The Literary Politics of Mitteleuropa: Reconfiguring Spatial Memory in Austrian and Yugoslav Literature after 1945 by Yvonne Zivkovic

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Literary Politics of Mitteleuropa: Reconfiguring Spatial Memory in Austrian and Yugoslav Literature after 1945 by Yvonne Zivkovic Sabine Egger The Literary Politics of Mitteleuropa: Reconfiguring Spatial Memory in Austrian and Yugoslav Literature after 1945. By Yvonne Zivkovic. Rochester, NY: Camden House. 2021. 319 pp. £95. ISBN 978–1-64014–088–2. Yvonne Zivkovic's study discusses how post-war writers in Austria and Yugoslavia have re-imagined the concept of Mitteleuropa as a cultural space between nostalgia and totalitarianism from 1945 to the present. In four chapters the book compares Central European memory spaces in the writing of Ingeborg Bachmann and Peter Handke between 1945 and the 1960s, Danilo Kiš and Aleksandar Tišma from 1960 to 1989, and Christoph Ransmayr and Dubravka Ugrešić after 1990, placing them within the framework of twentieth-century discourses on Mitteleuropa and twenty-first-century images of Europe and its potential dissolution. Chapter 1 links ideas of a transnational Mitteleuropa, put forward by politicians like Friedrich Naumann or Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, and Jewish Austrian writers Stefan Zweig, Joseph Roth or Ödön von Horváth, to Milan Kundera's and György Konrád's critical debate [End Page 210] of the 1980s. What emerges is a conflicted idea of Mitteleuropa, situated between hope and melancholia, utopian and dystopian visions of a multi-ethnic and pluralist territory left behind by the Habsburg Empire, and a 'mental space', following Lefebvre, shaped by the cultural heritage of the European enlightenment. Zivkovic argues that Claudio Magris's The Habsburg Myth does not capture the critical and dystopian dimension of these writings. The latter is already highlighted in Ruth Klüger's painful memory of 'Mitteleuropäer in Birkenau', which Zivkovic references in her opening (p. 1). The importance of Jewish authors in the literary politics of Mitteleuropa and the significance of the destruction of Jewish culture is brought to the fore throughout the book. Chapter 3 focuses on Kiš and Tišma, two Jewish Yugoslav writers from the Serbian border province of Vojvodina, who approach this difficult past through their distinct aesthetics. A further focus lies on the extent to which the ideas of Mitteleuropa discussed are political, even when they are represented as explicitly apolitical or 'antipolitical'. By using the latter as a term Konrád chose to distance his writing from the Soviet bloc in 1982, Ugrešić places herself within this tradition of Central European literature (p. 263). Zivkovic's comparative approach reveals surprising parallels in the ways Austrian and former Yugoslavian writers approach Mitteleuropa as a trope and mental space. Both Bachmann and Kiš reflect on the late turn towards Holocaust memory in their respective countries and historical settings. Drawing on a spectrum of literary traditions, post-communist memories and their recent experience of the fragmentation of a multi-ethnic European state in the Yugoslav wars, texts by Kiš or Ugrešić revisit and deconstruct patterns of the Habsburg myth. At the same time, Zivkovic's reading of Bachmann and Handke focuses on their Carinthian background and links to Slovenian culture, thus reversing traditional centre–periphery patterns in Austrian literature. Including Yugoslav literature in the Mitteleuropa debate revived in the 1980s by Kundera and Konrád opens up new perspectives on Europe as a cultural and political construct, as well as on the role of literature in this process. This not only applies to the widening of the Mitteleuropa discourse from a Balkan perspective. As Zivkovic points out in her conclusion, '[t]hrough an increased literary presence of Mitteleuropa in Ukrainian and Polish but also Croatian and Serbian literature over the last decade or so, the Central European margin is expanding further east and south' (p. 280). The impact of EU funding on promoting a specific vision of European collectivity is mentioned, as well as the role of exchanges with other Central European writers by means of networks, exile communities and literary festivals. It might also have been useful to discuss the role of literary awards in this context, as these play a major part in positioning authors in specific literary fields. The book also touches on what it means to write in a second language...