Revisiting Austria: Tourism, Space, and National Identity, 1945 to the Present 9781789204490

Table of contents :
CONTENTS
List of Illustrations
Preface
Introduction. Tourism, Space, and National Identity
Part I. “Where Is Th is Much-Talked-Of Austria?” Remapping Post-World War II Austria
Chapter 1. “We Love Our Heimat but We Need Foreigners!” Tourism and the Reconstruction of Austria, 1945–55
Chapter 2. Destination Heimat: Mobilizing Identity Discourses in Der Hofrat Geiger (Privy Councilor Geiger) (1947)
Chapter 3. German Tourists as Guardians of the Austrian Heimat: Renegotiating German-Austrian Relations in Echo der Berge/ Der Förster vom Silberwald (Echo of the Mountains/Th e Forester of the Silver Wood) (1954)
Part II. Dark Places: Tourism and the Representation of Austria’s Involvement in National Socialism and the Holocaust
Chapter 4. Linz09: Tourism and History on Local, Regional, and European Levels
Chapter 5. Alpine Vampires: Th e Haunted Landscapes of Elfriede Jelinek’s Die Kinder der Toten (Th e Children of the Dead) (1995)
Chapter 6. Th e Blind Shores of Austrian History: Christoph Ransmayr’s Morbus Kitahara (Th e Dog King) (1995)
Part III. Austrian Narratives of Place and Identity in the Context of Globalization
Chapter 7. Trapped Bodies, Roaming Fantasies: Mobilizing Constructions of Place and Identity in Florian Flicker’s Suzie Washington (1998)
Chapter 8. Th e Copy and the Original: Th e Sound of Music (1965) and Austrian National Identity
Conclusion. When Austria Moves to China
Index

Citation preview

REVISITING AUSTRIA

AUSTRIAN AND HABSBURG STUDIES

General Editor: Howard Louthan, Center for Austrian Studies, University of Minnesota Before 1918, Austria and the Habsburg lands constituted an expansive multinational and multiethnic empire, the second largest state in Europe, and a key site for cultural and intellectual developments across the continent. At the turn of the twentieth century, the region gave birth to modern psychology, philosophy, economics, and music, and since then has played an important mediating role between Western and Eastern Europe, today participating as a critical member of the European Union. The volumes in this series address specific themes and questions around the history, culture, politics, social, and economic experience of Austria, the Habsburg Empire, and its successor states in Central and Eastern Europe. Recent volumes: Volume 28 Revisiting Austria: Tourism, Space, and National Identity, 1945 to the Present Gundolf Graml Volume 27 Empty Signs, Historical Imaginaries: The Nationalization of Names and Naming in a Late Habsburg Borderland Ágoston Berecz

Volume 23 Comical Modernity: Popular Humour and the Transformation of Urban Space in Late Nineteenth-Century Vienna Heidi Hakkarainen Volume 22 Embers of Empire: Continuity and Rupture in the Habsburg Successor States after 1918 Edited by Paul Miller and Claire Morelon

Volume 26 Men under Fire: Motivation, Morale, and Masculinity among Czech Soldiers in the Great War, 1914–1918 Jiří Hutečka

Volume 21 The Art of Resistance: Cultural Protest against the Austrian Far Right in the Early Twenty-First Century Allyson Fiddler

Volume 25 Nationalism Revisited: Austrian Social Closure from Romanticism to the Digital Age Christian Karner

Volume 20 The Monumental Nation: Magyar Nationalism and Symbolic Politics in Fin-de-Siècle Hungary Bálint Varga

Volume 24 Entangled Entertainers: Jews and Popular Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna Klaus Hödl

Volume 19 Tropics of Vienna: Colonial Utopias of the Habsburg Empire Ulrich E. Bach

For a full volume listing, please see the series page on our website: http://berghahnbooks.com/series/ austrian-habsburg-studies.

REVISITING AUSTRIA Tourism, Space, and National Identity, 1945 to the Present

d Gundolf Graml

berghahn NEW YORK • OXFORD www.berghahnbooks.com

First published in 2020 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2020 Gundolf Graml

Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Graml, Gundolf, author. Title: Revisiting Austria: Tourism, Space, and National Identity, 1945 to the Present / Gundolf Graml. Description: First edition. | New York: Berghahn Books, [2020] | Series: Austrian and Habsburg Studies; vol 28 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019059250 (print) | LCCN 2019059251 (ebook) | ISBN 9781789204483; (hardback) | ISBN 9781789204490; (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Tourism—Austria—History—20th century. | Austria—Politics and government—1945- | Austria—In motion pictures. | National characteristics, Austrian, in literature. | Group identity—Austria—History. | Tourism—Social aspects—Austria. Classification: LCC G155.A8 G73 2020 (print) | LCC G155.A8 (ebook) | DDC 338.4/791436—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019059250 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019059251

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-78920-448-3 hardback ISBN 978-1-78920-449-0 ebook

For Barbara

CONTENTS

d List of Illustrations

ix

Preface

xi

Introduction. Tourism, Space, and National Identity

1

Part I. “Where Is This Much-Talked-Of Austria?” Remapping Post-World War II Austria

17

Chapter 1. “We Love Our Heimat but We Need Foreigners!” Tourism and the Reconstruction of Austria, 1945–55

19

Chapter 2. Destination Heimat: Mobilizing Identity Discourses in Der Hofrat Geiger (Privy Councilor Geiger) (1947)

55

Chapter 3. German Tourists as Guardians of the Austrian Heimat: Renegotiating German-Austrian Relations in Echo der Berge/ Der Förster vom Silberwald (Echo of the Mountains/The Forester of the Silver Wood) (1954)

87

Part II. Dark Places: Tourism and the Representation of Austria’s Involvement in National Socialism and the Holocaust

103

Chapter 4. Linz09: Tourism and History on Local, Regional, and European Levels

105

Chapter 5. Alpine Vampires: The Haunted Landscapes of Elfriede Jelinek’s Die Kinder der Toten (The Children of the Dead) (1995)

130

Chapter 6. The Blind Shores of Austrian History: Christoph Ransmayr’s Morbus Kitahara (The Dog King) (1995)

152

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Part III. Austrian Narratives of Place and Identity in the Context of Globalization

183

Chapter 7. Trapped Bodies, Roaming Fantasies: Mobilizing Constructions of Place and Identity in Florian Flicker’s Suzie Washington (1998)

187

Chapter 8. The Copy and the Original: The Sound of Music (1965) and Austrian National Identity

202

Conclusion. When Austria Moves to China

263

Index

276

ILLUSTRATIONS

d 1.1. Cover image of Styrian tourism brochure, “Schöne Ferien” (Beautiful Holiday), 1953. Atelier Koszler Landesfremdenverkehrsamt Steiermark. Reprinted with permission from the Austrian State Archive. 36 4.1. The baroque façades of the main square of Linz are mirrored on the window display of a map showing sites of National Socialist persecution. Photo by author.

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4.2. Berlin artist Hito Steyerl chiseled a stylized map of escape and deportation routes of Linz’s Jewish citizens into the façade of one of the Brückenkopfgebäude designed and built as part of Adolf Hitler’s Führerstadt concept for Linz. Photo by Andreas Kepplinger. Reprinted with permission.

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6.1. Portal of the former concentration camp Zement near Ebensee. Photo by author.

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6.2. KZ Gedenkstätte Ebensee. Photo by author.

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6.3. Entrance into one of the tunnels of the former concentration camp Zement at Ebensee. Photo by author.

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6.4. Art installation in one of the tunnels dug by concentration camp inmates. Photo by author.

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8.1. Signs outside the Salzburg Panorama Museum indicate locations relevant for the Trapp family’s history and for The Sound of Music. Photo by author.

