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The book Passages: Crossings, Borders, Openings: In Conversation with Austrian Writers, edited by Margarete Lamb-Faffelberger and Gabriele Petricek, came together as part of the Austrian-American Podium Dialog that brought writers from Austria to the Austrian Studies conference. It is a collection of short stories by contemporary Austrian writers, conversations with students, and academic essays.
The first part of the book is a collection of short stories, essays, and excerpts of larger works from these authors both in the German original and English translations done by the editors and guest contributors. The Austrian writers showcased in this book are a diverse group: some are of migrant background, while others write about themes related to ecocriticism or make connections between Austrian history (especially World War II) and today.
The second part of the book is a series of four interviews of several of the authors with Lamb-Faffelberger and several of her advanced German undergraduate students who took part in workshops with the authors. These interviews cover topics such as what inspires the authors and how they know when a work is finished. The students also posed several interesting questions to the writers about their perspectives when they write, such as [End Page 137] how Dimitré Dinev chose to write in the perspective of a child in his works or the alternative realities that Patricia Brooks uses in her novels. Lamb-Faffelberger’s comments on preparing her undergraduate students of different levels of German proficiency for the shop talk sessions with the writers are interesting but brief. I would be interested, perhaps in a future article, in hearing more about how she developed her course to read the authors’ works in class and about some of the challenges of working with students to prepare questions to ask the authors in the workshop.
The third part of the book is a series of academic essays on several of the authors and works that were covered in the first part of the book. These essays are based on the writers presentation of their works and subsequent conversations with them during the dialogues. The comparisons with other authors from Austria help to place these modern Austrian authors in the context of Austrian literary history. Several scholars noted certain themes running across
Abstract:
In detailing the cultural techniques required for his behavioral transition from ape to human following capture, Franz Kafka’s Rotpeter addresses not just physical but also cultural differences between apes and humans. The report can be interpreted as a satirical allegory of Jewish assimilation, a commentary that echoes Jay Geller’s notion of the “hierarchical differentiations that characterize antisemitism” (26). Although clothed, Rotpeter retains an ape’s body while exhibiting human behavior and thought patterns. The narrative implies that Rotpeter’s evolution entails cultural techniques of both domestication and hominization, rendering him neither wholly ape nor entirely human. This liminality leads Rotpeter to retroactively fetishize himself as a difference-embodying object while concurrently turning himself into a difference-encountering subject. The blurring of lines between the subject and object positions in Rotpeter’s subjectivity encapsulates the inherent ambiguity at the core of both abjection and Jewish assimilation.
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Education guides learners from the unknown to the known, an axiom teachers can forget for lack of challenging exercise. Most readers of this journal teach and so have probably been asked by interested colleagues outside our own specialty what they should read. If those asking know German, they can be directed to personal favorites as well as to various anthologies and histories or to critical discussions like Joanna Drynda and Marta Wimmer, eds., Neue Stimmen aus Österreich: 11 Einblicke in die Literatur der Jahrtausendwende or Hermann Korte, ed., Österreichische Gegenwartsliteratur, a special edition of Text + Kritik. But what about the interested but inexperienced reader—they still do exist—who does not read German but wants a fairly full picture of contemporary Austrian literature? Many specialists, precisely because they are that, might be at a loss for a reliable resource.
Here is where the present volume is invaluable as a compendium, a one-stop anthology of translated excerpts, reviews, and brief critical articles that form a trustworthy guide for general readers. A good many excerpts are from works not yet fully translated, and a few of them are labeled as “Recommended for Translation.” There is in addition a QR code (231) linking to a bibliography, compiled by Lara Bulloch, of “Austrian fiction, non-fiction and poetry, translated and published in the UK and USA between 2013 and 2023.” The Riveter series, which is edited by Rosie Goldsmith—I confess it took me a moment to work out “Rosie the Riveter”—focuses on various contemporary literatures; this edition commemorates Austria’s status as guest of honor at the Leipzig Book Fair in April 2023. It was funded by the Austrian Cultural Forum London as an initiative of the European Literature Network. Among others, the editors include Goldsmith (“Riveter-in-Chief”), Sheridan Marshall, Tess Lewis, and Jamie Bulloch.
