Nostalagia After Nazism: History, Home, and Affect in German and Austrian Literature and Film by Heidi Schlipphacke (review)

In Nostalgia After Nazism Heidi Schlipphacke skillfully draws on postcolonial and postmodern theories in addition to recent work on nostalgia to frame her discussion of select works by the Austrian authors Ingeborg Bachmann, Elfriede Jelinek, and Robert Menasse, the German filmmaker Tom Tykwer, and the German writer Birgit Vanderbeke. Distinguishing between “Euro-American” postmodernisms and belated or displaced German-Austrian versions, Schlipphacke illustrates how these German and Austrian artists deploy postmodern techniques in a distinctive dialogue with their nation’s history and as a means of critiquing any desire to deny that history. The place or “nonplace” of nostalgia in their works also sets them apart from their European and American contemporaries. Since nostalgia has been seen as engendering forgetting, it might seem totally out of place in a literature that deals with the burden of a National Socialist past. However, Svetlana Boym’s “reflective nostalgia” offers Schlipphacke a useful interpretive tool. “As a reflective emotion” it “balances melancholy and mourning” (19) and preserves a sense of loss or longing, which disallows forgetting. Through what she sees as a dialectic of entrapment and escape, Schlipphacke shows how some of the artists find a way to introduce a productive nostalgia that is always shaped by the weight of the National Socialist past and its legacy.

As this review is for the Journal of Austrian Studies, I concentrate my remarks on Schlipphacke’s insightful interpretations of the three Austrian writers. In her nuanced readings, she explores how each writer formally as well as thematically conducts a dialogue with the past. She also shows how both Jelinek and Menasse are in a dialogue with Austria’s literary history. Moreover, Schlipphacke uncovers a progression in the work of the three writers from what she terms “displaced nostalgia” in Bachmann to a “performative entrapment” in Jelinek and “transnational nostalgia” in Menasse.

In her reading of Ingeborg Bachmann’s fragment Franza (1966) Schlipphacke pays particular attention to intertextual references to the Victorian detective novel The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins. She suggests that the textual irony adds a new dimension to the concepts of nostalgia and utopia that are explored in the text. While not denying Bachmann’s oversimplification of the victim/victimizer dichotomy, Schlipphacke explores how Bachmann’s allusions create moments of “displaced nostalgia.” The figure of Percival Glyde, a villain in the Victorian novel, appears as an idealized father figure for the narrator in Franza. Franza associates her memories of him with the immediate postwar years and with “moments of the magic of alterity and hope” (51). However, the intertextual reference to Glyde, a sadist in Collins’s novel, and her later reunion with Glyde, who doesn’t remember her, ironize the memories and the nostalgic gesture.

In the chapter on Jelinek, Schlipphacke uncovers an aesthetic in the writer’s work that precludes any space for nostalgia or affect. Stylistically, Jelinek repeatedly performs a type of entrapment “tied to history and to a fixation with erasing historical forgetting” (81) that suggests the inevitability of the return of Austria’s National Socialist past in some form. Schlipphacke also discusses the untranslatability of Jelinek’s works. Using Die Klavierspielerin (1983) as an example, she effectively argues that the difficulty of translating Jelinek’s syntax and language, her use of citation and neologisms, and the failure of some critics to understand or consider the cultural context have led to misreadings abroad. Seeing the novel as the product of a “disturbed” mind or “pornography,” American and British critics fail to see the implied critique of fascism. Schlipphacke also compares the novel to Michael Haneke’s film La Pianiste (2001). She points out how the filmmaker removes “the national and historical concerns” and endows the figures with a “level of interiority absent in the novel,” giving the personal relationship a depth not in the novel (119). Schlipphacke also refers to Jelinek’s indebtedness to Bachmann and illustrates how the roles in Bachmann...