Contemporary Jewish Writing in Europe: A Guide
264
Contemporary Jewish Writing in Europe: A Guide
264Hardcover
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253348753 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 12/05/2007 |
| Series: | Jewish Literature and Culture |
| Pages: | 264 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x (d) |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Contemporary Jewish Writing in Europe
A Guide
By Vivian Liska, Thomas Nolden
Indiana University Press
Copyright © 2008 Indiana University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-34875-3
CHAPTER 1
VIVIAN LISKA
Secret Affinities: Contemporary Jewish Writing in Austria
Topography
In the heart of Vienna, slightly off the city center, lies the Judenplatz, an old square lined with baroque facades, restaurants, cafés, and small shops. A 1996 decision to erect a memorial for the 65,000 Austrian Jews murdered by the National Socialists led to the square's renovation, revealing a many-layered architectural palimpsest of Austrian Jewish history and culture. Important discoveries included the foundations of a synagogue where hundreds of Jews were burned in a pogrom on March 12, 1421 — the same day that Nazi troops would enter Vienna 517 years later. A sixteenth-century Latin inscription on a plaque states that the "Hebrew dogs" deserved their fate. On an adjacent facade a sumptuous golden emblem of the imperial monarchy decorates what is now the Verfassungsgerichtshof, the republic's courthouse of the constitution. House no. 244, in which Mozart composed Così fan tutte, testifies to the image of Vienna as city of music and festive living. Located off the center of the square, a statue dating from the twenties that was relocated to the Judenplatz in the late sixties depicts a larger-than-life Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, the quintessential Enlightenment dramatist, who preached religious tolerance and universal equality. On the opposite side of the square a small museum features a multimedia presentation of the life of Vienna's Jews in the Middle Ages, as well as an interactive database archiving the Nazi extermination of Austrian Jews. The same building houses a renovated synagogue and an Orthodox Zionist youth organization. The square's most recent and prominent addition is Rachel Whiteread's monument commemorating Austrian Jews exterminated by the National Socialists. This "Nameless Library," as the monument is called, consists of a concrete block depicting on its surface shelves of books with their spines facing inside and a permanently locked double door enclosing an empty area that remains forever inaccessible. As the American art critic Robert Storr has stated, this void at the core of the memorial represents the "hollow at the city's heart" (quoted in Young 1999).
The Judenplatz can, in many ways, be regarded as a symbolic topography of the historical, political, and cultural framework for a reading of contemporary Austrian Jewish literature. The square evokes five centuries of repeated persecution and a state and church–sanctioned anti-Semitism that led up to the near extinction of Austria's Jewish population under National Socialist rule. The artistically mediocre Lessing statue is a reminder of the interwar period known as "red Vienna" and of the late sixties, when leftist movements feebly attempted to revive a philosophical and political Enlightenment that never really gained a foothold in this predominantly Roman Catholic country. The incongruity of the monarchist emblem on the facade of the constitutional court building can be read as an architectural embodiment of the lip service that the postwar republic paid to democratic values even as it kept alive various practices and attitudes of its absolutist past. The memorial by the British artist Rachel Whiteread, commissioned by the Viennese municipality, testifies to the belated public acknowledgment of Austrian participation in the Holocaust, a guilt not officially voiced before the "Waldheim affair" in 1986, while the renovated synagogue points to the precarious revival of Jewish life in postwar Vienna. Finally, the square's urban setting and its typically Viennese restaurants and cafés embody the cosmopolitan atmosphere of the capital, with its many semiprivate spaces, where, since the mid nineteenth century, Jewish and non-Jewish artists and intellectuals mingled and sustained the city's often impressive cultural life.
That a monument commemorating the Holocaust was unveiled in the year 2000 points to the fact that it took fifty-five years for Austria to acknowledge its active involvement in the National Socialist murder of Jews. Many of its residents, especially those living on property confiscated from Jews, opposed the memorial and were supported in their resistance by Jörg Haider, the leader of the extreme right party. Significantly, many members of the small Viennese Jewish community were also against the memorial because they believed it would immortalize a shameful, humiliating past that should best be forgotten. This common struggle against Whiteread's monument points to another theme repeatedly invoked in the works of Austrian Jewish writers, namely, the effort by both Jewish survivors and non-Jews to maintain the blanket of silence in place since the end of the war. The perpetrators and survivors obviously had different reasons for wanting to preserve this silence, yet the unacknowledged guilt of the former and the shame of the latter joined hands in consolidating the specifically Austrian "Opferlüge," the lie that Austria was Hitler's first victim rather than a partner in the National Socialist vendetta against the Jews. Finally, fears of anti-Semitic vandalism, expressed in the debates preceding the erection of the monument and supported by repeated disfigurements of Jewish-related buildings in Vienna, correspond to another topic raised by the younger generation of Austria's Jewish writers, namely, a sense of lingering hostility against Jews among the general population of Vienna. The electoral success in 1999 of the extreme right party, which led to its participation in the coalition government with conservatives, increased those fears, prompting many Jewish intellectuals — among them most of the Vienna's "second generation" of authors — to manifest their concerns in essays, interviews and, to a lesser extent, in their artistic and literary works (Charim and Rabinovici 2000; Menasse 2000).
