Contemporary Austrian Research Articles

The Long Shadow of the Past: Contemporary Austrian Literature, Film, and Culture

The Long Shadow of the Past: Contemporary Austrian Literature, Film, and Culture

The Long Shadow of the Past: Contemporary Austrian Literature, Film, and Culture by Katya Krylova

The Long Shadow of the Past: Contemporary Austrian Literature, Film, and Culture by Katya Krylova

Contemporary Austrian Economics and the New Economic Sociology

Economic sociology, the study of how economic phenomena affect and are affected by social forces, is a field that arguably dates back to classical economists and social thinkers such as Adam Smith. Arguably, however, Emile Durkheim and Max Weber did the most to systematize and outline the field (see Steiner 2010; Swedberg 2010). Durkheim ([1909] 1978), for instance, described economic sociology as the application of the sociological perspective to economic phenomena. Similarly, Weber (1949, 65) has suggested that the field ought to concern itself with pure economic phenomena along with economically conditioned phenomena. The new economic sociology, which builds on the writings of these earlier thinkers, begins with the observation that all economic action is embedded within a context of ongoing social relations and seeks to trace out the impact of these social structures on economic behavior and outcomes (Swedberg 1997, 165). As Granovetter (1985, 483-484) explains, while neoclassical economics tends to advance an undersocialized conception of economic actors and traditional sociology tends to advance an oversocialized conception of economic actors, the focus on embeddedness avoids presenting economic actors as social eunuchs or social automatons. The new economic sociology also advances the proposition that economic institutions are socially constructed; that is, they are brought into being through the social action of individuals and are given force as a result of the meanings that individuals come to ascribe to them (Swedberg 1997, 165; Granovetter 1992, 7).

Constructions of Melancholy in Contemporary German and Austrian Literature by Anna O’Driscoll

Constructions of Melancholy in Contemporary German and Austrian Literature by Anna O’Driscoll

Spielerische Gedanken: Economic Crisis and Financial Speculation in Hugo Bettauer’s Die Stadt ohne Juden and Its Adaptation by Hans Karl Breslauer

Hugo Bettauer’s hugely successful novel Die Stadt ohne Juden (1922) offers a unique view of Austria during the early 1920s. This analysis of the novel and Hans Karl Breslauer’s 1924 adaptation explores how economic crisis and financial speculation function in these satirical texts. Economic matters permeate both texts and act as catalysts for both the expulsion of the Jews and their welcome return. This study analyzes how Bettauer and Breslauer, incorporating contemporary Austrian economic history, portray economic crisis and financial speculation as primary factors contributing to the political oppression and expulsion of the Jews. Bettauer’s novel not only recalls the effects of World War I and the dissolution of the Habsburg Empire but also questions the future of Vienna and Austria. Despite ostensibly happy endings, both texts provide ominous visions of the future.

Changing Addresses: A Collection of Contemporary Austrian Writing ed. by Johann Holzner and Alois Hotschnig (review)

