Zwischen Aufbegehren und Anpassung: Poetische Figurationen von Generationen und Generationserfahrungen in der österreichischen Literatur ed. by Joanna Drynda (review)

The last decade has witnessed a proliferation of studies that examine the relevance of generation as an analytical category and a heuristic device in German literary and cultural studies. Predominantly employed in the social sciences in the twentieth century, especially in sociology and history, it figures more and more prominently in contemporary literary and culture studies to explain and analyze the succession of generations and the production of art. Karl Mannheim’s 1928 essay “Das Problem der Generationen,” with its thesis that there exists a generational connection between biological and sociohistorical factors, continues to hold canonical status and informs the theory and methodologies underlying contemporary discussions of generation.

Mannheim’s theory is also the point of departure for Joanna Drynda’s 2012 volume Zwischen Aufbegehren und Anpassung. What distinguishes Drynda’s compendium from other recent studies of generation as an analytical category (for example, Ulrike Jureit and Michael Wildt’s Generationen: Zur Relevanz eines wissenschaftlichen Grundbegriffs(2005) and Björn Bohnenkamp, Till Manning, and Eva-Maria Silies’ Neue Perspektiven auf ein kulturelles Deutungsmuster(2009)) is its focus on the dialectic dialectical tension between the generational adaptation of literary aesthetic traditions and innovation very specifically in the specific Austrian context.

In her useful introduction, Joanna Drynda outlines how the anthology grew out of the annual conference of the Österreichische Gesellschaft für Germanistik in 2008 in Klagenfurt to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the 1968 student movements. The first essay by Clemens Ruthner raises a number of theoretical questions about the definition and utility of the concept of generation as a supplement to more traditional modes of understanding and categorizing literary and cultural developments. The questions that he poses inform to varying degrees the ensuing literary analyses of texts from the turn-of-the-century Habsburg through the present day: To what extent does national identity relate to generation as a category? In other words, how useful is it to differentiate between specifically Austrian as opposed to German modes of defining generation as an analytical category? The twenty-five essays in the volume that follow are organized chronologically according to the date of publication of specific literary texts as they grapple with the questions above.

The first three essays focus on literary production from the Wiener Moderne through the early decades of the twentieth century. Lucjan Puchalski, for instance, emphasizes how Hermann Bahr as representative of the Wiener Moderne privileges youth, generational renewal, and change, a notion, however, that he grounds in an aesthetic understanding that hearkens back to the Sturm und Drang writers. Katarzyna Jastal and Maria Klanska offer engaging contributions about Jewish-Austrian literary figures and publications on the outskirts of the dissolved Habsburg Empire and their publications during the cultural transition period between the two world wars in which they emphasize the commonalities with their Viennese compeers in privileging youth as the generators of innovative, dynamic energies.

The remaining twenty-two articles explore literary responses to major Austrian historical events of the twentieth century: World War II, the student movement of the late 1960s, and, finally, the fall of the Iron Curtain and German reunification. In this context, the category of generation is examined in relation to national identity, that is to say Austrian identity. Austrian writers of the postwar era certainly share a common National Socialist history, and the trauma of war and defeat with their (West) German counterparts and an emancipatory student movement took hold in Austria in the 1960s and 1970s as well. The articles examine the extent to which Austrian writers processed the experience of these extraordinary historical events and articulated a distinctive generational consciousness that contrasts with their German counterparts. In noteworthy articles, Günther Stocker and Sławomir Piontek revaluate both marginalized and well-known Austrian writers in the context of a critical yet undervalued Austrian postwar, even Heimkehrer, literature, including Karl Bednarik, Reinhard Federmann...