Recontextualizing Medieval Heritage and Identity in Contemporary Austria by Alexandra Sterling-Hellenbrand

While many recent publications in the area of medievalism studies focus on global places, spaces, and identities, Alexandra Sterling-Hellenbrand’s monograph, like Simon John’s Medievalism in Nineteenth-Century Belgium and Matthias Berger’s National Medievalism in the Twenty-First Century: Switzerland and Britain (both 2023), indicates that there are still numerous national receptions of medieval culture that invite critical attention. The study is of special interest because of Austria’s uniquely complex history as a relatively small European nation with large-scale transformations since World War I, during World War II (as the Nazis’ first victim in 1938), and since then as a country seeking to chart its own identity despite a tumultuous twentieth-century history.

One of Austria’s unique responses to how certain aspects of its medieval history were (ab)used during the various waves of nationalism since the late nineteenth century are the Styrian Literature Pathways of the Middle Ages (Steirische Literaturpfade des Mittelalters), which want to embed new sites of memory of medieval literature in the Styrian landscape for new generations of Austrians and foreign visitors alike. The pathways intentionally offer public access, through eight multidimensional installations in the landscape, to examples of medieval texts that still speak to the present. The overarching goal of the project is to reconfigure the country’s memory of its own medieval heritage beyond the dominant warrior epic (Nibelungenlied) by exhibits featuring the writings of Ulrich of Liechtenstein, Hugo of Montfort, and Herrand of Wildon or thematic exhibits with a focus on texts related to medieval health or life in medieval monasteries. Sterling-Hellenbrand also shows how two recent monuments based on the warlike Nibelungenlied, in the towns of Pöchlarn and Tulln, refashion the traditional national reception of the epic (as we know it from Richard Wagner) as a narrative that might inspire peace between West and East. The 2015 redesign of the Siegfriedskopf, a 1923 sculpture depicting the Nibelungenlied’s hero Siegfried in the central entrance hall to the University of Vienna and a source of continued contention between the political Right and Left, is another example of how contemporary Austria has been able to achieve the mourning work about how nationalist modernity read the medieval past.

What makes this study particularly enjoyable to read is that it is a mélange of engaged textual and cultural scholarship and anthropological observation. Thus, the author’s academic research is concatenated with personal reflections and insights from fieldwork, here specifically her walking along the literature pathways and including her own moments of reception together with responses available in scholarship, journalism, official documents, and public relations websites. This perspective helps readers delve into the local communities in which the various displays are placed and offers slices of evocative lived experience, creating a ‘thick’ description of the objects. Sterling-Hellenbrand herself participated in the country’s well-establish walking culture, which probably helped bring the Literaturpfade project about in the first place.

Throughout the study, Sterling-Hellenbrand offers multiple thought-provoking moments of terminological and thematic comparison between how Austria and the United States deal with ‘difficult pasts.’ This comparative framework becomes clear toward the end, when Sterling-Hellenbrand, following in the footsteps of Susan Neiman’s 2019 Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil, recommends that the United States might be able to learn from the recontextualizations of medievalist memories practiced by the Austrians. She juxtaposes the University of Vienna’s Siegfriedskopf with the contested history of the University of North Carolina’s Silent Sam and the City of Richmond’s statue of Confederate General Lee, concluding that the processes of ‘engaged remembering’ in Austria were more successful than their North American counterparts. She writes: ‘The Siegfriedskopf underwent an extensive transformation that relocated it from one category of German memorial—a Denkmal, or monument designed to celebrate and memorialize – to one much better suited to its purpose for the twenty–first century—a Mahnmal or monument designed to commemorate but also admonish and warn. By contrast, the disappearances of Silent Sam and Robert E. Lee perhaps represent lost opportunities’ (118). I think there are examples of similarly ‘engaged remembering’ in the United States, perhaps most importantly the thoughtful way in which the leaders and congregation of Washington (National) Cathedral dealt with its two Confederate windows, which depicted Generals Jackson and Lee. I also believe that not all Austrian and German acts of remembering are examples of Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung, i.e., conscious engagement with and working through the past. In fact, throughout most of the twentieth century, efforts at Vergangenheitsbewältigung, i.e., overcoming, perhaps even repressing the past without deeply engaging with it and accepting responsibility for it, may well have been in the majority. However, the definition of these terms is notoriously fluid, just like all recent discussions about how to remember the premodern past responsibly. That said, Sterling-Hellenbrand’s book is an excellent example of how diverse the study of medievalism has become. Her critical ethnography of Austrian medievalism enriches our field.