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Dora Bruder And The Longue Durée , Susan Weiner

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Modiano's methods in Dora Bruder recall the Annales historiographer's rejection of the history of events in favor of the "long duration," but with human history as its object. Modiano's long duration draws out repetitions and variations between his own life and Dora's as he reconstructs and imagines it, between Dora and fictional characters, between Dora's story and the lives of Holocaust victims and survivors known and unknown. Moreover, the author encourages the reader to take part in the uncanny connections the novel makes, through movements of the imagination not unlike Modiano's own. In so doing, we approach Dora and those …

People Who Leave No Trace: Dora Bruder And The French Immigrant Community , Mary Jean Green

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Although the neighborhoods where Dora Bruder once lived are now crowded with more recent immigrants, Modiano seems to have erased the contemporary French immigrant community from his narration. Yet immigrants and their children, like Modiano's own father, are very much at the center of this text. In fact, the story of the bureaucratic subjugation of the Bruder family suggests parallels with issues affecting immigration in the book's narrative present in 1996 and 1997, especially the deportation proceedings instituted against immigrant children who, like Dora Bruder, were born in France. Despite their remarkable absence from the streets of Modiano's Paris, French …

"Oneself As Another": Identification And Mourning In Patrick Modiano's Dora Bruder, Susan Rubin Suleiman

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Taking off from Paul Ricoeur's book Soi-même comme un autre (Oneself as Another), this essay discusses two kinds of identification in Modiano's relation to Dora: identification as appropriation, where the writer "assimilates" Dora's story in order to explore his own relation to his parents, especially his father; and identification as empathy, where the writer underlines the differences between his and Dora's stories and also seeks to come to a historical understanding of what happened to her. In that process, he also evokes the fate of other Jews who, like Dora and her family, were deported from France. I conclude …

Trauma And Transmission: Echoes Of The Missing Past In Dora Bruder, Judith Greenberg

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

This essay begins with the ethical imperative that Dora Bruder puts forward: to pay attention to the stories of the pain of others that had been ignored during the Holocaust. But Dora Bruder is also full of "missing pieces"—missing details in Dora's life story, missing elements in the narrator's relationship with his father, and the missing understanding that necessarily occurs in relation to "knowing" trauma and particularly, the Holocaust. The essay looks at those "missing pieces" both through insights in trauma theory and through the lens of 9/11, which introduced a new sense of the "missing" to this writer. It …

Modiano And Sebald: Walking In Another's Footsteps , Steven Ungar

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

This article studies Patrick Modiano's Dora Bruder (1997) and W.G. Sebald's Austerlitz (2000) in conjunction with a contemporary literature of diaspora grounded in the extended aftermath of World War II. Both texts straddle fiction and testimonial accounts such as memoirs, letters, and video/audio recordings. In addition, both raise questions with which traditional historians seldom contend, even when they group these questions under the category of memory. What understanding of the recent past might these two narratives promote? What do they imply—individually or as a set—concerning the nature and function of the historical subjectivity that literature can convey? Each in its …

Modiano Historien , Richard J. Golsan

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Beginning with the "Trilogy" (La place de l'étoile, Ronde de nuit, and Les boulevards de ceinture) of his first three novels published in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the work of Patrick Modiano has been indissociably linked with the history and memory of the Occupation. Dora Bruder is of course no exception along these lines. What makes Modiano's Occupation novels distinctive is their combination of the "historian's" knowledge of the historical realities of the period and the novelist's or "poet's" talent for powerfully evoking the feel and ambiance of "les années noires." While Modiano's practice as …

Fugue States: Modiano Romancier , Lynn A. Higgins

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The essay shows how in Dora Bruder, Modiano is able to call upon imagination and mobilize the novelist's craft while remaining faithful to historical truth.

