Vergessene Stimmen, nationale Mythen: Literarische Beziehungen zwischen Österreich und Kanada ed. by Nicole Perry and Marc-Oliver Schuster (review)

Canada and Austria have more in common than one might immediately think. Both countries live in the shadow of more powerful neighbors and have throughout their history both found conflict and cooperation in these relationships. Additionally, Canada, as a nation of immigrants, has received settlers from around the world, and at various points in their history a large percentage of these migrants came either from Austria-Hungary or its successor states. The relationship between these two middle powers has received sporadic attention from researchers, but it is always pleasant to see further examinations of their relationship, so Nicole Perry and Marc-Oliver Schuster's recent text Vergessene Stimmen, nationale Mythen is a welcome addition to this scholarship.

The essays in this book are adapted from papers presented at a 2014 conference on Austro-Canadian literature at the University of Vienna, and the text is published as part of a series on Canada from the University of Innsbruck. The authors, whose work is included in this volume, are from institutions in Canada, Austria, and Germany and the book is bilingual, with some essays in German and others in English, collected with an introduction and author biographies in both languages. One text focuses on Monique Bosco, who immigrated to Quebec from Vienna in the first half of the twentieth century and who wrote in French, but this essay about her life is written in German. Another essay compares Peter Rosegger's Jakob der Letzte with the Quebec writer Ringuet's Trente arpents, arguing that there are important parallels between the Austrian Heimatroman and Quebec's roman de la terre.

One essay that particularly captured my attention is Joseph Eliot Magnet's "Myth, Law, Culture: A Canadian Perspective." This piece illustrates how different the Canadian and American founding myths are, especially those involving ethnicity and the formation of nation-states. He argues that the founders of the United States conceived of their country as a monoethnic place, even if it was not, and that Canada was created with two distinct ethnic identities in tandem. Magnet goes on to explain that this vision of Canada as biethnic was exclusionary and leftno room for another founding people, the indigenous groups who were in North America at the time of Europeans' arrival on the continent. I would take this argument even further. Not only was there not solidarity between French and English founders and a complete dismissal of the issues faced by Canada's aboriginal people, but there has been comparatively little acknowledgment of the role of allophone immigrants. In Canada, the term allophone is used to describe immigrants who are native speakers of neither English nor French. Most people are aware of the significance of allophone immigrants in contemporary Canada, but we must acknowledge the roles played by migrants whose first language was neither French nor English in the historical development of the country.

As for Austrian emigrants, they began arriving in Canada in large numbers around 1900. Approximately thirty-seven thousand Austrians came to Canada in this period when the country was Attempting to establish its legitimacy by expanding westward into the Prairies (see Frederick C. Engelmann, Manfred Prokop, and Franz A. J. Szabo, eds. A History of the Austrian Migration to Canada. McGill-Queens UP, 1996: 26). Another major wave of Austrian migration came after World War II when both Jews and Gentiles, displaced by the destruction of the war and the Holocaust, sought out new homes outside Europe. It is this period that the authors represented in Perry and Schuster's text are most interested in, and with good reason. A large percentage of Austrians who were interested in immigration to Canada were Jewish, and until the postwar period this was a legal and practical impossibility for most. Contrary to the country's contemporary image, Canada was not welcoming to Jewish immigrants until essentially forced to open its doors by British imperial officials...