Austrian Cultural Forum NYC

The annual Festival NEUE LITERATUR brings some of the best up and coming German-speaking authors to New York, where they encounter well-known American writers in a series of conversations and readings.
This year's edition of the festival centers on the notion of mobility in today's increasingly globalized world. Many authors in Europe and the United States share an immigrant back-ground and write in languages that are different from what they grew up with.
The "immigrant experience" has become a common theme in many recent books of contemporary fiction. However, mobility or the lack thereof is not only experienced by authors who have arrived and struggled to establish themselves and their identities in a new and often hostile society, but also by writers who are longing to move away from their small-town provincial surroundings but feel that they are stuck and cannot leave.
Contemporary fiction lets people move from one place to another or never at all, but it shows that ultimately, mobility is a concept of our mind.

Graz-based author Olga Flor will participate in this year's Festival NEUE LITERATUR:

The Problems with Mobility – of People Who Eat Garlic, Beggars, and the Desire for Demarcation
Olga Flor in Conversation with Klaus Nüchtern and Daniela Strigl

Ms Flor, when you were a child, you and your parents moved from Vienna to Cologne, and after you finished university you lived for a while in Italy and the United States. How do you see any such major move? As an opportunity or an inconvenience?

When I was a child, I saw it more as an inconvenience, at least the second move, because it forced me to separate from my best girlfriend. On the whole, though, a move is of course an opportunity.

I’ve gone back to Cologne again and again, and not just because of my girlfriend. Particularly as a young adult, I was attracted to the city because of its diversity, its noise level – I’m probably associating that with the Carnival celebrated there in the course of the Catholic Church year – its courage to go out on a limb artistically, and also because there’s a certain dirty beauty to it. And of course because of its location. It’s in Germany, but close to Belgium and Holland.

As a child in Cologne, because of my appearance, people often thought I was Portuguese, Italian, or Turkish. Those were the countries most of the so-called guest workers came from in the 1970s. In those days, it wasn’t as common as it is today for Turkish women to wear the burqa, young women hardly wore it at all, it was just for older women, rather like the old women you could still see in rural parts of Austria. They wore headscarves, and their backs were bent from work and poor nutrition. The experience that made the greatest impression on me was when my mother (and I was with her) was thrown out of a store. The people said: “Get lost, you stink of garlic!” It probably didn’t hurt for me to be treated like a despised foreigner. Now I know how they feel.

Back in Austria, thanks to my accent, people jumped to the conclusion that I was a Kraut.

Today you and your family live in Graz. It’s too big to be a town, and too small to be a city. What is Graz?

A big town? A small city? A medium-sized town? By the way, not far from Graz there are places called Großklein and Kleinklein, or Bigsmall and Smallsmall. I’ve always wondered if there are places called Smallbig and Bigbig anywhere. In any case, Graz fits right in there: it can be suddenly smallbig and at the next moment bigsmall again. Even though the legislation on marital partnership is formulated with typical Austrian imprecision, the current interpretation of it, which is the most restrictive interpretation possible, clearly shows how things are in the small towns.

Graz has changed perceptibly since the fall of Communism in the Eastern Bloc opened up the borders. Political debates are dominated by fear of foreigners, of being disadvantaged and reduced to poverty. The allegedly organized beggar tourism is a constant source of irritation. How do you see it?

Begging is so humiliating (and unhealthy, not only in the winter) that probably no one would beg who wasn’t forced to because of dire circumstances. As far as I know, most of the beggars in Graz have come to us from Slovakia because of the lack of employment and infrastructure there, and they have come at their own expense. The parish priest at St. Vincent de Paul’s is looking after them, and he is also attempting to set up some bone fide means for them to sell their products that are made in Slovakia. He’s trying to combat their poverty by going to the root of the problem. It may be that there are also people who want to profit from this situation, at the beggars’ expense. That is reprehensible. As are the actions of political parties that want to capitalize on the suffering of others, i.e. the beggars, to raise their own ratings in the opinion polls.

