Grotesque Ambivalence: Melancholy and Mourning in the Prose Work of Albert Drach (review)

Albert who? Such was the reaction of many when the Austrian Albert Drach (1902–1995), the 86-year-young attorney and writer, won the Georg Büchner Prize of the German Academy for Language and Letters in 1988. Drach's career as a writer goes back to the 1920s. Although many of his relatives did not survive the Holocaust, he not only managed to live through deportation and exile, but even decided to return to Austria after the war and resume his law practice as well as his writing career. There was a brief flurry of serious critical attention accompanying the publication of some of his books in the 1960s and 70s, but that faded quickly. Then came the Büchner prize, the Manès Sperber prize, the Grillparzer prize, and more. In the ensuing years there has been increasing critical study of Drach, but virtually all in German. As the first book-length critical study of Drach in English, Mary Cosgrove's book is both notable and needed.

The first chapter places her work within the context of scholarship on Drach; and then through the first three chapters Cosgrove discusses the theoretical premises upon which she bases her study. Though Cosgrove sees in Drach a "certain affinity to the Jewish-Viennese intellectual and literary tradition" (p. 22), she prefers rather to view Drach more as an author who exhibits "(post)modern" tendencies. This "collision," as she calls it, of diverse influences typifies not only Drach's writing but also Cosgrove's approach. A critical environment hospitable to texts associated with the postmodern has developed more slowly in German-language areas than in neighboring France or in the United States. Cosgrove attempts to employ critical approaches by such scholars as Homi Bhabha and particularly Julia Kristeva in analyzing Drach's prose. Thus, she uses Kristeva's psychoanalytic approach to the body and the notion of subjectivity in understanding the grotesque in Drach's texts.

Chapter four focuses on an analysis of the book IA UND NEIN. Drei Fälle, particularly the section "UND." It is in this chapter that Cosgrove discusses Drach's perhaps most characteristic stylistic innovation, namely the "Protokollstil" with its heavy use of indirect speech. Derived from the court protocols with which the attorney Drach was all too familiar, it illustrates "the self-critical, shadowy side of rational language" (p. 104). In chapter five, Cosgrove examines the text Das Goggelbuch with particular reliance on Bhabha's concept of "mimic man," which he developed to critique British colonial efforts in India. Cosgrove states that Bhabha's discussion of "'the white man's artifice inscribed on the black man's body' is easily transferred to the construction of the Jewish other" (p. 107). Chapters six and seven analyze Drach's "Z.Z." das ist die Zwischenzeit. Whereas the first two case studies illustrate what Cosgrove terms the "body of jouissance," she states that "the dominant mode of corporeality in 'Z.Z.' could be described as a kind of sadistic stasis" (p. 151). Cosgrove explains in an earlier chapter that she views stasis, particularly as it relates to Drach's Holocaust accounts, as "a manifestation of the Death Instinct in language and social order" (p. 32). In this context Cosgrove references both Kristeva's work and Deleuze's conceptualization of (death) drives, along with psychoanalysis and the grotesque, another key concept for Cosgrove. A brief conclusion follows.

Although Cosgrove indicates she would rather discuss Drach as a postmodern writer than a Jewish writer, her choice of primary texts and the resultant discussion do much to belie that inclination. If anything, the reader comes away convinced that Drach's texts are thoroughly infused with his experiences as a Jew during the Holocaust. How he processes and articulates those experiences, however, may well be best understood from a postmodern/postcolonial critical perspective. Indeed, this may be one reason Drach so belatedly...