Abstracts "Identity, History and Space in Anna Mitgutsch's Haus der Kindheit und Josef Haslinger's Vaterspiel" In my paper, I would like to investigate the way in which both Anna Mitgutsch and Josef Haslinger investigate identity and history in relation to space in their most recent novels.In Mitgutsch's Haus der Kindheit (2000) and Josef Haslinger's Vaterspiel (2000), subjectivity seems to be a spatial concept. The experience of ethnic, political and cultural identities in both texts is structured by the trope of traveling -- geographical, temporal, and virtual. In Mitgutsch's novel, the protagonist Max Berman, a Jewish American Austrian experiences Austria and America as two distinct cultures.For him, America, the veritable Mecca of high culture, exemplifies the urban site of sophistication and innovation; Austria, on the other hand, is painted as rural and provincial. Furthermore, these two locations stand in contrast to a third remembered site. The protagonist's Jewish Austrian identity is rooted in an imagined, imperial turn-of-the-century Austria, defined by its ethnic pluralism and an established Jewish-Austrian tradition.*) In fact, as Sander Gilman has noted with regard to other Second Generation Jewish German novels, Austria in Mitgutsch's Haus der Kindheit seems to be the "authentic space for the expression of a Jewish narrative in German" ("America and the Newest Jewish Writing in Germany," The German Quarterly 73 (Spring 2000): 151-162). Indeed, it is in the contemporary European / Austrian context that Max' Jewish consciousness is heightened. By reclaiming his Austrian house (in geographical and temporal terms), Mitgutsch's protagonist demonstrates how place-making shapes (Jewish Austrian and American) identities and enables resistance against historical elision. Josef Haslinger's cityscape of Vienna in Vaterspiel is politically and historically marked.His protagonist, however, moves into a third realm, virtual space, and explores how place-making, even virtual place-making, shapes his identity. In Vaterspiel Haslinger, too, problematizesAustrian / German Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung through the juxtaposition of Austrian / German and American space. I would like to examine how "Austrian identity" and the Austrian / Jewish problematic, in particular, intersect with Austrian and American space in each novel.Identity is transformed as it travels across geographical, temporal and virtual space. *) Compare with Matti Bunzl's "Counter-Memory and
Modes of Resistance:The uses of Fin-de-Siècle Vienna for Present-Day Austrian Jews,"
Transforming the Center, Eroding the Margins:Essays on Ethnic and Cultural Boundaries in
German-Speaking Countries, ed. Dagmar C.G. Lorenz and Renate S. Posthofen abstract-liste | core | home | kunstraum.gleisdorf [46•01] |
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