Chrisine Busta - New Perspectives on the Life and Works

In February 2007 the Research Institute Brenner-Archives at the University of Innsbruck acquired the literary remains of Chr. Busta, who is among the most important Austrian lyricists of the post war generation besides I. Bachmann and Chr. Lavant. The literary remains consist of 51 boxes full of works, manuscripts, drafts and notes, paintings and sketches, correspondence (with over 500 persons), documents, a photo collection etc. The poems of the remains cover a longer period of time than the ones published. Busta`s remains may be understood as a legacy and as a confession. She was involved in National Socialism more deeply than it has been known so far. The project applied for is not about her "outing" or about moral evaluation, but about important aspects of Austrian cultural history and about Busta`s biography with respect to her way of dealing with the past in her poetry (above all with guilt). We have the following thesis: If you get to know Busta`s biography, her letters and works in more detail, you will find out that she reflected on her behaviour during the Nazi-period and that she dealt with the topics guilt and shame exclusively in her poetry, meaning that her poetry has a greater dimension than seen so far. This may be a special case in the literary history of Austria, Busta may represent a specific Austrian way of dealing with one`s past. The anti-thesis is that using Christian symbolism, which Busta did in her poetry, may be a specific Austrian way of not dealing with one`s past. The Catholic church considered National Socialism as one ordeal among others. That gave Catholics who had sided with the Nazis the possibility to play down their guilt or even make it a legitimized taboo. In this case Busta without further reflection would have kept the apolitical understanding of literature she already had in the Nazi-period. As a result of our work a website will be presented as basis for further research on Busta and on the Austrian literary and cultural history after 1945, which offers elaborate material based on sources: a list of titles and incipits of all poems and drafts in the remains, a complete list of letters which includes summaries, and a chronicle of Busta`s life. Via full-text search you will have access to two non-visible files of work and letter transcriptions, thus enabling you to find the exact location of the work and draw conclusions for statistical purposes. Users who want to see the whole poem (or letter) or publish it have to respect the rights of the Archives or/and of the copyright holders. Furthermore two books shall be published (Otto Müller Verlag): One volume will comprise texts by Busta so far unknown to a scientific und literary public. The choice of texts goes beyond what has been seen in former publications. The notes and drafts included will give the reader an impression of Busta`s way of work. The second volume will entail a choice of letters from and to Busta with commentary. A biographical portrait will resume the new findings. Busta`s documents, letters and diaries as well as the documents and letters of others make it possible to describe her life between self perception and the perception by others. And they enable to relate Busta`s personal situation to her poetry. In addition the volume will contain photographs and facsimiles.

In the life and oeuvre of Christine Busta, poetics, religion and politics interweave in a distinctive and symptomatical way. This was the crucial thesis of the application, and it was corroborated during the project. Bustas involvement with National-Socialism was investigated for the first time; in this context as well as in the context of the Austrian post-war era, her writings were analysed. In 1948, new themes and motives entered Bustas poetry: 1945 was not the relevant turning point, but 1948, and with it the moment of denazification. These findings add a paradigmatical criterion to post-war literary history. // Bustas extensive correspondence (approx. 200 letters between 1957-1970) with Johannes Urzidil was analysed as an example: Urzidil belonged to the german-speaking literary circles of Prague in the inter-war years and was forced to emigrate with his jewish wife Gertrude in 1939. In their correspondence, Busta banned questions regarding her biography; both, she and Urzidil, emphasised the Czech or Prague aspect of Bustas origin (her father moved to Prague after 1918) in order to create a mystic community ignorant of all historical and biographical facts. Their correspondence is a concentrated discussion of literary works and ideas. // With Erfreuliche Bilanz, a scholarly edition of poems in Viennese dialect was published. This book shows a very different author: In the idiom (often: slang) of Vienna Busta is less moralizing than in high-level poetic language, and succeeds in unerring and joking and yet poetic characterisations of persons and everyday situations. // The database, built up and used during the project, was intended for future online publication from the start (project sustainability). The webapplication BustaSearch (http://webapp.uibk.ac.at/brenner-archiv/BustaSearch) gives access to 10.433 data-set entries containing Bustas entire literary oeuvre, numerous correspondences as well as non-literary material (such as her book reviews, her literary judgements, transcriptions of audio cassettes containing interviews with her). Physically, these documents are to be found in her Nachlass (51 boxes at the Research Institute Brenner-Archives and 10 boxes at the Literary Archives of the Austrian National Library). The webapplication aims to cross the gap between the restrictions of copyright law and the scholarly demand for open access to archival materials. It enables users to approach the materials economically and in a knowledge-orientated way. The webapplication facilitates approaches from various fields of interests, such as archival, editorial, literary, cultural, and historical scholarship. As a contribution to sustainability and open access policy, the source codes of the application are published as well to stimulate further development in the field of digital humanities. // That the taboo on christian themes in poetry has been successfully broken is the hope of the project participants. Without questioning the appellative and humanistic reasons of the author, one of the reasons of her immense success in the 1950s and 1960s was that her poems were read as instructions for exculpation from whatever has been before 1945. This mechanism was not known before neither has Bustas own involvement and its description is one of the main achievements of the project: An insight that is not only relevant for this one author, but can be (and should be) applied to biographical research on other artists of the post-war era.