Austrian Literature

[nnyhav]

Austrian literature is a difficult category, as Austria waxed before and waned during the 20th century: wikipedia reflects the confusion. Vienna, an intellectual center to be envied in its days of empire, now seems just one amongst many mitteleurometropolises. Modern Austrian literature is identified with its brightest lights shining beyond its borders, Thomas Bernhard and Nobelaureate Elfride Jelinek (I've read and enjoyed a fair bit of the former, nothing of the latter as yet, and the LRB piece on Greed doesn't encourage me), with Peter Handke getting honorable mention.

But there's much more to it than that. Eurozine just released another in their series on European national literatures, "Literary perspectives: Austria: anything but a German appendix".

There are already threads established for Robert Musil (from the empire without qualities?), Stefan Zweig and Adalbert Stifter: who else deserves attention?

[Eric]

I read the Eurozine article by Daniela Strigl, and this longish article does introduce you to a whole list of names of contemporary Austrian authors, most of whom you may never have heard of:

http://www.eurozine.com/articles/200...strigl-en.html

The number of unknown names (for me at least) is somewhat overwhelming, but the thing of cardinal importance it demonstates is that Austrian literature has moved on since the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and people are writing it right now. Never mind Musil, what about...

Another important matter brought up in the article is one that always irritates me, and I brought up in my thread entitled "A language is not a country". This is the way the big, more powerful, countries (e.g. Germany, the Netherlands, Britain, Sweden) take over any bits of literature they can find in the same language next door (e.g. in Austria, Flanders, Ireland, and Finland) and pretend it's their own.

Smaller literatures deserve to be identified as such. The "German appendix" attitude blocks an understanding of the differences between national literatures being written in the same language in different countries.

[nnyhav]

It works both ways: Austria makes outsize claims for their imperial heritage (for example, Kafka, Canetti), but those claims are well justified for Vienna's lasting contribution and for self-identified Austrian writers; never mind Musil, there's Hermann Broch (The Sleepwalkers and The Death of Virgil) and Joseph Roth (The Radetzky March and much else): "I am a conservative and a Catholic, consider Austria my fatherland, and desire the return of the Empire." And that's just the headliners.

[Heteronym]

Recently I've become curious about a writer called Karl Kraus: has anyone read it anything about it?

[Eric]

All very fine, I too have heard of Broch's sleepwalking Vergil and Kraus and Musil and Roth, and have even read a little by them.

But my point is this: these people wrote a long time ago. Have British readers no curiosity as to what's being written now in Austria, beyond grandstanded authors such as Jelinek?

[nnyhav]

Heteronym, my interest in Kraus was piqued via 3QD by the review of The Anti-Journalist, but the name had come up before in connection with Walter Benjamin in some of the blogs I frequent ...

Eric, most Anglophonies don't even have much curiosity in Broch or Kraus or Musil or Roth (if it's not Philip), though they probably heard of the last two and maybe even took a few tentative steps in the Radetzsky March. But I'm going for the most part with books and authors who've stood the test of time, and not just in one country, or region. So I'm a tourist; but I've seen more than most of what Europe, Russia, Latin America, Japan have to offer, without ever having been there. (As far as Eastern EuroLit goes, I really only began to appreciate just what and how much was out there a couple years ago: click here. I've found India and China more problematic; and outside of classics I've neglected the rest of SE Asia, Africa and the Middle East.) The Eurozine article I linked (and you relinked) put at least a couple of authors in front of Jelinek for me (Thomas Glavinic, Arno Geiger) once they're Englished. So what's the point of ranting? And to whom is it directed anyway?

[Eric]

Nnyhav, I rant a bit now and again, but it doesn't do me any harm. It's for anyone that wants to agree or disagree. As Britain has such a shockingly bad record regarding taking on board translations, compared with France, Germany, the Low Countries and Scandinavia (i.e. our neighbours) I would like things to change. Ranting is one strategy.

I quite agree that most Brits don't touch even the Austrian classics, let alone what's being written now. For most of those older writers you almost have to do a quick Google or short course in Austro-Hungary, its geography, the Habsburgs, the languages covered by this empire and the significance of the various ethnic groups within it.

I was intrigued by "Death of Vergil", although it is heavy going in parts. Roth's hotel life also has its atmospere. I've only read stories by Musil, have put off reading the Big Novel for literally decades.

Modern Austria may have the Empire lurking in the background, plus the Hitler legacy, but I would also like to find out more about what people have written over the past couple of decades. Austria is not Austro-Hungary any more. Austria has shrunk to a virtually monolingual minor country, with quite a lot of ethnic input from surrounding countries, a sort of shrivelled Austro-Hungarian Empire with gastarbeiter. How modern Austrians cope with everyday life and history would be interesting to know, beyond Jelinek's rather unusual prism.

