument. Common to all of them is the emphasis on Grillparzer and Stifter as the founders of Austrian literature, although this early nineteenth-century location seems far from the sixteenth-century Empire or from the late twentieth-century Republic. At times these critics concede that their fundamental motive for writing about Austrian literature and tradition is to make sense of the significance of a handful of great writers from the early twentieth century--Musil, Broch, Kafka, Rilke, and sometimes Doderer or a few others. At least in the 1950s this theme was central to the concerns of scholars who wrote about Austrian literature, and it continues to be important for anyone who writes about Austrian intellectual history. Implicit in most of these accounts is a special relationship to Bohemia that is closer than the connections to Hungary or Galicia, but this theme was not developed by these authors in a coherent way. (23) Moreover, they often write about Vienna as if it was the center of a single culture or multi-culture in German, and they are rarely sufficiently sensitive to the changes in what constituted Austria or how it was constituted.

What is missing in these accounts is a strong sense of historical structure and periodization that makes explicit the political and institutional forms and geographical realities that underlie the notion of an Austrian literature. Working in the fields of literary history and intellectual history, Doderer, Heer, Ivask, Eisenreich, and Seidler helped to make conscious Austrian understandings about their cultural past. In the immediate aftermath of National Socialism, these writers were concerned to assert the identity of the Second Republic by arguing the distinctiveness of Austrian literary traditions. What seems more important now is this tradition itself, an empirical reality that is too often overlooked or misunderstood in the context of German literature. Too often Austrian literature has been lost between the conventional narrative of German culture and expansive claims about the multinational monarchy of the Habsburgs. What is needed is a better understanding of a German literary tradition that was located not in Berlin, Tubingen, and Weimar, but in Vienna, Prague, and Cisleithanian Austria. Especially important both for Austrian literature and for Austrian cultural memory is greater candor about the special place of Bohemia and Moravia in Austrian literature. Certainly for the nineteenth century more can be done to locate Vienna in relation to Bohemia, and to distinguish the centralized, Josephinist monarchy from the Dual Monarchy of 1867-1918. Sixty years after the Second World War and in the context of the new concerns of the European Union, it is possible now to locate Austrian literature in a way that resists the temptations of idealizing Austria, stereotyping Germany, or obscuring the deep affinity between Austrian and Bohemian cultural traditions. (24)