Panel title: Belonging and Otherness in Multiethnic Austria

Paper 1: Geoffrey C. Howes, Bowling Green State University

The Madness of Count Chojnicki: Habsburg Cultural Pessimism in Joseph Roth's Radetzkymarsch

This paper will examine the rambling conservative opinions of the Polish Count Chojnicki, whose extreme pro-Habsburg beliefs cause him to disdain every aspect of the monarchy on the eve of World War I as decadent, weak, and moribund. His attitudes will be looked at in terms of the political and cultural realities they reflect, but also in terms of their irrational, even superstitious basis. Chojnicki is taken from the battlefield to Steinhof, where Herr von Trotta visits him to receive his prophecy of the Emperor's impending death. Chojnicki's madness will be seen as a negative Utopia, a vision of the world so far from reality as to be mad, yet which lays bare the "madness of normality" (Arno Gruen) that prevails before the war: the refusal to believe that the structure of the monarchy, which seems to supply all political and cultural meaning, bears the origins of its own destruction. In Die Kapuzinergruft, a reprise of Chojnicki's character-this time through the eyes of his brother-implies that any lessons that the conflagration of war might have taught have been ignored.

Paper 2: Nikhil Sathe, Ohio University

Family Ties?: Images of Eastern Europeans in Recent Austrian Film

External and internal events since 1989 have led to reassessments and re-positionings of Austrian national identity specifically with regard to Eastern Europe. Not only the fall of the Iron Curtain, the ensuing wars in the former Yugoslavia, and the waves of migrants and refugees from Eastern Europe in Austria, but also Austria’s entry to the European Union, and the electoral success of the xenophobic, and at times anti-Europe and anti-EU expansion Freedom Party have prompted shifts in Austria’s often-touted roles as a bridge between East and West, as the heart of a vaguely defined notion of “Mitteleuropa,” or as a special “relative” of the East through its Habsburg past.

These shifts have been a focus in a number of recent Austrian films. This paper will examine how Barbara Albert’s Nordrand (1999), Barbara Gräftner’s Mein Russland (2002), Andrea Maria Dusl’s Blue Moon (2002), and Susanne Zanke’s Bauernprinzessin (2003) reflect on the Austria’s changing status through their representations of Eastern European characters. Nordrand focuses on four characters struggling with their family pasts in Vienna’s northern skirts, in the Balkans, and in Romania, implicitly questioning notions of home and belonging. The Viennese protagonist of Mein Russland contends with her threatened role as a matriarch as well as her preconceptions of others when the Ukrainian family of her son’s fiancée comes for a visit. In the road movie Blue Moon, the central character travels from Vienna to Odessa in search of his mysterious lover, forcing him to confront his notions of Eastern Europe. Like Nordrand, Bauernprinzessin turns to issues of otherness and belonging, but shifts from metropolitan Vienna to a rural, alpine farm in the Pinzgau where the female protagonist unsettles her family’s inheritance plans when she opts to take control of the farm with her Bosnian Muslim lover.

This paper will examine how these films address the relationship with Eastern Europe and will specifically focus on the prevalent motif of familial relationships. This emphasis reveals the filmmakers’ concern less with a Habsburg legacy than with a more direct engagement in present conflicts centering on globalization and multiculturalism.

Examining four debut films, this paper aims to highlight a vital and promising film culture in Austria.

Paper 3: Margy Gerber, Bowling Green State University

Emigrant/Immigrant Experience as an Ever Changing Silhouette Vladimir Vertlib’s Quest for an Austrian Heimat

Born in Leningrad in 1966, Vladimir Vertlib emigrated with his parents in 1971, the beginning of a ten-year odyssey which would lead from Israel to Vienna, to brief stays in a half dozen other countries and repeated migration attempts in Austria and Israel before the family finally settled in Vienna in 1981. Vertlib speaks of a boomerang effect, implying that their returning to Austria was more an involuntary reflex than a willed decision; Vertlib‘s parents viewed Austria as a “Land der Mörder.” Encapsulated in the Russian Jewish immigrant enclave in the Brigittenau district of Vienna, the school child Vertlib learned that die Einheimischen were not to be trusted. Relations with the Austrian Jewish community were also tenuous, for the Vertlibs, like other Jews from European Russia, were Jews in name only, and their life experience differed in essential ways from that of the Austrian Jews. As a Viennese Jewish character in Vertlib’s autobiographical novel Zwischenstationen remarks: “Russen durftet ihr nicht sein, richtige Juden seid ihr keine mehr, Gojim aber auch nicht.”

Vertlib’s enculturation into Austrian society was correspondingly slow. When he began to write in the early 1990s, it was with the realization that his experience as emigrant and immigrant provided him with an unusual vantage point from which to view Austrian society. Vertlib maintains that for emigrants Heimat is a reale Fiktion, since, in contrast to the native population, emigrants create for themselves an idealized image of Heimat. Memories of the past and perceptions of the present merge in ever new configurations, like a Schattenbild the appearance of which changes in keeping with shifts in the viewer‘s perspective and in the angle of the lighting, while the silhouetted subject itself remains the same. This Schattenbild, the influences which change its form and the commonalities which constitute its essence, are the subject of Vertlib’s writing.

My paper will investigate Vertlib’s discussion of the emigrant/immigrant experience and its effect on his search for an Austrian identity in his novels (Die Abschiebung,1995; Zwischenstationen,1999; Das besondere Gedächtnis der Rosa Masur, 2001; Letzter Wunsch, 2003) and other shorter texts. Topics will include the special perspective of the Russian-Jewish immigrant on Austrian society and the Austrians themselves, and the influence of Vertlib’s native Russian and knowledge of Russian culture on his writing.

Paper 4: 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.