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This paper delves into autobiographical texts, uncovering thematic and narrative parallels, with a keen focus on the depiction of humiliations in Das rauhe Leben [The Rough Life] by Alfons Petzold and Ein Mann seiner Klasse [A Man of his Class] by Christian Baron. It posits humiliation as both excluding and order-establishing, yet also catalyzing resistance to societal exclusion. Following a theoretical examination of humiliation, the study scrutinizes how it shapes the autobiographical narratives, analyzing narrative techniques, its impact on plot and character, spatial significance, and associated discourses.

This article analyses the relation between Leo Perutz’s novel Zwischen neun und neun (1918) and the poetics and works of several German-speaking authors who can be considered Perutz’s literary role models. In chronological order, consideration will be given to the enigmatic, paradoxical situations characterising Heinrich von Kleist’s works, to E.T.A. Hoffmann’s serapiontisches Prinzip, irony and humour, and to Arthur Schnitzler’s narratological techniques and the resignation of his characters. The comparison with these models will demonstrate how the novel relates to the tradition of German literature, in what manner it surpasses it and which elements enable its correlation with modernism.

The essay examines the ferrotypes taken in the Wiener Prater, featuring members of ‘Jung-Wien’, including Hermann Bahr, Richard Beer-Hofmann, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Felix Salten, and Arthur Schnitzler. A closer examination is given to one photo, revealing that contrary to common belief, the figure depicted is not Hofmannsthal, but rather the industrialist Fritz Mendl (1864–1929).

The writer and journalist Paul Goldmann (1865-1935) was one of Arthur Schnitzler’s closest friends. At the same time, he represents the greatest friendship break in Schnitzler’s life. The correspondence between Goldmann and Schnitzler from 1888 to 1931 provides a better understanding not only of Goldmann’s biography, but also of his difficult relationship with Schnitzler.

Silence is commonly understood as a void – in this sense, there is no silence. The figure of thought – silence, calibrates meaning within relationships. I argue that the meaning of several writings in Franz Schubert’s diary has a much larger impact than is commonly understood to this day. Specific tones and ‘beep’ sequences evoke emotions and a deep layer of melancholy, all of which serve as the guiding force in Schubert’s music. In contrast, silence – the moment in which meaning becomes elusive – impoverishes that moment within the lines of the diary note Mein Traum.

Studia austriaca, Cover for Vol 32 (2024)

Studia austriaca XXXII (2024) - The Entire Volume

Studia austriaca, Vol 32 (2024) - Cover and Introductory Pages

Studia austriaca XXXII (2024) - Call for Papers

Elfriede Jelinek’s Die Schutzbefohlenen [Charges (The Supplicants)] shows how the fact that those without (acknowledged) rights speak, even though their language is not the language acknowledged by those who are privileged, nonetheless gives them a right to have rights. As a consequence, the privilege is to be doubted, according to which rights would not be universal. This will be explored in the following.

Even though Robert Menasse claims, through the words of his alter ego Roman Gilanian, the protagonist of Sinnliche Gewissheit [Sensual Certainty], that he does not know what to say about the Brazilians, this novel displays a certain portrait of Brazil. As a land of blatant social injustice, of sensuality, hedonism and irrationality, Brazil is at the same time fascinating and repulsive for a novelist who sees it through European eyes. For Menasse, Brazil remains foreign and mysterious, a land full of contradictions and paradoxes that seem to pose a threat to his philosophical concepts. This article highlights three themes that play a key role in the plot of Sinnliche Gewissheit: colonialism, regression and sensuality which, at the same time, challenge the idea of Heimat.

This paper investigates home videos made by Hojda Stojka, the son of Ceija Stojka (1933-2013), artist and survivor of Auschwitz, Ravensbrück, and Bergen-Belsen. Based on a close reading of significant video sequences, a narrative interview with the videographer, and Ceija Stojka’s publications and films, it analyses how the auto/biographical videos relate to the persecution of the parents’ generation. The paper focuses on the importance of spaces like kitchens, cars and stages, on the value assigned to auto/biographical audiovisual recordings, and the recontextualization and integration of photographs and television recordings into the family memory.