Reviewed by: Changing Addresses: A Collection of Contemporary Austrian Writing ed. by Johann Holzner and Alois Hotschnig Carl E. Findley III Johann Holzner and Alois Hotschnig, eds., Changing Addresses: A Collection of Contemporary Austrian Writing. New Orleans: uno Press, 2012. 167 pp. If this new collection, Changing Addresses, is any indication of the state of contemporary Austrian writing, one thing is certain: the Austrians are dripping with ideas. Changing Addresses is the first in a new series entitled “Studies [End Page 162] in Central European History, Literature, and Culture” (series editor Günter Bischof, New Orleans), the fruit of a longstanding partnership between the University of New Orleans and the University of Innsbruck. The editors include the scholar Johann Holzner (Innsbruck) and the Austrian short story writer Alois Hotschnig (winner of the 2008 Erich Fried Prize; his collection of quizzical black fables, Maybe This Time, recently appeared in English with Peirene Press in 2011). Together with the translators, under the direction of Brigitte Scott (also of Innsbruck), they have embarked on an ambitious project to disseminate, and in some cases introduce in English for the first time, eleven Austrian writers (many of them young and Tyrolean) who represent some of the best and most cerebral writing in Austria today. The guiding principle that Holzner and Hotschnig had in mind in choosing writers for this collection were those whose imaginations illuminate fresh, existential possibilities through a “distance from everyday reality.” According to Holzner, contemporary Austrian writers, with razor-sharp skepticism, relentlessly assault reality, which they use to “break open whatever still exists of former foundations,” creating a felicitous relativism, but “without opening the door to arbitrariness.” Setting the bar for Austrian writers as high as he does, Holzner could easily be describing a high-wire artist, working with ideas so friable, so finely taut, that the slightest misstep can result in fractured vision. The title of the collection comes from a poem by Sepp Mall. The poem illustrates Holzner’s idea of poetic felicity “in the tension of things stretched to the breaking point,” which is particularly evident in Mall’s use of opposing images. Christoph Bauer’s elegantly titled “Poems” is concerned with changing identities and mental peregrination. With lines like “a stranger I arrived under my skin” and “passport and luggage ready, all in all a paying guest inside my body’s hut,” Bauer adeptly explores the dangers of too much self-observation and the grayish romance of dubious forms of self-discovery. Bauer is followed by Sabine Gruber’s delightful short story “Leaves,” which is about an obsessive, old-maid leaf collector and her voyeuristic neighbor’s machinations to fill the woman’s life with meaning once autumn has passed. It explores the idea that change is something that must be managed and controlled—often to ill effect. The story is a sophisticated counter-narrative when placed after Bauer’s dynamic poem, which seems volatile when juxtaposed with Gruber’s languid tale. Barbara Hundegger’s poem, “at z.* from your balcony,” presents a highly fragmented poetic voice that, like its confusing title, disrupts the emergence of narrative cohesion by breaking the [End Page 163] logic of each stanza, just as meaning is about to surface. Ulrike Längle’s “The Sinking of the ‘Romanshorn’” is a surreal mystery story that plays with the sinking of a ferry as seen through the eyes of a child. Claudia Paganini’s “Golden Mountains” is a fascinating piece, reminding one, at times, of Musil’s early novella The Perfecting of a Love, with its floating, cerebral imagery. The theme of shifting images and fragmented identities is left behind with Carolina Schutti’s two stories, which are some of the most enjoyable pieces in the collection. Schutti, a researcher and Canetti scholar, displays scholarly precision in her writing, and her story “Kellstein” is full of humor and wit (it would be surprising if one of her influences were not Robert Menasse). A brief tale about a dimwit as hilarious as Grimmelshausen’s Simplicius, this story is so delightful and unexpected that it is worth purchasing the collection for the sheer pleasure of this one well-crafted story. The final piece in Changing Addresses...

Examining social processes with agent-based models

It is plain that the Austrian revival that began in the 1970s has yet to succeed in convincing the mainstream of the academy to jettison their physics-based mathematical models in favor of the sort of models and forms of argumentation that contemporary Austrians advocate. Agent-based computational modeling is still in its relative infancy but is beginning to gain recognition among economists disenchanted with the neoclassical paradigm. The purpose of this paper is to assuage concerns that readers might have regarding methodological consistency between agent-based modeling and Austrian economics and to advocate its adoption as a means to convey Austrian ideas to a wider audience. I examine models developed and published by other researchers and ultimately provide an outline of how one might develop a research agenda that leverages this technique. I argue that agent-based modeling can be used to enhance Austrian theorizing and offers a viable alternative to the neoclassical paradigm.

Examining Social Processes with Agent-Based Models

It is plain that the Austrian revival that began in the 1970s has yet to succeed in convincing the mainstream of the academy to jettison their physics-based mathematical models in favor of the sort of models and forms of argumentation that contemporary Austrians advocate. Agent-based computational modeling is still in its relative infancy but is beginning to gain recognition among economists disenchanted with the neoclassical paradigm. The purpose of this paper is to assuage concerns that readers might have regarding methodological consistency between agent-based modeling and Austrian economics and to advocate its adoption as a means to convey Austrian ideas to a wider audience. I examine models developed and published by other researchers and ultimately provide an outline of how one might develop a research agenda that leverages this technique. I argue that agent-based modeling can be used to enhance Austrian theorizing and offers a viable alternative to the neoclassical paradigm.

The Rediscovered Writings of Veza Canetti: Out of the Shadows of a Husband (review)

