Marlene Streeruwitz's Novel Nachwelt as Postmodern Feminist Biography1

Abstract

In her award-winning novel Nachwelt (1999), Marlene Streeruwitz composes an exquisite account of the life of Anna Mahler (1904-1988), the sculptress and daughter of Gustav Mahler and Alma Mahler-Werfel. In this work, Streeruwitz innovatively uses elements of the traditional genre biography and critically examines the genre by drawing on postmodern and feminist criticism.2 This article explores how Streeruwitz moves beyond traditional notions of biography and demonstrates that Nachwelt questions the concept of a coherent and autonomous self, a critique that is central to postmodern as well as feminist thought. The relevance of the genre aspect is highlighted by the fact that two different genre designations follow the novel's title on the cover page: the first one is Reisebericht, followed by Roman, a combination that indicates the merging of different genres. Indeed, Streeruwitz successfully uses diary and travelogue entries as well as interviews as structuring devices for the novel, in which the narrator recounts ten consecutive days (March 1-10, 1990) in as many chapters.3 The protagonist Margarethe Doblinger is an Austrian author and dramaturge who sets out to research Anna Mahler's life. This research takes her from Vienna to Los Angeles and Santa Monica where Anna Mahler lived for decades from after World War II until shortly before her death in 1988.4 The biographer Margarethe meets about a dozen of Anna Mahler's acquaintances, including former husbands, friends and neighbors, and interviews eight of them. The interviews are transcribed in a fairly readable, though very verbal syntax. The text offers only the responses to Magarethe's questions, but not the questions themselves. The interviewees' recollections reveal important memories which the individuals still have of Anna. Some anecdotes and stories overlap. All in all, the eight interviews cover six to ten pages each, totaling about 80 pages, i.e., not even a fourth of the 400-page narrative. In the remaining pages, the narrator offers additional information about Anna Mahler's life in conversations and interior monologue sequences. Margarethe's interaction with some of the characters that Anna was particularly close to are also described as are Margarethe's thoughts about her daughter and her lover who stayed behind in Vienna, her work as a dramaturge, and her reminiscences about her own childhood and upbringing. Of particular interest in this biographical novel are the comparisons that Margarethe draws between her own life and that of Anna Mahler. By contemplating the difficulties that her subject faced, the protagonist tends to slide into reflections about her own role as, for example, artist, mother, or Austrian. Born in Vienna in 1904, Anna Mahler5 was first educated in Vienna and later sent to British boarding schools. Although her father was Jewish, her mother insisted that Anna would be brought up in the Catholic tradition but Anna later returned to Judaism.6 Anna Mahler married five times. Her husbands included the art student Rupert Koller, the composer Ernst Krenek, the publisher Paul von Zsolnay, the Russian composer Anatole Fistoulari, and her last husband Albrecht Joseph, long-time secretary of her stepfather Franz Werfel.7 All of these marriages ended in divorce or separation. She is survived by two daughters from different husbands and several grandchildren. Anna Mahler was a gifted musician, yet had to realize early on that she would always live in her father's shadow. She tried to make a name for herself first as a pianist with the goal to become independent of her famous father and mother, but only partially succeeded after moving from music to fine arts by becoming a sculptor. Besides several commissioned sculptures and busts, an exhibition in Leverkusen and one in London, her career as an artist was not as successful as she had hoped. In 1988, Anna Mahler died at the age of 84, shortly before the city of Salzburg exhibited a collection of her works to rehabilitate her as an Austrian-Jewish emigre artist. …