The Habsburg Legacy from a Postcolonial and Postimperial Perspective

In the discourse on the Habsburg Monarchy, two opposing attitudes prevail. Depending on one’s perspective, which can be nationally exclusive or nostalgic, the Monarchy is perceived either as a “peoples’ dungeon” (Völkerkerker) or “unity in multiplicity” (Einheit in der Vielheit). A group of researchers has recently invested much effort to overcome this discursive gap, by applying a theoretical paradigm called the Habsburg Postcolonial. This theoretical approach relies on Anglo-Saxon postcolonial studies and recent research into Central European cultural phenomena, and analyzes opposing cultural forces in the Danube Monarchy (a multinational state formation of questionable colonial importance), by focusing on: the intertwining of language, culture and politics; images of the self and others; dynamics between the center and periphery; and particularism and universalism. Unlike overseas colonialism, dichotomies such as that of center and periphery do not appear in pure forms in complex empires such as the Habsburg Monarchy, so there is a strong tendency among scholars to use postimperial theories when researching this area. This article is concluded with a short case study that shows how the same historic material—a story about medieval Hungarian nobleman Bánk—was transposed in a variety of (supra)national contexts in the turbulent nineteenth century

The Staging of History in Julia Franck's Novel "The Blind Side of the Heart"

In ihrem Roman "Die Mittagsfrau" (2007) sucht Julia Franck die Inszenierung einer schmerzlichen, allgemeinen historischen Vergangenheit mit der Last eines individuellen Traumas zu verknüpfen. Ihre Protagonisten sind verstörte, aus prekären familiären Verhältnissen stammende Menschen, die nach keinen politisch-ideologischen Überzeugungen handeln und trotzdem in die Zwickmühle von Politik und Ideologie geraten. Große, geschichtsbewegende Ereignisse kommen nur als Hintergrundgeschehen vor, im Vordergrund steht hingegen die Frage, wie Menschen im Alltag leben, was Francks Geschichtskonzeption in die Nähe der Mikrogeschichte Carlo Ginzburgs rückt.In her novel "The Blind Side of the Heart", published in 2007, Julia Franck establishes a link between a painful historical past and the burden of individual trauma. Her protagonists are distraught people with precarious family past who do not act according to their political or ideological beliefs, but nevertheless fall into the predicament of politics and ideology. While big historic events remain in the background, Franck focuses on the question how people live their everyday lives. Franck's concept of history is therefore closely affiliated with Carlo Ginzburg's notion of microhistory

Introduction. Representations of History in German Contemporary Literature of the 20th Century (III)

VorwortPrefac

Deutsche Sprache, kroatische Identität // German Language, Croatian Identity

Rezension zu: Daniel Baric: "Langue allemande, identité croate. Au fondement d’un particularisme culturel". Armand Colin, Paris 2013 //Review of: Daniel Baric: "Langue allemande, identité croate. Au fondement d’un particularisme culturel". Armand Colin, Paris 201

D\u27Annunzio\u27s “Fiume Exploit” Between Libertinism and Violence. On the Port of Love by Giovanni Comisso

The centuries-old territorial dispute over the status of the city of Rijeka/ Fiume reached a new and dangerous climax with D’Annunzio’s “Fiume exploit” (1919–1920); the adventurous action, meant as a militant response to the so-called mutilated victory in World War One, receives its historical importance particularly in regards to two contradictory phenomena: militant nationalist extremism whose different practices were accepted by then emerging right-wing radical movements on the one hand and, on the other hand, avant-garde art projects and new, unconventional lifestyles which were promoted and executed in Rijeka by many creative followers of the ‘soldier-poet’. The collection of short stories titled Il porte dell’amore (The Port of Love, 1924), written by Giovanni Comisso (1895–1969), one of D’Annunzio’s prominent adherents, stands out among contemporary literary representations of the ‘exploit’. The work features D’Annunzian Rijeka as a city of liberty and debauchery, neglecting most of the other important aspects of this historical event or referring to them indirectly, mostly through poetic images, sometimes also through grotesque humor. Dealing with subjects such as juvenile unconventionality, bravery and ferocity, Comisso’s stories focus on excessive sensuality as well as on emphatic loyalty to D’Annunzian ‘exploit’ and hence, of course, on the Italian imperial project

