Gleichzeitigkeit des Ungleichzeitigen or Literary History with Multiple Timelines

Abstract

Frantisek Palacký, the great Czech historian and leader of the conservative nationalists, opened his 1866 essay on Austria’s Concept of State by asking whether Austria is a unified whole with a single purpose, destination, and mission. Is it, he asked, “a living organism” or “just a conglomerate of nations and people without order and internal cohesion” (1)? Palacký was for several decades an Austro-Slav. He believed that the various nations and ethnic groups could be accommodated in a federated Monarchy, within which the various nationalities would enjoy equal right. But his question could be answered at the time only negatively. In the first place, of course, because in 1866 it was fairly obvious already that Austria was going to share the power with the Hungarians but not with the Czechs, let alone the other nationalities. Furthermore, whatever way power was to be shared, no configuration was to be a “living organism”, for this applied then only to people who were held together by a common language. Indeed, the metaphor of a biological organism guided not just Palacký’s thinking but all the national awakenings of the nineteenth century that led to the founding or reestablishment of the nations now existing in East-Central Europe. This leading image of most historiography and literary histories in the region was reinforced in the nineteenth century through Darwinism and social Darwinism, and it lived on even in movements that turned against the romantic tradition. The Polish positivists of the 1870s, for instance, denounced the romantic dreams but their “realistic” program of building an integrated society spoke of “Organic Work”. Advocating cooperation and the sharing of responsibility, they treated society as an organism and stressed the harmonic interaction among its parts. Thinking of society and history in terms of organic bodies and their growth is still very much with us, though it has become evident that the metaphor of a “living organism” often leads to exclusion and violence, as well as the internal suppression of elements considered “foreign”, diseased, or infectious. Organic concepts still structure most literary histories, though perhaps in a less pathological vocabulary: they describe how the biographies and the oeuvres of writers “develop” in “phases” (the organicism