Katherine Arens, University of Texas, Austin

"Das Kloster bei Sendomir": Grillparzer's Non-National Historical Literacy

This presentation will use "Das Kloster bei Sendomir"to discuss Grillparzer's approach to the regional history of Central Europe as Habsburg history.Traditionally, he is considered a Habsburg (anti-)hagiographer, and a dramatist in the tradition of German Classicism -- as a "modern" dramatist in the European traditions. Yet such frameworks, I believe, do not address the historical discourse from which Grillparzer as author and historian speaks.

"Kloster" seems less than transparent to us today, becauseit is clearly written for an audience who remembered -- if not experienced themselves -- the dismantling of the Kingdom of Poland, its brief reinstatement during the Napoleonic Wars, and its final demise.In consequence,I will argue here thathis adaptation of recent Central European history in "Kloster" speaks to his desire to build out of his specific interpretive community a very specific political interrogation -- not just partisan politics, but a sophisticatedmeditation on the nature of Central Europe's structures of rule.

I will trace how Grillparzer's handling of genre, his (re)use of traditional materials, and his attention to other textual organizers in "Kloster," as in his longer works, place his sense of history in a different tradition of literacy and textuality, and as responding to a different approach to what constitutes a nation's history. He does not place his texts in the context of authorial authority and the buddingmodern nation state that reaches from Schiller and German Idealism up to modernism.Instead, he places his authority as an author differently, speaking to an interpretive community which expects not only a realist interaction with a text, but also takes history as a much more plural narrative to be rethought and renegotiated on a day-to-day level.

In this sense, then, Grillparzer's texts rest on a persistent, non-Hegelian approach to historical understanding that represents the author as an agent of historical literacy, notthe leadership of an author/authority, as a tool for historical change. No wonder, then, that Grillparzer found little to appreciate in German Romanticism and nascent (nationalist) realism -- he rejects such nationalist history writing as an inappropriate representation of the region's history, as well as a falsification of the kind of political subject neededto stave off historical catastrophe.He thus shows us an early vision of Central Europe much as Claudio Magris's Danubio shows it: as a region resistant to nationalist history because of its layered histories and constantly unmanaged and unmanageable confrontations between historical master narratives from various nationalist groups.