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8.2. Right-wing politician Jörg Haider performs a tune adapted from The Sound of Music. Cartoon by Peter Schrank. Reprinted with permission.

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8.3. Sound of Music tourists at a stop above the Wolfgangsee, taking in a view that imitates the aerial shots at the beginning of The Sound of Music. Photo by author.

221

8.4. Aligning physical and virtual places by “indexing and dragging” on Fräulein Maria’s Bicycle Tour. Photo by author.

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8.5. Participants of Fräulein Maria’s Bicycle Tour at a stop near Leopoldskron. The laminated booklet with film stills can be seen mounted on the bike’s steering handle in the foreground. Photo by author.

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8.6. Is this the “original” tour bus . . . ? Photo by author.

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8.7. . . . Or is it this one? Photo by author.

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8.8. Tourists take pictures in front of the Sound of Music gazebo in Hellbrunn Park. An imitation of the second degree turns into an authenticating device. Photo by author.

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9.1. Hallstatt in its iconic representation. Photo by Nick Csakany. Public domain.

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9.2. A photo of the copied Hallstatt church in the Chinese Hallstatt See mounted on a barn of the Austrian Hallstatt. Artwork and photograph by Norbert Artner. Reprinted with permission.

266

PREFACE

d R

evisiting Austria is the result of many journeys, geographically, intellectually, and personally. Living in Salzburg, Austria, in the 1990s, it was impossible to overlook the impact of tourism on the country’s economy, politics, culture, and, yes, education. But being in the midst of transformative developments rarely provides one with the vantage point necessary for a more critical and nuanced view of events. I found such a vantage point after moving to the United States, where I was able to remain connected to the fields of Austrian history and culture while exploring other areas of interdisciplinary inquiry. Some unexpected turns and unplanned detours on this journey might have slowed down my eventual arrival but also greatly enhanced the analytical toolkit I applied to the study of tourism. Despite, or perhaps because, of some very stimulating and inspiring excursions into the arenas of film studies, Black German and Afro-German culture, as well as ecocriticism, the topic of tourism and its multifaceted connections to Austrian national identity remained an area of research that I kept returning to. Revisiting Austria is an attempt to pull together thoughts on this subject matter that I developed over the course of the last decade. As much as this book is based on my own research, it also has been shaped by encounters and conversations with mentors and colleagues. I do not have the space to list them all but want to acknowledge at least a few for their significant contributions. At the University of Minnesota, German Studies scholars Patrizia McBride, Richard McCormick, and Arlene Teraoka were early supporters of this project; Karen Till introduced me to the analytical power of cultural geography and the study of place; and the late Daphne Berdahl was an inspiring teacher of ethnographic perspectives. Barbara Drescher, Lisa Jennings, Tim Malchow, Beth Muellner, and Leo Riegert read and commented on some very early drafts of this project. The Austrian Studies Association, the German Studies Association, and the consortium of Women in German offered opportunities to try out my argu-

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ments. The feedback and support provided by these scholarly communities were crucial and I want to thank especially Robert Dassanowsky, Daniel Gilfillan, Hilary and Todd Herzog, Sara Lennox, Oliver Speck, and Jackie Vansant for feedback, publishing opportunities, and support. I am also grateful to Regina Maria Kecht for reading and commenting on various chapters. I was extremely lucky to have found supportive professional environments at the academic institutions where I have worked. At Bucknell University, Katie Faull, Helen and Peter Morris-Keitel, and the faculty writing group provided a stimulating environment for expanding the scope of my project. At Agnes Scott College, my colleagues Julia Knowlton, Philip Ojo, and Michael Schlig always have an open door to trade advice on the administrative challenges of running small language and culture programs. Lesley Coia, Christine Cozzens, Chris DePree, Megan Drinkwater, Katherine Smith, Peggy Thompson, and Willie Tolliver have either commented on parts of this project or helped keep the writing going when it threatened to get sidelined by the challenges of service and administration that increasingly shape a faculty member’s work. Bucknell University and Agnes Scott College have also provided financial support for this project in the form of multiple professional development grants for research trips and site visits. Agnes Scott College sponsored a welcome sabbatical leave that allowed me to spend extended time in Austria. I would like to thank Birgit Kirchmayr and her colleagues and students at Johannes Kepler University’s history department for their hospitality at a crucial stage in the project. Thanks to the students participating in Agnes Scott’s faculty-led Global Journeys courses I had the opportunity to test some of the connections between tourism and identity formation not only in Austria but also in Germany, Hungary, Slovakia, and Peru. I could not have written Revisiting Austria without the unwavering support of my family. My parents in Austria opened their house as base camp for many of the explorations and site visits on which this book is based. My children, Nina and Noah, have lived with this book since they were born, and they patiently accepted that quite a few of our family vacations doubled as research visits. Most importantly, I want to thank Barbara Drescher who has accompanied this project from its very beginning. Her keen eye for unique connections, her intellectual integrity, and her steadfast conviction that the value of academic inquiry is measured ultimately in how it changes our understanding of people’s lives keep inspiring me. I am immensely grateful to have such a partner and travel companion.

INTRODUCTION Tourism, Space, and National Identity

d I

n the spring of 1995, I was walking through downtown Salzburg, the city I called home for six years while studying at the University of Salzburg, when an American couple suddenly stopped me in front of Salzburg’s cathedral: “Do you know where we can find the cemetery where the Trapps had been hiding from the Nazis?” I must have looked puzzled, and the two tourists tried to help me along: “You know, Sound of Music? Maria and the children?” I knew about the Trapp family’s emigration and their subsequent success as a family choir in the United States. I had also been asked quite a few times by American exchange students whether I knew the song “Edelweiss.” But I had never seen the film, nor had I bothered to visit any of the filming locations in Salzburg. At that time, I truly did not know these American tourists were referring to the catacombs in St. Peter cemetery, so I apologized for not being able to help them and went on my way. Admittedly, I did so with a sense of cultural superiority, secretly congratulating myself for not wasting any time with what I considered an inauthentic, touristic distraction from Salzburg’s actual historical and cultural attractions. This anecdote illustrates what I will be focusing on in this book, namely how the multifaceted interconnections between tourists and locals, between places and spaces of history and culture, and between notions of reality and inauthenticity have shaped the construction of Austria’s national and cultural image after 1945. Daniel Boorstin’s condemnation of the tourist as a “pleasure-seeker” and “passive” consumer of inauthentic images implies a dismissal of tourism as a trivial pursuit, which resonates especially with a particular strand of cultural criticism of and in Austria after 1945.1 Authors such as Ingeborg Bachmann, Thomas Bernhard, Franz Innerhofer, Felix Mitterer, and Nobel laureate Elfriede Jelinek, to name only a few of the more prominent names, criticized the seminal tourist images of Austria’s landscape and of its cultural and architectural icons as a Potemkin façade, which the country’s political, cultural, and social elites used to cover up the country’s involvement in the crimes committed by the National