Literature in the Post-Imperial Key: Reflections on Post-1918 Austrian Literature

Changes wrought by the dissolution of Austria-Hungary reflected particulary forcefully on the status of Austrian Germans: their hopes in connection to the Anschluss with Germany soon evaporated and the until then dominant ethnic group of the great Central European empire found itself squeezed within the boundaries of a small state. Challenges facing the Republic founded on the ruins of the sunk Empire, their numerous political, social and economic repercussions had already in the immediate postimperial period marked a new Austrian culture and literature in manifold ways. The emphasis was often on the Habsburg Monarchy complex, whether to disparage its legacy in a satiric or ironic tone, or to represent it – in the face of the emerging obvously authoritarian systems of national states – as a kind of retrospective utopia. The Anschluss of 1938 and the Austrian collaboration in the crimes of the Nazi Germany in the Second Republic, a country of astounding economic prosperity and a high level of democracy, were tabooized for a long time. Only in the 1980s did Austrian society, now as a consolidated nation, manage to overcome its own national-socialist legacy, albeit some Austrian authors confronted even earlier this aspect of a more recent Austrian history; still, in the post-war period the dominant authors attempted to establish a continuity between the imperial Austria with the small Alpine republic, simultaneously bypassing the Austrian involvement in the crimes of the Third Reich. This is what Claudio Magris, pointing to the works of Austrian authors of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries termes „the Habsburg Myth“, a phenomenon which primarily – though not exclusively – manifested itself in the act of idealizing the Danube Monarchy. As an insight into the array of possibilities featured in this context, this essay uses the four paradigmatic works of Austrian literature, two each from the First and the Second Republic, the works whose high level of aesthetic relevance in many ways draws precisely on the overlapping of the performance of history, viewed principally from a critical or, rather, nostalgic perspective, with the presentation of cultural, political and social conditions at the time of their emergence: Die letzten Tage der Menschheit (The Last Days of Mankind, 1922) by Karl Krauss, a dramatic text offering the ruthless showdown with the K.u.K.-universe on the backdrop of the war apocalypse; Radetzkymarsch (The Radetzky March, 1932) by Joseph Roth, a novel which is considered the pattern for the positive retrospective connotation of the Danube Monarchy; Die Wasserfälle von Slunj (The Waterfalls of Slunj, 1963) by Heimit von Doderer, a novel representing the Austro-Hungarian world in a nostalgic vein, while the references to the Third Riech are completely sidestepped; and the drama Heldenplatz (Heroes Square, 1989) by Thomas Bernhard which is a radical critical break with the ambivalent Austrian relationship towards the national-socialist past and the Holocaust

Goethe’s Idea of Weltliteratur on the Occasion of the Anniversary of the “Journal of World’s Literature”

The idea of Weltliteratur, which Goethe formulated in the second half of the 1820s, was inspired not only by his encounter with other European and non-European literatures of different epochs, which Weimar Classic showed keen interest for all his life; it was in many ways spurred by his insight into an accelerated modernization of the literary and cultural machine of one hand, and, on the other hand, a desire for reconciliation among the European nations after protracted (Napoleonic) wars. This was about a particular literary concept in which Goethe strives to position literature within the modern, in the gap between the process of “internationalization” and “nationalization,” between its ever greater exposure to the globalizing trends and its ever stronger national differentiation in the face of the advanced processes of integration of the contemporary nations and their cultures. When coining the term, Goethe did not pursue a sustained approach, so that his primarily associative statements do not provide an argumentative ground whereby to fix the meaning of the concept of Weltliteratur. It is this openness of the concept that has generated the discussion about world literature which has gone on until today and has been creating new referential frameworks