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Titel
Sein oder Schein. Die Österreich-Idee von Maria Theresia bis zum Anschluss


Autor(en)
Stieg, Gerald
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283 S.
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€ 34,99
Rezensiert für H-Soz-Kult von
William M. Johnston, Melbourne

Ever since just before World War I, Austrian essayists have embarked upon a literary quest for Austrian “national identity.” The quest may be likened to that of Cervantes’ Don Quixote. Almost always male, the Austria-seeking essayist remains undeterred by the failure of others, and like Don Quixote he requires a debating partner, a Sancho Panza. This foil may be a writer like Hofmannsthal or an historian like Friedrich Heer or a composer like Mozart or in the case of the present book a comic like Hanswurst. As in Cervantes’ novel, closure can be neither imagined nor attained.

Austrians cannot end their obsession with identity-seeking because no one agrees upon how to delimit the “object” of the quest. Is “identity” an historical structure or a catalog of traits or a portfolio of discourses? Just as Don Quixote went “mad” after reading too many chivalric romances, so the Austrian quester takes wing after reading essays, many of them fanciful or delusory. No explorer has yet exhausted the oddities abiding in a land called – take your pick – Austria or Kakanien or Cisleithanien or Mitteleuropa or Zentraleuropa.

Given that Austria both before and after 1918 harbored more than its share of unclassifiable individuals, it follows that any country populated by so many one-of-a-kind types will itself become unclassifiable. That is what makes the quest for Austrian identity quixotic. There is always one more bizarre symptom and one more eccentric or repugnant interpreter to catalog.

Into this crowded literary landscape enters the latest knight errant, the phenomenally well-read and wonderfully intelligent Gerald Stieg. Gifted with a talent for brevity, this native of Salzburg has spent a career in France where colleagues avoid obsession with the quest. He has read more widely among the pertinent texts, genres, and periods than perhaps anyone else since Friedrich Heer (1916–1983). So widely in fact has Stieg ventured that one dares to hope that here at last is a quester who will resolve some of the conundrums.

With wit that frequently verges on sarcasm, Stieg’s essay sorts out many dozen of discourses about what makes Austria Austrian and what makes its national identity “chimerical.” Whereas the French edition lacks footnotes and contains only two items of bibliography, the German edition singles out ten titles and lists 85 texts discussed in the text. The eloquence of Stieg’s German conceals the fact that he first wrote this book for French readers.

In 23 chapters arranged into three sections, Stieg re-appraises more than 50 figures, many of whom incarnate major dilemmas. Although at first glance the book may appear to be loosely constructed, the organisation actually coheres tightly. Part One of 50 pages sorts out the dialectic of key terms like “national” and of slogans such as “l’Autriche c’est ce qui reste,” while the “personal prelude” (pp. 20–34) narrates Stieg’s intellectual autobiography with acumen worthy of Karl Kraus. Part Two of 120 pages probes ambivalent phenomena like the 40-year rivalry between Maria Theresia and Frederick II of Prussia, the Revolutions of 1848, the tragic antinomies of “Sankt Lueger,” the frantic zigzagging of political parties, and the adhesion of well-intentioned Jews to the “Austrian idea.” After a shameful delay propagandists for the Second Republic rediscovered these embattled patriots only during the 1970s (pp. 128–143). An unbearably sardonic – and Krausian – section recounts anti-Austrian tirades from Hitler’s” “Mein Kampf” (pp. 144–155). All these pages abound in clarifications, aperçus, and bonmots. Most original of all are the nearly 100 pages of Part Three on “cultural constructs of identity.” Here Stieg’s phrase-making enlivens analyses of the bizarre discourses that emerged between 1914 and 1945.

Perhaps the book’s most striking coinage concerns what Stieg calls “Das Prinzip Papageno” (pp. 225–235), a notion that might well be translated as “the Papageno Reflex.” Having aligned the figure of Papageno with Hanswurst and der liebe Augustin, our quester defines the “Papageno Principle” as a lifelong “identification with the stage of childhood” – a proclivity that results in a refusal ever to embrace a specific father-figure (p. 235). Stieg sees this preference for “normlessness” as inextricably Austrian (p. 234). The discussion leads into an exhilarating analysis of what is Austrian in the eternal child Mozart. These passages configure a hoard of apologists’ clichés into a literary divertimento (pp. 235–246).

Throughout Stieg situates episodes of Austrian identity-questing in the specifics of their period. He divides the 31 years from 1914 to 1945 into four sub-periods, each one more prone to identity-panic than the one before. World War I brought forth a delirium austriacum-germanicum in the sometimes labyrinthine texts of Bahr, Müller, Musil, Hofmannsthal, and Kraus. The 1920s focus on the reasoning of the Austromarxists Karl Renner and Otto Bauer, the latter earning Stieg’s highest praise for cogency (pp. 120–124). The 1930s center on the “phantasmagorias” of Catholic and catholicizing apologists of the Ständestaat like the uprooted Jews Franz Werfel, Leopold von Andrian-Werburg, and Joseph Roth, each of them surprisingly distinctive. Stieg’s brief account of the Nazi-Years features a satire of the grotesqueries by which Baldur von Schirach contrived to Nazify Mozart (pp. 240–244).

If one wished to pair Stieg’s “Sein oder Schein” with another recent book, one might choose Katherine Arens’s equally well argued study “Vienna’s Dreams of Europe: Culture and Identity beyond the Nation-State” (New York, 2015). Its selection starts with Sonnenfels and Grillparzer before moving on to Nestroy, Hofmannsthal, Schnitzler, Bayer, and Handke, and it delves with similar aplomb into theater-centered discourses about Austrian distinctiveness. The key difference is that Arens, one of very few women to tackle these questions, situates her identity-questers within the entire Habsburg Empire, whose hybrid cultures flourished within what she calls “a chain of Austrias.” Many spokespersons for Arens’s quasi-imperial notion of Austria flourished far from today’s Republic – in Triest, in Galicia, and in the Bukovina. Apart from Stieg’s painful pages on the Jews (pp. 128–144), thinkers from such outlying zones play too little role in his dissection of “national” as distinct from “imperial” identity.

One might liken Stieg to a Don Quixote who boasts Papageno as his Sancho Panza. Unrelenting in argument, acidulous in tone, and sometimes deeply moving (e.g. on the plaintive loyalty of Austriaphilic Jews), this quester’s tale belongs among the most unsettling essays on Austrian identity. Perturbing precursors include Robert Müller, Robert Musil, and Karl Kraus, not to mention Fredrich Heer in his cri de coeur, “Der Kampf um die österreichische Identität” (Wien, 1983). Happily Stieg’s gift for Papageno-like improvisation is kept in check, partly one suspects in homage to his mentor and fellow “borderliner” (p. 31), Felix Kreissler, whose passionate gravitas animates these pages. With never failing equipoise, Stieg plays the role of a learned and witty contrarian who parses age-old problems with such skill that the skeptic in one wishes – per impossibile – that Stieg could resolve at least some of the dilemmas. As the quest must now inevitably resume, all future participants will have to address this book, and no doubt many will adopt Stieg as their Sancho Panza. They could not choose better.

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