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Socialist regime. These literary investigations came in different shapes and forms, but over time they have affirmed the notion of an Austrian reality as hidden, concealed, and camouflaged—the list of verbs could go on—by tourism. Asked if she thinks of “alpine tourism as a perfect means to cover up history in Austria,” Elfriede Jelinek responds rather decisively: “Yes. Everything that has been done in this country since 1945 was the result of an intricate cover-up.”2 To be clear: the work done by Jelinek, by her above-mentioned literary colleagues, as well as by critics and journalists such as Josef Haslinger, Robert Menasse, Marlene Streeruwitz, Armin Thurnher, and others, was central to a long overdue change of the political climate in the 1980s. Thanks to these writers’ work, Austria could no longer deflect responsibility for its deep complicity in the crimes of National Socialism. Similarly, specific tourist images and narratives have, without a doubt, helped Austria position itself as Hitler’s “first victim.” Provocative book and article titles in which Austria features as touristische Bananenrepublik and in which Austrians appear either as street-smart modern pirates shaking down their unaware foreign guests or as servile and sycophantic hosts (or prostitutes) selling themselves to their (German) visitors have certainly contributed to a more critical look at tourism’s corrosive social and economic impact.3 However, they have also resulted in an often simplified and skewed perspective on tourism that ignores the latter’s potential role as a discursive arena for both the formation and the analysis of (post)modern identity processes. Tourism mirrors and shapes socioeconomic, political, and cultural practices and is therefore an invaluable tool for understanding how people define and construct their normality. This is the foundation from which this book engages tourism as discourse that makes visible the complex and contradictory negotiations of Austrian-ness in the twentieth and twenty-first century. My goal was not to write a history of tourism in Austria after 1945. Nor did I want to produce a comprehensive survey of the cultural texts that address tourism as topic.4 Rather, by closely examining, at specific moments in time, particular connections between political or cultural narrations of Austrian national identity and tourism, I will demonstrate that tourism was not a trivial sideshow but a central discursive terrain for the negotiation of core issues of Austrian identity. In doing so, I draw on a series of interdisciplinary approaches that have demonstrated the validity for studying history and culture through the lens of tourism. What insights the analysis of tourism offers even for well-researched areas has been established by reinvestigations of German post-1945 memory culture and practices through the “rhetoric of tourism.” While historian Alon Confino acknowledges the importance of the documents, monuments, and events that explicitly address the memory of the Third Reich for understanding how Germans after 1945 dealt with the Nazi past, he considers the discursive space of tourism crucial for gaining insights into the processes of constructing a sense of postwar normality.5 As Confino writes, “Tourism, like festivals, religious ritual, art, and

Introduction

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cinema, is not a flight from reality but a symbolic practice and representation to understand and negotiate with it.”6 Thus, shortly after 1945 when Germans discussed tourism activities at the local and regional level, they were not simply repressing the past. Rather, they engaged in a selective process of remembering the particular aspects of the National Socialist regime that had provided lower income strata with hitherto unknown forms of leisure and travel possibilities and therefore with a version of pleasant normality wistfully remembered in 1945 amid the ruins of World War II.7 A brief overview of tourism studies in the European context illustrates how the practices of tourism have allowed for innovative and insightful analyses of complex social phenomena over the past decades. In 1958, at about the same time the spoils of the Wirtschaftswunder enabled middle-class Germans to populate Italy’s beaches, German writer Hans Magnus Enzensberger published his essay “A Theory of Tourism” in which he critiques tourism as the belated symptom of Europe’s failed bourgeois revolutions in 1848.8 The political revolution that prepared the ground for the bourgeoisie as the new governing class went hand in hand with a “revolution of the mode of production,” with the latter destroying the very freedom created by the former.9 The first organized trips to Italy’s beaches by railcar illustrate this dialectic. While the workers viewed the railroad as a means to leave behind their debilitating and often harmful workplace conditions, the organization of the railroad system subjected them yet again to the capitalist disciplining of people’s time and bodies: “[T]ourism had thought of the [railroad] net as a liberation, but knitting this net ever more tightly, society closed in again.”10 Workers movements tried to maintain the spark of revolution by demanding more and more paid vacation time. In response, capitalism offered holidays designed as extensions of industrialized production.11 Enzensberger’s Marxist critique of tourism draws attention to the commodifying strategies through which capitalism appropriates ideas of freedom and sells them to a captive clientele. For Enzensberger, tourism only proves that “we have grown accustomed to accepting freedom as mass deceit, a mass deceit that enjoys our confidence although we have already seen through it. As we point to the return tickets in our pockets, we are admitting that freedom is not our goal and that indeed we have already forgotten what freedom is.”12 Passages like this one illustrate Enzensberger’s perspective on tourism as key manifestation of “false consciousness.” Yet, the implied notion of an absolute idea of freedom, and the Manichean distinction between an omnipotent tourism industry on the one hand, and its hapless customers on the other, close off any further analysis of tourism on an individual level. As my discussion of other approaches to tourism will show, Enzensberger’s theory does not address tourism’s potential for individual and communal reinvention, nor does it allow for nuances and changing power structures in the larger tourist discourse. Where Enzensberger’s essay claims that tourist desire for “true” freedom results in the latter’s destruction, Dean MacCannell’s seminal book, The Tourist:

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A New Theory of the Leisure Class (1976), argues that tourism facilitates the construction of individual authenticity under the imperfect conditions of modernity. For MacCannell, the critique of tourism as an example of capitalist alienation falls prey to the assumption that a perfect society is possible in the first place: “The intellectual critique of society assumes the inauthenticity of everyday life in the modern world” because the imagined level of perfection has not yet been reached.13 Such a perspective overlooks, however, the “spurious side of the social structure of modernity,” the “information, memories, images and other representations which become detached from genuine cultural elements, from the ‘true’ sights, and are circulated and accumulated in everyday life.”14 In contrast to Enzensberger, for whom the tourist is guilty of aiding and abetting—against better knowledge—capitalism’s attempt to destroy an objective idea of authenticity, MacCannell views authenticity as the result of the tourist’s act of engaging with the very elements of society often deemed inauthentic and simulated. In other words, for MacCannell the tourist has agency. He, the tourist—neither Enzensberger nor MacCannell address the gender blind spots of their perspectives—recognizes that the division of places into “front stages” and “back stages” is not absolute.15 The “back stages,” which for tourists seem to harbor a community’s actual essence, might also have been constructed in order to create (rather than simply depict) an authentic experience. Thus, in MacCannell’s study, tourist and tourism function as metaphors for modern life’s complex experiences of fragmentation and mobility. The tourist temporarily leaves the familiar social context for a greater experience of authenticity, being fully aware of the experience’s likely limitations and of the futility of the search for the “real.” The very thing thought to be missing “at home” will also not be found “elsewhere.” An emblematic figure illustrating the experience of fragmentation and uncertainty as a basic and underlying condition of modernity, “‘the tourist’ is one of the best models available for modern-man-in-general.”16 MacCannell’s analysis of tourism’s “front” and “back” stages already touches on the visual elements of tourism, the vistas and spectacles offered by the hosts and consumed by tourists, which John Urry’s groundbreaking work The Tourist Gaze (1990) focuses on as one of the crucial elements for analyzing tourism. Building on Michel Foucault’s notion of the disciplining medical gaze, Urry approaches tourism as a socially constructed practice of looking at that which is different from everyday, non-tourist practices: “Places are chosen to be gazed upon because there is anticipation, especially through daydreaming and fantasy, of intense pleasures, either on a different scale or involving different senses from those customarily encountered.”17 In Urry’s understanding, the tourist gaze is “constructed through signs,” and the practice of touring constitutes a “collection of signs” whose meaning has been predetermined by other social discourses.18 David Crouch and Nina Lübbren acknowledge that this concept equips tourists with a certain agency when it comes to “making sense of visual material