Reviews Of Recent Publications

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Benthien, Claudia and Inge Stephan, eds. Meisterwerke: Deutschsprachige Autorinnen im 20 Jahrhundert Reviewed by Barbara Kosta

Finney, Gail, ed. Visual Culture in Twentieth-Century Germany: Text as Spectacle Reviewed by Hester Baer

Gigliotti, Simone and Berel Lang, eds. The Holocaust: A Reader Reviewed by Erin McGlothlin

Matejka, Ladislav and Krystyna Pomorska, eds. Readings in Russian Poetics: Formalist and Structuralist Views Reviewed by Peter Steiner

Rigaud-Drayton, Margaret. Henri Michaux: Poetry, Painting, and the Universal Sign Reviewed by Claire Nodot-Kaufman

Van Cauwelaert, Didier. One Way: A Novel Reviewed by Amy L. Hubbell

Introduction: Patrick Modiano's Dora Bruder, Richard J. Golsan, Lynn A. Higgins

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

After establishing a reputation as a literary enfant terrible in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Patrick Modiano is now firmly ensconced as a Grand Old Man (perhaps the Grand Old Man) of French letters and arguably as France's greatest living novelist…

Prince Eugene And Maria Theresa: Gender, History, And Memory In Hofmannsthal In The First World War , Wolfgang Nehring

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Hugo von Hofmannsthal was one of the Austrian poets and intellectuals who took an active part in the historical-political events of 1914. He expected from the war a new vitality of public life and an end of the cultural crisis. In his early years he had advocated closer bonds between poesy and life. Now he encountered a situation that gave him the chance to strengthen his ties with reality. He worried about the existence of Austria, in which he was rooted, and tried to conjure up the Hapsburg spirit of the past for his contemporaries and to explain Austria's national …

Images Of The Second World War In Austrian Literature After 1945 , Karl Müller

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The author examines selected examples of post-1945 Austrian literature, asking what pictures of the Second World War they imparted and what role they played when, certainly from 1948 on, a certain image of history began to take shape in Austria against the background of the Cold War. This image involved a fade-out in particular of the racist nature of the war, and it had a collectively exonerating and distorting impact. Attention is paid to the stories and novels of former participants in the war and National Socialists, such as, for example, Erich Landgrebe, Erich Kern, Hans Gustl Kernmayr, Kurt Ziesel. …

Marlen Haushofer: Recollections Of Crime And Complicity, Maria-Regina Kecht

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

This essay wants to introduce readers to one of Austria's most astute women writers of the immediate postwar period. Marlen Haushofer, in contrast to her contemporary Ingeborg Bachmann, has not (yet) gained international renown despite her literary craftsmanship. Looking at those works of her that most poignantly thematize the postwar reaction to the years of National Socialism and deal with the issues of guilt and responsibility, I focus on Haushofer's gendered perspective on the roles of victim, perpetrator, and bystander as played out in the seemingly apolitical microcosm of the family.

The essay consists of an introductory discussion of the …

Cultural Memory And Intellectual History: Locating Austrian Literature, David S. Luft

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

"Cultural Memory and Intellectual History: Locating Austrian Literature" is an essay about the way intellectuals contributed to reshaping cultural memory in Austria after the Second World War. By cultural memory I mean collective memory of the cultural past, of the creative achievements of a society, in this case the achievements of writers. At the center of my story are five intellectuals trying to make sense of the significance of Austrian literature and the Austrian cultural past, usually in a mode of advocacy, both recalling and creating a cultural past for the tiny postwar republic. Cultural memory of this kind is …

Gender, The Cold War, And Ingeborg Bachmann, Sara Lennox

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

This essay uses the methodology of materialist feminism to situate Ingeborg Bachmann's life and writing in their Cold War context. After outlining the ways in which U.S. Cold War policy affected Austrian cultural life in the nineteen-fifties, I show that Bachmann's own activities during the period of U.S. occupation were steeped in that Cold War atmosphere. I also argue that the Cold War reconfiguration of gender relations left their imprint on Bachmann's writing. Comparing the narrative techniques of the unpublished short story "Sterben für Berlin" (1961) and Bachmann's Büchner Prize Speech "Ein Ort für Zufälle" (1964), I maintain that both …

Gender, Cultural Memory, And The Representation Of Queerness In Ingeborg Bachmann's Narrative "A Step Towards Gomorrah." , Imke Meyer

