Postmodernism and the Place of Nostalgia in Ingeborg Bachmann's Franza Fragment

Abstract

The concept of nostalgia is currently everywhere in academic and popular discourse. With its Greek root words nostos (to return home) and algos (pain or sorrow) (Hutcheon 193), the term conjures the pain associated with the loss of nation, home, and childhood.1 A product of migration, nostalgia is difficult to define, and those who write about it almost invariably point to the elusiveness of the concept. Since Fredric Jameson's seminal work Postmodernism: Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991) it has become possible to conceive of nostalgia as a necessary byproduct of the postmodern. Generally considered to be a regressive or even reactionary tendency that would represent an anachronistic residue in the fabric of postmodern texts, it can also be seen as a necessary outgrowth of the lack of historicity that characterizes postmodernity In the German-language context, the concept of nostalgia is in need of further analysis, since the unique fixation with history in post-war Germany and Austria is reflected in an aesthetics often characterized by the coupling of postmodern style with historical critique. In this essay, I explore the concept of nostalgia as simultaneously affective, regressive, and ironic in Ingeborg Bachmann's Franza fragment (19651966). This novel reflects the author's experimentation with postmodern style such as intertextuality and overcoded citations,2 yet it simultaneously engages in a vigorous critique of the residues of fascism in the post-war Austrian Heimat via the representation of gender and family relations of power and oppression. Politically abhorrent due to the mantra of never again in German and Austrian public discourse, the linkage between nostalgia and nation is disallowed in these countries. The longing for a past time and home always points to the period before 1933, and this sort of longing is akin to forgetting, to the erasure of the suffering endured in the Holocaust and the national guilt for having caused this suffering. In this sense, unreflected nostalgia is forgetting. Perhaps the only officially sanctioned form of nostalgia in Germany is Ostalgie, the longing for the unspoiled state of East Germany with its socialist resistance to fascism and charming consumer products such as the Trabant car.3 In Austria, nostalgia for the mythologized Habsburg Empire is sometimes seen in light of a Utopian vision of multicultural harmony, but even this form of nostalgia is viewed with a level of skepticism. Critics such as Linda Hutcheon and Svetlana Boym have recently reconceptualized the role of nostalgia in postmodernism so that irony, and affect no longer remain at odds with one another. Hutcheon provides a place for reflection within the postmodern that does not deny affect. In distinguishing between revivalist and postmodern architecture, she makes the following observation: The postmodern architecture does indeed recall the past, but always with the kind of ironic double vision that acknowledges the final impossibility of indulging in even as it consciously evokes nostalgia's affective power. In the postmodern, in other words, (and here is the source of the tension) nostalgia itself gets both called up, exploited, and ironized. This is a complicated (and postmodernly paradoxical) move that is both an ironizing of nostalgia itself, of the very urge to look backward for authenticity, and, at the same moment, a sometimes shameless invoking of the visceral power that attends the fulfillment of that urge. (205, emphasis in original) The play of postmodern cognition allows, according to Hutcheon, for irony and affect, two modes generally considered to be incompatible with postmodernism (Jameson, Postmodernism 11). This sense of nostalgia recalls Boym's notion of reflective nostalgia, a form of longing that thrives inalgia, the longing itself, and delays the homecoming-wistfully, ironically, desperately (xviii). If nostalgia is to have a place in the German postmodern, then it is in the sense described by Hutcheon, as an affect that nevertheless retains its ironic distance. …