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amongst other material in an active process.”19 However, they also criticize Urry’s perspective for containing the tourist’s agency as “‘fixed’ by a particular access to visual culture, the standard gaze.”20 In other words, while the gaze becomes a highly complex apparatus shaped by other social discourses—by marketing, by individual and collective experiences—the object of the gaze, the “places [that] are chosen to be gazed upon,” maintain their assumed stability.21 More recent approaches to tourism studies have challenged this dichotomy between mobile tourists and stable places. Instead of focusing on whether the places visited by tourists are authentic or inauthentic, interdisciplinary approaches developed in cultural geography, sociology, anthropology, cultural studies, and tourism studies, investigate how the practice of tourism contributes to the construction of places and spaces, and how this practice, in turn, shapes the conceptualization of “authentic” identities of the various agents involved. Anthropologist Simon Coleman and geographer Mike Crang, for instance, draw on literary theory’s notion of constructing space through narration in “an eventful and unique happening, more to do with doing rather than knowing, less a matter of ‘how accurate is this?’, than ‘what happens if I do it?’” From Coleman and Crang’s point of view, “[w]e should . . . see places from the perspective of a performance that takes them up and transforms them, redeploys them and connects them through metonymic relationships, or . . . spatial stories.”22 Such a view inverts the conventional role of places in tourism. Instead of being the stable and immovable opposite of the mobile tourist’s action, places become the ever-changing manifestation of the tourist’s interaction with other tourists, images, and narratives. While orthodox analyses of tourism had (and have) as their goal the deconstruction of “false” place images in order to reveal a “true” place, more recent approaches conceive of various images, narratives, and texts as the very things that construct a place at particular moments in time. As Crang writes, We have then to look at the performativity of images and texts moving and making [places] through processes of signification. This is subtly but importantly different from looking at images as depicting places with varying degrees of accuracy or truthfulness, because it shifts us to thinking through the ontology of tourist places rather than the epistemology of their representations.23

Applied to Austria after 1945, the focus on the “ontology of tourist places” obviously challenges the view that tourist images and narratives have covered up the nation’s reality. On the contrary, tourism has been and is inseparable from that reality and is a crucial analytical tool for tracing the reconstruction of the Austrian nation after 1945. The adaptation of the concept of performance has been instrumental in breaking up the calcified notion of the tourist as a mobile actor consuming a static place. At the same time, the concept of performance has introduced the potential

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for new misreadings of the relationship between tourists and places. “Too often,” Coleman and Crang write, “dramaturgical metaphors suggest performance occurs in a place—reduced to a fixed, if ambient, container.”24 To avoid such confusions, Coleman and Crang encourage a “theorization [sic] of performativity where the self is contingently and performatively produced, as opposed to the performance studies emphasis on performance in the sense of speech acts.”25 Regardless of the specific context, this notion of performativity suggests that place and space no longer function as the stabilizing elements in complex and fluid identity positions. Instead, place itself has become a constantly reproduced—and performed—category.26

Performativity and National Identity Although the precise ways in which the various authors use the terms performance and performativity vary, sometimes greatly, they ultimately refer back to Judith Butler’s concept of the performativity of sex. As Butler famously argued, it is not only the category of gender but also the category of sex that is produced by socio-cultural discourses.27 Every time a certain idea of gender is enacted and performed, the presumably pre-discursive category of sex is already implicated in the discursive performance as well. Although it might seem that the performance of a specific notion of gender either affirms or contradicts the “natural” sex, the normative power of the latter is co-constructed in the performative moment. As Butler writes: “In the first instance, performativity must be understood not as a singular or deliberate ‘act,’ but, rather as the reiterative and citational practice by which discourse produces the effects that it names.”28 To make her point, Butler uses the example of drag performances or gender parodies: “The notion of gender parody . . . does not assume that there is an original which such parodic identities imitate. Indeed, the parody is of the very notion of an original.”29 In other words, the parody reveals that the very idea of clearly defined sexual categories is the product of the retroactive normativizing by social and cultural discourses. It is important to note that Butler does not speak about performance so much as about performativity. The term performance is all-too-easily confused with the idea of conscious staging, of the intentional manipulation of an audience in order to believe a particular version of reality, which would bring the analysis of tourism right back into a discussion of inauthentic versus authentic representations. The term performativity acknowledges that any process of identity construction is ultimately an enactment of already existing discourses and that this kind of enactment happens routinely and often without much reflection. One of the charges that have been brought against Butler’s concept of performativity was that she denies the existence of physical bodies and materiality in general. Yet, as Cynthia Weber clarifies, “[Butler’s] point is not that bodies only

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exist in discourse as citational processes. Rather, her point is that it is through discursive performances—repeated, yet, varied citational processes—that our understandings of material bodies are mediated.”30 Thus, to say that tourists engage in a performative construction of places does not deny the existence of places outside of discourse. Rather, it underscores that we can only grasp the meaning and function of these places through discursive processes. The concept of performativity forms an important link between the discourses of tourism and the discourses of Austrian national identity that I will trace in this book. Political scientist Cynthia Weber has shown how Butler’s notion of performativity can help to deconstruct the perception of the state as “prediscursive, natural realm of international politics to which the discursive, socially constructed, cultural referent of sovereignty refers.”31 As Weber writes further, “[i]f we accept that—like sex and gender—states and sovereignty are both discursive effects of performative practices, then it follows . . . that there is no sovereign or state identity behind expressions of state sovereignty. The identity of the state is performatively constituted by the very expressions that are said to be its result.”32 As this quote makes clear, Weber focuses on state sovereignty, but her observation also concerns nation states, and here especially the ways in which Austria’s existence as a state and a nation has evolved at different speeds and through a series of iterative configurations. The name of the first independent Austrian state emerging out of the collapsing Habsburg Empire in 1918 was Republik Deutschösterreich (Republic of German Austria). Although the name soon had to be changed to the Republic of Austria during the peace negotiations in St. Germain where any future political association between Germany and Austria was prohibited, it illustrates the citational practice at work. In other regions of the former Habsburg realm, newly created nation-states such as Hungary and Czechoslovakia could be viewed as the eventual realization of long-held visions of national sovereignty. Austria, by contrast, became “the state nobody wanted” (Staat, den keiner wollte),33 a political entity in intense pursuit of a suitable national identity. Once the immediate association with Weimar Germany was off the table, a separate notion of Austrian-ness gradually became evident in the 1920s, partially based on the performative enactment of baroque and Catholic discourses (an element that I will discuss in more detail later). After the dismantling of parliamentary democracy in 1934, the Austro-Fascist Ständestaat emphasized this particular Austrian identity as German, yet in decisive opposition to National Socialist Germany. The Austrian Habsburg family’s role as rulers over the Holy Roman Empire of the German nation served as discursive repository for these performative constructions of a separate Austrian-ness, whose contradictory lines of argumentation historian Felix Kreissler aptly described as “national schizophrenia.”34 Various contorted attempts to differentiate a German Austria from Germany became null and void in 1938 when the Anschluss resulted in the performative

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enactment of Austria as an integral part of a larger German Reich. Austria became the Ostmark, itself an example of a peculiar performative reenactment of historical discourses. After the country’s liberation by Allied troops in 1945, the proclamation of the Austrian Second Republic as an independent and sovereign nation-state was based on yet another set of citational practices, which revived and embraced the discourses of a distinct Austrian-ness that the First Austrian Republic had initially rejected. There is hardly a more symbolic figure for these iterative processes than the Austrian Social Democrat Karl Renner. In 1918, as first chancellor of the first provisional government of the democratic First Republic of Deutsch Österreich, Renner argued for Austria to join a larger German republic. After the liberation of Austria in 1945, Renner served as inaugural chancellor of the Second Austrian Republic, whose reconstruction as an independent nation was based on a complete and permanent rejection of all ideas of AustrianGerman collaboration. The fact that Renner twice inaugurated the existence of an independent Austria in moments of profound crisis underscores Weber’s observation that invocations of state identity are “often moments when states traumatically confront the impossibility of ‘being’ sovereign and thus insist upon their sovereign subjectivity all the more.”35 While a separate Austrian state in 1918 seemed more like a transitional construct that would eventually be absorbed by a larger German nation-state, the independent Austria reconstructed in 1945 became the foundation for what is arguably the most stable expression of Austrian-ness since the dissolution of the Habsburg Empire. The successful development of the Second Republic as a neutral country and—from the 1970s under Social-Democratic Chancellor Bruno Kreisky until very recently—as a fairly stable welfare state has facilitated the emergence of a distinct Austrian national identity. Since the 1960s, survey after survey has indicated that a vast majority of Austrians think of themselves as belonging to a nation rather than only a state artificially separated from its Germanic national affiliation.36 Although this development makes it look as if statehood came first and national identity second, Weber’s observation that the “identity of the state is performatively constituted by the very expressions that are said to be its result”37 remains crucial. As I will show throughout the first two chapters, the construction of post-1945 identity around the tropes of landscape and cultural heritage inflected by the discourse of tourism was very much based on the discursive citation of long-standing ideas of Austrian-ness and their subsequent adaptation to the post-1945 situation.38 In other words, while the stability of the Second Austrian Republic certainly made it easier to use this state construct as a foundation for the deepening of an Austrian national identity, the Second Austrian Republic’s proclamation as a separate Austrian (and not a second German) nation-state in 1945 was only possible because of a performative reenactment of older discourses of Austrian-ness in the first place.

