Cultural memory and intellectual history: locating Austrian literature

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

It is remarkable to see how many of the most important critical formulations of the concept of Austrian literature appeared in the decade and a half after the state treaty that ratified Austrian independence in 1955. The principal contributions to this conceptualization were Heimito von Doderer's "Athener Rede: Von der Wiederkehr Osterreichs," (7) Friedrich Heer's Land im Strom der Zeit, especially the lead essay on "Humanitas Austriaca" (17-105), Ivar Ivask's "Das grosse Erbe: Die ubernationale Struktur der osterreichischen Dichtung," Herbert Eisenreich's "Das schopferische Misstrauen oder Ist Osterreichs Literatur eine osterreichische Literatur?" and Herbert Seidler's "Die osterreichische Literatur als Problem der Forschung." By 1970, Seidler (quite conscious of his debt to Walter Weiss) could provide an impressively objective, scholarly overview of the field that moved for the most part beyond the ideological impulse of the founding essays, although his work was still marked by the temptation of essentialism. Arguments about Austrian literature from this period were often written in essayistic, occasional form, usually in the context of justifying the claim that there was something distinctive about Austrian literature. It seems helpful to see these essays as a stage in the development of understandings of Austrian national identity; and, despite their limitations, they contributed in important ways to identifying what an account of the Austrian tradition in German culture might look like. (8)

Consciousness of Austrian literature as a field began to emerge in the nineteenth century, especially in relation to Franz Grillparzer, Adalbert Stifter, and Viennese theater; and key figures such as Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Josef Nadler shaped these arguments further in the early twentieth century. (9) But the decisive period for the creation of the contemporary concept of Austrian literature was the decade and a half after Austrian independence. The recurring theme of the commentators I discuss here is that the field of German literature has been conceived in a way that cannot do justice to Austrian writers. They were influenced by public discussions, and they contributed to shaping public discourse about memory. I see their work as a stage in a process of understanding rather than as timeless statements of historical relationships.

Since the eighteenth century the concept of German literature has been tailored to fit a particular model of the kleindeutsch (little German) nation, an approach that was actually reinforced both by the experience of National Socialism and by the postwar division and reunion of (little) Germany. To Austrian ears, any attempt to discuss Austria in this context sounds like grossdeutsch (greater German) nationalism if not National Socialism. Meanwhile, German critics rediscover from time to time that their favorite German writers come from another country: a decade after the essays I discuss here, Ulrich Greiner could still note the delightful anomaly that half of German literature in the twentieth century came from Austria (11). (10) At the same time, it is often hard to say whether the main problem for Austrians is that they are ignored or misunderstood or (mis-)represented as Germans. While Austrian accounts of Austrian and German culture are often ideological, commentators on German history, literature, philosophy, and social science are frequently not even aware of perspectives that open up from the south. Nonetheless, conventional memory and cliche rather than careful thinking have been too prominent in understandings of Austrian literature and national identity. Even in a scholarly setting Austrians often proceed from a narrow, nationalist conception of German culture from the Hohenstaufen to Luther to Frederick the Great to Bismarck to Hitler, a tradition that is usually conceived as anti-Austrian and anti-Catholic, and sometimes even as racist, especially as anti-Slav. The ideal image of Austria or the Austrian tradition is usually imagined as the opposite of this, but this model is of course schematic and polemical rather than historical. What is meant by "Austrian literature" nearly always turns out to be a specifically German literature that is distinguished from Prussian and national German literature.