I too am a tourist with literature, to an extent. But I want to know something about the country where the books are written. I don't read thrillers and crime novels, where couleur locale is often artificially tacked on to enhance the story and make it a little more exotic. (On "The Triangle" on TV the other night, someone muttered something about Lithuania being land-locked...)

As I am a translator as well, mostly of Estonian literature recently, I find that the more you learn about any particular country at a general knowledge level, the more you can appreciate its literature and, often, what makes an author tick. So if I tackled Austria, I would read a potted history beyond the peak of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (Kakania, to you), and the trough of Hitler.

I find reading literature from Asia and Africa more problematic than European literature, as there are so many factors that are different to what is familiar to me throughout Europe. Those Asian and African writers that ape Western ones aren't that interesting, and yet I haven't yet put enough effort into identifying genuine Asian and African writers who write about something that resonates.

But returning to Europe, Eastern & Central European literature has always fascinated me. There are echoes and resemblances, so whether literature is written originally in Polish, Hungarian, Yiddish, Russian, German, Finnish, Ukrainian, whatever, the more I read, the more I somehow get immersed in that whole region. And this region has been damaged by being endlessly fought over by Prussia, Russia and Austro-Hungary. It's a cultural zone, if you like. Only now are the nation states there recovering from Hitler & Nazism and Stalin & Communism, whose influence dominated the zone for two thirds of the twentieth century. That's why the contemporary literature is interesting too.

[Mirabell]

I admit I have real trouble keeping Austrian, Swiss and German writers apart, I just subsume them as writers writing in German.

So Ingeborg Bachmann, whom I mentioned in the German thread, she's actually Austrian, as is Mayr?cker, and Norbert Gstrein. Franz Innerhofer, if he's ever translated, was a great writer, already canonized. Heimito von Doderer is one of the gians of Austrian lit. Robert Schindel is one of the major contemp writers.
The others, post WWII...Bernhard, Jelinek, Handke, Mayr?cker, Gstrein, Streeruwitz.

[Eric]

Not so many people have difficulties keeping U.S., British, Australian, New Zealand and Australian writers apart. But the countries are wide apart, scattered over the globe. With the German-speaking world, in adjacent countries, people will move around. Writers too. But I still believe in literature being rooted in a particular culture.

[Mirabell]

Not so many people have difficulties keeping U.S., British, Australian, New Zealand and Australian writers apart. But the countries are wide apart, scattered over the globe. With the German-speaking world, in adjacent countries, people will move around. Writers too. But I still believe in literature being rooted in a particular culture.

That's not the point. Traditionally, the literatures are viewed as basically ONE german language literature. I study German lit and have written papers on Bernhard, Jelinek and Keller, that is austrian and swiss writers. If I remember correctly, in several years I wrote only once on a German writer, Adorno.

Our most prestigious prizes used to be (the deutscher buchpreis is new) prizes awarded to writers in the German tongue, not Germans. The B?chnerpreis, the Preis der Gruppe 47, the Bachmannpreis and many others.

We as a culture often do not make the distinction, which is why it's hard for me to make it now.

[Eric]

Mirabell says:

Traditionally, the literatures are viewed as basically ONE german language literature.

By whose tradition? Do Austrians think of their literature as an appendage, or is this the same type of chauvinism which turns Oscar Wilde and Seamus Heaney into "English" authors?

There are, of course, individual cases which are more difficult to define. Was Kafka a Czech writer who wrote in German, and Austro-Hungarian author, or a German one?

When you say "German Literature", you must define whether you mean a) literature written in the German language, or b) literature written by people who live in, or are citizens of, Germany. It is a culturally colonialist trick to blur the distinction.

I do make a distinction between Spain's literature and that of Latin America (ditto Portuguese literature and Brazil), Flemish and Dutch, Finland-Swedish and Swedish, and so on. And, indeed, the literature of the BRD and GDR during the Cold War! Only people like Jenny Erpenbeck can be brought up within the ?lite family of a member of the nomenklatura of the GDR, then metamorphose into a nice cuddly "all-German" writer.

As I have claimed elsewhere, the country, its history, culture, politics and geography, as well as the language, all contribute towards making a literature specific.

The Runeberg Prize, that I have mentioned on another thread, is awarded to citizens of Finland, whether they write in Swedish or Finnish. Both of these are indigenous languages.The Swedes haven't yet taken on board their Finnish-speaking (immigrant) minority.

