Marlene Streeruwitz (b. 1950), who has just received the prestigious Literary Prize of the City of Bremen (2012), is an Austrian author who, in her plays, her prose, and her poetological writings, dwells above all on the role of women in our society, on the duty of memory that the generation which lived through the war refused to assume, and on the consequences of that refusal. In the early 1990s she began by publishing plays, followed by novels. This article, taking as its example one of her early plays (Tolmezzo, 1994), attempts to show what role the problem of the repression of collective memory plays in the author’s poetics, and how, in her texts, history, personal history, and its possibility of representation pass through a paratactic syntax and a “broken language,” the only means of saying the long waiting of the victims and the long silence of a society.

Marlene Streeruwitz, born in Baden bei Wien (Austria) in 1950, first made a name for herself in the early 1990s as a dramatist. The reasons that allow one to attach this author incontestably to the postwar generation are not solely of a chronological order but concern, far more, her resolve to confront a past that other Austrian authors, such as Thomas Bernhard or Ilse Aichinger, lived through directly. Streeruwitz lays out her literary undertaking as a “non-Jew” from the perspective of “those who come after” (die Nachgeborenen), or more exactly of “those who were born after,” who observed their society in its present and its past and chose to take upon themselves the task of trying to understand. The first term one encounters in this context is, of course, “Vergangenheitsbewältigung,” which can be translated as “duty of memory” (although the German verb bewältigen can in this case indicate “to learn from the past,” to take it on, but also to master, to overcome the past). This term designates the collective work on National Socialism, the deportations, the Shoah, that first the FRG and, much later, Austria carried out, and which is linked to the so-called “denazification” of society.

The second major “term” at the basis of part of Streeruwitz’s artistic work is that of “Wiedergutmachung.” Generally a “reparation”; which cannot, however, truly be one, when its aim is to repair murders, persecutions, spoliations. If in Germany the work1 on historical responsibility and the work of “reparation” began in the early 1950s, in Austria it would, in systematic fashion, begin only in the course of the 1990s2.

These data and the specificity of the Austrian constellation constitute the basis, or rather the point of departure, the constant backdrop of a large part of the work of Streeruwitz and of Elfriede Jelinek (far better known in France). In a long interview dating from 2004, the year in which she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, Jelinek speaks for the first time of her Jewish roots and, re-emphasizing the political aspect of her own work, counts Streeruwitz among her “comrades-in-arms”3. In taking the floor on the subject of their need to unmask the violent element that runs through her society — every society — through and through, Jelinek also explains her aim, which is to unmask violence in three fundamental forms: the violence hidden behind political mechanisms and the exercise of power, the violence between the sexes, and the violence inherent in the “repression of violence.”

It is precisely this last form that, in turn, interests Marlene Streeruwitz. Her starting hypothesis is an “originary scene” in which takes place what defines the Holocaust: the incomprehensible hatred of man and organized extermination. Streeruwitz underscores the obscenity that leads some to humiliate others and finally to murder them; she observes the obscenity of power, and notably the feeling of power engendered by the fact of being authorized to decide on the life and death of other people, to dispose of the life of the Other at will; and she fixes her attention on the obscenity of the repression of collective memory.

As Nele Hempel shows very convincingly through the example of the novel Nachwelt [Posterity]4, Streeruwitz sets out to diagnose the conflict between the prewar generation and the postwar generation, to examine the foundations and reasons for the silence as well as the repression of past events, and to underscore what effectively led to the “transmission” of the problem to the following generation, her own. She does so in the terms of a second “originary scene,” where the questions that “those who come after” pose to the “generation of the perpetrators” run up against offensive counter-questions (“and you, what would you have done?”) and on which rests the “double morality of public life”5, in the terms employed by Streeruwitz in her essay Tagebuch der Gegenwart [Diary of the Present].

In this second originary scene — which plays out within the family6 and the society of “those who come after,” and which follows the first, violent originary scene in which the informers, the collaborators, and all “those who did not know” act, and which led to the extermination, to the Shoah — the youngest generation is left to itself, abandoned alone before its own questions7. Before this fundamental and unresolved question: How could this have happened? Before the feelings of guilt that one does not want to have and from which one can also not escape, since the “old” generation does not take on this guilt nor assume responsibility for it, making it weigh upon the shoulders of the following generation. Left alone, then, with as its sole knowledge that of having had the luck to be born “after.”

