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  • Nostalgia after Nazism: History, Home, and Affect in German and Austrian Literature and Film
  • Christopher J. Wickham
Nostalgia after Nazism: History, Home, and Affect in German and Austrian Literature and Film. By Heidi Schlipphacke. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2010. 309 pages + 10 b /w images. $65.00.

In keeping with the trend in culture studies that directs attention to the history of feeling, this study scrutinizes affect and its role in creative nostalgia. The focus is on the peculiar conditions that obtain in postwar Germany and Austria (considered here as a single cultural site), specifically the impossibility of activating the positive emotional components typically inherent in nostalgia. In other words, how do the writers and filmmakers investigated in this book do nostalgia without being nostalgic? The horrors of the Holocaust preclude a longing for return to a lost home or a past within this space, so is there room for anything other than total rejection as the strategy for approaching, overcoming, or mastering that past? Schlipphacke’s analysis of the expression of this dilemma in selected works of Ingeborg Bachmann, Elfriede Jelinek, Tom Tykwer, Robert Menasse, and Birgit Vanderbeke is subtle and ingenious.

A chapter is devoted to each of these authors /filmmakers, so that each section of the book comprises an independent study in its own right. Nevertheless, the thematic links between the chapters emerge clearly, and comparisons among the artists give the study the necessary unity. Indeed the sequencing of the chapters tracks a progression in the aesthetic development from one author to the next. Schlipphacke has formulated appropriate labels for the characteristic aesthetic approaches to nostalgia that she identifies in the works of the authors examined. Thus, Bachmann’s strategy of introducing into her Franza fragment the intertextual father-figure Percival Glyde from Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White exemplifies her use of “displaced nostalgia,” whereby some positive attributes are allowed to inhabit the otherwise fascist family structure. “Glyde reintroduces the emotion of nostalgia into Bachmann’s text. He represents the single alternative to oppressive male figures in the novel” (50). In the case of Jelinek, the descriptor is “performative entrapment,” which signifies the writer’s compulsive repetition (another key phrase) of Austria’s ineluctable national catenation to fascism and the Holocaust and the obstruction this presents for nostalgic emotion and integration [End Page 462] into global discourse and European unity (33). This obstruction informs Schlipphacke’s master narrative of the aporia in which Germany and Austria find themselves: as other nations and cultural communities have advanced in their theoretical discourse on, for instance, colonialism and postmodernism, German and Austrian intellectuals have been trapped in a loop because their particular perspective must always include an explicit or implicit accounting of the fascist past. Their contributions must therefore remain, in a sense, provincial positions in globalized debate.

The chapter on Tykwer foregrounds the shared elements of the filmmaker’s œuvre, especially his self-referentiality and characteristic concluding tableaux. Here, according to Schlipphacke, we find a fantasy of escape from the confines of the past that induces an ecstatic sense of openness. At the same time it retains a sense of longing that is simultaneously familiar and alienated (174). According to this analysis, Tykwer avoids charges of rejecting nation and denying history by holding on to the transitional moment of escape, but without determining the alternative and new. The spatio-temporal coordinates of his escape fantasies are “no longer” and “not yet.”

The concluding chapters, on Menasse and Vanderbeke, are short by comparison, but nevertheless identify two further steps in the progression of affective rehabilitation with respect to home and nostalgia. Menasse’s contribution is to introduce a geographical and cultural alternative into his narratives, namely Brazil. This enables him to develop what Schlipphacke calls a “transnational nostalgia” that breaks the compulsive entrapment cycle of Jelinek (179). Menasse’s Trilogie der Entgeisterung utilizes both postwar Vienna and contemporary São Paolo and is concerned with “the cultural translation of fascism and the Nazi family and with the non-linearity of time and the shrinking nature of global space” (179). Thus the bonds of social, temporal / historical, and geographic constraint that obstruct German-Austrian forward motion...

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