These things have to be thought about. The issues are complex. Large countries have the unpleasant habit of regarding many people writing in their language as boors and provincials until they prove to be important writers. Then, Germany (Austria, Switzerland), England (Ireland, Scotland, Wales), Russia (when it was still the Soviet Union), Sweden, the Netherlands, etc., all play this same sleight of hand: if authors are bad, they're foreign or parochial bumpkins; if they're good, they belong to us.

[Mirabell]

By whose tradition? Do Austrians think of their literature as an appendage, or is this the same type of chauvinism which turns Oscar Wilde and Seamus Heaney into "English" authors?

Many of your remarks appear to me to attack a straw puppet, created to set up your rant. The fact that the literatures are often subsumed under German, because of the common language, finds no equivalent in any other area. There is no tradition, or at least no respectable one, of thinking of the three as basically the same country or indeed the same culture.

But the fact remains that Germanistik, which is what I call German Lit, comprises German, Austrian and Swiss writers, as well as some 'Romanian' (The bukowina poets) or 'Czech' writers (Kafka). Germanistik is taught in Austria as well, and comprises both German and Austrian writers. There is, as far as I know, no "Austrian Lit" study, except as a specialization of Germanistik, on the same level that "war lit" would be a specialization.

I should add that I always think of literature written in the German language when I refer to "German Literature". I dislike intensely to think in terms of nations, which is the only thing about this board that bothers me. I mix up German and Austrian writers not because I think of the big ones as being members of the German nation, but because the term 'German' refers, for me, first and foremost to the language.

Then, Germany (Austria, Switzerland), [...] all play this same sleight of hand: if authors are bad, they're foreign or parochial bumpkins; if they're good, they belong to us.

That is not true, and if you'd ever bothered to look closer you'd see that. There aren't no two "classes" of writers, good ones, which are Germans and bad ones, which are 'regional' Austrian writers. On the contrary, Austrian writers, the best ones anyway, are very much Austrian writers, much more so than many German writers are recognizably German.

[Stewart]

I should add that I always think of literature written in the German language when I refer to "German Literature". I dislike intensely to think in terms of nations, which is the only thing about this board that bothers me.

I can understand it, but if I didn't think in terms of nations, the flags would be redundant. With Swiss Literature we can't exclusively lump it all under German Literature, because of the likes of Blaise Cendrars, who wrote in French...and there's no doubt names out their who have written - or are currently writing - in Italian and Romansch. That's why I would hope people used the tags feature, therefore people can tag things like French Literature and Francophone Literature, German Literature and, er, Germanophone Literature, etc.

[Mirabell]

@Erik I realize that my long answer may have sounded confusing. I have come up with a simpler one.

Two things. One, the analogy you (Eric) put up is not valid because Germany is very young, far younger than Austria, the Heiliges R?misches Reich Deutscher Nation doesn't count, naturally. There is no 'German culture', that's a racially informed Romantic idea. There's a prussian culture, a rhineland culture, things like that. B?chner may be a German writer but that doesn't explain anything. Put him into Baden and presto! you have a cultural context you can work with. H?lderlin? W?rttemberg. Fontane? Prussia. B?ll? Cologne (i.e. Rhineland). This leads to number

Two. We here are much more likely to talk about literatures in terms of language than in terms of nations, except if we are expressly talking about that aspect of a certain text or strand of literature. GENERALLY we tend to refer to languages. That's the tradition I spoke of. THis is not restricted to German, it also goes for Italian (where Swiss writers are also discussed), French (where Spanish, Belgian, French etc. writers are discussed), Hispanic studies. Russian studies, too. With English there's a bit of an inconsistency, because the commonwealth is lumped in with the British, and the Americans get their own section.


@Stewart: I realize this is a bit impractical and I did not, if you notice, complain, I just stated a personal difficulty, it was Erik who started a discussion. I'm fine the way things are.

[nnyhav]

Any classification scheme is gonna be problematic (but then so are AustroHungarians [especially the latter]). Language is too broad and country too narrow to indicate what tradition the writing arose from, belongs to (if it belongs -- I've been puzzling about how to categorize emigre literature like Aleksandar Hemon or Dubravna Ugresic -- no, Yugo first; or Olga Grushin ... and then there's Nabokov, equally split between two tongues, with 2 decades each in Russia [similar problem there], Berlin/Paris, USA and Geneva), and there are even exceptions to that generalization (over the centuries, Poland's been all over the map, and India is bigger than any of its languages) and the point will always be arguable (though Eric's calling Canadians Australians might cause them to politely demur ). The academic distinction is no better: Hermann Hesse, Thomas Mann, G?nter Grass, Heinrich B?ll, Arno Schmidt, W.G.Sebald come out of a tradition identifiable as specifically German without splitting regional hairs. The wiki partition serves well enough between German, Austrian and Swiss, I think.

