Revisiting Austria: Tourism, Space, and National Identity, 1945 to the Present by Gundolf Graml

Abstract

Reviewed by: Revisiting Austria: Tourism, Space, and National Identity, 1945 to the Present by Gundolf Graml Andrew Behrendt Gundolf Graml, Revisiting Austria: Tourism, Space, and National Identity, 1945 to the Present. Austrian and Habsburg Studies 28. New York: Berghahn Books, 2020. 292 pp. Gundolf Graml's book Revisiting Austria presents a fresh, enterprising assessment of the role played by tourism in the construction of "Austrianness" under the Second Republic. Not content with the stodgy dismissiveness shown to the topic by earlier studies, Graml stakes out tourism as a "central discursive terrain for the negotiation of core issues of Austrian identity" (2). Indeed, it is the discourses of tourism, space, and landscape, more than their material conditions, that interest Graml, as borne out by the theoretical apparatus he employs: Butler, Bhabha, and Baudrillard, for instance, feature prominently. His chief scholarly intervention is in naming performativity as both link and catalyst between the discourses of national identity and tourism, then training that lens on a multidisciplinary selection of texts, places, and practices. While indeed spanning from 1945 to the present, the book dwells mainly on the immediate postwar decade and then on the 1990s through the 2010s. Part I (chapters 1–3) explores the significance of tourism for an Austria seeking domestic stability and international rehabilitation amidst the ruins of National Socialism. In chapter 1, Graml interrogates a compact yet creative assortment of primary texts, notably federal publications and questionnaires, to survey how tourism promotion efforts simultaneously advanced other agendas. He lays out how this literature conceptually located "Austria" in the postwar order and offered a vision of "normality" while also disciplining the citizenry to be good "hosts" in support of the push for tourists. The next two chapters seek out these themes in the Heimatfilm, the era's signature cinematic genre—which, as Graml amply demonstrates, doubled as a mode of virtual tourism. His elaborate reading of Der Hofr at Geiger (1947) proves that it performed weightier memory work than mere escapist nostalgia, but it falters somewhat under the burden of its numerous interpretive frames. Graml's analysis of Echo der Berge/Der Förster vom Silberwald (1954) is sharper, throwing light on the film's exploration of that fraught borderland between Austrian and German identity. Part II delivers an extended critique of the memorialization of the Holocaust by the city of Linz during its tenure as a European Capital of Culture in 2009. Here he draws a bead on the public exhibitions of "Linz09," [End Page 149] which sought to make tangible the "ghosts" of Nazism and mass murder by forcing visitors to confront evidence of that past in jarring visual displays. But none, Graml contends, achieved true success, because overreliance on traditional historiographical methods constrained their affective power. Graml counters that such memorialization might escape these bonds by merging empirical research with literary "alternate worlds" that challenge the viewer with an inescapable "co-presence of past and present, of victims and perpetrators" (117, 165). As examples, chapters 5 and 6 offer close readings of a pair of postmodernist novels from 1995 dealing with the Holocaust, Austrianness, and tourism in radically different ways. The first is Elfriede Jelinek's Die Kinder der Toten, in which the repressed genocidal past of a mountain resort breaches the present by means of zombie infestation. Next follows a similar examination of Christoph Ransmayr's Morbus Kitahara, an allegory of post–World War II Austria set in a fictional lakeside town. All told, a stimulating proposition—but as Graml submits no applied models for consideration, it remains uncertain whether postmodernist experimentation and public history are indeed compatible projects. Part III studies responses to The Sound of Music as a way to probe the intricate relationship between tourism and Austrian identity in the era of contemporary globalization. Chapter 7 looks at the film Suzie Washington (1998), which tells the odyssey of Nana, a young Georgian woman as she wends her way through Austria, attempting to pass as a tourist as she navigates between the Scylla of the migration police and the Charybdis of human trafficking. In Graml's view, the movie, which ends with Nana smuggled into Germany in a Sound of Music tour van—a...