Die unerlösten Erlösten

Contribution to Publishing Costs D 3272 Die unerlösten Erlösten Renate LUNZER 09.10.2000 The subject of this research is the Austro-Italian dialectics of the Triestenean "irredempted redempted" ("irredenti redenti"): a strong intercultural incentive which has determined the attitudes mentales of Trieste/Venetia-Julian authors from the end of the Habsburg-Empire up to our day. The investigations presented have been carried out on the basis of a representative corpus of texts, fictional and non (autobiography, journalism, essay, translation), along with oral testimonies and unpublished archive-material, leading from irredentist poets like Biagio Marin, Giani Stuparich or Scipio Slataper up to the generation of Giorgio Voghera and eventually to the austro-germanistic mythologist Claudio Magris. The main parameters of this study are: the dialectics between Italian irredentism and central european ecumenic attitudes; a dialectics implying the liberation from Austrian rule and the unification with Italy as a fulfillment of risorgimento-ideals on the one hand, but on the other hand also the betrayal of these very ideals by Italian fascism and, as a consequence, the growing north-Italian reappraisal of old-Austrian values; the dialectics between amalgamation and archipelagos in a series of successful or failed attempts of settling the intercultural tensions and differences of a plurilingual frontier-area whose fringe-identity had always been challenged by alterity ; the alternative patterns of cultural irredentism: the position of Venetia-Julian intellectuals between mazzinianism, Austro-marxism and interventionism; "austriacantismo" versus "italianiti"; "Trieste, made of tragedy" (Slataper); the critical Triestenean attitudes towards the official Italian claim on cultural hegemony at the country`s northern fringe with its vivid pluralistic and internationalistic avantgarde-culture; the complex of over-Italianism in many authors of the region, followed by their growing disillusion with Italy, eventually compensated by a return to Austrian values along with the search for the lost oikumene in a powerful evocation of the fringe`s cultural memory; Mitteleuropa-myths from the 1950ies onwards and their literary representations; Claudio Magris` book The Habsburg-myth: written as an attempt to destroy Habsburg-mythology, the book has on the contrary provoked a unique boom of Austrian heritage in and out of Italy and even in Austria itself. Conclusion: a substantial part of the interaction-processes introducing Austria to Italian cultural consciousness have been carried out in a specific milieu of Trieste/Venetia-Julian intermediaries. This milieu has been characterized by its pluralistic outillage mental as well as by the polarity between in and out, between assimilation and resistance as the advantage/disadvantage of all fringe-identities. Trieste has thus become a modell-case for the productivity als well as for the tragedy of interand cross-cultural confrontation, for the possibility of culture as translation, realized by the three generations of Triestenean writers at the centre of this book.