Marlene Streeruwitz works in the today and in the microcosm of the Self, that of the “personal” or “interior” stories, one is tempted to say. Her analysis does not concern only violence and the mechanisms of power in general, which form the ensemble “Church, Politics, History, Literature” and “grand narrative”8 and which Jelinek describes in detail:

Violence comes down upon the characters, and violence is always something simple even if it bursts forth in multiple forms. […] there is only one way to practice power: stringy and scheming. How is it shown? By showing that power destroys everything and engenders only itself. […] It follows that everything that takes place on stage, as in life, is, from the very beginning, pre-drawn by this single thing that is nothing because it is only destruction, whose aim is in turn only nothingness. […] And this indescribable character of what oppresses us all renders her plays at once explicit and entirely enigmatic. […]9

Streeruwitz’s analysis also takes into account the indifference that society feels toward History, and stages it above all through the soliloquies of certain of her characters.

In one of her early plays (Tolmezzo, 1994), the repression of collective memory is “shown” through the silence of the characters who “listen to” the monologues of a woman who left, “back then,” into exile. For Streeruwitz, the only means of saying the long waiting of the victims and the long silence of a society pass through a paratactic syntax and a “broken language.”

Tolmezzo. Eine symphonische Dichtung

The “incongruity between the title and the content”10 of the play represents on its own the first effect of strangeness, of “distancing,” with which Streeruwitz’s audience or reader is confronted. For most of the Austrian author’s plays bear “exotic” titles: New York. New York, Waikiki Beach, Sloane Square, Ocean Drive, Elysian Park, Tolmezzo, Troyes, Sapporo. But the lived experience bound up with an “exotic” place is nonetheless refused to the reader or spectator, who in the end see all their expectations disappointed and are obliged to abandon all hope of a “holiday getaway.” With rare exceptions, the contents of her plays detach themselves completely from their respective titles:

With the titles of her plays, Marlene Streeruwitz has already knowingly led her audience astray insofar as she suggests spectacular settings whereas the plays unfold in entirely different places — one thinks, for example, of New York. New York, where the spectators in reality find themselves in Vienna, in a public lavatory stamped with the seal of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.11

The commune of Tolmezzo, a small Italian town not far from the Austrian border in the region of the Carnic Alps, was delighted to learn of the play’s existence, and the fact that no link between the town and the play exists seems to be accepted12. The place where the action effectively unfolds in the play unmistakably recalls Vienna. Elements, architectural ones for example, make it recognizable: a small square on which stands a building from the so-called Founders’ era (Gründerzeit), housing a tea salon: “Columns in the tea salon. Painted. Echoing the historic Café Central.”13

Manon Greef and her American daughter Linda are in Vienna for the first time since “that time,” when the mother had been forced to leave Austria. Around them gravitate a few characters whose function consists in sketching the Vienna of the “after,” like Professor Krobath, who declares himself active “[w]ithin the framework of the decline of this culture”14 (in the play New York. New York, a nearly homonymous character, Professor Chrobath, deplores the decline of the West)15; or Monsieur Lambert, the young editor-in-chief who has left his native province for Vienna, and the businessman Stoll, who immediately recognizes in Manon a “Viennese woman” without drawing any further conclusion from it: “STOLL: Ah. Your mother is Viennese. Of course. One notices it right away.”16

The three “Sängerknaben” of the famous boys’ choir, who in the play are three old gentlemen singing the tercet for boys’ voices from The Magic Flute, are the symbol of the tradition of a certain Viennese culture, but present themselves “as fallen relics of a past become anachronistic and, at best, launched onto the market under the banner of tourism”17.

It is night. While showing her daughter the café that she herself and her friends used to frequent, the mother addresses her daughter in German, whereas it is in English that she usually speaks to her18:

MANON: Here. It is here that we were. Every afternoon. After school. […] And my brothers. And I. We were here. And Heß. Schnabl. And Malcher. And Lizzi Bodenstedt. Every day. Every day we were here. We sat back there. There. And we made noise. We were young. Quite simply. And there in front. That is where Dr. Walter always sat. The one who always stared at Lizzi. And sent her bouquets of flowers. Insistent. Because she was beautiful. We all were. Young. And beautiful. Untouchable. In a certain way.19

From this memory that opens the play (first scene), other fragments of History/history crystallize and find themselves repeated by other characters, in part also in the form of choral song, in order to represent “relations of violence that underpin the present as well as the past”20. Manon’s memory also closes the play:

MANON: Here? Is it here that we were? Every afternoon? A long time ago. Far too long. […] I am glad to be old. And if everything has already happened to someone. Then one need no longer be afraid. At least.21

