Through Romanticism’s Looking Glass: Nostalgia, Taboos, and Cinematic Exorcisms in Josef Winkler’s The Cinemascreenwalker

Controversial Austrian writer Josef Winkler (born 1953) has continually criticized homophobic and xenophobic tendencies in Carinthia since the beginning of his writing in 1979. Informed by recent discussions of “Habsburg nostalgia” in contemporary Austrian culture, this study analyzes Josef Winkler’s literary road movie The Cinemascreenwalker (Focusfilm 2009) as a self-refl exive portrait of the artist. This investigation reveals that the writer’s cultural pessimism is deeply embedded in an awareness of Western cultural dominance influenced by Romantic creations of trademark and identity. At the same time, The Cinemascreenwalker negotiates its own immersion in commodified nostalgic attitudes through performative disruptions of spectatorial expectations, radicalizations of genre dictations, and aesthetic exorcisms of collective repressions. Winkler’s art experiment not only exposes oppressive social dynamics inherent in the perversion of Romantic idylls, it also mobilizes the Romantic trajectories in the context of their critical potentials.