The perennial question of what Austrian literature is arises once again in an interview between Goldsmith and Katja Gasser (5–7), and the volume includes sections on “Austrian History” (10–29), “Vienna” (32–51), “Stefan Zweig and Europe” (53–56), “Writing about Europe” (60–66), “Literature beyond Vienna” (67–77), “Austrian Jews” (78–99), “Austrian Publishing” (109–24), “Translation” (125–30), “Austrian Women” (131–57), “Austrian Poetry” (159–80), “Where Writing Emerges” (181–90), “Austrian Borderlands” (193–99), “Rural Life” (200–205), “Children and Young Adults” [End Page 139] (206–12), and “Austrian Crime
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Der vorliegende Band enthält 170 Texte von Stefan Zweig, die vor allem seine publizistische Tätigkeit dokumentieren. Die zwischen 1900 und 1940 verfassten Texte erschienen, von wenigen Ausnahmen abgesehen, vorwiegend in Zeitungen und Zeitschriften, oder wurden bisher nicht veröffentlicht. Manche Beiträge erstrecken sich über mehrere Seiten, andere wiederum bestehen aus nur zwei oder drei Sätzen. Wie bereits im Buchtitel angedeutet, wurden die Artikel unter dem Gesichtspunkt jüdischer Themen ausgewählt. Im Anhang werden alle in den Texten genannten Personen mit biographischen Angaben aufgelistet. In den meisten Fällen existierte bisher nur der Text der Erstveröffentlichung, d.h. die hier wieder zugänglichen Arbeiten dürften den meisten heutigen Lesern und Leserinnen unbekannt sein. Das Buch besteht aus zwei Hauptabschnitten: 1. Literatur, Kunst, Musik, Sigmund Freud, Lyrik, Autobiographisches; und 2. Geschichte, Politik, Zeitgeschehen.
Der umfangreichste Abschnitt ist der Literatur gewidmet. Es handelt sich hier um Rezensionen, Autorenporträts, Nachrufe, Einleitungen zu Werken, etc. Die einzelnen Autoren werden in alphabetischer Reihenfolge behandelt, wären sie dagegen chronologisch aufgelistet worden, hätte man eine kurze Literaturgeschichte meist jüdischer Autoren vor sich. Von einigen Ausnahmen abgesehen (z.B. Herzl, Joseph Roth, Rathenau, Döblin, Wassermann, Werfel) geht es um unbekannte und oft jüngere Schriftsteller, die Zweig einem größeren Publikum bekannt machen will. Umfangreichere Autorenporträts befassen sich mit Personen (z.B., Herzl Wassermann), die Zweig persönlich gut kannte und Einfluss auf seine Arbeit hatten.
Ein separates Kapitel befasst sich ausschließlich mit Sigmund Freud. Beide Männer standen seit 1908 im Briefkontakt, der sich zu einer—wenn auch nicht immer ungetrübten—Freundschaft entwickelte, die bis zu Freuds [End Page 128] Tod 1939 dauerte. Zweig war fasziniert von Freuds psychoanalytischen Arbeiten und erkannte deren Bedeutung für seine Zeit: “[Die] Gedanken, die kühnen und oftmals genialen Deutungen, mit denen Sigmund Freud unsere Gegenwart beschenkt und herausgefordert hat, sind als Tat nicht mehr zu bestreiten und zu widerlegen. Sie sind lebendig und haben Leben erzeugt. Weit über Deutschland, über Europa, über unseren Kontinent hinaus gibt es kein psychologisches Denken mehr ohne oder gegen sie” (298). Zwar idealisiert Zweig sowohl die Psychoanalyse als auch Freud, die Person, aber er tritt andererseits auch nicht als unterw
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Paul Miller-Melamed’s Misfire: The Sarajevo Assassination and the Winding Road to World War I is an attempt at yet another monograph concerning the origins of the First World War. For his main thesis, Miller-Melamed asserts that the assassination in and of itself was not the “cause” of the later conflict, which he argues arose strictly due to the brinkmanship, bravado, miscalculations, and miscommunications of the statesmen of Austria-Hungary, and to a lesser extent Serbia, Russia, and Germany. To be sure, there’s hardly anything novel there, especially for historians familiar with the topic, which he himself states outright. Indeed, with the outbreak of World War I, there was plenty of blame to go around, and one can find it where-and whenever one decides to focus. Thus, the strength of this book lies not with this well-established thesis. Instead, this work shines because of the author’s more nuanced sub-claims, which stem from his coverage of the complex Balkan affairs in the decades before the war.
More specifically, throughout the book Miller-Melamed adroitly dismisses a litany of popular myths that have arisen around the murders, ranging from the seemingly trivial to the deeply analytical. The most [End Page 111] intriguing claim here is when he dismantles presumptions of official Serbian condonation, complicity, and premeditated policy to help the Black Hand carry out this infamous deed. Indeed, he presents the Black Hand as not just a reductive, if fittingly ominous, misnomer but also as a red herring. He urges us to consider and recognize not some abstract, grandiose conspiracy but instead, the agency of each Bosnian individual who clumsily planned and carried out the assassination. As such, we get a deep, almost dossier-style profile of the young, militant activists, none of whom (he asserts) has any teleological connection to the terrorism that has haunted the twenty-first century. Thus does he shift the narrative to emphasize the motivations, lifestyles, and actions of this loosely fraternal Bosnian group rather than the nefarious Black Hand. But in so doing, he does not lose sight of nuance, being sure to address the ties of each Bosnian youth to certain agents in Serbia, many of whom had more prosaic, domestic political reasons for pushing for trouble abroad.
To prove this point about the agency of these young Bosnian men, Miller-Melamed could stand to be more explicit in his use of sources. He pulls heavily from the trial proceedings of these Bosnian ag
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