It is around these fragments of memories reaching back to the time before exile and the Shoah that the character of Manon condenses. She delivers five interior monologues, which one can call them thus not only because they are almost interior, although the character of course pronounces them, but above all because it seems that no other character in the play can (or will) hear them: some “stare straight ahead,” like an entire society subject to repression; henceforth, it is no longer to her daughter that Manon recounts what happened, but to herself; to the audience, the author indicates:

Manon recounts the following text to the audience. The characters around her pay her no attention. An old lady recounts, in disjointed fashion, out of context, one of the stories of her life. The others speak among themselves. Softly. Or stare straight ahead.22

Manon, who like almost all of Streeruwitz’s characters does not have the status of a character and is only a fragment, a “shard” of a character, “recounts a text” for all “those who come after” and from whom memory has been stolen. No one listens to her; she recounts fragments of a story that is also that of many other “Viennese” and that no one wants to hear; she soliloquizes. In this play, Streeruwitz expresses, “first-hand” and in snatches, memories that all reject, but in her will to represent them she sets them against the theft of memory, against “the avoidance of remembrance[, against] repression”23 for, as we can read in her Frankfurt Lectures, all of this constitutes nothing but “acts that turn against the dignity of the person.” Dignity, by contrast, consists in the “capacity to remember”24, a capacity that the other characters around Manon do not possess:

MANON: Hubert Habich. He wanted to marry me. When I then got my visa, he even accompanied me to the train. I would no longer have had any money for the tram. His Daimler stood before the door. Swastikas on both sides. We spoke of nothing. I then asked him whether he had any money. All our bank accounts had been closed. He gave me the money. Later he married someone else. I heard tell. And died. Drank himself to death. Even before it was over.25

In other of Manon’s monologues, there is talk of visas, of closed bank accounts, of passports (p. 311), of her beautiful friend Lizzi Bodenstedt: “She was among the first. Although. She was only. It was only her mother. Strictly speaking.”26

The account of the train journey and of the money is told through to the end and is interrupted only by the futile discussions of Stoll and Krobath:

MANON (to the audience): Our passports were completely illegal. We had not paid, of course, that tax [the Reich Flight Tax]. We would not have been able to anyway. I showed the inspector that I had money. […] MANON (to the audience): When we then arrived in Paris, the inspector came. He gave me back the money. I then told him that he should keep it. And help as many people as possible. It was Hubert Habich’s money.27

These snatches of memory are continually interrupted, often by rituals of violence and power staged by other characters. This condensation of “situations and atmospheres evoked by associations that let the strangeness of the repressed history show through can be described as the central dramatic principle of the play”28: the semantic contents of the remembered history are less important than the fact of signaling the abrupt eruption of the repressed, for the “dignity of remembrance” cannot reach us from the outside painlessly. Each person’s duty is to confront remembrance with the gaze, for himself and at the same time for the whole of society, and to learn to come to terms with it. And above all to come to terms with the silence of the previous generation. Otherwise, the repressed always erupts again, in the most diverse forms, and pursues us until we are too weary to keep pushing back the pain of remembrance.

The repressed, the unsaid, determine the task that Streeruwitz wants to take on. For her it is a matter, as she defines it in an interview, of a “poetics of searching”29 expressed through various stylistic means, for example through the excessive punctuation whose significance Elfriede Jelinek particularly underscores:

So there it stands. In sentences, as if our backs were being boxed without cease, and the sentences come out of the mouth only in pieces, finely hacked by periods. […] The periods are beacons in the actor’s prosody, so that he may be more attentive. So that we may be more attentive.30

Another stylistic means whose use Streeruwitz justifies in her “poetics of silence”31 presented in the Tübingen Lectures is the conception of her texts as places of encounter between the spectator/reader and himself. It is above all in the caesuras that interrupt the sentence and the body of the text by inserting a moment of silence into them that the text “hands itself over” to the reader and the spectator, so that the latter may confront himself. In the course of the text, lacunary spaces and disturbances are thus produced, transforming the language into a broken language, which the author also disturbs by other means, such as “the cut, the changes of lighting, the additions, quotations, collages of a linear and spatial nature.”32 The paratactic syntax and the caesuras in the text reflect and signal the fact that Streeruwitz proposes no answer. There is neither key, nor answer, nor solution in her plays. This is the reason why she avoids relations of causality between sentences:

The sentence that affirms that it could describe a state of affairs is a mendacious enormity. And in this one can only resort to breakage. To attempt, beyond the omission of what one cannot supply, to establish a reality of another level that admits that everything is nothing but an assemblage of scattered shards.33

In Tolmezzo, the repressed is part of these realities “of another level”; to try to lay bare its contents is a slow process whose components are something “unfinished that nevertheless allows for the possibility of a concrete representation”34, even if this representation sometimes corresponds only to an empty space, that of a silence too long.

