Austria, the Writing of History, and the Search for European Identity

Abstract

In his address to the International Author's Congress held in Paris in 1935, Robert Musil—who claimed to have always held himself back from politics because, in his words, like hygiene, he had no talent for it—attempted to describe the problem of being an Austrian writer. A German author, he suggested, is unproblematically German in his writings. But an Austrian writer, he said, was in a more problematic situation. “My Austrian homeland expects from its poets that they be more or less poets of the Austrian homeland, and there are the creators of cultural history who make of show of demonstrating that an Austrian poet has always been something other as a German one.” It is perhaps the fate of Austria to have a surfeit of Kulturgeschichtskonstrukteure, of intellectuals who feel a need to build a cultural history of Austria and to project it into a distant past, and this largely in the face of the overwhelming reality that a unified cultural history of Austria is impossible, unlike, some might think, that of ancient nations such as Germany, France, or Italy.