Diskurse des Kalten Krieges. Eine andere österreichische Nachkriegsliteratur by Stefan Maurer Doris Neumann-Rieser Günther Stocker

Abstract

Reviews 274 Eschenbach’s own curation of her image and its role in her posthumous reception. Karin S. Wozonig analyses the role of the poet and literary critic Betty Paoli in establishing Ebner-Eschenbach as a writer. Paoli, a highly regarded journalist, had a powerful influence and her favourable reviews of EbnerEschenbach ’s stories recommended them to a bourgeois Austrian readership whose tastes she understood. Like Julius Rodenberg, whose publication of Lotti, Die Uhrmacherin in Deutsche Rundschau marked a breakthrough in EbnerEschenbach ’s career, Paoli also offered some pre-publication mentoring, but Wozonig points out that it is impossible to know how much Ebner-Eschenbach took account of what she knew to be Betty Paoli’s preferences when writing her stories. This volume offers fresh engagement with the modernity of EbnerEschenbach ’s works, in chapters such as Marie Luise Wandruszka’s thoughtprovoking analysis of Ebner-Eschenbach’s engagement with suffering in the context of Spinoza’s thought. Insightful readings of Ebner-Eschenbach in her literary networks include Walter Hettche’s analysis of the aesthetics of realism with regard to sexual violence towards women, in the context of the relationship between Ebner-Eschenbach and Paul Heyse, as well as Ebner-Eschenbach’s relationship to the authors of Jung Wien (Evelyne Polt-Heinzl), to Ferdinand von Saar (Magdalena Stieb), and to the Czech realist Karolina Světlá (Milan Tvridík). To close this volume, Ulrike Tanzer reflects on the institutional and political constraints which affect the kinds of research carried out within the academy and the degree of recognition given to different kinds of projects. She rightly emphasizes the significance of editorial work as a foundation for new research. So much of Ebner-Eschenbach’s correspondence remains unedited — not least the many letters she exchanged with other women writers, for whom she was a much-admired role model and mentor. As this volume shows, such editorial projects are the source of valuable new insights into the broader cultural context that are of significance not just within Austrian studies but also in the wider context of European literature. Charlotte Woodford Selwyn College, Cambridge Diskurse des Kalten Krieges. Eine andere österreichische Nachkriegsliteratur. Ed. by Stefan Maurer, Doris Neumann-Rieser and Günther Stocker. Vienna, Cologne and Weimar: Böhlau, 2017. 737 pp. €80. ISBN 978–3-205–20380–3. Stefan Maurer’s, Doris Neumann-Rieser’s and Günther Stocker’s impressive volume on Cold War discourse patterns in Austrian post-1945 literature, published in 2017, has become very timely with the United States’ formal withdrawal from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, an arms control treaty from 1988, that originally heralded the end of the Cold War period. This act may well signal the return of a phase in twentieth-century Reviews 275 history that held a whole generation hostage to the dramatic, ideologically simplified, bipolar world-view of good and evil, freedom and slavery, West and East, lightness against the dark — the world-view that is the focus of this survey study. The result of a four-year-long research project at the University of Vienna about the Cold War period (1945–66), this jointly written and published collection of materials is of epic proportions with its 737 pages, comprising fifteen main and more than 130 sub-chapters, an introduction, index and biographical lexicon of authors discussed. The authors convincingly justify the large scale of their study by adopting Lawrence Grossberg’s ‘strongly antireductionist’ (p. 20) cultural studies approach, and quite rightly claim that their survey of the ‘Diskursfäden’ (p. 16) that affected the literary field in Austria between 1945 and 1966 is the first of its kind in its scope. Anchoring their survey in the New Historicist method that wants to find the ‘soziale Energie’ (p. 17) shaping literary representations of the Cold War discourse in and about Austria at the time, the authors provide a formidable overview of a hitherto under-researched part of Austrian literary production. This volume’s most significant achievement lies in the identification of fifteen central tropes, or ‘Diskursmuster’ (p. 19), that form the headings of the main chapters and allow an initial classification of texts from diverse genres and production backgrounds. A listing of...