Nostalgia after Nazism

History, Home, and Affect in German and Austrian Literature and Film

Heidi Schlipphacke

This book maps nostalgia and its displacements in the works of seminal post-Holocaust German and Austrian authors and filmmakers such as Ingeborg Bachmann, Elfriede Jelinek, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Michael Haneke, Tom Tykwer, and Robert Menasse. By focusing on nostalgia, the author links the central tropes of post-fascist German-language culture (home, family, history, nation) with affect. Within the former Nazi countries, the author argues, nostalgia encounters a taboo, since the fascist past must never be idealized. Nostalgia after Nazism utilizes globalization theory in order to delineate a cultural particularity within the former Nazi nations. The caesura of the Holocaust has produced an historical and affective break that distinguishes these nations from other European countries. Germany and Austria experienced a regression to a pre-modern state during the period of the Third Reich; hence, their belated re-entrance into modernity following the fall of Nazism has had profound implications for national identity and aesthetics. The compulsive fixation with the Nazi past has resulted, the author proposes, in a hesitant and tenuous engagement with the post-national discourses of globalization.

University Press Copublishing Division / Bucknell University Press

Pages: 312 • Trim: 6½ x 9¾

978-1-61148-345-1 • Hardback • May 2010 • $115.00 • (£88.00)

Subjects: Literary Criticism / Reference, History / Reference

Nostalgia after Nazism

History, Home, and Affect in German and Austrian Literature and Film

Hardback

Summary

This book maps nostalgia and its displacements in the works of seminal post-Holocaust German and Austrian authors and filmmakers such as Ingeborg Bachmann, Elfriede Jelinek, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Michael Haneke, Tom Tykwer, and Robert Menasse. By focusing on nostalgia, the author links the central tropes of post-fascist German-language culture (home, family, history, nation) with affect. Within the former Nazi countries, the author argues, nostalgia encounters a taboo, since the fascist past must never be idealized. Nostalgia after Nazism utilizes globalization theory in order to delineate a cultural particularity within the former Nazi nations. The caesura of the Holocaust has produced an historical and affective break that distinguishes these nations from other European countries. Germany and Austria experienced a regression to a pre-modern state during the period of the Third Reich; hence, their belated re-entrance into modernity following the fall of Nazism has had profound implications for national identity and aesthetics. The compulsive fixation with the Nazi past has resulted, the author proposes, in a hesitant and tenuous engagement with the post-national discourses of globalization.

Details

University Press Copublishing Division / Bucknell University Press

Pages: 312 • Trim: 6½ x 9¾

978-1-61148-345-1 • Hardback • May 2010 • $115.00 • (£88.00)

Subjects: Literary Criticism / Reference, History / Reference

Author

Heidi Schlipphacke is associate professor of German at Old Dominion University.

Reviews

In keeping with the trend in culture studies that directs attention to the history of feeling, this study scrutinizes affect and its role in creative nostalgia. The focus is on the peculiar conditions that obtain in postwar Germany and Austria….Schlipphacke’s analysis of the expression of this dilemma in selected works of Ingeborg Bachmann, Elfriede Jelink, Tom Tykwer, Robert Menasse, and Birgit Vanderbeke is subtle and ingenious….She has presented a lucid and sophisticated analysis of a dynamic thematic complex too often viewed as static….Nostalgia after Nazism nevertheless offers a provocative, detailed, and well-argued study of shifts in the creative processing of nostalgia in postwar, post-fascist German and Austrian culture.
— Book Reviews

In Nostalgia After Nazism Heidi Schlipphacke skillfully draws on postcolonial and postmodern theories in addition to recent work on nostalgia to frame her discussion of select works by the Austrian authors Ingeborg Bachmann, Elfriede Jelinek, and Robert Menasse, the German filmmaker Tom Tykwer, and the German writer Birgit Vanderbeke. . . .Schlipphacke has chosen texts 'that engage in especially complex ways both formally and thematically with the confrontation with recent history and the emotions that accompany such a confrontation'. Her analysis, which itself is complex, is lucid and thought- provoking. Th e author provides a model for connecting theory and literature as well as a model for us teaching and reading a literature that is so rooted in Austria’s fascist history beyond that country’s borders.
— The Journal of Austrian Studies