Introduction

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It took some time to peel Austrian identity from its historical entanglement with German national identity. The fact that it happened can be tied to various historical events: the 1943 Moscow Declaration, in which the Allied nations tried to spark Austrian resistance by declaring their intent to reconstruct a free and independent Austria; the small resistance movements in various Austrian regions; the political leadership’s common experience of internment in Nazi concentration camps, where Austrian Social Democrats and Christian Socialists mended their fractured relationships in what would later be mythicized and to some degree exaggerated as Politik der Lagerstraße (politics of the camp road).39 If these various moments prepared the ground for the reconstruction of an independent Austria, it was the discursive arena of tourism during the postwar decades that facilitated the further fine-tuning of this identity construction. To say that these various manifestations of Austrian-ness were the result of performativity is not to suggest that the communities of people living in the respective places and landscapes of these “Austrias” existed neither independently of these labels nor decisively changed every time a new label was invented. But it is only through these changing discourses that one can identify particular communities as agents of and within performative constructions of “Austrian-ness” at specific moments in time. This connection between discourse and performativity distinguishes my approach from other investigations of Austrian national identity discourses. Since any in-depth discussion of the existing scholarly literature on Austrian national identity would require a separate book, I will only briefly address two works that have shaped my own thinking but whose foci on Austria’s national identity discourses also differ significantly from my project. Peter Thaler’s book, The Ambivalence of Identity (2001), makes a convincing argument that Austria’s biggest postwar accomplishment was the successful re-orientation of the national imagination from “German-ness” to “Austrian-ness.” According to Thaler, the gradual intensification of an Austrian national imagery in the context of resistance against and persecution of Nazis greatly facilitated the reconstruction of Austria in the form of the Second Republic, but it did not automatically produce a strong sense of a distinct non-German Austrian-ness.40 The latter came about only when post-1945 revisionist historiography produced a distinct Austrian identity whose dissemination across the primary, secondary, and higher education levels benefitted greatly from the specifically Austrian system of Proporz—the allocation of controlling power over state institutions between the two major parties, Socialists (later Social Democrats) and Christian Socialists, proportional to their respective share of parliamentary seats.41 In sometimes implicit, but often quite explicit ways, centuries-old ideas of the Austrian realm’s connection to an evolving German national identity were declared null and void. Austria, it now seemed, had been “Austrian” all along, it had simply forgotten.42

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Institutional governmental efforts at fostering a distinct Austrian national identity were especially important at the level of culture and education where many Austrians maintained “often deep-seated emotional bonds to the larger German cultural realm” despite all efforts to deflect onto Germany all responsibility for the crimes of National Socialism. However, as powerful as the institutional revisionism of the Austrian national imagery was, people usually do not adopt new behaviors and attitudes simply because they have been told to do so. Thaler implicitly acknowledges the important role of non-institutional, everyday discourses and performances in the formation of a new national imagery when he qualifies the importance of the various institutionalized efforts: “It would be too one-dimensional to say that Austria’s new identity was created by public institutions, but it most definitely relied on their support.”43 Anybody who has lived in a different national environment than the one they have been socialized in knows how difficult it is to learn the shared norms and the barely noticeable nuances that constitute national identities. That is because these norms transcend most textual and institutional codifications and rely on “[e]veryday, habitual performances,” which, in turn, “are constituted by an array of . . . practical, embodied codes which guide what to do in particular settings.”44 One arena where these performative enactments of the embodied codes of the national imagery become visible is the discourse of tourism. In my understanding, this discourse consists not only of tourist behavior and tourist images per se, but of a wide range of government documents, cultural texts, and in situ observations of tourists that together form the discursive terrain where the national imagery and its related “codes of conduct” are being negotiated. The focus on seemingly mundane and everyday enactments of the national is what connects my analysis of national identity discourses with another relevant book, The Discursive Construction of National Identity (2009). The collective of authors led by Viennese linguist Ruth Wodak conceives national identity narratives as “dynamic” constructs that “are produced and reproduced, as well as transformed and dismantled, discursively” and can be analyzed through the study of powerful and everyday uses of language.45 The authors’ understanding of national narratives—a term drawn from Stuart Hall’s writings—includes discursive representations of the national in “literature, in the media and in everyday culture and it creates a connection between stories, landscapes, scenarios, historical events, national symbols and national rituals which represent shared experiences and concerns, triumphs and destructive defeats.”46 Yet, in a reflection of the authors’ affiliations with the Vienna School of Discourse Analysis, the subsequent discussion focuses mainly on examples of discourses in the sense of speech acts. From public speeches and addresses,47 to focus group interviews,48 to qualitative oneon-one interviews,49 the authors trace the multiple ways in which the Austrian national imagery is constructed in the discursive acts of a wide range of actors. What this systematic and comprehensive study confirms is the extent to which

Introduction

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the typical tropes of Austrian national identity, from the beautiful landscape to the cultural achievements, have become intrinsic elements of the narration of Austrian-ness. What it leaves out, however, is a closer look at the everyday, coincidental, and often seemingly trivial instances in which national identities and belonging develop. For instance, the authors describe how individual interviewees respond to opening questions about their “spontaneous associations and images related to the concept of ‘Austria’” by mentioning “typical tourist clichés,” including the country’s landscape as locus amoenus and references to high culture.50 However, in their analyses of these interview responses, the authors repeatedly gloss over such comments as merely tourist stereotypes and privilege statements that provide presumably more substantive information about an interviewee’s interpretation of Austrian-ness. As I will show throughout this book, tourism is not a sideshow but a crucial discursive space where the Austrian national imagery is adapted to new historical contexts, where different groups wrestle with diverging interpretations of Austrian-ness, and where “insiders” and “outsiders” negotiate, define, and redraw the boundaries between “belongers” and “non-belongers.” For the purpose of my larger argument, I interpret the discourse of tourism as consisting of a broad range of cultural texts that engage with the connection between tourism and Austrian-ness in one form or another. My use of the term texts is intentionally ambiguous. I conceive the discourse of tourism as a continuum, delineated by government documents related to the reconstruction of Austrian hotel infrastructure after World War II on the one hand, and by the activities of international tourists on a Sound of Music tour on the other. Some of these texts address tourism fairly directly, others draw on the imagery of tourism to engage with specific aspects of Austrian identity and history in a critical or polemical way.

