Modern Austrian Writing

Essays that focus specifically on major Austrian writers and the influence of their work on German literature as a whole.

This book examines Jewish writers and intellectuals in Austria, analyzing filmic and electronic media alongside more traditional publication formats over the last 25 years. Beginning with the Waldheim affair and the rhetorical response by the three most prominent members of the survivor generation (Leon Zelman, Simon Wiesenthal and Bruno Kreisky) author Andrea Reiter sets a complicated standard for ‘who is Jewish’ and what constitutes a ‘Jewish response.’ She reformulates the concepts of religious and secular Jewish cultural expression, cutting across gender and Holocaust studies. The work proceeds to questions of enacting or performing identity, especially Jewish identity in the Austrian setting, looking at how these Jewish writers and filmmakers in Austria ‘perform’ their Jewishness not only in their public appearances and engagements but also in their works. By engaging with novels, poems, and films, this volume challenges the dominant claim that Jewish culture in Central Europe is almost exclusively borne by non-Jews and consumed by non-Jewish audiences, establishing a new counter-discourse against resurging anti-Semitism in the media.

Essays that focus specifically on major Austrian writers and the influence of their work on German literature as a whole.

Assessing the impact of fin-de-siècle Jewish culture on subsequent developments in literature and culture, this book is the first to consider the historical trajectory of Austrian-Jewish writing across the 20th century. It examines how Vienna, the city that stood at the center of Jewish life in the Austrian Empire and later the Austrian nation, assumed a special significance in the imaginations of Jewish writers as a space and an idea. The author focuses on the special relationship between Austrian-Jewish writers and the city to reveal a century-long pattern of living in tension with the city, experiencing simultaneously acceptance and exclusion, feeling “unheimlich heimisch” (eerily at home) in Vienna.

The sixteen articles compiled here are devoted to individual prose works published after 1970 that reflect the "Austrian tradition" within the field of German literature. The works treated include those of the popular and widely recognisable names of world-renowned writers such as Peter Handke, Thomas Bernhard, Ingeborg Bachmann, and Nobel Prize winner Elias Canetti as well as of less well-known figures. Collectively these authors display a distinctly Austrian point of view: they are the literary voice of modern-day Austria, a country whose cultural and artistic achievements are often too casually subsumed under the more general "German" rubric. The authors and their works clearly demonstrate that Austria has made and continues to make a unique contribution to modern German-language literature and to world literature that is greatly disproportionate to its modest size and population. The essays in this volume have been written by experts in the field of Austrian cultural and literary studies. With but one exception, the works they present are readily available in English translation. The essays reveal a variety of interpretative perspectives but all share the common goal of explicating a single literary text for a diverse readership interested in the modern literary scene.

For decades postwar Austrian literature has been measured against and moulded into a series of generic categories and grand cultural narratives, from nostalgic ‘restoration’ literature of the 1950s through the socially critical ‘anti-Heimat’ novel to recent literary reckonings with Austria’s Nazi past. Peering through the lens of film adaptation, this book rattles the generic shackles imposed by literary history and provides an entirely new critical perspective on Austrian literature. Its original methodological approach challenges the primacy of written sources in existing scholarship and uses the distortions generated by the shift in medium as a productive starting point for literary analysis. Five case studies approach canonical texts in post-war Austrian literature by Gerhard Fritsch, Franz Innerhofer, Gerhard Roth, Elfriede Jelinek, and Robert Schindel, through close readings of their cinematic adaptations, concentrating on key areas of narratological concern: plot, narrative perspective, authorship, and post-modern ontologies. Setting the texts within the historical, cultural and political discourses that define the ‘Alpine Republic’, this study investigates fundamental aspects of Austrian national identity, such as its Habsburg and National Socialist legacies.

This series of essays attempts to revise the widespread view of Austria as the "first victim of Hitler" and thus place the events of the 1930s and the Anschluss of March 11, 1938 into a more accurate perspective. The articles fall into three groups: those dealing with events leading up to the Anschluss, those concerned with the Anschluss directly, and those presenting the retrospective views of contemporary authors toward the Anschluss. The presentations make clear how the Nazi takeover was prepared and how the political events of the 1930s and the Anschluss still influence contemporary Austrian society adversely.

An overview of the Austria's recent history written for the general reader and the student.