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The Literary Politics of Mitteleuropa
Reconfiguring Spatial Memory in Austrian and Yugoslav Literature after 1945
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Yvonne Zivkovic
Language:
English
Published/Copyright:
2021
About this book
Shows how postwar writers in Austria and Yugoslavia re-imagined the concept of Mitteleuropa, Central Europe, as a cultural space between nostalgia and totalitarianism.
The German term Mitteleuropa, or Central Europe, was never just a geographical concept: it connoted extending German influence to the east. In the 1980s, the eastern European dissident writers György Konrád, Czesław Miłosz, and Milan Kundera revived the concept to counter a perceived Cold War memory vacuum, aligning themselves with the multiethnic and multilingual legacy of the Habsburg Empire. Their observations gave rise to a protracted public debate that posited literature against politics. This debate was both anticipated and expanded upon in postwar literary works by Ingeborg Bachmann, Peter Handke, and Christoph Ransmayr in Austria, and Danilo Kiš, Aleksandar Tišma, and Dubravka Ugrešić in (the former) Yugoslavia, all of whom questioned notions of geographic identity and national allegiance by imagining Mitteleuropa as a cultural space between nostalgia and totalitarianism.
Yvonne Zivkovic draws on space and memory studies to show how Mitteleuropa emerged as an alternate memory discourse that reveals deep ties between the Second Austrian Republic and the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. The writers discussed address the major themes of the 1980s debate - traumatic memory, geographic displacement, and transnationalism - but also share a literary aesthetics that privileges the intersections of prose fiction and the essay, the literary fragment, and intertextuality. Zivkovic's book shows the persistence of Mitteleuropa as a literary network and as a cultural collective that examines civic values against public tendencies of memory manipulation.
The German term Mitteleuropa, or Central Europe, was never just a geographical concept: it connoted extending German influence to the east. In the 1980s, the eastern European dissident writers György Konrád, Czesław Miłosz, and Milan Kundera revived the concept to counter a perceived Cold War memory vacuum, aligning themselves with the multiethnic and multilingual legacy of the Habsburg Empire. Their observations gave rise to a protracted public debate that posited literature against politics. This debate was both anticipated and expanded upon in postwar literary works by Ingeborg Bachmann, Peter Handke, and Christoph Ransmayr in Austria, and Danilo Kiš, Aleksandar Tišma, and Dubravka Ugrešić in (the former) Yugoslavia, all of whom questioned notions of geographic identity and national allegiance by imagining Mitteleuropa as a cultural space between nostalgia and totalitarianism.
Yvonne Zivkovic draws on space and memory studies to show how Mitteleuropa emerged as an alternate memory discourse that reveals deep ties between the Second Austrian Republic and the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. The writers discussed address the major themes of the 1980s debate - traumatic memory, geographic displacement, and transnationalism - but also share a literary aesthetics that privileges the intersections of prose fiction and the essay, the literary fragment, and intertextuality. Zivkovic's book shows the persistence of Mitteleuropa as a literary network and as a cultural collective that examines civic values against public tendencies of memory manipulation.
Author / Editor information
Contributor: Yvonne Zivkovic
YVONNE ZIVKOVIC is Alice Tong Sze Research Fellow at Lucy Cavendish College, University of Cambridge.
Topics
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Frontmatter
i -
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Contents
v -
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Acknowledgments
vii -
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Abbreviations and Note on Translations
ix -
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Introduction: Mitteleuropa as a Transnational Memory Discourse
1 -
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1: The Legacy of Mitteleuropa: Between Geopolitics and Geopoetics
31 -
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2: Ingeborg Bachmann and Peter Handke: The Austrian Periphery and Mitteleuropa
81 -
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3: Mitteleuropa as Conflicted Community in the Writings of Danilo Kiš and Aleksandar Tišma
163 -
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4: Mitteleuropa after 1989: New Memory Challenges in Christoph Ransmayr and Dubravka Ugrešić
223 -
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Conclusion: Mitteleuropa Literature in the Twenty-First Century: Revisiting the Promise of Border-Crossing
277 -
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Bibliography
289 -
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Index
313
Publishing information
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
eBook published on:
January 23, 2024
eBook ISBN:
9781787449473
Original publisher:
Camden House
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
eBook ISBN:
9781787449473
Keywords for this book
Mitteleuropa; Austrian literature; Yugoslav literature; spatial memory; literary politics; European identity; cultural exchange; European literature; European modernism; memory discourse; European culture.
Audience(s) for this book
For an expert adult audience, including professional development and academic research