Chapter Itinerary This book consists of three large sections loosely connected (I) to Austria’s immediate postwar period, (II) to the country’s shifting political landscape in the 1980s and 1990s, and (III) to Austria’s search for a role in a globalizing world at the turn of the twenty-first century. Part I, “‘Where Is This Much-Talked-Of Austria?’ Remapping Post-World War II Austria,” analyzes the role of tourism discourse in reconstructing an independent Austria and affirming its national identity narrative as distinct from Germany. In chapter 1, I analyze how a series of government activities aimed at rebuilding Austria’s tourism infrastructure also provide insights into the renegotiations of “Austrian-ness” during the Allied occupation. A discussion of The Book of Austria, a publication by the official Austrian press service in 1948, will shed light on the complex ways historical narratives drew on the tourist gaze and on the general habitus of Western tour-

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ism to put Austria back on the map of the international community. Chapters 2 and 3 in this first section focus more on the domestic aspect of the discourse of tourism. Through an analysis of two highly popular Heimatfilme, Hofrat Geiger (Privy Councilor Geiger) (1947) and Der Förster vom Silberwald (The Forester of the Silver Wood) (1954), I will highlight the role of film both as a medium that represented tourist practices and as important element of the tourism discourse itself. Specifically, these chapters will demonstrate how the filmic representation of typical tourism landscapes modeled possible ways to negotiate the contradictions between Austria’s longstanding self-image as a German nation and its sudden reinvention as an already distinctly Austrian community after 1945. Part II, “Dark Places: Tourism and the Representation of Austria’s Involvement in National Socialism and the Holocaust,” focuses on the complex connections between Austria’s long denial of its co-responsibility for the Holocaust and Austrian writers’ use of the discourse of tourism to criticize this historical “amnesia.” Chapter 4 analyzes the historical exhibits that were part of the European Capital of Culture program organized by the Upper Austrian city of Linz in 2009. As a specific manifestation of the discourse of tourism, the ECOC program became an important venue for addressing and exhibiting the history of Linz as one of Hitler’s Führerstädte in a serious but also accessible way. The various historical exhibits sparked a heated debate between, on one side, the curators and historians who tried to engage visitors through affective and performative modes of historical representation, and, on the other side, a group of local historians who criticized the exhibits as dumbed-down representations of history and accused the curators of kowtowing to touristic expectations. I will use this debate as point of departure for two literary excursions into Austria’s “heart of darkness.” In chapter 5, “Alpine Vampires: The Haunted Landscapes of Elfriede Jelinek’s Die Kinder der Toten (The Children of the Dead),” I will trace the author’s use of the discourse of tourism for redrawing the map of Austria into a monumental landscape of what Alison Landsberg called “prosthetic memory.”51 Chapter 6, “The Blind Shores of Austrian History: Christoph Ransmayr’s Morbus Kitahara (The Dog King),” takes a closer look at how an iconic Austrian tourism region, the Salzkammergut, is transformed into an inverted ghost map that re-inscribes the crimes of National Socialism into the very landscape that undergirds Austrian national identity. Both chapters in this section address the shifting narratives of Austrian-ness during the 1990s, a time when the repressed legacy of Austria’s collaboration with National Socialism returned with a vengeance. Furthermore, both chapters discuss the important role of fictional narratives in the affective representation of difficult historical topics. At the center of the book’s third and last part, “Austrian Narratives of Place and Identity in the Context of Globalization,” are various manifestations of The Sound of Music narrative as a particular example of the link between the discourse of tourism and Austrian national imagery. Chapter 7, “Trapped Bodies, Roaming

Introduction

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Fantasies: Mobilizing Constructions of Place and Identity in Florian Flicker’s Suzie Washington (1998),” analyzes Flicker’s film as critical look at the increasingly untenable Austrian self-image as welcoming host country. Contrasting the tourism marketing rhetoric with the heroine’s experience of Austrian xenophobia and racism, Flicker thematizes how the discourse of tourism’s suggests a quasiuniversal idea of mobility but puts up actual barriers based on race and national origin. This also has important ramifications on the apparatus of critical inquiry across a range of disciplines, with the notion of mobile, hybrid, and transnational identities sometimes acting akin to a deus ex machina that would remove the entrenched political and economic inequalities connected with the nation-state. Suzie Washington’s allegorical use of the Sound of Music theme provides its heroine with at least a modicum of agency and, in doing so, offers a segue into chapter 8, which traces the evolution of The Sound of Music narrative and its connection to nineteenth-century narratives of Austrian-ness. Rather than interpreting the recent staging of a German-language version of The Sound of Music at the Salzburg Landestheater as a final reconciliation of this long-rejected example of “American kitsch” with the “real” Austria, I discuss these latest manifestations of Sound of Music tourism as yet another instance of how Austrian-ness is renegotiated in the context of tourism. As this discussion will show, global (and globalized) narratives such as The Sound of Music do not per se signal a new transnational paradigm. Depending on the respective political context, they can very well be used to reaffirm national(ist) tendencies in a new costume. The function of tourism as a factor in constructing and validating an “authentic” notion of Austrian-ness features prominently in the chapters of this book. The conclusion, “When Austria Moves to China,” reverses this perspective to some extent. While outside visitors have often functioned as validators of domestic constructions of Austrian-ness, in the case of the alpine town of Hallstatt, the Chinese visitors came to not only look but also survey, measure, and photograph in order to reconstruct a full-size copy of the town, lake included, in a Chinese housing development. How this changed Austrian debates about authenticity and identity in a global context will be the focus of this final outlook.

Notes 1. Daniel J. Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (New York: Vintage Books, 2012), 85. 2. Eva Brenner, “‘Where Are the Big Topics, Where Is the Big Form?’ Elfriede Jelinek in Discussion with Eva Brenner about Her Play Totenauberg, Theater, and Politics,” in Elfriede Jelinek: Framed by Language, ed. Jorun B. Johns and Katherine Arens (Riverside, CA: Ariadne Press, 1994), 30. 3. Peter Turrini, “SPIEGEL Essay: Die touristische Bananenrepublik,” Der Spiegel, 10 November 1986, http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-13520866.html.

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4. For such overviews, see Wolfgang Hackl, Eingeborene im Paradies: Die literarische Wahrnehmung des alpinen Tourismus im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2004); Wolfgang Straub, Willkommen: Literatur und Fremdenverkehr in Österreich (Vienna: Sonderzahl, 2001). 5. Alon Confino, “Traveling as a Culture of Remembrance: Traces of National Socialism in West Germany, 1945–1960,” History & Memory 12, no. 2 (2000): 101–2. 6. Alon Confino, Germany as a Culture of Remembrance: Promises and Limits of Writing History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press Books, 2006), 220. 7. Ibid., 221. 8. Hans Magnus Enzensberger, “Vergebliche Brandung der Ferne: Eine Theorie des Tourismus,” Merkur 126, August (1958): 701–20. All quotes in this chapter are taken from this reprint: Hans Magnus Enzensberger, “A Theory of Tourism,” New German Critique 68, Spring/Summer (1996): 117–35. 9. Enzensberger, “Theory,” 124. 10. Ibid., 126. 11. Ibid., 129. 12. Ibid., 135. 13. Dean MacCannell, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 146–47; emphasis in original. 14. Ibid., 147. 15. MacCannell critically reflects on the gendered implications of his initial concept in the foreword to a later edition of The Tourist. See ibid., x. 16. Ibid., 1. 17. John Urry, The Tourist Gaze (London: Sage Publications, 1990), 3. 18. Ibid. 19. David Crouch and Nina Lübbren, “Introduction,” in Visual Culture and Tourism, ed. David Crouch and Nina Lübbren (New York: Berg, 2003), 10. 20. Ibid. 21. Urry, Tourist Gaze, 3. 22. Simon Coleman and Mike Crang, “Introduction: Grounded Tourists, Travelling Theory,” in Tourism: Between Place and Performance, ed. Simon Coleman and Mike Crang (New York: Berghahn Books, 2002), 10. 23. Mike Crang, “Circulation and Emplacement: The Hollowed-Out Performance of Tourism,” in Travels in Paradox: Remapping Tourism, ed. Claudio Minca and Tim Oakes (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006), 53–54. 24. Coleman and Crang, “Introduction,” 10. 25. Ibid., 11. 26. For a collection of essays that reflect this changing attitude toward place and space, see Vincent J. Del Casino and Stephen P. Hanna, eds., Mapping Tourism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003). 27. Butler describes the conventional idea of gender as “the discursive/cultural means by which ‘sexed nature’ or ‘a natural sex’ is produced and established as ‘pre-discursive’, prior to culture, a politically neutral surface on which culture acts.” Judith Butler, “Gender Trouble, Feminist Theory, and Psychoanalytic Discourse,” in Feminism/Postmodernism, ed. Linda J. Nicholson (New York: Routledge, 1990), 7. See also Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993). 28. Butler, Bodies, 2.

