Cold War Discourses

For a long time the Austrian literature of the period from 1945 to 1966 has been characterized by a lack of political subjects and a programmatic rejection of contemporary history. The common assumption in German studies is the thesis of a polarization of Austrian post-war literature between a conservative, traditionalist wing on the one hand and a progressive one dealing with language experiments and avant-garde forms of poetry on the other. This concept has shaped the perspective on Austrian literary history to this day, resulting in the disregarding of all texts that do not fit into this framework. Yet - contrary to common stereotypes - novels, stories etc. dealing with political subjects did exist in this period, but one must look for them on the margins of the literary scene, outside the dominant aesthetic movements, in genres of lower prestige or within the large group of writers who never made it into the canon. In the light of this situation, the proposed research project is intended to offer examination of Austrian literature of the period between 1945 and 1966 based on those forgotten texts and focusing on the discourses of the Cold War they contain. Particular impulses for this project come from the field of historical studies, where research on Cold War subjects has recently been very successful due to the opening of many important archives following the end of the international conflict of two world systems and due to the resultant new research opportunities that transcend the old ideological struggles. Nevertheless, the main focus of the project and its methodology belong explicitly to the field of literature studies. Thus the aims of the proposed research project are 1.) to describe the various discourses of the Cold War in Austrian literature and to analyse their specific rhetorical figures and thought patterns, 2.) to contextualize these texts within the framework of the national and international Cold War discourse, 3.) to analyze the exchange processes between literary and non-literary texts, between fiction and non-fiction, especially the circulation of specific metaphors, allegories and images of the Cold War. The theoretical setting of the proposed research project is rooted in New Historicism and its assumptions about the specific relations between text and context, but also draws on recent studies of Albrecht Koschorke et al. on the function of political and social metaphors. The project`s methodological design can be summarised as historically contextualized discourse analysis with a strong interest in the literary strategies and rhetoric of discourse representation. It is no exaggeration to say that this project will undertake the first systematic research concerning Austrian literature during the Cold War, filling a gap in Austrian literary history.

The starting point of the project was a growing doubt regarding the widespread thesis in literary history that Austrian postwar literature did not deal with contemporary history and explicitly political subjects. Beyond that, the increasing number of cultural studies regarding Cold War issues also inspired the idea to examine Austrian Cold War culture, especially because to this day there has been no systematic analysis of Austrian Cold War literature. So the project entered terra incognita. As a result of an extensive search in libraries, archives and contemporary media we actually found more than 50 books in the period from 1945 to 1966 dealing extensively with the Cold War, most of them from little known or even forgotten authors like Ulrich Becher, Kurt Becsi, Reinhard Federmann, Rudolf Henz, Franz Kain, Leo Katz, Erik v. Kuehnelt-Leddihn, Auguste Lazar, Robert Neumann, Susanne Wantoch or Joseph Wechsberg, to mention just a few. The variety of these texts covers a wide spectrum of topics and genres from complex political novels to thrillers and propaganda-plays, from communist childrens books to nuclear drama and satire. The project outcomes show how these texts are closely interconnected with their historical and societal framework as well as their specific aesthetics in selecting contemporary issues, conflicts and images, while confirming, challenging, subverting or transforming them. Similarly, they reveal how such texts are formed by the national and international discourses of the Cold War but also how they themselves shape these discourses through specific literary means. After an intensive contextualized analysis of the novels, narratives and dramas we identified fifteen important discourse patterns characterizing Austrian Cold War literature and demonstrating that there actually was an extensive and manifold literary debate about the East-West-conflict which dominated the period in so many respects. These discourse patterns or subjects were: images of the border, Romeo and Juliet variations, journeys behind the Iron Curtain, totalitarian structures, criticism of mass-society and materialism, the Gulag-system, the National-Socialist heritage and its protagonists, the nuclear threat, espionage and the figure of the spy, images of the enemy and images of disease, Cold War rhetoric and propaganda, art as a weapon, conversion and traitors, images of Austria in the Cold War, kidnapping and abduction. The detailed results of our study will be published as a monograph, most likely in 2015.