A01=Yvonne Zivkovic
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Austrian literature
Author_Yvonne Zivkovic
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Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=DSBH
Category=DSK
COP=United States
cultural exchange
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European culture.
European identity
European literature
European modernism
Language_English
literary politics
memory discourse
Mitteleuropa
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Price_€50 to €100
PS=Active
softlaunch
spatial memory
Yugoslav literature
Product details
- ISBN 9781640140882
- Weight: 400g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 15 Mar 2021
- Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Ltd
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
- Language: English
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Shows how postwar writers in Austria and Yugoslavia re-imagined the concept of Mitteleuropa, Central Europe, as a cultural space between nostalgia and totalitarianism.
The German term Mitteleuropa, or Central Europe, was never just a geographical concept: it connoted extending German influence to the east. In the 1980s, the eastern European dissident writers György Konrád, Czesław Miłosz, and Milan Kundera revived the concept to counter a perceived Cold War memory vacuum, aligning themselves with the multiethnic and multilingual legacy of the Habsburg Empire. Their observations gave rise to a protracted public debate that posited literature against politics. This debate was both anticipated and expanded upon in postwar literary works by Ingeborg Bachmann, Peter Handke, and Christoph Ransmayr in Austria, and Danilo Kiš, Aleksandar Tišma, and Dubravka Ugrešić in (the former) Yugoslavia, all of whom questioned notions of geographic identity and national allegiance by imagining Mitteleuropa as a cultural space between nostalgia and totalitarianism.
Yvonne Zivkovic draws on space and memory studies to show how Mitteleuropa emerged as an alternate memory discourse that reveals deep ties between the Second Austrian Republic and the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. The writers discussed address the major themes of the 1980s debate - traumatic memory, geographic displacement, and transnationalism - but also share a literary aesthetics that privileges the intersections of prose fiction and the essay, the literary fragment, and intertextuality. Zivkovic's book shows the persistence of Mitteleuropa as a literary network and as a cultural collective that examines civic values against public tendencies of memory manipulation.
YVONNE ZIVKOVIC is Alice Tong Sze Research Fellow at Lucy Cavendish College, University of Cambridge.
