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Reviewed by:
  • Unterwelten by Uwe Schütte
  • Anita McChesney
Uwe Schütte, Unterwelten. St. Pölten: Residenz Verlag, 2013. 221 pp.

Scholarly interest in Austrian writer Gerhard Roth has grown slowly but steadily over the past decade. Uwe Schütte’s Unterwelten enriches this scholarship with the first comprehensive look at the author and his work since the completion of the cycles Die Archive des Schweigens and Orkus in 2011. The cornerstone of Roth’s literary production, the fifteen volumes had been over thirty years in the making, and Schütte traces the biographical and literary developments that culminate in these texts. The study argues that Roth’s unorthodox approach to life and literature help shape his legacy as an author who travels [End Page 147] into the underworld of individual and collective unconsciousness, of Austrian history, and of European culture.

At the center of Unterwelten is Gerhard Roth himself. Accordingly, the four-part study begins with Roth’s biography followed by three sections that examine his literary oeuvre chronologically: “Das Frühwerk” (1972–1978), Die Archive des Schweigens (1980–1991), and Orkus (1995–2011). Also included are sixteen pages of photographs of Roth and a chronological table of the author’s life. These additions underscore connections between Roth’s experiences and work; they also provide readers a more intimate portrait of the author. The biography in Part I builds the foundation of Schütte’s book and establishes the themes and tone for the subsequent analyses. With a succinct overview of Roth’s life from his early childhood to the completion of Orkus, the section shows how those experiences drive his style and themes. Pivotal to later texts, for example, was Roth’s tense relationship with his father, whose refusal to disclose anything about himself led the author on a quest to uncover his parents’ past and their connection to National Socialism. Also crucial to Roth’s focus on the roots of National Socialism in Austria were experiences in a postwar society where he witnessed the traces left by that suffering and by the great secret engulfing the country’s past. The biographical overview of Roth’s life forms the first stage of a journey that, as Schütte states, will lead readers into the author’s literary underworld.

In Part II, short, poignant discussions of early, experimental texts from die autobiografie des albert einstein to Winterreise show how past and contemporaneous experiences inform the author’s themes and style. Roth’s early contact with sickness through his father’s work as doctor, his own medical studies, and interactions at the “House of Artists” at the psychiatric institution in Gugging, for example, inform characters through whom Roth tests the fluid boundaries between “normal” and “diseased” states of consciousness. More than two thirds of Unterwelten is devoted to analyzing Die Archive des Schweigens and Orkus. Part III traces Die Archive des Schweigens from its planning stages to its conclusion. This arc offers an insightful overview of the cycle as a journey into Austria’s past, while the individual text analyses show how the unique topics and approaches of each volume contribute to a broader pathological study of Austria. As Schütte suggests, the cycle represents a journey to uncover the hidden proclivity to repression, violence, and submission to authority throughout Austria that Roth considers paradigmatic [End Page 148] for fascist thought patterns. Part IV reads Orkus as a continued investigation into the roots of National Socialism that broadens the scope from Austria to the world. The author’s international travels inform novels that attempt to uncover the anthropological roots of what Roth sees as a global propensity for violence. A unifying theme throughout Schütte’s study of Gerhard Roth is the notion of a “Widerspruch,” which he sees as the center of the author’s life and works. From his physical appearance and the contrast between his imposing height and his warm, shy personality to the contrast between author’s simple, bourgeois lifestyle and the pointed challenges to the establishment in his work, Roth epitomizes contradictions. Dichotomies recur in Roth’s works, stylistically in the tension between different media and genres and thematically in contrasts between the official versions...

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