What, for you, defines Heimat, or homeland? Is that even a concept that you can use without reservations? And how would you differentiate between the concepts “homeland” and “home”?

I admit I’ve been suspicious of the term every since I was first confronted with Heimat films, those sentimental films in idealized regional settings. And the Waldheimat [1983 TV series set in the Austrian Alps], with all its connotations, did nothing to improve my relationship to this word. No, I don’t like the word.

But when you think about it, it’s a little childish to replace the word “homeland” with “home,” just to make yourself feel better. Ideally, you would replace the content of the word “homeland,” what it conjures up, the desire for demarcation, the narrow-minded fear of foreigners that is once again taking hold here in Austria with terrible repercussions: Now the people seeking asylum in Austria are not only to be denied employment (to assume that would point them toward criminal activities is definitely too far-fetched), but also to be held in internment camps. While there, of course, they are to be given the opportunity to buy everything that people in internment camps can buy – consumer potential must not be allowed to go to waste unused while people are detained for an initial security check! But it remains unclear exactly what money these interned people who want to stay here are supposed to use to make their purchases.

Fear of foreigners has taken the form of frenzied deportations. We’re even deporting young, well-educated people (in whose education we ourselves invested!) who grew up in Austria, simply because of their parents’ country of origin, because what is this going to come to, we’re no self-serve store! There’s so much talk of the strain on the national economy, but it doesn’t seem to have occurred to anyone that the economy might show more of a profit if we allowed people who were educated here to work here too.

Mobility is increasingly required by the job market, as a kind of forced flexibility. Is there any chance at all anymore that one can resist that, or would it be pointless? If we want to be cynical about it, we could say that, in comparison to worldwide migration,  commuters’ problems are negligible, and they should be happy to have work.

In answer to your first question: basically yes. But it certainly requires a great effort and a lot of resourcefulness, all the more so when the job market is tight. The workforce in general now offers mobility as part of its streamlined adaptation to market demands. And there’s nothing wrong with a change in position, both in the mental and the physical sense, with changing your point of view and your place of residence, as long as you do so voluntarily. But the constant pressure to do so makes it extremely difficult to have a life with children, a life as a couple. And, yes, in comparison to all the people in the world who embark on a dangerous flight out of dire necessity, only to suffer inhuman treatment in internment camps like the one on Lampedusa, we nomads of the Central European workforce are exceptionally privileged.

In your novel Talschluss [Valley under Quarantine], you use quarantine to create a situation in which people become isolated, in your next novel, Kollateralschaden [Collateral Damage], the main scene is set in a supermarket, where things that were a long time coming escalate and come to a head: Why do you like to work within confined narrative spaces?

Maybe I just need a strong structure, as far as technique is concerned. As for the content: maybe the world within will get narrower and narrower if, as I recently saw in a sensational newspaper headline, Google will soon know more about us than we ourselves do?

Translated by Jean M. Snook

2010 PEN WORLD VOICES OF INTERNATIONAL LITERATURE
April 26 - May 2, 2010

by Katharina Diewald

For the sixth time, more than 150 writers from around the world will gather in New York City to engage in conversations, readings, and performances. This year, World Voices, PEN American Center's festival of cosmopolitan, literary exchange, will again have a highly prominent Austrian presence.

Austria will be represented by the Austrian Cultural Forum as well as by two contemporary novelists: Martin Pollack and Josef Winkler. Both their works have been available in English translation for some years. Pollack, a journalist, editor, and renowned translator of Polish literature by writers such as Ryszard Kapuściński, deals with incidents in recent history in a documentary manner in his literary work. His 2004 book Der Tote im Bunker: Bericht über meinen Vater is his first to be published in English (The Dead Man in the Bunker). Winkler, in turn, is a distinguished fictional yet partially autobiographical writer whose work is largely concerned with the theme of death and with the impact of Catholicism on rural life in Austria. An example is his novel Der Leibeigene (The Serf). With the participation of two writers who work in such diverse ways, Austria shows proof of its dynamic literary scene at the PEN festival.
 