Introduction

29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51.

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Butler, “Gender Trouble, Feminist Theory,” 338. Cynthia Weber, “Performative States,” Millennium 27, no. 1 (1998): 80–81. Ibid., 82. Ibid., 91. Hellmut Andics, Der Staat, den keiner wollte: Österreich von der Gründung der Republik bis zur Moskauer Deklaration (Vienna: Molden-Taschenbuch-Verlag, 1976). See Felix Kreissler, Der Österreicher und seine Nation: Ein Lernprozess mit Hindernissen (Vienna: Böhlau, 1984), 31. Weber, “Performative States,” 92–93. Ruth Wodak et al., The Discursive Construction of National Identity (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), 53–54. Weber, “Performative States,” 91. See Ernst Bruckmüller, Österreichbewusstsein im Wandel: Identität und Selbstverständnis in den 90er Jahren (Vienna: Signum-Verlag, 1994), 26–27; Wodak et al., Discursive Construction, 54. Robert Kriechbaumer, Österreichische Nationalgeschichte nach 1945: Die Spiegel der Erinnerung, die Sicht von innen (Vienna: Böhlau Verlag, 1998), 21. Peter Thaler, The Ambivalence of Identity: The Austrian Experience of Nation-Building in a Modern Society (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2001), 88. Ibid., 111–12; 124–32. Ibid., 131. Ibid., 141. Tim Edensor, National Identity, Popular Culture and Everyday Life (Abigdon, UK: Routledge, 2002), 90. Wodak et al., Discursive Construction, 3–4. Ibid., 24. Ibid., 70–105. Ibid., 106–45. Ibid., 146–85. Ibid., 150. Alison Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004).

Bibliography Andics, Hellmut. Der Staat, den keiner wollte: Österreich von der Gründung der Republik bis zur Moskauer Deklaration. Vienna: Molden-Taschenbuch-Verlag, 1976. Boorstin, Daniel J. The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America. New York: Vintage Books, 2012. Brenner, Eva. “‘Where Are the Big Topics, Where Is the Big Form?’ Elfriede Jelinek in Discussion with Eva Brenner about Her Play Totenauberg, Theater, and Politics.” In Elfriede Jelinek: Framed by Language, edited by Jorun B. Johns and Katherine Arens, 18–34. Riverside, CA: Ariadne Press, 1994. Bruckmüller, Ernst. Österreichbewusstsein im Wandel: Identität und Selbstverständnis in den 90er Jahren. Vienna: Signum-Verlag, 1994. Butler, Judith. Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” New York: Routledge, 1993.

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———. “Gender Trouble, Feminist Theory, and Psychoanalytic Discourse.” In Feminism/Postmodernism, edited by Linda J. Nicholson, 324–40. New York: Routledge, 1990. Coleman, Simon, and Mike Crang. “Introduction: Grounded Tourists, Travelling Theory.” In Tourism: Between Place and Performance, edited by Simon Coleman and Mike Crang, 1–17. New York: Berghahn Books, 2002. Confino, Alon. Germany as a Culture of Remembrance: Promises and Limits of Writing History. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press Books, 2006. ———. “Traveling as a Culture of Remembrance: Traces of National Socialism in West Germany, 1945–1960.” History & Memory 12, no. 2 (2000): 92–121. Crang, Mike. “Circulation and Emplacement: The Hollowed-Out Performance of Tourism.” In Travels in Paradox: Remapping Tourism, edited by Claudio Minca and Tim Oakes, 47– 64. New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006. Crouch, David, and Nina Lübbren. “Introduction.” In Visual Culture and Tourism, edited by David Crouch and Nina Lübbren, 1–20. New York: Berg, 2003. Del Casino, Vincent J., and Stephen P. Hanna, eds. Mapping Tourism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. Edensor, Tim. National Identity, Popular Culture and Everyday Life. Abigdon, UK: Routledge, 2002. Enzensberger, Hans Magnus. “A Theory of Tourism.” New German Critique 68, Spring/Summer (1996): 117–35. ———. “Vergebliche Brandung der Ferne: Eine Theorie des Tourismus.” Merkur 126, August (1958): 701–20. Hackl, Wolfgang. Eingeborene im Paradies: Die literarische Wahrnehmung des alpinen Tourismus im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2004. Kreissler, Felix. Der Österreicher und seine Nation: Ein Lernprozess mit Hindernissen. Vienna: Böhlau, 1984. Kriechbaumer, Robert. Österreichische Nationalgeschichte nach 1945: Die Spiegel der Erinnerung, die Sicht von innen. Vienna: Böhlau Verlag, 1998. Landsberg, Alison. Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004. MacCannell, Dean. The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. Straub, Wolfgang. Willkommen: Literatur und Fremdenverkehr in Österreich. Vienna: Sonderzahl, 2001. Thaler, Peter. The Ambivalence of Identity: The Austrian Experience of Nation-Building in a Modern Society. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2001. Turrini, Peter. “SPIEGEL Essay: Die touristische Bananenrepublik.” Der Spiegel, 10 November 1986. http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-13520866.html. Urry, John. The Tourist Gaze. London: Sage Publications, 1990. Weber, Cynthia. “Performative States.” Millennium 27, no. 1 (1998): 77–95. Wodak, Ruth, et al. The Discursive Construction of National Identity. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009.

Part I

“WHERE IS THIS MUCH-TALKED-OF AUSTRIA?” Remapping Post-World War II Austria

d Where is this much talked-of Austria? What is her place in space and time, in history and culture? —Ernst Marboe, The Book of Austria (1948) Tourism is a matter for the entire state, the entire people. Each misstep does not only produce negative results for the one who caused it, but for the entire nation, for Austria’s reputation at home and abroad. —Tibor Szinovacz, former chair of Slovakian National Railroad, in consultation letter to Austrian Ministry of Reconstruction (1946)

Chapter 1

“WE LOVE OUR HEIMAT BUT WE NEED FOREIGNERS!” Tourism and the Reconstruction of Austria 1945–55

d I

n the fall of 1945, Chancellor Karl Renner1 made what must have been a surprising plea amid the ruins of Vienna: “We love our Heimat, but we need the foreigners! We need tourism and invite the whole world to be our guests. Vienna and Salzburg as sites of art, our Alps as tourist destinations of the first order, will joyfully greet the foreigners.”2 The fact that the country’s chancellor discusses tourism at a rather inopportune moment, a few months after the collapse of the murderous National Socialist regime that a significant number of Austrians had supported, seems to underscore the perception that references to tourism serve the purpose of deflecting from more serious political and historical topics. Furthermore, Renner’s invitation to the world appears to illustrate the very notion of Austrian economic and cultural self-colonization through tourism. In other words, Renner’s brief statement symbolizes the complex and contradictory role tourism has played with regard to Austrian national identity and history over the past decades. Indeed, Austrian governments, corporations, politicians, academics, and teachers have used tourist stock images and narratives of Austria in order to reposition the country internationally, to sell goods, and in general, avoid taking responsibility for an inconvenient past. However, in doing so they have never been able to completely erase or cover up this inconvenient past, no matter how beautiful the images or how convincing the revisionist historiography. Again and again, literary and journalistic critical treatments of Austria’s tourism economy reveal that it is precisely by way of the tourism-related construction, exhibition, and dissemination of Austria’s places, its history, and its culture that the Nazi past becomes

