Jetzt & Alles: Österreichische Literatur: Die letzten 50 Jahre ed. by Bernhard Fetz, Stephanie Jacobs and Kerstin Putz (review)

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Reviewed by:

• Jetzt & Alles: Österreichische Literatur: Die letzten 50 Jahre ed. by Bernhard Fetz, Stephanie Jacobs and Kerstin Putz
• Vincent Kling

Bernhard Fetz, Stephanie Jacobs, and Kerstin Putz, eds., Jetzt & Alles: Österreichische Literatur: Die letzten 50 Jahre. Vienna: Residenz Verlag, 2023. 240 pp.

Like The Austrian Riveter, reviewed in JAS 75.1, the present volume honors Austria’s guest status at the Leipzig Book Fair 2023 and catalogues an exhibit running concurrently in the Österreichisches Literaturmuseum in Vienna and the Deutsches Buch- und Schriftmuseum der deutschen Nationalbibliothek Leipzig. Directors of both institutions offer a welcome, Johanna Rachinger for the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek (13–14) and Frank Scholze and Stefanie Jacobs on behalf of the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek and the Deutsches Buch- und Schriftmuseum (15–16), respectively. Before the greetings is a large-print reproduction, suitably enough, of Ernst Jandl’s poem “nationalliteratur” (10–11).

This catalogue looks, partly on purpose it would seem, like a coffee table book, replete with hundreds of illustrations, manuscript pages, and photographs but also artifacts of every kind. When the Austrian Literature Museum was first opened, it charmingly boasted in its advertising that it even owned Heimito von Doderer’s walking stick. How much more is here. This book shows enough items to suggest the phrase “everything but the kitchen sink”—and there may be one of those, too.

The items all have relevance to the given writer’s work, like the wooden box in which Arno Geiger kept the photographs from his Die Bewohner von Château Talbot project (149), the film stills from Oswald Egger’s Wo noch war ich wieder? (206–207), Friederike Mayröcker’s collection of stuffed Snoopy figures (81), or the small box of Florjan Lipuš’s pencil stubs (55). The items are anything but a hodgepodge or flea market, however, since their arrangement is always correlated to the author’s production; moreover, they are arranged thematically in organized chapters.

Before that, Bernhard Fetz and Kerstin Putz note in their “Auftakt” section (26–27) that 2023 is an appropriate date for bracketing fifty years, half a century after the founding of the Grazer Autorinnen Autorenversammlung in rebellion against the conservative Austrian P.E.N. Club and after the death of Ingeborg Bachmann. The year 1973 also saw the award of the Georg Büchner Prize to Peter Handke, who dedicated his award speech to Bachmann’s memory. This section also includes (29–37) the collage compiled by Marlene [End Page 152] Streeruwitz for Austria, answering an inquiry from a Danish newspaper requesting “ten points of view on the flavours and characteristics as well as the cultural and spiritual baggage of your country” (29), an apt inclusion considering Streeruwitz’s wide range, from Freud to the Wiener Schnitzel, from the Sissi films to demagogic politics.

The chapters deliberately cultivate variety in depicting objects, and if the accompanying texts are short, they without exception offer strong analyses based on the items shown. How, for example, could the section on Jandl in the chapter “Atemloses Sprechen” (88–85) not include pictures of his magnetic tape recorders and his microcassette player as well as manuscript pages? Kerstin Putz’s comments on “Josef Winkler: Wortmaschine, Schreibmaschine, Sprachmaschine” (104–7) argue that the distinctive typeball on Winkler’s IBM Selectric typewriter helped determine the very rhythm and sequence of sentences by the appearance the page presented. Likewise, Magdalena Haid and Kerstin Putz quote Elfriede Jelinek in “Auf der Bühne und vor der Röhre” (108–11) about her Apple Computer: “Es ist fast so, als wäre der Computer für meine Arbeitsweise erfunden, denn ich schreibe ja sehr schnell” (108). The segments on Winkler and Jelinek are contained in a chapter called “Wortmaschinen”; one sees throughout this book that the artifact takes prominence over what it produced or accompanied. It is not that material comes before spirit, but that there can be no expression of spirit without its being recorded in some material form.

Take as another example the manuscript sheets, typescripts, and overwritten musical scores shown in Susanne Rettenwander’s “Gert Jonke: Die Sprache als Instrument” (68–73) in the chapter “Sprachmusik,” which also includes Arnhild Inguglia-Höfle’s discussion of Gerhard R...