The Art of Resistance: Cultural Protest against the Austrian Far Right in the Early Twenty-First Century by Allyson Fiddler (review)

Austria has undergone tremendous political changes from 1986 to the present, which transformed the once politically quiet and consensus driven post-war country to a fundamentally politically polarized nation, in which a significant part of the political resistance is conducted by means of cultural productions. Kurt Waldheim's election as president and the simultaneous rise of Jörg Haider and his Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ) in 1986 contributed both to Austria gradually shedding the founding myth of the Second Republic as the first victim of Hitler's aggression, but it also led to the rise of new right-wing populism. The formation of coalitions with the FPÖ and the Austrian People's Party (ÖVP) in 2000–2002 and 2002–2006 as well as 2017– 2019 led to a diverse range of cultural protests against the Austrian far right, which Allyson Fiddler—one of the leading experts on this topic—carefully examines in her book The Art of Resistance, focusing on the turn of the millennium and the ÖVP-FPÖ coalitions from 2000 to 2006.

The first chapter provides an overview of political developments from 1986 to 2000 as well as the cultural protests in those years, which furthermore provides readers with an overview of how Waldheim and Haider polarized the country. The second chapter, entitled "Performing Politics: On the Sounds, Symbols and Sites of Resistance," examines protests in the early 2000s from Christoph Schlingensief's "Ausländer raus!" shipping container and Paul Poet's 2002 documentary film about this project to a series of political musical performances. Very importantly, this chapter also emphasizes the enacting of everyday cultural resistance in Austria. In chapter 3, "Novel Responses: Protest in Prose," the author examines Ernst Molden's Doktor Paranoiski (2001), Erika Pluhar's Die Wahl (2003), Marlene Streeruwitz's novels and Walter Wippersberg's trilogy of political thrillers. Additionally, Fiddler examines a wide range of short stories by Paulus Hochgatterer, Eva Jancak, Dieter Schrage, El Awadalla, Luca Kilian Kräuter, Hoppelmann Karottnig, Richard Weihs, Brigitte Tauer, and many more, closing the chapter with a discussion of Gerhard Haderer and Leo Lukas's graphic novel Jörgi der Drachentöter (2000). The fourth chapter, "Projecting Protest: Resistance on Screen," deals with film, of which Ruth Beckermann's Homemad(e) (2001) and Peter Kern's 1. April 2021—Haider lebt stand out among several other shorter films. The fifth chapter, "Staging Resistance: Dramatic Themes and Interventions," focuses on plays by Elfriede Jelinek, Franzobel, Streeruwitz, and Robert Menasse and also shows how theater could be brought to the streets of Vienna. This book overall offers a rich selection of well-known and also more obscure artists and their cultural productions.

In her conclusion, the author argues that while Austria did not have a far-right government between 2006 and 2017, that does not mean that art did not have any reason to protest. This can be seen in Elfriede Jelinek's Schutzbefohlenen (2013), which deals with the so-called refugee crisis. Robert Schindel's novel Der Kalte (2013), his sequel to Gebürtig (1992) and Ruth Beckermann's film Waldheims Walzer (2018), as well as further episodes of Marlene Streeruwitz's So wird das Leben are mentioned, as well as Tony Glasberg's Land im Sumpf (2017), which is a fictionalized portrayal of what would happen if a neo-Nazi group took over the government. And Fiddler makes it clear that this topic is an ongoing work in progress for the artists who will continue to produce works of resistance, and there is no doubt that there will be other new artists who will become known in years to come to work on this issue.

This book is remarkable for closing an important gap in Austrian Studies scholarship on contemporary politics and specifically the cultural responses and resistance to far-right wing governments in Austria. The political situation in a country...