(Translated from the German by Alice Hattenville)

Notes

  1. See for example Werner Bergmann/Rainer Erb/Albert Lichtblau (eds.), Schwieriges Erbe. Der Umgang mit Nationalsozialismus und Antisemitismus in Österreich, der DDR und der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Frankfurt am Main/New York 1995 (Schriftenreihe des Zentrums für Antisemitismusforschung 3); Peter Reichel, Vergangenheitsbewältigung in Deutschland: Die Auseinandersetzung mit der NS-Diktatur von 1945 bis heute, Munich, Beck 2001. Nele Hempel examines this subject in detail in Streeruwitz in: Nele Hempel, “Die Vergangenheit als Gegenwart als Zukunft. Über Erinnerung und Vergangenheitsbewältigung in Texten von Marlene Streeruwitz,” in: Text+Kritik, 2004, no. 164, pp. 48-58. See also: Nele Hempel, Marlene Streeruwitz: Gewalt und Humor im dramatischen Werk, Tübingen, Stauffenburg 2001.↩︎

  2. See for example the academic work of David Forster, “Wiedergutmachung” in Österreich und der BRD im Vergleich, Vienna/Innsbruck, Studienverlag 2001. In 1998 the Austrian Republic created a commission of historians to conduct research on the indemnifications carried out (or not) in Austria from 1945 onward. The results of this research were published in 2003 (http://www.boehlau-verlag.com/hiskom/) and gave rise to striking cases of “belated” restitution (Klimt, Schiele). This delay, and more generally the delay that Austrian society accumulated before assuming all responsibilities with regard to the National Socialist period, is closely linked to the “myth” that made Austria the “victim” of the annexation in March 1938. Cf. Heidemarie Uhl, “Das erste ‘Opfer.’ Der österreichische Opfermythos und seine Transformationen in der Zweiten Republik,” Österreichische Zeitschrift für Politikwissenschaft (ÖZP), 1/2001, pp. 93-108.↩︎

  3. Elfriede Jelinek/Christine Lecerf, L’Entretien (The Interview), Paris, Seuil 2007, pp. 13-21, 28, 79-91, 108-109. This interview was published only in French. See also, regarding the history of the “Viennese” Jews up to the collapse of the monarchy: William O. McCagg Jr., Les Juifs des Habsbourg. 1670-1918 (A History of Habsburg Jews, 1670-1918), Paris, PUF 1996.↩︎

  4. See the article cited in note 1. Marlene Streeruwitz, Nachwelt [Posterity], Frankfurt am Main, Fischer 1999. The title of the novel defines the world of Margarethe, the “born-after” protagonist, as that of “posterity.” Furthermore, Margarethe pursues the project of writing the biography of Anna Mahler (daughter of Alma Mahler-Werfel and Gustav Mahler), who was forced to flee Nazi Austria and lived notably in London, in California, and in Spoleto.↩︎

  5. Marlene Streeruwitz, Tagebuch der Gegenwart, Vienna/Cologne/Weimar, Böhlau 2002, p. 41.↩︎

  6. “In the family […], it is indeed the blocking of reflection and the prohibition on thinking that reign,” declares Marlene Streeruwitz in the article based on a lecture given within the framework of the Erich Fried Lectures organized at the House of Literature in Vienna. Marlene Streeruwitz, “Vater. Land,” Die Presse, April 21, 2007, Spectrum, p. IV.↩︎

  7. In the play New York. New York, one can read, for example, the following dialogue: “SELLNER [30 years old]: My God. I mean. I only keep wondering. I ask everyone. I myself did not take part in the war (Pause). // HORVATH: No one took part. The war makes itself all on its own (Pause).” Marlene Streeruwitz, Waikiki-Beach. Und andere Orte. Die Theaterstücke, Frankfurt am Main, Fischer 1999, p. 53. See also: Nachwelt, p. 170.↩︎

  8. Maria Stehle, Sabine Harenberg, “‘Das Schreiben ist für mich eine Art Anti-Verdrängungsstrategie.’ Themen und Formen in Marlene Streeruwitz’ Theaterstücken und Prosawerk,” in: Ilse Nagelschmidt (ed.), Zwischen Trivialität und Postmoderne: Literatur von Frauen in den 90er Jahren, Frankfurt am Main, Lang 2002, p. 214.↩︎

  9. Elfriede Jelinek, “Die Macht und ihre Preisliste (zu den Theaterstücken Marlene Streeruwitz’),” in: Streeruwitz, Waikiki-Beach. Und andere Orte, 1999, pp. VII, IX, X, XI.↩︎

