Agnieszka B. Nance, Texas State University, San Marcos

Polish Galicia through the Eyes of an Austrian – Images of 1846 in Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach’s Kreisphysikus and Jakob Szela.

One of the entities that emerged as a result of the three partitions of Poland was Galicia, which became the largest province in the Austrian Empire. The future of Galicia as the core of a Polish state or as the Polish “imagined community” was widely discussed in political and intellectual circles. These real debates had their fictional counterparts. Although born in Moravia, Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach (1830-1916) is one of the germanophone authors who recognized this Polish Galicia, the “other Austria,” the Austria of small border villages. The Poles, as represented in two of her short stories, Der Kreisphysikus (1883) and Jakob Szela (1883), emerge as a national group—distinct from the Czechs, Jews, and Austrians—accommodated within the Habsburg framework and with their own national imperatives.

In this paper, I will present how, through her ironic narrative tone, Ebner-Eschenbach draws a colorful picture of the actual Polish aristocracy in Galicia, as well as of their connection to the émigrés in Paris, and presents for the reader the fundamental problem of the Polish aristocracy: the fact that their interest was drawn away from their immediate surroundings and towards vague political schemes. In her version of this situation, the political discussion among the Polish nobility in Galicia was almost exclusively concentrated on the fight for independence of the Polish state and on its symbols of nationhood, paying little or no attention to the Galician present. In both texts, Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach uses the historical events of 1846 in Galicia to present to readers current circumstances and future possibilities for the reestablishing of a Polish state. In so doing, she postulates that a new kind of aristocratic leadership must be asserted in order to construct a new Polish community that would help the lower classes and avoid a new peasants’ uprising. In so doing, she suggests that only a socially-unified Polish community that declares a common cause across traditional political lines would be able to justify its claim for independence. This is less than a full affirmation of the Polish peasants’ cause because she criticizes mainly the truly ineffectual upper class. But she does argue that a more coherent future is more likely to be found in Polish culture rather than in its politics. Therefore, Ebner-Eschenbach envisions Galicia as the heart of a multiethnic culture of Poles and Germans, even where she disagrees with many Poles about Habsburg political policy.