Settings and Sets: Landscapes and Cityscapes in Austrian Literature
Session Coordinator: Geoffrey C. Howes
Dept. of German, Russian and East Asian Languages
Bowling Green State University
Bowling Green, OH 43403-0219
ghowes@bgnet.bgsu.edu

Austrian Spaces in the Prague of Rilke, Kafka, and Hasek

In Prague in 2004, a traveler can find many memorials to Hasek and Kafka. Inspired by these markers, the traveler may wish to visit the birthplace of another famous Prague author, Rainer Maria Rilke, only to discover that nothing remains of the building, and no official markers identify the site.

Why this lack of attention to Rilke in Prague? Certainly his fame as an exceptional "German" poet overshadows his experience as a citizen of Austria-Hungary as well as his particular identity as a German-speaking Bohemian who supported Czech nationalism. It cannot be simply that Rilke is not accorded the same recognition as Hasek because he wrote in German, for, although Kafka wrote exclusively in German, he seems to have been posthumously rehabilitated as Czech.

The space of Prague is not as innocent as it appears. Social theorists from Lefebvre to Harvey tell us that the physical manifestation of a city represents underlying power structures. This paper compares Prague’s cultural landscape around 1900 with portrayals of Prague spaces (physical and social) in Rilke, Kafka, and Hasek, seeking the way “relations of power and discipline are inscribed into the apparently innocent spatiality of social life” (Ed Soja).

Jenifer Cushman
University of Minnesota, Morris
cushmajs@mrs.umn.edu

Naturbursch and Hirtenmadel. Nature and cultural identity in contemporary Austrian literature

In Austria, often equated with natural beauty, nature has become part of national identity. The image of the natural Austrian, set apart from the modern and postmodern life style, has served the country’s tourist industry, but is partly responsible for the national identity crisis of the last two decades of the 20 th century. After decades of tourism, being Austrian was no longer natural, but an act performed for visitors. Because natives were no longer natural, the reassuring capacity of nature, long a stabilizing mirror for Austria’s national identity, was gone.

The contemporary authors Norbert Gstrein (Einer, 1988) and Robert Menasse (Schubumkehr, 1995) exploit these epistemological instabilities to challenge accepted notions of what it means to be Austrian. Without nature as a stable frame of reference, oppositions such as nature vs. society or essence vs. performance collapse, because they can no longer be defined in terms of difference. Like nature, the narratives in both texts do not explain anything anymore. Both are centered on heinous crimes, but the perpetrators are victims too, making questions of innocence and guilt difficult, if not moot. Thus resolution never comes, leaving expectations dangling above an epistemological and human abyss.

Isolde Mueller
Saint Cloud State University
immueller@stcloudstate.edu

Austrian Landscapes and Cityscapes: Research Desiderata

Much attention has been paid to Vienna as a cityscape in Austrian literature, and to the Alpine countryside as a site of tourism and the intersection of beauty and brutality in premodern social structures. Still, there are many ways in which the questions of space and setting, so crucial for the Austrian cultural and political self-image, could be fruitfully investigated.

This paper will suggest some directions that the study of the representation of Austrian topographies could take, for example:

How do political divisions (Kronländer, Bundesländer, city districts, etc.) signify cultural and social distinctions?

How do regions or dialects function as the material of cultural expression?

What is the role of the difference between provinces and cities, center and periphery?

Vienna, Prague, and Budapest as Austro-Hungarian metropoles

How do border areas (Alpen-Adria, Hungary, Iron Curtain, Bavaria, Südtirol) represent cultural confrontations?

The Kulturlandschaft as romantic ideal and economic reality.

Locales as icons: Salzkammergut, Semmering, etc.

Buildings as icons: Narrenturm, Stefansdom, etc.

Landscapes as objects of nationalism.

Memorials and museums.

Rivers and lakes as places of the imagination.

Geography and biography.

Geographical movement as metaphor or literary movement

Contested spaces.

Official versus unofficial images, versions or designations of spaces.

Geoffrey C. Howes
Bowling Green State University
ghowes@bgnet.bgsu.edu