Cultural memory and intellectual history: locating Austrian literature

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

In order to establish that there was an Austrian literature, scholars from this period often felt obliged to demonstrate an essence, most explicitly perhaps in Kurt Adel's Vom Wesen der osterreichischen Dichtung (1964). Joseph Strelka, in his "Von Wesen und Eigenart der osterreichischen Literatur," emphasized the difficulty of defining such an essence for any literature, but he also pointed to "the historical reality of the sublime ethos of Austrian literature." (17) Although Strelka saw the methodological problems inherent in defining any national literary tradition as distinct from others, he was obviously drawn to approaches that emphasized the way in which Austrian literature expressed the multinational Monarchy as a whole. His essay is in some respects an explanation of the difficulty of defining Austrian literature, although his view follows the contours of what Heer, Ivask, and Eisenreich argue.

Scholars who wrote about Austrian literature in the early years of the Second Republic were coming to terms with their generation's experience: the end of empire and the challenge of creating something new. It is difficult to convey the range of claims about the Austrian essence that appears in essays from these years or the contradictory assertions of an impressionistic criticism. But these tendencies were prominent until about 1970 and have never entirely disappeared from Austrian characterizations of themselves and their intellectual history. In a recent essay on Austrian nationalism, Ernst Hanisch emphasizes the perils of attempting to describe what is distinctive about Austrian culture. He comes close to capturing this rhetorical approach in his characterization of the Austrian press service view of music from 1948 to 1957, although the scholarship on Austrian literature did not go quite so far: "The Austrian-European aristocrat of the mind--so we are informed--activated Gothic imagination, Hellenic esprit, the Celtic passion to give form, and Slavic seriousness in order to create the wonder of Austrian music." (18)

In 1970 Herbert Seidler presented a mature statement of the field which was close to the work of Walter Weiss and explicitly resisted simple advocacy of Austrian ideology. (19) His excellent and remarkably non-ideological article "Die osterreichische Literatur als Problem der Forschung" shows the emergence of a more disinterested perspective that reflected back on earlier work. He begins by emphasizing the historical variability of the term "Austrian," and he makes clear that what we ordinarily refer to as Austrian literature is "written in the German language" (354). Seidler insists that the historical and linguistic experience of German-speaking Austrians is simply not comparable to the Netherlands or Switzerland (354), and he underscores the need for sobriety and objectivity in addressing the "ticklish" question of "the connections among language, community, and nation" (356). Perhaps most refreshing of all is his call for scholars who actually know the wide range of languages that would comprise a truly multinational Austrian literature. The model of Austrian literature he develops is thoughtful, even shrewd, but Seidler, too, feels the impulse to generalize over broad historical periods during which the term "Austrian" changed its meanings in significant ways. In addition to sheer advocacy, it is this impulse to generalize that introduces the ideological dimension in a negative way.