10 - Austrian Prose Fiction, 1945–2000

Summary

GERMANY's ANNEXATION OF AUSTRIA in 1938 destroyed the flourishing literary culture of interwar Austria almost overnight. Among the émigrés from Nazism were many of the most eminent literary figures of the age, and remarkably few of the exiled Austrian writers returned after 1945. This offered, as film-maker and writer Ruth Beckermann puts it, “an opportunity for the mediocre, those who stayed behind, to attain honor and glory.” The charge of mediocrity, though apposite, conceals another characteristic of those who stayed behind, namely the fact that many of them had co-operated to a greater or lesser degree with the National Socialists. The opportunity for such writers to attain “honor and glory” depended not solely on the absence of returning exiles but on a favorable cultural climate arising from developments within the wider fields of politics and cultural politics.

Austrian self-understanding in the postwar decades was characterized by what has been aptly dubbed double-talk. The thesis that Austria had been the first victim of Hitlerite aggression insisted that Germans, not Austrians, were responsible for the War and the Holocaust, while domestic politics both tacitly acknowledged the fact that Nazi sympathies and willing participation in the Wehrmacht were widespread phenomena, and rehabilitated the vast majority of those who had been involved. A similar phenomenon can be seen at a microcosmic level in the re-emergence of literary culture. Although the PEN Club had enshrined anti-fascism as one of its humanitarian principles, the Vienna PEN Center — re-established in 1947 — largely failed to exclude writers who had collaborated with the Nazis. A Literaturreinigungsgesetz (Purification of Literature Act) was passed by parliament but never implemented, while the Education Ministry's list of banned authors contained, in 1948, just six names. The institution of literary prizes tended to further the rehabilitation of those who had remained in Austria between 1938 and 1945. Throughout the 1950s, numerous prominent writers of a nationalist bent, who had begun their careers under the Ständestaat (corporate state) received Austria's major literary awards. The situation was exacerbated by continuities in cultural policy and the cultural bureaucracy, which ensured that the state support available to writers tended to go to the same names as had benefited before and during Nazi rule.