[Mirabell]

Hesse's, Grass', Schmidt's and B?ll's work are very clearly situated in a special regional context. Hesse has tried to transcend it time and again, Grass has never attempted as much, neither has Schmidt who has allowed dialect to enter his orthography, and B?ll's coordinates are very much Rhineland indeed.

Any classification scheme is gonna be problematic

You're right about that, my friend.

[Eric]

The Thoughts of Eric (pace Mao Tse Tung)

Mirabell, it's nice to be challenged by someone who likes a duel. We both hope to win.

"Rant" is such a male word.

I take in board that you cannot read Russian at the level that you can read a novel. Nor can I. Perhaps, given your purported background, you should learn more Russian. Both German and Russian are fine literary languages, but to try to subsume and swallow smaller literary cultures is not democratic.

If you dislike nations, maybe Europe should divided up into empires. The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact tried very hard to achieve this. The EU is not the heir to this devious pact!

No one nowadays talks about Hitler as an Austrian dictator. I think they think he's German. However, all the people such as Fritzl, Kampusch's predator, etc., are labelled as Austrian. What is the socio-cultural reason for this? There's an interesting blurring of borders, even after Anschlu?. But Austrian literature should remain Austrian, and be labelled so, whatever international university departments, each with their own interests, say.

Germany and the USA are not that young.

I do not generally use vulgar words such as "to shit" and "to fuck". As a native-speaker of English, I restrict myself to using the more elegant phrases. Sometimes, however, a retort is necessary.

I never shit in the pool. I translate literature. I prefer to treat authors as individuals with a very definite national and linguistic background. But "German" and "English" literature are rather too all-embracing as international categories.

Grass and the Kashubians?

What is your opinion about nomenklatura-groupie Erpenbeck and her recent success as a pan-German author? Little by little, the spotlight is being shone on such people from the former GDR.

You still have not explained what Fontane, Storm, etc., have done to render themselves "boring". This seems rather a sweeping statement.

Why do we need "Germanistik" to tell us which German-language authors to read? Who draws up the Germanistik lists that people uncritically follow? And from what nations do they come?

There are many, many questions generated by such a seemingly banal question as to who is a German author.

[Mirabell]

Ah, poor boy.

Why do we need "Germanistik" to tell us which German-language authors to read? Who draws up the Germanistik lists that people uncritically follow? And from what nations do they come?

"Why" presumes that someone claimed something like that before. I detect a pattern. You love to reply to things that no-one said, right?

Grass and the Kashubians?

More like Grass and the Rhineland, which is a heavy influence. The Kaschubian bits are clearly more like quotes.

I do not generally use vulgar words such as "to shit" and "to fuck".

And yet its nice to see you do it sometimes. Bravo.

Perhaps, given your purported background, you should learn more Russian.

Yes, very nice. Do we have a laugh track here? An offensive remark followed by a faux-paternal advice. Encore.

If you dislike nations, maybe Europe should divided up into empires.

YES that is what I talked about. Indeed, by attacking dumb divisions I wasn't attacking dumb divisions I was attacking SOME dumb divisions. I see. Good to have you here to clarify that.

You still have not explained what Fontane, Storm, etc., have done to render themselves "boring". This seems rather a sweeping statement.

All the more so because I didn't call Fontane boring, nor do I remember an "etc." included in my Storm comment.

Oh, and

smaller literary cultures

Take care. I hear some Austrian is just sneaking up behind you, brandishing what appears to be...wait...a bottle of Zweigelt. Can't be much fun that. Some women might be watching. THANK GOD wimmin don't write literature or they might write it down. Huh.


Say, have you read that second post at all?


Funny. While researching Gotthelf in English I came upon a remark by Walter Muschg, who is a famous Swiss writer, who wrote about Gotthelf, an even more famous Swiss writer that he was the best German writer of his time. See? That's what I meant. Or...no, wait, that's probably a strange case of reverse colonialization or sumpin. No?

Funny that someone who apparently gets rashes when someone hands a literary prize to a woman would be so finicky about this topic.

[Mirabell]

Oh and I don't do duels. I explain why I am right.

[Eric]

I'm beginning to think that "Mirabell" is acting a little like a wind-up equivocator. Not German and a 26-year old female, but a male with English as his mother tongue. Which foreigner uses "finicky"?

This answering back to the most trivial comment and always disliking every bloody book mentioned on principle, smacks of some of the people that used to populate both the BBC Book Boards and Big Readers. We would rather not descend into a swamp of disagreement.

"Mirabell's" erudition begins to come unstuck with Grass and the Kashubians. Anyone who knows anything more about Grass than his "Tin Drum" will know about the Kashubian dimension. Bluff is bluff.

Good try, but now it's time to come out of the closet.