The Literary Politics of Mitteleuropa

Reconfiguring Spatial Memory in Austrian and Yugoslav Literature After 1945
Erscheinungsjahr 2021
ISBN: 978-1-64014-088-2
Verlag: Boydell & Brewer

Buch, Englisch, Band 218, 330 Seiten, Print PDF, Format (B × H): 155 mm x 231 mm, Gewicht: 658 g

Reihe: Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture

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, Czeslaw Milosz, 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 Ugrešic 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.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Zivkovic, Yvonne

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Deutsche Literatur
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Europäische Literatur
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Europäische Geschichte

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Acknowledgments
Abbreviations and Note on Translations
Introduction: Mitteleuropa as a Transnational Memory Discourse
The Legacy of Mitteleuropa: Between Geopolitics and Geopoetics
Ingeborg Bachmann and Peter Handke: The Austrian Periphery and Mitteleuropa
Mitteleuropa as Conflicted Community in the Writings of Danilo Kis and Aleksandar Tisma
Mitteleuropa after 1989. New Memory Challenges in Christoph Ransmayr and Dubravka Ugresi?
Conclusion: Mitteleuropa Literature in the 21st Century: Revisiting the Promise of Border-Crossing
Bibliography
Index

Über Autor(innen)

Zivkovic, Yvonne
YVONNE ZIVKOVIC is Alice Tong Sze Research Fellow at Lucy Cavendish College, University of Cambridge.

Yvonne Zivkovic holds a PhD in German and Comparative Literature from Columbia University and is an Associate Lecturer at University College London.