Blicke aus Mitteleuropa: Zu neueren Texten von Christoph Ransmayr und Martin Pollack

This article analyzes the ways of constructing Central European identity in the essays and reports of Christoph Ransmayr and Martin Pollack, starting from the early texts of the democratic transformation period through up until the most recent publications. The Central Europe of Ransmayr and Pollack is not a utopia of the past Habsburg Empire, nor is it a political construction from the countries of the former Eastern Bloc; rather it is a socio-historically shaped space of the experiences of the two totalitarianisms and the two forms of terror: those of the Nazi and the Soviet regimes. The specific perspective of the authors’ recent texts (Kontaminierte Landschaften, Atlas eines ängstlichen Mannes, and most of all Der Wolfsjäger) can be described as “an emancipatory consciousness of being different.” Pollack and Ransmayr share this perspective with other Central-European researchers and writers (including Karl Schlögel, Timothy Snyder, Andrzej Stasiuk, Jurij Andruchowicz, Jachym Topol, and György Konrád), but the extraordinary position of Austria with respect to both the crimes of the Third Reich and the Soviet repressive measures makes the Austrian notion of a “Central-European separate path,” of crucial importance.