WHERE TO MEET

MARTIN POLLACK
APRIL 30
GLOBAL VOICES
1-2:30 PM
Instituto Cervantes New York

JOSEF WINKLER
APRIL 30
KAFKA IN AMERICA
6:30-8 PM
Austrian Cultural Forum



For detailed information please visit www.pen.org.

Ernst Jandl at Home Abroad: Correspondences with Anglo-American Culture

by Hannes Schweiger
(Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for the History and Theory of Biography, Vienna)

Ernst Jandl (1925-2000) was a multilingual writer who continuously crossed the cultural boundaries between the German- and English-speaking world. He translated Gertrude Stein, Robert Creeley, John Cage, and W. H. Auden into German. He wrote poetry and prose in English, a language that was an important means of expression and experimentation for him, particularly during his final years. His texts have been translated into English, mainly by Michael Hamburger, one of the most influential translators of German-speaking poets like Goethe, Hölderlin, Rilke, and Celan.

In 1971 Jandl was invited by Christopher Middleton, Professor of Germanic Languages and Literature, to teach and give readings at the University of Austin, Texas. The bilingual journal Dimension, edited by A. Leslie Willson from 1968 to 1994, frequently published texts by Jandl. But ultimately, his sound poetry and performance art did not depend on translations to have a tremendous impact on non-German-speaking audiences.

When 7,000 poetry enthusiasts gathered for an event at London’s Royal Albert Hall on June 11, 1965, the rather unknown Austrian poet Ernst Jandl gave his performance just before the star of the evening, Allen Ginsberg. Jandl outshined him. Alexis Lykiard remembers: “One of the most impressive moments was when the Austrian Ernst Jandl read and the audience successively turned football crowd, Boy Scout rally, and wolfpack.” Jandl read some of his longtime sound poetry hits: “schtzngrmm” and ”ode to n” as well as Kurt Schwitter’s “fury of sneezing” together with Pete Brown and Michael Horovitz. The reading at Royal Albert Hall, captured on film by Peter Whitehead in his legendary Wholly Communion, and a tour across Britain to meet other avant-garde poets marked the beginning of Jandl’s intensive correspondence and exchange with British and American writers and artists such as Ian Hamilton Finlay, Michael Horovitz, John Furnival, Bob Cobbing, and Christopher Middleton. And when Ginsberg died in 1997, Jandl noted: “Allen Ginsberg and I were friends for 32 years. Our alliance of poetry, freedom, and love has no limits.”

English-language literature und culture had an important influence on Ernst Jandl on a poetological level. Jandl regarded Gertrude Stein as one of the most important literary voices of her time, and her influence on his work is unmistakable. He first came across her while he was a prisoner of war in an American POW camp in Stockbridge (UK), where he worked as a translator and interpreter. After returning to Vienna in 1946 he studied German and English language and literature in order to become a High School teacher. From that point onward he developed a keen interest in English and American literature and made use of the English language as a means of expression. Stein was the key figure in his incessant search for new ways to depart from the traditional canon. She treated language as something very concrete, a material that poets can shape and experiment with, in both a playful and serious manner. Jandl felt committed to Stein’s cause and like her continuously tried to overcome the limitations of poetry and art.

Jandl felt that art can be regarded as a perpetual realization of freedom. Music, and especially jazz, was instrumental in freeing art’s full potential. Jandl considered jazz the prime example for democratic art and the quintessential form of artistic expression in the 20th century, a means to overcome the differences between the elite and the common people. Jandl’s objective was to transcend the boundaries separating high and low, young and adult readers, prose and poetry, avant-garde and popular art. He was also tremendously interested in the mutual exchange between literature, music, and visual arts. Both his personal relationships with writers and artists from the US and the UK as well as his fascination with Anglo-American literature, music, and art demonstrate that he knew no national boundaries either. Jandl was truly an international artist. His voice continues to echo around the world.