Literatur aus Österreich—zum Problem der Norm und der Devianz: Wendelin Schmidt-Dengler in Memoriam by Rosa Marta Gómez Pato and Jaime Feijóo (review)

This remarkable volume reveals a fundamental change in criticism that has occurred since the postwar conversations about Austrian specificity. They were prompted by a perceived need to set the Austrian tradition apart from Germany—or vice versa. Ranging from Hans Weigel’s ironic assertion that nothing but their shared language distinguishes German and Austrian literature to the strategies of Basil, Eisenreich, and Ivask anchored in cultural and mentality history, the distinctness of Austrian literature was denied or confirmed in almost essentialist terms. This new collection published by Rosa Marta Gómez Pato and Jaime Feijóo is dedicated to the memory of prominent scholar and critic of Austrian literature, the late Wendelin Schmidt-Dengler, who presented a workshop at the University of Santiago de Compostela. Schmidt-Dengler introduced innovative approaches to Austrian Germanistik that helped to rehabilitate Austrian literature as a national literature in its own right while reintegrating it into world literature. Often labeled “provincial” in the 1950s and 1960s, major Austrian writers had nonetheless been routinely coopted by German literary history. In response, Austrian critics had opposed discussing “their” authors as part of the larger German-speaking context.

The articles are contributions by Spanish, German, and Austrian scholars and public intellectuals. They reflect international twenty-first-century literary and culture historical debates with a focus on the topics of norm and deviance. The latter are explored with regard to Austrian specificity as well as recurring topoi in Austrian writing represented by such authors as Bachmann, Aichinger, Spiel, Handke, Jandl, Schwaiger, and Jelinek. Foregoing the attempt of establishing an airtight theoretical framework for the ten articles, the theoretical considerations are embedded within the individual piece, allowing a spectrum of approaches to unfold. Ulrike Steinhäusl’s reflections are devoted to the current critical interest in topography, descriptions of landscape mediating historical content, and the discourse of nature as a product of civilization in Austrian prose, provocatively subtitled “Es gibt keine unschuldige Gegend” (11). Steinhäusl traces changing notions of Austrian specificity on the part of the political and cultural establishment of a given period, expressed, for example, in Austria’s national anthems. She contrasts those concepts with those of creative authors who critically review official versions of history in light of the events of the 1930s and 1940s. Rosa Marta Gómez Pato’s article on spaces and sites in Ilse Aichinger focuses on poetry. She shows that entirely without sentimentality, Aichinger reveals the interconnectedness of identity, language, history, and individually experienced reality. António Sousa Ribeiro discusses cartography in the context of the motif of travel in Holocaust literature, where the disappearance of (livable) space and the rule of absolute power become painfully manifest. Margarita Blanco Hölscher traces the legacy of regimes of terror in the literary landscapes of Carmen Laforet and Ingeborg Bachmann, whose careers evolved in the shadow of fascism and National Socialism, and Jaime Feijóo examines the complicated and ultimately unhappy love of exiled author Hilde Spiel for her native Austria as he raises the issue of Austria’s multiple faces. Ernst Jandl’s performative art is the topic taken up by Matthias Beilein and Jane Boatin, who address the issue of the often-disputed but still existing literary canon and explore the requirements for inclusion. Elisabeth Graf applies the concept of deviance to the protagonists of Peter Handke’s and Wim Wender’s Die Angst des Tormanns beim Elfmeter. Handke, central to twentieth-century Austrian literary history, is also the topic of Teresa Martins de Oliveira’s analysis of the author’s Don Juan, a literary figure emblematic of social deviance and configured by Handke in a manner deviating from the Don Juan tradition. The question of what traits place a literary work and its author in an outsider position is raised by Daniela...