This article analyses the ways in which fraternity is imagined in Victor Hugo’s introductory essay to Paris guide (1867) and Danton und Robespierre (1871), by the Austrian poet Robert Hamerling. Both texts use the French Revolution as a pretext to articulate a cosmopolitan vision that has to be understood as a reaction to the political tensions in the prelude to and aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War (1870-71). By reconstructing how Hugo and Hamerling intervene in a broader debate on the question of nationalism and internationalism, this article sheds more light on how literature was a vehicle for cosmopolitan views.

Studia austriaca XXXI (2023) - Call for Papers

The Austrian novelist, essayist and journalist Maria Lazar (1895-1948), only recently rediscovered, who was a contemporary of Thomas Mann and an acquaintance of Bertolt Brecht, wrote many different types of texts. Considered a promising talent back in Vienna, the reception of her works decreased during Lazar’s years in exile. The following contribution aims to reconstruct the dynamics of her marginalization and takes a closer look at the socially critical dimension of No Right to Live and Die Eingeborenen von Maria Blut [The Natives of Maria Blood].

Studia austriaca, Vol 31 (2023) - Cover and Introductory Pages

Studia austriaca XXXI (2023) - The Entire Volume

Studia austriaca, Cover for Vol 31 (2023)

Focusing on the example of the so-called “Augsburger Messer” in Thomas Bernhard’s Amras, the paper explores the possibility of overcoming the barriers to a hermeneutical reading of Bernhard’s texts through the exploitation of literary things. By comprising both its material and its symbolic dimension the micro analysis of the “Augsburger Messer” suggests coupling the eclectic potential of things in literary texts with Bernhard’s additive and associative style. Eventually, this approach not only opens up a new perspective on Amras as one of Bernhard’s most remarkable texts, but also presents his writing as one that is deeply permeated with the traumatic structures of violence and (Austrian) history.

Taking studies on deconstruction, performance theories, and pragmatics as my point of departure, I investigate Elfriede Jelinek’s last political play Schwarzwasser (2020), where the so-called Ibiza-gate – which in 2018 involved the former Vice Chancellor of Austria – is represented. In her interpretation, Jelinek refers to René Girard’s Violence and the Sacred and Euripides’ Bacchae in an intertextual dialogue. This contribution aims to show how and why Jelinek recalls and employs The Bacchae in her play and to establish a connection between the political function of Greek theatre and Jelinek’s view of Austrian populism.

Studia austriaca XXX (2022) - The Entire Volume

This article examines how David Schalko’s series Braunschlag (2012) presents a community that is threatened by disintegrative forces and dysfunctional communications. The series is read as a political allegory on postmodernist struggles in Austrian culture – as a laboratory for western European societies in general – between globalisation and provincialism. As this is linked to aspects of popular culture in the series, the article includes theoretical thoughts about popular cultural “common grounds” with their inclusive and exclusive function, as analysed by M. Bauer, U. Eco and M. Tomasello.

Women play a specific and analogous role in the narrative of Elias Canetti and Thomas Bernhard. Such characters never appear as the only protagonists, but provide a counterpart to male figures, by whom they are often subjugated and marginalized. It is therefore the aim of this article to examine and compare the different ways in which the male characters of Canetti’s Die Blendung and Bernhard’s Das Kalkwerk and Ja dominate and exploit female figures, in an attempt to emphasize similarities and differences in the works of the two authors.

Studia austriaca, Cover for Vol 30 (2022)

This essay explores one of the films which dealt with the above-mentioned topics and had its cinematic release in the period under discussion – Kassbach, an adaptation of Helmut Zenker’s novel, which was made by Peter Patzak, a prominent Austrian director who passed away in 2021. In this respect, Kassbach would be a work that preceded numerous other Austrian films with a cinematic release in the 1980s and which, even before the Waldheim affair, would touch upon Austria’s difficult past. This article focuses on the film’s message that the lack of de-Nazification at the time, understood not only as a political and bureaucratic, but also as a psychological and social process, facilitates the establishment of right-wing radicalism.

