Bürokratie und Literatur

This book focuses on encounters with bureaucracy in twentieth-century Austrian literature and compares them with representations of alternative political systems. The exemplary text corpus ranges from bureaucratic classics by authors such as Kafka, Joseph Roth, and Fritz von Herzmanovsky-Orlando to bureaucratic bestsellers by Friedrich Kleinwächter and Alois Brandstetter to avant-garde texts by Konrad Bayer, Albert Drach, and Heimrad Bäcker. In a confrontation of the representation of the everyday experience of bureaucracy with the results of sociological and philosophical work by Max Weber, Jürgen Habermas, and Michel Foucault, fictional administrative processes are analyzed as forms of domination, as systems, and as a manifestation of disciplinary power. The book also shows how bureaucracy appears in conjunction with alternative forms of government, including traditional, non- economic, and self-determining forms. In the course of the analyses, it becomes clear that bureaucracy can only be thematized as malfunctioning - and that it mostly appears as a deformation, in which the social structure as a whole and processes of power become visible. The center of the investigation is made up of an analysis of narrative and literary techniques, which allows for a poetics of bureaucracy to be sketched out, in which aesthetic decisions can be seen to expose and explain bureaucratic culture and its contradictions. The text corpus reveals a wide range of formal complexity and many ways of coming to terms with bureaucratic systems and their paradoxes. Despite all these differences, the literary texts show how bureaucracy affects all alternative orders and attempts to incorporate them. Neither heroes nor gods and not even love and nature can escape bureaucracy`s influence. A few characteristics of bureaucratic discourse receive special attention. One is the focus on the informal system that underlies bureaucracy`s principles and undermines its key mechanisms. Its identification makes clear why citizens often find administrative orders arbitrary and far from transparent. Another characteristic is the way in which bureaucracy is presented as an Austrian specialty, which attempts to make up for the state`s symbolic shortcomings and to compensate for and conceal political crises. However, the analyses demonstrate the exportability of the analyses of bureaucratic mechanisms and paradoxes. In striking agreement with everyday discourse, literary texts confirm the continuity and immobility of bureaucratic culture and provide a number of explanations that reveal debates about cutting red tape and eliminating bureaucracy to be nave fantasies.