Rediscovered Writings of Canetti: of Shadows of a Husband, by Julian Preece. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2007. 184 pp. $75.00. Canetti's writings were first published in 1930s and were aU but forgotten until her husband, Nobel Laureate Elias Canetti (1905-1994, Nobel Prize, 1981) released them in 1991, thirty-seven years after her death. Since then, her importance has been increasingly recognized and appreciated as one of most significant female voices of Vienna during Austria's Systemzeit in 1930s. Canetti was born as Veneria Taubner-Calderon in 1897 into a mixed Sephardic-Ashkenazi Jewish family and lived as an assimilated Jew in Leopoldstadt, Vienna's second district. In 1934, she married seven-year younger Elias Canetti, who shared with her his Sephardic Jewish heritage. Between 1933 and 1938, she wrote extensively and published her work in Arbeiter-Zeitung. Canettis barely escaped Anschlus in 1938. They fled England, where died in 1963. Canetti was an unrivaled observer of life of disenfranchised in Austro-fascist Vienna of 1930s. Her oeuvre that survived nearly four decades of destruction, silence, and neglect consists of two novels, three plays, and several short stories. Julian Preece is well known in Canetti-research circles. He is coeditor of a volume on Elias Canetti and has contributed several chapters on Canetti's work scholarly essay collections. In 2006, Ariadne Press published The Viennese Short Stories, which are Preece's translations of some of Canetti's writings. Already in 1995, Preece published in Modern Austrian Literature article entitled The Re-Discovered Writings of Magd-Canetti: On Psychology of Subservience. monograph that is under review here bears essentially same title, yet its subtitle reads Out of Shadows of a Husband. In his introduction his book Tfce Rediscovered Writings of Canetti, Preece explains that he is strictly interested in what he calls literary between Elias and his wife Veza, their private drama played out against backdrop of European history and cultural politics. It is his intention tell the story of this collaboration and conflict, hurt, revenge, reconciliation, renewed partnership, and finally, shared obscurity in exile (p. 8), and he rejects notion supported by several distinguished contemporary Austrian and German writers and scholars that Vezas more famous and longer lived husband stifled her ambitions (p. 33). Lastly, Preece deems Nobel Laureate's claim believable that his wife chose pseudonym Veza Magd (Magd means maid; she also used pseudonyms Veronika Knecht and Martha or Martina Murner) not because she felt that she had serve him but rather to serve' people she wrote about (p. 33). Preece's book is divided into eight chapters in which author describes and discusses, analyzes, and interprets Canetti's youth and early years of Canetti marriage when successfully wrote for various journals of Socialist Left in Shared Beginnings and Worker's Writer: at Arbeiter-Zeitung, 1932-33, difficult and terrifying time in Vienna before couple's traumatic escape England in 1938 in Writing under Cover, 1934-38. In chapter Rivalry and Partnership, Preece describes years in England where wrote her novel Tortoises in 1939 but could no longer find an authence for her work, a state of affairs that induced her destroy most of her writings in 1956. …

On the road to nowhere? Contemporary Austrian popular film

Apart from the internationally-esteemed filmmakers Michael Haneke and, in the avant-garde tradition, Valie Export or Peter Kubelka, contemporary Austrian film directors have gained little recognition outside Austria. However, since the late 1980s a new film genre has come to fruition in Austria. These films, often called Kabarettfilme/cabaret films, are popular among all levels of the Austrian population, even though they show the dark side of life in Austria. In this respect, they are similar to the Neues Volksstck/popular play. In tone, however, these films are more humorous and more accessible to a wider audience. This article attempts to describe the strategy that makes these films so popular in Austria. It discusses the strategy employed to entwine tragedy and comedy and, at the level of reception, the interaction between audience and film. Ultimately, the article tries to explain why these films seem to produce great national but only minor international success.

Competing Discourses about Austria's Nazi Past and Racist Bomb Attacks in the 1990s

Competing Discourses about Austria's Nazi Past and Racist Bomb Attacks in the 1990s

Silenced Facts. Media Montages in Contemporary Austrian Literature by Bianca Theisen (review)

Silenced Facts. Media Montages in Contemporary Austrian Literature by Bianca Theisen (review)