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

This paper explores the questioning of a culturally produced fixed binary gender opposition, as well as of genre conventions, in Bachmann's "Gomorrah." This questioning, I argue, is achieved despite and in part even due to the fact that a lesbian relationship between the text's protagonists remains unrealized. The text's refusal to depict a lesbian relationship is not so much a capitulation to taboos of the 1950's. Rather, it points up the lack of a language and the lack of generic forms that would allow for the representation of true alternatives to traditional gendered power dynamics. If the narrative wants to …

Jewish History And Memory In Paul Celan's "Du Liegst" , Irene Fußl

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

In the poem "DU LIEGST" (1967), Paul Celan demonstrates his mindfulness of historical dates as memorials to past traumas—the execution of the conspirators of the plot to assassinate Hitler on 20 July 1944, the murder of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg in 1919, and the be-heading of Danton in 1794. Celan has also written the specific date of the poem into the text, although hidden, and weaves together Jewish tradition and events of the recent past in a lyric exploration of human suffering. Building on the hitherto predominantly biographical readings of the poem, the presence of traditional Jewish texts (Old …

Geographies Of Memory: Ruth Beckermann's Film Aesthetics , Karen Remmler

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

How might we view the films by the Jewish Austrian filmmaker, Ruth Beckermann through the lens of the prose by the late German writer W.G. Sebald? The archival and, at the same time, haunting prose of Sebald's works such as The Emigrants or Austerlitz bears a close resemblance to the work of memory that Beckermann's films begs us to do. By focusing on particular spaces of remembrance in Beckermann's films in comparison to Sebald's similar practice of intermeshing historical and individual memories, this essay explores how the gendered construction of cultural memory takes place through transcultural encounters with those deemed …

Viennese Memories Of History And Horrors , Dagmar C. G. Lorenz

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

World cities, including Vienna, are notorious for their crime history and for the imaginary crimes in fiction and film associated with them. The works of authors such as Musil, Canetti, Doderer, Jelinek, and Rabinovici, and Reed's film The Third Man portray Vienna as a setting of crimes.

"Conventional" crimes in literature and films include serial murders, crimes of passion, as well as underworld and gangster activities. These crimes pale in comparison with the crimes committed during the Nazi era and covered up thereafter. Aichinger in "Strassen und Plätze" calls to mind atrocities that occurred at different locations in Vienna. Only …

The Necessity Of Remembering Injustice And Suffering: History, Memory, And The Representation Of The Romani Holocaust In Austrian Contemporary Literature, Roxane Riegler

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

This essay focuses on the role of memory in Austria. It demonstrates the significance of literary production when addressing and coming to terms with the past. Reflecting on the role of memory in history and literature, I see the boundaries between the two blurring. My inquiry includes several questions: Why should we remember? How can we integrate literature into a theoretical framework of memory and history? Why do authors take the trouble to reconstruct a burdened past or even relive pain and suffering? How do authors address the connections between the past and the present? Is it important to draw …

Staging Memory: The Drama Inside The Language Of Elfriede Jelinek, Gita Honegger

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

This essay focuses on Jelinek's problematic relationship to her native Austria, as it is reflected in some of her most recent plays: Ein Sportstück (A Piece About Sports), In den Alpen (In the Alps) and Das Werk (The Plant). Taking her acceptance speech for the 2004 Nobel Prize for Literature as a starting point, my essay explores Jelinek's unique approach to her native language, which carries both the burden of historic guilt and the challenge of a distinguished, if tortured literary legacy. Furthermore, I examine the performative force of her language. Jelinek's "Dramas" do not unfold in action and dialogue, …

Translating Czernowitz: The “Non-Place” Of East Central Europe, Leslie Morris

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The historian Karl Schlögel’s proclamation that Czernowitz is a “real place” and not just a literary topos serves as the point of departure, and the point of contention, for this essay. This essay examines the rhetorical and textual recreations of Czernowitz as “place” on contemporary maps of Jewish mourning and, specifically, in the work of the Czernowitz-born poet Rose Ausländer. Czernowitz poses an interesting problem for contemporary literary and cultural theory that seeks to map the fault lines between literary text, cultural and historical memory, and geographical and textual sites of memory. This legendary Jewish city, once a part of …