Tradition and Innovation: Austrian Poetry at the Opening of the Eighties

Abstract

By BETH BJORKLUND Austrians were fond of their 1,000-year-old Danubian monarchy of multilingual nationalities; in fact, according to some observers, they are still trying to recover from the shock of the 1918 loss. Meanwhile, however, Austrian society has become an active participant in the contemporary world community sharing its materialistic and nonmaterialistic values as a result of the post-1945 economic boom, which brought attendant support also to the arts. The relationship to tradition is indeed a crucial question in Austrian literature, and awareness of the cultural heritage results in a unique form of modern sensibility: relativizing the present in an effort to conserve the past, on the one hand, and reacting against the past in an effort to change the present, on the other. Since both the tradition and the departures from it are different in Austria from those in other European countries, this also represents an important factor in the much-debated issue of an Austrian literature as distinct from that of