“Das Verborgene sichtbar machen”: Ethnische Minderheiten in der österreichischen Literatur der neunziger Jahre by Roxane Riegler (review)

Roxane Riegler’s study of autobiographical and literary texts that narrate contemporary minority experiences in Austria during the 1990s belongs to a generation of scholarship that attempts to acknowledge multiple traditions of knowledge by decentering the majority gaze. Riegler’s volume, published in the Austrian Culture Series edited by Margarethe Lamb-Faffelberger, provides engaged readings of Milo Dor’s Wien, Juli 1999, Ceija Stojka’s Wir leben im Verborgenen and Reisende auf dieser Welt, Barbara Frischmuth‘s Die Schrift des Freundes, and Vladimir Vertlib’s Zwischenstationen. The texts treat the experiences of immigrants to Austria from Eastern Europe, Turkey, the former Soviet Union, including (secular) Jews and indigenous ethnic minorities, such as the Roma. These literary texts serve as artistic documents of vastly differing minority experiences and address the tensions between minority and majority cultures in the decade when—as the Cold War came to an end and Austria, too, joined the European Union—national boundaries became porous.

The concept of otherness with regard to minority experiences is neither homogeneous nor fixed, as Riegler illustrates in her first chapter, an overview of the evolving status of immigrants and autochthonous minorities in post-war Austria. Riegler emphasizes the social and historical constructedness of difference, highlighting that it is always in flux. What connects the literary texts chosen for this study is not only the time frame in which they appeared. Each of these texts also exemplifies, in Riegler’s words, “versöhnliche Ansätze, die eine tiefe ethische Einstellung wiedergeben” (4). Riegler’s first of six chapters also traces the genesis of discrimination by investigating the political and economic as well as psychological mechanisms that have effected marginalization or exclusion in the Austrian context.

Riegler’s second chapter is devoted to a discussion of literary theoretical approaches that include an eclectic intercultural and transgenerational constellation of theorists. Martin Buber, Louise Rosenblatt, Homi Bhabha, Terry Eagleton, Satya Mohanty, and Japanese Systems guide her literary discussions. Key questions that she develops through her readings of these scholars have to do with the assumptions and prerequisites that allow for productive communication and dialogue between groups separated into sociopolitical hierarchies and the concrete and virtual spaces in which these dialogues can take place. Riegler argues that oppressive hierarchies may be dismantled and ethically equitable relations might be achieved through engaged and respectful dialogue in terms of Buber’s “das Zwischenmenschliche.” Riegler locates Buber’s “das Zwischenmenschliche” in the space ever reconstructed in the act of careful and engaged reading. Riegler interprets the literary texts not simply in terms of descriptive historical documents of four very different minority communities in Austria. These literary self-representations also reflect parallel realities that continually interact and negotiate multiple traditions of knowledge within the majority culture. Theorizing the impact of these knowledges on or within Austrian majority culture is, however, a task for further study.

Riegler’s readings of the five primary texts are motivated to a large extent by the biography of her four chosen authors, although she is careful to include a brief discussion of the reception of each work too. This allows her to explore the dialogue that has ensued between work and readership. Furthermore, beyond identifying central themes related to minority experience in Austria in the texts, Riegler bears in mind the impact of narrative strategies in her interpretations. Thus, Riegler understands Milo Dor’s Wien, Juli 1999 in metatextual terms as a text that privileges writing as an act of resistance. Fiction is the liminal space, a bridge between past and present, history and the future, and the doubled narrator, that is, the writer and his editor, reveals the repetition of oppression and marginalization of the other even as it emphasizes the productive tension between resignation and resistance. Riegler identifies Ceija Stojka’s two autobiographical texts as artistic documents of Romani suffering and culture rarely visible or audible in Austrian and European majority culture. Riegler reminds us that the writing...