Christina Guenther, Bowling Green State University

Viennese Multiethnicity at the Turn of the 21st Century: A comparison of Ruth Beckermann’s Homemad(e) and Doron Rabinovici’s Ohnehin

Since the 1980s several Jewish authors living in Austria have grappled with their sense of what Ruth Beckermann has called Unzugehörigkeit and they explain this concept in terms of public amnesia with regard to Austria’s role during the Third Reich. More recently the Waldheim elections and then the formation of a blue-black coalition in Austria have generated stronger responses from this group of so-called second-generation Jews living in Austria. One way in which these authors continue to counter the anti-Semitism, which once again became salonfähig in public discussions and political discourse in Austria of the late 1990s, is to explore and problematize the relationship between place and identity in an attempt to carve out a space in which they can live and work.

In my paper I shall examine and compare Doron Rabinovici’s Ohnehin (2004) with filmmaker Ruth Beckermann’s Homemad(e) (2001). In both of these works, the artists engage with contemporary Vienna/ Austria as a physical and historical site and develop notions of multiethnicity as a mode of resistance. They stake out an alternative space in Vienna that resists the pervasive politics of xenophobia reflected in the 1999 national election results. Doron Rabinovici’s (*1961) most recent novel Ohnehin is set in the multiethnic community of the Viennese Naschmarkt, in which characters from the Middle East, Eastern and Southern Europe and the regions of the former Habsburg empire cross paths, at times even colliding with bodenständige Viennese. By contrast, in her most recent Vienna-film, Homemad(e), Beckermann provides a personalized portrait of her own Viennese “home,” the Mark-Aurel Straße. In Homemad(e), a“Momentaufnahme” of her own stomping grounds in the First District, her camera largely stationary, she observes the intercultural exchange of Jews, Muslims, and Christians, a mix of Eastern European and Middle-Eastern immigrants. One might call it a grassroots project that signifies a joint venture between Beckermann and her multiethnic neighbors, the interviewees. Beckermann maps in this Vienna film a site of diaspora experience in which new cultures produced by regimes of political domination and economic inequality coexist and counter anti-Semitism and xenophobia.

I would like to examine in how far these models of multiethnicity hearken back to multiethnic Habsburg in order to explore how Beckermann and Rabinovici have adapted and recast this notion at the beginning of the 21st century.