Studia austriaca, Vol 30 (2022) - Cover and Introductory Pages

Studia austriaca XXX (2022) - Call for Papers

In 1947 the Russian writer Gaito Gasdanow published The Spectre of Alexander Wolf, a novel that appears to mirror various aspects of Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s Reitergeschichte [A Cavalry Tale] (1899). Although at present it cannot be philologically proved that the Reitergeschichte directly inspired Gasdanow, several striking parallels can be drawn between the two works, such as the way the themes of war and revolution are addressed, the encounter with doppelgängers, their deaths, and how the capture of the horse ultimately deals the fatal blow to both protagonists. This article examines these aspects closely by contextualizing them within the literary output and the biographies of both authors.

Studia austriaca XXIX (2021) - Call for Papers

Studia austriaca, Cover for Vol 29 (2021)

The aim of this paper is to investigate the influence of Austrian Sprachskepsis on the poetics of the contemporary writer Kathrin Röggla, focusing especially on the use of the subjunctive as a legacy of the poet Ernst Jandl. The comparison between his poem Aus der Fremde – Sprechoper in 7 Szenen (1980) and die alarmbereiten (2010), one of Röggla’s most recent works, emphasizes how Röggla consciously continues the Austrian tradition that sees in Sprachkritik a fundamental tool of social criticism.

Daniel Glattauer’s novel Gut gegen Nordwind (2006), English translation: Love virtually (2011) is the first email-novel of German literature. The love triangle between Leo Leike, Emma and Bernhard Rothner is narrated through 785 emails. Their “computer mediated communication” gives birth to a virtual world that is separated from their ordinary lives. This virtual dimension becomes the projection screen for their identities, bodily representations and desires. It also becomes their cage as they will never meet in reality.

The following article is focused on the importance of visual perception in Veza Canetti’s Die Gelbe Straße. The novelist portraits a Viennese microcosmos as a fabric in which glances are tightly interwoven, representing an urban way of life that, due to its complexity, demands sharp attention and cunning strategic behaviour from everybody. Canetti aims to challenge all the clichés which praised Vienna as an anti-modern, idyllic capital city, characterizing it as deeply rooted in history and art, and thus more humane. Her novel opposes this idealized vision of her hometown by revealing the pitiless nature of its inhabitants. The multiple ways of looking which may be detected on one street mostly reflect different forms of exerting power in society.

Physical setting plays an important role in literary writings. After the spatial turn, scholars of literary studies also turned their eyes to the sociological significance of spatial description in literary texts. This essay presents a spatial analysis of Grillparzer’s Der arme Spielmann and argues that in this novella Grillparzer uses the contrast in space as a vital indicator of the disparity between his characters. These spatial contrasts are mainly derived from characters’ differences in terms of birth, class, wealth, education, job and so on. The difficulty of reducing those differences signifies the suffocating political atmosphere in nineteenth-century Austria.

The following article reconstructs the almost 25-year-long relationship between the two fin de siècle poets Arthur Schnitzler and Richard Dehmel. The analysis is based on the assumption that the rival “artist friendship” is determined by a constitutive generic competition. Schnitzler admired Dehmel’s genius in forms of poetry that he himself had not mastered, first and foremost lyric poetry, but otherwise regarded him critically where he himself had succeeded, namely in the genre of drama. This early resentment forms a lifelong paradigm of Schnitzler’s perception of Dehmel and prevented a sincere appreciation of Dehmel as an artistic equal.

Studia austriaca XXIX (2021) - The Entire Volume

Studia austriaca, Vol 29 (2021) – Cover and Introductory Pages

This paper problematizes the etymology of the word “Ungeziefer” in Franz Kafka’s Verwandlung, connecting it to the Jewish tradition and Egyptian mythology as well as to the anti-Semitism that flourished from the Renaissance to the early twentieth century in the German and Central European area. Gregor Samsa’s desire for freedom and emancipation embodies a monstrous and tragical metamorphosis, which gives the opportunity to free the protagonist, albeit in a humiliating and nihilistic way, from the yoke of philistinism in the family, paradoxically freeing also his relatives from a stagnant existential condition. Kafka’s “Ungeziefer” thus becomes a symbol of growth, transformation and rebirth.