Just as the Holocaust memorial occupies the center of the square, living traces of the Holocaust occupy a central position in contemporary Austrian Jewish literature. This parallel goes beyond thematic issues. One of the more significant aspects of the Judenplatz is its juxtaposition of different forms of cultural memory. The archeological site, museum, synagogue, multimedia installation, figurative statue, conceptual memorial, and — beyond these actual media — the interaction between the square's loaded meanings and the quotidian, urban environment in which they are embedded can all be read as metaphors for different modes of relating to Jewish history, tradition, and culture. Reflections on these modes and their implications for literature permeate the work of such major Austrian Jewish authors as Robert Schindel, Robert Menasse, and Doron Rabinovici, but also, to a lesser extent, that of Waltrud Mitgutsch, Peter Stephan Jungk, Elfriede Jelinek, Ruth Beckermann, and Vladimir Vertlib. Excavating the past, storing archival evidence, communicating past experiences, mimetically representing lives and stories and, most of all, creating a monument to the memory of the dead are concerns in terms of — and often against — which these writers repeatedly formulate their own poetics and, more generally, their understanding of the possibilities available for literature in this context.
Significantly, the most artistically intentional and also the most enigmatic medium referred to in the constellation of the Judenplatz is the shape and name of the memorial itself. Rachel Whiteread's choice of the closed library and its shelves suggests a core that cannot be entered and evokes the necessarily mediated and indirect nature of remembrance from a contemporary perspective. With its cut pages facing outside, the memorial's inverted books suggest a repository of stored knowledge or a collection of narrated experiences of the past. At the same time, they make room for the projection of new stories onto them, stories that will inevitably inscribe themselves in the interstices and against the background of the old ones. As they create such stories, Austrian Jewish authors of the second generation search for an approach that Robert Schindel, in his novel Gebürtig (Born-Where), calls "a committed but not devouring relationship [to the past]" (1995, 243). Their works intimate that neither empathy with the suffering of the parents nor hatred of the perpetrators should determine the present to the point of de-legitimizing its weight and importance. Most of these works insist that it is only by bringing the present into the picture or, rather, into the writing of the past that a true commemoration of the Holocaust by the generation of the survivors' children can take place.
Contemporary Austrian Jewish authors share a focus on the recent historical trauma with other European Jewish writers — especially German Jewish writers — belonging to the same generation. In both Austria and Germany many young Jewish intellectuals and artists turned to their origins, identity, and tradition after becoming disillusioned by the various leftist movements of the eighties. In both countries the experience of previous generations and the impact of the Holocaust made any direct access to the Jewish tradition impossible. Yet the second generation of Austrian Jews rarely displays its Jewishness as straightforwardly and uncompromisingly as Jews in other countries. As several critics have noted, recent Austrian Jewish literature is characterized by an unusual complexity and indeterminacy. In her introduction to the anthology Jewish Voices, German Words, Elena Lappin, sister of the German Jewish writer Maxim Biller, remarks that "Austrian Jews are not as explicitly ('antagonistically') Jewish as German Jews" and supports her statement with a reference to Robert Menasse, in whose work she finds a "subdued presentation of Jewish topics" (1994, 15). In his groundbreaking study of contemporary Jewish literature entitled Junge jüdische Literatur (Young Jewish Literature), Thomas Nolden discusses Robert Schindel — in contradistinction to Biller — as the primary example of the "aesthetics of mediation" and the indirect treatment of the past in works by authors of the second generation (1995, 91–94). In a similar spirit, Andreas B. Kilcher ends his essay comparing Biller and Rabinovici with the remark that "while Biller's exterritoriality is based on a neatly defined Jewish otherness, Rabinovici builds his marginality on a ruptured, wounded and precarious Jewish identity, whose cultural position is precisely not clearly definable" (2002, 146).
To a great extent, these authors' approaches to Jewish issues typically reflect the specificity of Austria's historical, cultural, and literary context and manifest themselves in thematic as well as formal compositional and stylistic aspects of their work. Their indirect and non-antagonistic attitude expresses itself most concretely in the works' insistence on the need to confront the past through, rather than against, an affirmation of the present. In the same spirit, these works embrace Jewish concerns while avoiding a closed and unified concept of Jewish identity and encourage an awareness of the Austrian Jews' burdened yet fruitful interaction with the country's non-Jewish environment. These topics find their literary corollary in a heterogeneous and radically non-transcendental poetics that invokes the Jewish tradition as a lively, life-affirming attitude toward everyday human existence.
Confronting the Past: "A committed but not devouring relationship"
One reason that Austrian Jewish authors are less antagonistically "Jewish" than, say, many German Jewish authors lies in the different ways that Germany and Austria dealt with the Holocaust during the postwar years. While Germany — especially following the student revolts of the late sixties — practiced an overt if often problematic "Vergangenheitsbewältigung" (mastering of the past), both Jews and non-Jews in Austria hushed up the past for a longer time. It was not until 1986 — when it was revealed that Kurt Waldheim, the former UN secretary-general, had covered up his activities during World War II, with Austrians reacting to the international outcry by electing him president — that Austria's role in Nazi war crimes was openly discussed. The long silence allowed the unacknowledged guilt of the perpetrators and the repressed trauma of the survivors to linger and, according to many writers, to proliferate in the form of unconscious ressentiments and pathological neuroses.
