The Re-Construction and Deconstruction of a Family Narrative: Eva Menasse’s Vienna

Abstract

This chapter analyses Eva Menasse's Vienna as a prominent example of the contemporary family narrative in Austria. It investigates how Menasse's generational position shapes her investigation of a family narrative rooted in trauma and transmitted to descendants through a collection of family myths and tales. It discusses how Menasse's narrator gradually engages in a process of myth shattering in order to reveal and come to terms with the underlying content of her ancestors' traumatic experiences. This narrative de-construction is further discussed in the context of a woman's emancipation from a family story dominated by the historical experiences of its male protagonists. The chapter concludes that Menasse's postmemorial novel testifies to a woman's attempt to preserve her ancestors' memories, while simultaneously responding to a fundamental generational shift in the course of which narrative authority is handed over to descendent generations.Eva Menasse was born in 1970 and raised in Vienna by a Jewish father and a Catholic mother originally from the Sudetenland. While Menasse had already established herself as a reporter and editor for the Austrian news magazine Profil and later FAZ, she first attracted wide public attention and literary acclaim with her debut novel, Vienna, published in 2005. In Der Bund, Julia Kospach notes: ?Eigentlich war schon vor der Veroffentlichung klar, dass es sich bei Eva Menasses Roman Vienna um das meistbeachtete literarische Debut des Fruhjahrs handeln wird'.1 This early interest in and curiosity about Menasse's debut novel is certainly linked to the public visibility of the Menasse family. Both her father, Hans Menasse, a well-known former football player on Austria's national team and her brother, the established writer and intellectual Robert Menasse, are prominent figures in Austrian society. The FAZ drew additional public attention to Menasse's debut novel when the paper serialised it ahead of its publication. Ultimately, though, it was the narrative quality of Vienna, a novel structured around a collection of family anecdotes presented in a humorous yet highly sensitive and selfreflexive style, that thrust Eva Menasse to prominence in her own right on the contemporary literary scene in Germany and Austria. In 2009, the author published her second fictional narrative, Lassliche Todsunden, a collection of short stories that explore the deeper and darker motivations in human relationships. This second publication further enhanced her reputation for insightful and striking narrative writing and showcased her skill for presenting unnervingly accurate observations on human interrelations through the lens of sharp but affectionate humour.This chapter discusses Menasse's debut novel, Vienna. A multigenerational narrative, Vienna fits into a trend in contemporary German-language literature in which the descendants of war witnesses and Holocaust victims approach the long legacy of the past through a creative re-investment in their family histories. The first half of this chapter offers a brief introduction to the popular genre of the contemporary family narrative, before moving to an investigation of the mechanisms involved in Menasse's narrative re-construction of a traumatic family history from the perspective of postmemory. The second half of the discussion focuses on the narrator's emancipation from a traumatically charged family narrative as a necessary step in the process of coming to terms with the past. The chapter further discusses this emancipatory turn as a woman's decision to claim a voice of her own within a narrative dominated by male protagonists.Postmemory and the family narrativeThe contemporary family narrative emerged as a popular genre in German-speaking literature at a time of fundamental generational shift. With the passing away of witnesses to the National Socialist era, lived experiences and memories need to be translated into cultural memory. However, the long and ongoing traumatic aftermath of the National Socialist past poses a tremendous challenge to this process. …