  10. Text+Kritik, 2004, no. 164. Hempel, p. 55.↩︎

  11. Ibid.↩︎

  12. See www.comune.tolmezzo.ud.it↩︎

  13. Streeruwitz, Waikiki-Beach. Und andere Orte, 1999. Tolmezzo. Eine symphonische Dichtung, p. 294.↩︎

  14. Idem, p. 306.↩︎

  15. Ibid. New York. New York, p. 56.↩︎

  16. Ibid. Tolmezzo. Eine symphonische Dichtung, p. 299.↩︎

  17. Manfred Mittermayer, “Theater der Zersplitterung. Zu den Dramen von Marlene Streeruwitz,” in: Henk Harbers (ed.), Postmoderne Literatur in deutscher Sprache: Eine Ästhetik des Widerstands, Amsterdam, Rodopi 2000, p. 178. See also: Franziska Schößler, “Zeit und Raum in Dramen der 1990er Jahre. Elfriede Jelinek, Rainald Goetz und Marlene Streeruwitz,” in: Georg Mein/Markus Rieger-Ladich (eds.), Soziale Räume und kulturelle Praktiken. Über den strategischen Gebrauch von Medien, Bielefeld, Transcript Verlag 2004, pp. 235-255, in particular p. 250.↩︎

  18. Nele Hempel (Text+Kritik, 2004, no. 164. Hempel, p. 51) qualifies this type of figure that speaks two languages by mixing them, or that speaks English with a German accent and “old-fashioned” German “now imbued with a slight American accent,” as “hybrid existences,” and observes that “in this particular language of émigrés, a reference to their past is inscribed indelibly, as well as, of course, the memory of that past.”↩︎

  19. Streeruwitz, Waikiki-Beach. Und andere Orte, 1999. Tolmezzo. Eine symphonische Dichtung, p. 295.↩︎

  20. Mein/Rieger-Ladich, Soziale Räume und kulturelle Praktiken, 2004. Schößler, p. 250.↩︎

  21. Streeruwitz, Waikiki-Beach. Und andere Orte, 1999. Tolmezzo. Eine symphonische Dichtung, p. 344.↩︎

  22. Idem, pp. 300-301.↩︎

  23. Marlene Streeruwitz, Können. Mögen. Dürfen. Sollen. Wollen. Müssen. Lassen. Frankfurter Poetikvorlesungen, Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp 1998, p. 124.↩︎

  24. Ibid.↩︎

  25. Streeruwitz, Waikiki-Beach. Und andere Orte, 1999. Tolmezzo. Eine symphonische Dichtung, p. 301.↩︎

  26. Idem, p. 314.↩︎

  27. Streeruwitz, Waikiki-Beach. Und andere Orte, 1999. Tolmezzo. Eine symphonische Dichtung, pp. 326-327.↩︎

  28. Mein/Rieger-Ladich, Soziale Räume und kulturelle Praktiken, 2004. Schößler, p. 250.↩︎

  29. Claudia Kramatschek, “Es gibt keine Utopien für Frauen. Im Gespräch: Die Schriftstellerin Marlene Streeruwitz über die Poetik des Suchens,” in: Freitag, 20.2.1998. Cited from: Maria Stehle/Sabine Harenberg, “Das Schreiben ist für mich eine Art Anti-Verdrängungsstrategie,” p. 218.↩︎

  30. Streeruwitz, Waikiki-Beach. Und andere Orte, 1999. Jelinek, p. VIII.↩︎

  31. Marlene Streeruwitz, Sein. Und Schein. Und Erscheinen. Tübinger Poetikvorlesungen, Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp 1997, p. 71. On Streeruwitz’s poetics, see Hildegard Kernmayer, “Poetik des Schweigens. Poetik der Brechung. Poetik des Banalen. Écriture féminine. Zu Marlene Streeruwitz’ poetologischen Konzepten,” in: Günther Höfler (ed.), Marlene Streeruwitz, Graz/Vienna, Droschl 2008, pp. 29-45.↩︎

  32. Streeruwitz, Sein. Und Schein. Und Erscheinen, p. 81.↩︎

  33. See Marlene Streeruwitz’s interview with Grohotolsky: Ernst Grohotolsky (ed.), Provinz, sozusagen: Österreichische Literaturgeschichte, Graz/Vienna, Droschl 1995, p. 247.↩︎

  34. Ulrike Hass/Marlene Streeruwitz, “‘Die Leerstellen zu sehen. Das wäre es.’ Ein Gespräch über Theater,” in: Text+Kritik, 2004, no. 164, p. 61.↩︎

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