The Art of Resistance: Cultural Protest against the Austrian Far Right in the Early Twenty-First Century by Allyson Fiddler

Abstract

 Reviews Allen’s conceptualization, crucially, supports the established ideas of periodization while also challenging and differentiating the monopoly of these ideas through his selection of case studies and split chapters. Second, the selection of films is a refreshing mix of the canonical and films that so far have received little or no academic attention, organized in well interwoven and thematically cross-referenced chapters. Most of all, Allen appreciates the artistic complexity of these films as the contributions of directors who believed in socialism and socialist art as contributors to a better humanity. is allows him again to prove that reading these films and artworks as merely a reproduction of political ideology or as examples of life under a dictatorship would be to disregard their aesthetic complexity. Instead, he demonstrates that laying greater emphasis on the aesthetic and the struggle to create something entirely new under difficult conditions is the appropriate approach to doing these films justice. Or, in Allen’s words: [T]hroughout its history, East German cultural policy oscillated between two poles: on the one hand, the desire to portray itself as the contemporary embodiment of a long-established tradition of German classical humanism; and, on the other, as the realization of a new kind of political entity that had broken with the bourgeois traditions of the pre-war period and was committed to a modern, internationalist form of socialism. In part, the polemical character of many of the cultural debates that took place over the forty years of the GDR’s existence is a reflection of the impossibility of reconciling two such contradictory projects (p. ) U C D S E e Art of Resistance: Cultural Protest against the Austrian Far Right in the Early Twenty-First Century. By A F. New York and Oxford: Berghahn. .  pp. £. ISBN ––––. Allyson Fiddler’s excellent new book e Art of Resistance, ‘the first large-scale study of the creative work of protest against the ÖVP–FPÖ coalition’ of the early s (p. ), examines the range of artistic and cultural responses to the entry of the far-right Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ), then led by Jörg Haider, into the Austrian coalition government in , aer the party obtained its hitherto largest ever share of the vote (. per cent) in the  general election (p. ). In , as Fiddler traces, the FPÖ had polled  per cent of the vote and ended up being a very minor coalition partner with the then Sozialistische Partei Österreichs. e much larger share of the vote in  and openly xenophobic policies of the party gave the international community much more cause for concern, leading to diplomatic sanctions against Austria by the EU, Israel, and the United States (p. ). Inside Austria , a wave of protests sprang up almost immediately following the  elections, which persisted until the coalition’s demise in . An important precedent had already been set here with the Waldheim affair of the late s. e generation of artists and intellectuals that protested against the election of former UN Secretary General Kurt Waldheim to the presidency of Austria in , on account of his deception regarding his Nazi past, is widely regarded as having been instrumental MLR, .,   in the formation of a civil society in Austria (see Dagmar C. G. Lorenz: ‘e Struggle for a Civil Society and Beyond: Austrian Writers and Intellectuals Confronting the Political Right’, New German Critique,  (), –). Indeed, many of the protagonists of the  protests would be closely involved in the protest movements in Austria at the beginning of the twentieth century. Fiddler’s study examines not only works by well-known authors and artists, such as the Nobel laureate Elfriede Jelinek, Robert Menasse, Christoph Schlingensief, and Marlene Streeruwitz, but also those of others who are less familiar. Fiddler’s book stands out for the range of works in different media that she discusses . ese include acts of everyday protest (demonstrations, speeches, graffiti, dance, etc.), as well as literary texts, films, and dramas. e Introduction and first chapter set the political context in which these various cultural responses to the Austrian Wende occurred, before proceeding to detailed analyses of texts, films, and forms of protest. e majority of the works analysed were...