Austrian Culture – serie

Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach war Oesterreichs groesste Schriftstellerin des 19. Jahrhunderts. Ihr langes Leben verlief parallel zu dem von ihr hochverehrten Kaiser Franz Joseph I (1830-1916). Ihre Stellung als Frau und Aristokratin verschaffte ihr unvergleichliche Einblicke in die politischen und sozialen Zustaende ihrer Zeit, die sie in ihren Werken mit dem ihr eigenen Einfuehlungsvermoegen darstellte. Obgleich sie sich urspruenglich als Dramatikerin sah, fand Ebner-Eschenbach letztlich in der Erzaehlung und in scharfsinnigen Aphorismen literarisch zu sich selbst. Das Leben und Werk dieser bedeutenden Chronistin der Monarchie wird hier in seiner Gaenze dargestellt.

What can post/colonial studies and their approaches contribute to our understanding of the Austro-Hungarian (k.u.k.) occupation and administration of Bosnia-Herzegovina from 1878 to 1914? This anthology presents some possible answers to this research question which goes back to a workshop held at the University of Antwerp in 2005. Later more researchers were invited from the small international circle of established and emerging experts to contribute to this new perspective on the imperial intermezzo of Bosnia-Herzegovina (which is usually overshadowed by the two World Wars and the Yugoslav Succession Wars of the 1990s). Alternative readings of both Austrian and Bosnian history, literature, and culture are meant to serve as a third way, as it were, bypassing the discursive fallacies of Habsburg nostalgia and nationalist self-victimization. As a result, the essays of this interdisciplinary volume (collected and available in print for the first time) focus on the impact the Austro-Hungarian presence has had on Bosnia-Herzegovina and vice versa. They consider both the contemporary imperialist setting as well as the expansionist desire of the Habsburg Monarchy directed southward. Exploring the double meaning of the German title WechselWirkungen, the authors consider the consequences of occupation, colonization and annexation as a paradigm shift affecting both sides: not only intervention and interaction at a political, economic, social, cultural, and religious level, but also imposed hegemony along with cultural transfer and hybridity. Finally, the imperial gaze at the Balkan region outside of the Habsburg territories is included in the form of three exemplary case studies on Albania and Montenegro.

How did Austrian writers grapple with their country’s problematic twentieth-century history? Nine scholars investigate how the complex role of the national past changed the content and context of Austria’s literature. Contributions range from Klaus Zeyringer’s aggressive argument for an authentically Austrian literature, to the late Harry Zohn’s autobiographical insights of a transplanted Viennese. Probing essays examine the Liberal and the National-Socialist era writers in exile and in their roles as post-war social critics.Shadows of the Past also puts the authors themselves in the spotlight: A «mini-reader» of hard-hitting as well as humorous narrative texts complements the literary history that begins the volume. Written by Barbara Frischmuth, Elisabeth Reichart, and Erich Wolfgang Skwara, these six texts are accompanied by helpful introductions to each author. As a further aid for English-speaking readers, the original in German literary and critical texts are translated for the first time. Shadows of the Past allows students of European culture and comparative literature to experience a dramatic century in Austrian literature and history.

Das alltaegliche Leben von ethnischen Minderheiten in Oesterreich ist fuer viele ein unbekanntes Gebiet. Darueberhinaus werden Minderheiten als soziales und wirtschaftliches Problem gesehen, doch wird das im oeffentlichen Diskurs kaum hinterfragt. Am Ende des vergangenen Jahrhunderts gab nur wenige literarische Erzeugnisse, die Minderheiten- oder Migrantenerfahrung in den Mittelpunkt stellten und von der Literaturkritik wurden diese Texte nur am Rande wahrgenommen. Diese Studie analysiert fuenf Werke von vier AutorInnen unterschiedlicher Herkunft (Milo Dor, Ceija Stojka, Barbara Frischmuth und Vladimir Vertlib), die sich mit eben diesem Thema auseinandersetzen. In der Analyse und Interpretation der Texte wird Fragen von Alteritaet und Identitaet, Kultur und Ethik, Ausgrenzung und der Rolle des Staates nachgegangen.

This book examines Elfriede Jelinek’s investigation of Austria’s and Western Europe’s «obscene fantasies» through her «perversion» of generic forms in three of her best-known texts (Die Liebhaberinnen, Lust, and Die Klavierspielerin). Each chapter investigates a central psychoanalytic concept (alienation, jouissance, perversion, and sublimation) and reads a Jelinek text in relation to the genre that it is perverting, exposing the «obscene fantasies» that lie at its heart. This book argues that the disruption of genres is one of Jelinek’s most significant literary contributions, with her works functioning to create a «negative aesthetics» as opposed to a positive reworking of generic forms.

The thirty articles featured in Contested Passions: Sexuality, Eroticism, and Gender in Modern Austrian Literature and Culture are based on papers given at the MALCA conference in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, in the Spring of 2007. They cover literary works by several Austrian authors of the nineteenth and twentieth century such as Schnitzler, Musil, Hofmannsthal, Broch, Kraus, Drach, Jelinek and also developments in the graphic arts, including works by Klimt and VALIE EXPORT; architecture – for example, Loos; film; and the popular media.

Do the Balkans Begin in Vienna? takes up one of the most fraught areas of Europe, the Balkans. Variously part of the Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, and Byzantine empires, this region has always been considered Europe’s border between the Orient and the Occident. Aiming to clarify the politics of drawing cultural borders in this region, the book examines the relations between the Habsburg Monarchy and the Balkans as an intermediate space between West and East. It demonstrates that the dichotomy Orient versus Occident is insufficient to explain the complexity of the region. Therefore, cultural multi-belonging, historical disruption, and recurrence of identities and conflicts are proposed to be «the essence» of the Balkans. Do the Balkans Begin in Vienna? depicts the fictional imagination of the Balkans as a «utopian dystopia». This oxymoron encompasses the utopian projections of the Austrian/ Habsburg writers onto the Balkans as a place of intact nature and archaic communities; the dystopian presentations of the Balkans by local authors as an abnormal no-place (ou-topia) onto which the historical tensions of empires have been projected; and, finally, the depictions of the Balkans in the Western media as an eternal or recurring dystopia.There is at present no other study that distinguishes these particular geographical reference points. Thus, this book contributes to the research on Europe’s historical memory and to scholarship on postcolonial and/or post-imperial identities in European states. The volume is recommended for courses on Austrian, German, Balkan, and European studies, as well as comparative literature, theater, media, Slavic literatures, history, and political science.

Since coming to public notice through major museum catalogues and the work of Carl Schorske around 1980, fin de siècle Vienna has been cast as the final bloom of a dying culture. Yet this assessment is itself a historical construct, deriving from the politics of the twentieth century. This volume argues that «Habsburg nostalgia» is anything but backward looking: instead, images from this glittering Habsburg past become evidence of a culture’s sophisticated sense of how and why history is made, in both official and popular spheres. Including the first translation of an original account of Crown Prince Rudolf’s suicide at Mayerling in 1889, Belle Necropolis argues for Austria’s continued reuse of its own history to point the way toward the future rather than simply memorializing a past that only exists as living memories of shared stories, not as a truth in itself. Case studies included here range from imperial stereotypes before 1900 through their adaptations in the film 1. April 2000 and today’s musicals, and from the politics of representing Austria since Rebecca West up through Schorske’s master narrative of the Ringstrasse. Through these studies, Habsburg culture emerges as a culture of commemoration that uses its own past to overcome the limits of a small country seeking a role on the contemporary world stage.