Die vielsprachige Seele Kakaniens: Übersetzen und Dolmetschen in der Habsburgermonarchie 1848 bis 1918 by Michaela Wolf (review)

As the boundaries of Europe continuously change in political struggles for democracy, national sovereignty, and social justice, one question that repeatedly arises is the following: is there a model for the European Union from within? According to Michaela Wolf, the answer is a resounding yes. In Die vielsprachige Seele Kakaniens, she contends that the Habsburg Monarchy presents a timely sociopolitical “Experimentierstelle für die EU” (17). While much has been written about Kakanien and its multiculturalism in postcolonial terms, she argues that a translational paradigm, coupled with Pierre Bourdieu’s sociocultural conception of everyday life, offers a far more nuanced picture of that thick social fabric at local and translocal scales. There are other influential thinkers who guide Wolf’s thinking: Homi Bhabha, Hans Vermeer, and Moritz Csáky. Yet, Wolf’s book is a thoroughly innovative intervention in the latest study of the Habsburg Monarchy, a stunningly rich language- and textbased insight into “den hybriden Charakter der Monarchie” (371).

As the title of this book indicates, Wolf locates the multilingual subject at the heart of contemporary Austrian culture between Franz Josef I’s ascendancy to the throne in 1848 and the end of World War I in 1918. She is interested in documenting—often with Bourdieusian empirical data—the ubiquity of translational practices that make up modern Austrian society. Yet, Die vielsprachige Seele Kakaniens does not focus on personal struggles; instead, it teases out “die Kreuzungen, Doppeldeutungen und Bedeutungsverschiebungen,” which are characteristic of complex social relations during the Habsburg Monarchy (57). It illustrates why culture qualifies for a dense social network in which works of translation transcend geopolitical, linguistic, ethnic, religious, and economic boundaries. To highlight these multifaceted movements, Wolf examines, among others, government officials, court interpreters, soldiers, artisans, domestic workers, and apprentices. She explains that these multilingual subjects are daily practitioners of translation in the double sense of “Übersetzen und Dolmetschen” (103). They go back and forth between non-equivalent social fields to engage in “‘polykulturelle Kommunikation’” and this negotiation blurs commonly drawn boundaries between the various sectors of society (87). Wolf writes: “In diesem Raum dominieren Prozesse, die auf kontinuierlichen Austauschbewegungen quer durch alle sozialen Schichten beruhen, was diesen Prozessen auch in besonderem Maß eine Alltagsbezogenheit verleiht” (366). Thus the Habsburg Monarchy is incomprehensible without a careful examination of translation as a cultural, sociopolitical, and linguistic paradigm for daily activities.

The book is divided into ten chapters and each of them plays an important role in Wolf’s larger argument. She begins by clarifying for the reader that translation is not merely a vehicle for communication, but a work of transculturation. This thesis becomes clear when Wolf brings together a wide range of translational practices under particular historical circumstances. In each chapter, she shows with great precision how polycultural communication manifests itself in a variety of ways between diverse multilingual subjects. This remarkable coverage spanning from the working class to ministerial institution highlights the complexity of cultural politics in the Austrian Empire. It makes clear how languages, more than anything else, make up the commons in an increasingly nationalist and politically unstable multi-ethnic state.

Even a brief look at any of Wolf’s meticulously developed tables suffices to say that the politics of translation is a recurrent theme in the Habsburg Monarchy. For example, the overwhelming majority of military units was comprised of German-, Italian-, Serbo-Croatian-, Polish-, Czech-, and Slovene-speaking soldiers, but German speakers made up approximately 75% of the entire army. This meant that officers more likely than not had to communicate with each other in German and in one other language. Similar to the school system or the government, the military constituted a political action field where translation was institutionally framed. Wolf investigates examples of less formalized “habitualisiertes Übersetzen” as well (90).

What I find immensely valuable about Wolf’s well-researched translational topography is that it debunks universal or utopian imaginations of...