Carnivalism in Postwar Austrian- and German-Jewish Literature – Edgar Hilsenrath, Irene Dische, and Doron Rabinovici

Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of carnivalism has been a useful tool for understanding medieval and renaissance literature, in particular for locating subversive textual elements undermining traditional social hierarchies (church and state). In addition, critics have noted carnivalesque characteristics such as role reversal and grotesque realism in twentieth century narratives by authors like Angela Carter. Susan Vice describes how Carter's 1986 short story the "Kitchen Child" satirizes societal conventions by portraying the servants of an English country house as much more refined than their masters (Introducing Bakhtin 189). This article demonstrates how carnivalism, as outlined by Bakhtin in his two critical studies Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics (1963) and Rabelais and his World (1965), has become an important aesthetic model in post-Shoah German- and Austrian-Jewish literature. In order to show the widespread nature of carnivalism, this analysis examines a disparate group of writers who differ in terms of age, nationality, and gender. It focusses on works by the Holocaust sur-vivor Edgar Hilsenrath (Der Nazi und der Friseur, 1977), the Austrian Doron Rabinovici (Suche nach M, 1997), and the German-American Irene Dische ("Fromme Lügen," 1989, and "Eine Jüdin fur Charles Allen," 1989) – the latter an American-born author considered here, as in other studies, as a German-Jewish writer because most of her stories, originally in English, are translated and published in Germany and examine issues central to the concerns of the Jewish community in that country. It shows how each of these three writers uses the central elements of carnivalism – including masquerade, role reversal, and grotesque realism – both as a means of expressing the incomprehensible nature of twentieth-century chaos and atrocities and as a vehicle for social criticism. With regard to the latter point, it focusses on how postwar Austrian- and German-Jewish writers have used carnivalism to sharpen their critical perspective on the Holocaust, to focus on the guilty past of German and Austrian society, and to highlight anti-Semitism and the Jewish identity crisis.

Bakhtin describes the nature of medieval and renaissance carnival life as "free, full of ambivalent laughter, blasphemy, the profanation of all that was holy, disparagement and obscenity, and familiar contact with everyone and everything" (Dostoevesky 130). As this quote indicates, the carnival was a celebration with two major goals. The first was to establish an atmosphere of carnivalistic mésalliances in which people, thoughts, and values would no longer be divided or distanced and hierarchies would disappear, largely because of the use of masquerade (Dostoevesky 123). The second was to criticize all that was held to be authoritative or holy.

In the German- and Austrian-Jewish context one can apply the idea of car-nivalistic mésalliances and, as this analysis also shows, the antiauthoritarian critical function of the carnivalesque to the relationship between Jews and non-Jews. Anti-Semitism has long been an obstacle to Jewish integration or mésalliances in the diaspora and to overcoming the notion of Jewish German/Austrian and non-Jewish German/Austrian as binary opposites. Since the Holocaust, of course, any Jewish sense of belonging to German or Austrian society has been even more difficult, for some impossible. The critic Dan Diner describes postwar German- and Austrian-Jewish/non-Jewish relations as a negative symbiosis (9). The term refers to the division between Jews and non-Jews in contemporary Austria and Germany, whereby both sides share the common history of the Holocaust, but view it from radically different perspectives. With respect to post-Shoah literature the carnivalistic mésalliances would refer to the way in which the narrative strategies associated with carnivalism explore the feasability of dialogue between the two sides in this opposing mutuality.

On the subject of the Holocaust one might wonder how carnivalism, a trope associated with laughter and festivity, can be brought to bear on a horrific cata-strophe like the Shoah and its aftermath. The answer becomes clearer when one considers the difficulties faced by postwar writers in developing an appropriate literary aesthetic that would capture what appears to be incomprehensible and indescribable, namely the mass...