Consequently Austrian literature of the second generation often figures the past as a spectre, ghost, or phantom that links the guilt of the perpetrators to the shame of the survivors. As early as 1946 Ilse Aichinger, addressing the Austrian population in her famous essay "Aufruf zum Misstrauen" (A Summons to Mistrust, 1999), warned of the hidden monster lurking in the innermost recesses of each individual. Similarly, Elfriede Jelinek's novel Die Kinder der Toten (Children of the Dead, 2000) features "Untote," souls that cannot find rest and embody a past that has never been confronted. In the afterword to Born-Where, the English translation of Gebürtig, Michael Roloff calls Schindel's book a "generational novel of ghosts" (1995, 288). In the epilogue to Papirnik, Doron Rabinovici's collection of short stories, the survivor Lola Varga collects accounts of the past as if they were pieces of a "memory puzzle": "She conjures up the names in us, the cities and countries, the streets and pathways, the places of being and the sites of death, the spots of murder and the hiding-places of survival" (1994, 125). It is noteworthy that it is "in us" that she lets these names appear; clearly here, too, the work of memory consists in letting the past emerge from an inner hiding place. However, Rabinovici suggests that this work, once made public, is in danger of being recuperated and instrumentalized. Lola Varga is ultimately celebrated for being a survivor and is invited to give public lectures as a guest of honor. She is in the subject of press conferences, municipal officials give speeches praising her memoirs, and yet, as the last sentence of the epilogue intimates, there is no substance behind the show: no one wants to know what actually happened.
Mullemann, the central figure in Rabinovici's novel Suche nach M. (The Search for M, 1997), is literally a phantom who haunts the city of Vienna. Wrapped in bandages that both protect and hide a mysterious skin disease symbolizing the wounds of the past, the phantom compulsively adopts and thereby exposes the guilt that is woven into the very fabric of his environment. This phantom turns out to be a disguise worn by Dani Morgenthau, the son of survivors who kept silent about the past. Dani, a paradigmatic representative of the "second generation," is described as "a clump of pains made of numerous deaths and nothing more than a bundle of commemoration" (2000, 76), whose self risks disappearing under the stifling effect of his parents' wounds, which have inscribed themselves into his skin. Rabinovici insists that it is the task of the second generation to uncover the hidden past, yet he simultaneously warns that an exclusive and obsessive concern with this past may turn into a neurosis compounded of guilt and revenge: "The search for the culprit turned into an addiction" (31). Mullemann's obsession increases as he is hunted down by those who consider him a threat to the status quo. While some members of the current generation of non-Jewish Austrians admit that the effects of his presence in the city could benefit all, the grandfathers who were implicated in the crimes want to do away with the unsettling revenant. Rabinovici describes these effects by toying with the semantic field of the phantom's bandages:
Fathers muttered about the "bandage creature" living off the crimes of others and showing up everywhere in the country. He planted his traps and entangled everyone in his plans. It was not merely a matter of a phantom criminal, but of the web of politics, the entanglements of high finance, the embroilment of parliament that had steered and restrained the people for decades. ... But a few grandfathers warned that if all that should be brought out into the open there would be terrible consequences. If these things began to unwind, the very bindings holding the community together would dissolve. (125)
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Contemporary Jewish Writing in Europe by Vivian Liska, Thomas Nolden. Copyright © 2008 Indiana University Press. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
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Table of Contents
ContentsForeword by Alvin H. RosenfeldAcknowledgmentsIntroductionThomas Nolden and Vivian Liska1. Secret Affinities: Contemporary Jewish Writing in AustriaVivian Liska2. Writing against Reconciliation: Contemporary Jewish Writing in GermanyStephan Braese3. Remembering or Inventing the Past: Second-Generation Jewish Writers in the NetherlandsElrud Ibsch4. Bonds with a Vanished Past: Contemporary Jewish Writing in ScandinaviaEva Ekselius5. Imagined Communities: Contemporary Jewish Writing in Great BritainBryan Cheyette6. A la recherche du Judaïsme perdu: Contemporary Jewish Writing in FranceThomas Nolden7. Ital'Yah Letteraria: Contemporary Jewish Writing in ItalyChristoph Miething8. Writing along Borders: Contemporary Jewish Writing in HungaryPéter Varga with Thomas Nolden9. Making Up for Lost Time: Contemporary Jewish Writing in PolandMonika Adamczyk-Garbowska10. De-Centered Writing: Aspects of Contemporary Jewish Writing in RussiaRainer Grübel and Vladimir NovikovList of ContributorsIndexWhat People are Saying About This
". . . A remarkable collection of intelligent, clearly written, and extraordinarily useful essays. . . . a valuable resource for all of us in the field."