Like Chewing Gum on the Sole of a Shoe...

The success of East European literatures in the German-speaking world has a direct correlation with expectations and – yes, also – clichés that German-speaking publishers conjure up about the East.

First, somebody has to match his record: Peter Handke has been in the spotlight of German-speaking literary criticism for fifty years. For every book, every play and every interview, even.

Awake. Get up. Snow outside.

In Austria, an audience attuned to culture gets indignant if Austrian writers are treated as German writers. This happens now and again – I last noticed it in Eva Menasse’s case in an anthology about German-Israeli relations. I have to admit, people used to get much more hot and bothered. For instance, a few years ago when ZDF published a list of Greatest Germans, which was based on a public vote, the featured names included Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Sigmund Freud or Empress Elisabeth of Austria. The media then had a field day and moaned about the ‘Great Neighbour’. Tempers overheating in these situations like to slip in the word Anschluss to the protest. Maybe this seems like a digression from literature, yet it highlights the core problem of cultural identity: what is Austrian? Is that even a reasonable question?

In part one, I explained that in Austria we practically have no professional literary criticism be it good or bad. There are a handful of managers of literary journals or literary shows. Plus, we have a larger number of part-time critics working as a sideline in many fields, including literature. The same also applies in Germany, yet the size of the country and the myriad of publishing options prevent literary critics or those writing about literature from forming a homogenous group. In Austria’s media landscape, which is easy to figure out, there has been no great affinity with literature from the start. Apart from the public broadcaster ORF, as well as several supra-regional daily newspapers and weekly magazines, not even the basis of a Feuilleton exists where texts about literary criticism would be published. Incidentally, nobody thinks about what a Feuilleton should be. An extended cultural feature section? An island that is tolerated from the publisher’s side and harbours more or less intellectual libertines?

The Feuilleton debates largely initiated by writers diagnose the condition of German-language literary criticism as feeble, if not degenerate. The tirades against the critics are a tradition that pervades the German literary scene since its inception, that is, since the late 18th century.