Studia austriaca, Vol 27 (2019) - Cover and Introductory Pages

Studia austriaca XXVII (2019) - The Entire Volume

A first insight into a new digital edition project of Arthur Schnitzler’s correspondence with eighty-six writers is the basis for a discussion of the methodological and epistemological transformations in editing in the last five decades. As a modernist writer, Schnitzler is one of the protagonists of the culture of letters. Bringing his correspondence into relation with his diary aims at not only reconstructing his “life” and “work”, but at visualizing transnational correspondence networks.

Henrik Ibsen’s naturalistic drama Klein Eyolf (1894) was successfully performed at prestigious theatres in London, Berlin and Vienna, a fact which emphasises the establishment of Naturalism in bourgeois high culture. Carl Henop-Hauswirth’s German parody of Ibsen’s play, entitled Klein-Schreyolf (1895), was performed at one of the many popular theatres in the Viennese suburbs only a few weeks after the premiere. This article analyses the social and artistic circumstances leading to the Ibsen parody. It shows the critical exchange of culture between Vienna’s city centre and periphery.

This article focuses on the comics of the Austrian artist Nicolas Mahler. Selected comics from Franz Kafkas nonstop Lachmaschine (2014) will be analysed as ‘minimalistic form’ and inter-spatial phenomena. In Mahler’s so-called ‘graphic anecdotes’, inter- and transmediality become evident in a variety of ways: in the form and organization of anthology, the construction of pseudo-epigraphs, and the accentuation of ‘transition’ and ‘in-between’. As they address and reflect on the position of comics in the literary field, they also contribute to the current discussion about graphic narrative

Michael Köhlmeier is a speaker for those who lack a voice. This also implies talking to those who are to be blamed for pretending to be mute – and it results in the imperative to take a stand against such a wrong attitude. However, right-wing populism seems to ignore the implications of language; henceforth Köhlmeier has to address them in a way that shows the reasons they refuse to listen: the populists’ inherent lack of responsibility. He shows why he refuses to accept what they do and keeps talking to them because of the difference between the populist and himself, nonetheless offering a dialogue.

Musicologists would consider Gustav Mahler’s symphonies heterophonic, while literary scholars might read them as modern narratives that invite a myriad of interpretations. This road into the open is reflected in Arthur Schnitzler’s 1908 novel Der Weg ins Freie. The protagonist Georg von Wergenthin is a Mahlerian figure, enamored of Vienna but also in search of a way out. This paper is a comparative study of Mahler’s music in its dialogue with literature – from Dante and Goethe to D’Annunzio and Hofmannsthal – as well as their shared characteristics that come to shape fin-de-siècle Viennese modernity.

Studia austriaca XXVIII (2020) - Call for Papers

Studia austriaca, Vol 28 (2020) - Cover and Introductory Pages

Gregor von Rezzori’s novel Der Schwan presents a highly symbolic narrative structured on important dichotomies such as life and death, beginning and end, childhood and adulthood. The young narrator experiences different situations, such as the suicide of his uncle, the unwished-for separation from his beloved sister, his first encounter with a girl, and the murder of a swan, to all of which he reacts in a passive way. However, he remains entangled in his family bonds and all these experiences come to symbolize the predestined nature of his life, which is and will be characterized by a series of failures and by his decline.

Norbert Gstrein’s novel Die kommenden Jahre (2018) addresses two central themes discussed in the media and public sphere of today, climate and migration. The main argument is that in the novel this occurs aesthetically in form of a rhapsodic connection between the two topics. How such a literary rhapsody works is shown in three steps: a discussion of the thematic articulation of climate and climate change by the characters (the majority of the main figures are climate researchers), an analysis of the poetic construction of rhapsodic movements on the level of the range of characters and their development, and a reading of the reciprocal relationship between climate, migration, and writing. In this novel, Gstrein develops a poetic model of narrating climate and migration.

This article aims at providing an analysis as well as an interpretation of the novel Spaltkopf (2011) by the Russian-Austrian writer Julya Rabinowich, read through the lens of current theories on cultural transfer. Within this context it scrutinizes the references to Russian and German tales occurring throughout the novel. This analysis endeavours to establish how the osmotic synergy of the two cultural heritages, which are represented both through a new medium – the novel Spaltkopf – and via their original forms influenced by the visual-pictorial dimension, can be considered a valuable seismograph recording the processes of German-Russian cultural transfer.