The Fiction of the I: Contemporary Austrian Writers and Autobiography

The Fiction of the I: Contemporary Austrian Writers and Autobiography

The Legacy of Kafka in Contemporary Austrian Literature

Filipp, Frank, ed. The Legacy of in Contemporary Literature. Riverside: Ariadne, 1997. $29.50 hardcover. Evaluating the legacy ofa great and extraordinarily influential writer is never an easy task. Such examinations tend to gravitate between the Scylla of positivistic influence study, where subsequent writers openly affirm and admit the impact a prominent literary precursor has had on their work, and the Charybdis of often broad, and hence vague, identification of intellectual or thematic constellations, which attempts to align the work of a later writer with the models of a significant forerunner. Of the nine essays collected in the present volume, only two successfully sail through these treacherous waters. The general problem is compounded in this instance by the sheer stature of as one of the most prominent, most influential of all modern German fiction writers: is there any author who does not share in some way, if only indirectly, in Kafka's legacy? Moreover, what defines Kafka's significance is the way in which his writing has tended to gather together, in concentrated form, many of the issues and dilemmas that have become the hallmarks of European modernism. Here one could go through a litany of terms and phrases, such as Freudian psychoanalysis, alienation, linguistic skepticism, existential angst, bureaucratization of civil life, etc. When contemporary writers articulate such omnipresent themes, are they always doing so in Kafka's name, as it were, or as his heir? Put differently: What criteria can be used to distinguish between the participation in a more generally shared cultural-intellectual problematic and the specific influence of a particular artist, especially one whose reach is as broad as Kafka's? If, as Frank Pilipp maintains in his preface, Austrian literature displays a more concentrated indebtedness to than do other national literatures (2), is it himself or the wider intellectual-historical tradition that explains this affinity? The major failing of the present volume is that it does not address this extremely complex problematic. Over half of the essays in this volume (five of nine) treat two authors who freely admitted Kafka's influence on their writing: Elias Canetti and Peter Handke. Kristie A. Foell points out differences between Kafka's fictional world and that portrayed in Canetti's Die Blendung in order to arrive at the uninspired conclusion that it was Kafka's person and his life, not his manner of writing, that fueled Canetti's imagination. Readers familiar with Canetti's reflections on Kafka's correspondence with Felice Bauer will not be surprised by this assertion. Richard H. Lawson seeks to explore parallels between Kafka's and Canetti's aphoristic writings. However, as becomes clear over the course of his deliberations, what he understands under the term aphorism is simply autobiographical self-expression. This explains why his examples of aphoristic utterances by are drawn solely from his diaries. Lawson completely ignores that both and Canetti were composers of aphoristic texts that reflect a specific literary genre, defined by its employment of rhetorical, structural, and figurative devises. Thus the special sympathetic relationship (34) he identifies between and Canetti is once again grounded in personal-biographical rather than in formal literary issues. Fully three essays address the impact of Kafka's work on Peter Handke. The outstanding contribution in this group, and one of the two outstanding pieces in this collection, is Thomas F Barry's Kafka and Handke: Poetics from Gregor to the Gregors. Barry is not satisfied with cataloging superficial connections between Kafka's and Handke's works; indeed, he expresses some skepticism about the significance of ties such as Handke's proclivity for giving his characters names that invoke those of Kafka's protagonists. Instead, he digs to the psychological level, citing their negative sense of their own body ego as Kafka's and Handke's most profound commonality. …

The Fiction of the I: Contemporary Austrian Writers and Autobiography

The Fiction of the I: Contemporary Austrian Writers and Autobiography

Framed Visions: Popular Culture, Americanization, and the Contemporary German and Austrian Imagination

Framed Visions: Popular Culture, Americanization, and the Contemporary German and Austrian Imagination

Framed Visions. Popular Culture, Americanization, and the Contemporary German and Austrian Imagination

Framed Visions. Popular Culture, Americanization, and the Contemporary German and Austrian Imagination

Illuminating Intersections: Ten Years of Feminist Criticism on Contemporary Austrian Women Writers

This review focuses on ten years of feminist reception of selected works written by Austrian women writers from the 1970s through the 1990s, with the exception of Elfriede Jelinek. Taken as a whole, the seondary literature can be categorized roughly under the following rubrics: mother-daughter relations; Austria's National-Socialist past; language and gender; the female other meets the "foreign" other; and intertextual allusions. I have singled out those contributions that provide a foundation for further research and/or suggest new directions.

Patriotism or Nationalism? Fauré and the Great War

Even though Gabriel Fauré's contemporaries championed his music as quintessentially French, Fauré distanced himself from policies of national exclusion in art, and his own construction of French musical style was cosmopolitan. This essay summarizes Fauré's political choices during the Great War, explains his motives, and indicates how some of his decisions affected French musical life. Fauré's outspoken preface to Georges Jean-Aubry's La Musique française d'aujourd'hui provides one key to the composer's position. Jean-Aubry, following Debussy, reckoned as authentically French only musical styles attached to pre-Revolutionary traditions. Fauré felt that such a narrow characterization of French music falsified the diversity of the historical record. His preface therefore takes issue with Jean-Aubry's book and insists that German composers had played an irrefutable role in the formation of modern French music. We may understand Fauré's-and other composers'-wartime decisions in terms of a distinction between patriotism and nationalism. Composers such as Fauré, Bruneau, and Ravel emerge as patriots. Debussy, who sought to purify French music of foreign contamination, emerges as a nationalist. Both nationalism and patriotism call on collective memory and experience, but nationalism exercises its power protectively and tends toward exclusion, while patriotism, favoring political over ethnic determination, tends toward inclusion. Fauré's patriotism emerges through the evidence of the preface; charitable activities; his refusal to sign a French declaration calling for a ban on contemporary German and Austrian music; and his attempt to unite the Société Nationale and the Société Musicale Indépendante. Fauré's wartime music, in contrast to his writings and activities, evades connections with historical events and raises methodological questions about perceived relations between political belief and artistic expression.

Out from the Shadows: Essays on Contemporary Austrian Women Writers and Filmmakers

Out from the Shadows: Essays on Contemporary Austrian Women Writers and Filmmakers