Music, National Identity, and the Past in Postwar Austrian Literature.

Abstract

This dissertation examines the place of music in the work of three contemporary Austrian authors: Thomas Bernhard, Elfriede Jelinek and Gert Jonke. Against prevailing scholarship, I argue that music serves these authors not principally as a formally removed or aesthetically pleasing site of escape from, but as entry point into the contentious political, national, and historiographical narratives underpinning postwar Austria’s troubled historical trajectory. Bernhard, Jelinek and Jonke reproduce in their work a dominant cultural discourse claiming postwar Austria as the “Land of Music;” but they simultaneously insist on keying Austria’s musical exertions to the historical myth, foundational for national imaginary of the emergent Second Republic, that Austria was a victim of, rather than a willing and active participant in the crimes of Nazi Germany. The heart of the dissertation comprises three musically mediated literary encounters with the Land of Music discourse so conceived. In Bernhard’s hands the memory of Austria’s National Socialist past is carried and conveyed, but also contested, through the sound of music. For Jelinek, Austria’s aggressive musical discourse reinforces patriarchal structures built on the foundation of a residual fascism. And Jonke links postwar Austria’s musical inundation to the cognitive shortcomings of the Austrian subject while charting a hypothetical alternative that would have taken its cue from the aesthetic project of New Music, a musical trajectory much maligned in postwar Austria. The study focuses on music in Bernhard, Jelinek and Jonke as a way of contributing to the secondary literature on each of these authors, including the ever-growing scholarship on music in their work. Beyond this, the study argues on behalf of music’s place in the world as a vital tool, one that people recruit and contest as a way of accomplishing specific types of cultural, social, and political work. By arguing for newly productive ways of accounting for postwar Austria’s musical engagement, the dissertation contributes to a revivification of music as broader object of literary study.