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visible. Thus, instead of dismissing tourism as the “fake” surface covering up the “real” Austria, I will analyze tourism as a conglomerate of complex and often contradictory performances that also manage to display the not-so-beautiful aspects of Austria. In adapting historian Alon Confino’s question—“Why did some Germans think of tourism after 8 May 1945?”—for Austria, we can thus ask, “Why did Chancellor Karl Renner talk about Fremdenverkehr in 1945?”3 One plausible reason was that tourism constituted an important element in the effort to rebuild Austria’s economy after the destruction caused by World War II and that Chancellor Renner followed the blueprint used in the wake of World War I. After the Habsburg Empire’s dissolution, the newly-founded First Austrian Republic had to cope with the loss of most of the Habsburg realm’s more distinguished tourist destinations, many of which now belonged to other countries: Meran, the small South Tyrolean town renowned for its air quality, had become part of Italy; the well-known spas at Karlsbad, Marienbad, and Franzensbad were now within the borders of the newly created Czechoslovakian Republic; and the Mediterranean tourist destinations around Trieste and Rijeka had ended up in Yugoslavia or Italy.4 Aristocratic and upper-middle class Sommerfrische activities in these places had already been an important element of the Habsburg Empire’s economy around the turn of the century, covering about 80 percent of the dual monarchy’s export deficit.5 At the same time, many of these destinations had been at the forefront of the nationalist upheavals that dominated the Empire’s last phase leading up to World War I. Tourism in Bohemia, for instance, often turned into a highly nationalistic turf war between Czech-speaking hosts and German-speaking visitors, a development mostly overlooked in the nostalgic descriptions of imperial Austria’s lost grandezza but highly relevant for discussions of tourism’s role in the context of national identity.6 Faced with this dramatic redrawing of Austria’s tourism map, the regional governments of the First Austrian Republic needed to develop new regions for a Fremdenverkehr, as tourism activities were mostly called then and well into the twentieth century. A large credit from the League of Nations in 1922 supported the expansion and electrification of the Austrian Federal Railways, which subsequently became the backbone of Austria’s public transportation system and an important agent in Austria’s tourism marketing and organization efforts. The Austrian government successfully negotiated visa waivers for visitors from a number of European nations, with the German Reich, Czechoslovakia, and the United Kingdom being among the most important markets. These developments paid off, insofar as official registrations of tourists increased significantly from 2.5 million in 1922 to 4.2 million in 1929. Most importantly, the percentage of foreign visitors from hard-currency countries increased from 37 percent in 1923 to 43.6 percent in 1929.7 Germans formed by far the largest segment with 54.4 percent of all foreign tourists in 1932. By comparison, the second-largest contingent of tourists from Czechoslovakia reached only 15.1 percent the same year.8

“We Love Our Heimat but We Need Foreigners!”

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The significant percentage of German tourists was related to the linguistic and cultural ties between Germany and Austria and to the high purchasing power of the German mark relative to the Austrian schilling. It was in these two areas that troubles arose with the beginning of the world economic crisis in 1929. Fearing a depletion of its monetary reserves, the German government implemented a fee of one hundred marks for all foreign trips taken by German citizens.9 While this caused a significant decrease in the number of German visitors, it paled in comparison to the developments in 1933–34: after Adolf Hitler’s election as chancellor in January 1933, the German National Socialist regime tried to break the anti-Nazi stance of the authoritarian Austrian government by undermining tourism with the “1000-Mark Sperre” (customs fee), which required every German citizen who traveled to or through Austria to pay a fee of one thousand Reichsmark. As a result, the percentage of foreign tourists decreased by almost 30 percent in general, but by more than 50 percent in Tyrol and Salzburg, the preferred vacation destinations of German tourists.10 Eventually, Austria gave in to Nazi Germany’s pressure and relaxed the ban against National Socialist activism on its soil. A supposedly mutual agreement between the German Third Reich and the Austrian Republic in 1936 led to the cancellation of the fee. Austria’s tourism industry briefly recovered until the country’s annexation by Hitler’s Germany in 1938.11 Notwithstanding the dramatic disruption in 1933–34, during the interwar years Austria’s tourism industry helped to cover up to a third of its trade deficit, putting it just behind France and Germany in terms of revenue from tourist activities.12 It was the memory of this kind of development that after 1945 spurred the mantra-like references to the tourism industry’s importance by government officials, economists, and tourism representatives. It is certainly one of the reasons why Chancellor Renner talked about Fremdenverkehr. In light of the widespread destruction of the transportation infrastructure in 1945, this focus on tourism as path to economic recovery appeared premature, to say the least. Visiting Austria a few months after the end of hostilities, the American author John Dos Passos was amazed “to find [him]self so deep in Russia so soon.” The combination of destruction and destitution led him to describe Vienna as a city “dying by inches.”13 In the city of waltzes and operettas alone, more than 270,000 people had lost their apartments and homes, and an area the size of the entire inner city of Vienna had been completely destroyed by bombing raids and artillery.14 But it was not just the Soviet-occupied area around Austria’s capital that illustrated the destruction caused by World War II. The partition into different occupation zones underscored the impression that only fragments were left of the country formerly known as Austria. The military demarcation lines between the occupation zones resembled borders between “hostile nations,” and the increasing animosities between the Western allies and the Soviet Union produced anxiety about the country’s future.15 The various Austrian provinces acted like sovereign nations when it came to foreign trade. Even the commercial

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interactions between the various occupation zones were hardly different from trading with foreign countries, a situation that resulted in a veritable “latent trade war” (latenter Handelskrieg).16 Rather than dismissing Renner’s statement as untimely, I read his remark about tourism as performative enactment of Austria as a spatially and politically cohesive nation-state at a time when geopolitical realities seemed to make this all but impossible. By naming Austrian landscapes and cities as hosts, Renner does more than simply reference older historical elements of Austria. He cites older tourist discourses about Austria; he appeals to the citizens within and the world outside alike to remember and re-enact these discourses; and, in so doing, he devises a road map for the performative reconstruction of Austria in the discursive terrain of tourism long before a spatially and politically unified Austria would again become a political reality. In other words, Renner’s statement underscores that Fremdenverkehr—tourism—is more than a distorted representation of an already existing Austrian nation. Rather, to quote Weber, the idea of an Austrian nation after 1945 is “performatively constituted by the very expressions that are said to be its result,” meaning by the tourist images and narratives that circulated about it.17 What invites further analysis is the discrepancy between the lack of actual tourism activity on an economic level and the importance of tourism on a symbolic, political and cultural level. Due to Austria’s prominent status as a tourist destination and to the sizable portion of Austria’s GDP generated by the tourism industry from the late 1950s on, many analyses of Austrian tourism after World War II have focused on quantifiable aspects.18 However, for the immediate postwar period, a quantitative approach appears rather meaningless. According to statistical data, tourism only gradually became an economically significant sector in the years 1947–48, with no exact numbers for overnight stays available for the years 1946–48.19 Simultaneously, Fremdenverkehr was debated with great fervor in daily newspapers, magazines, and in the correspondence between Austrian government officials on the one hand, and US officials in the various military and civil occupation departments on the other. Since “crude consumption figures do not reveal very much of spatial practice,” as cultural geographer David Crouch formulates it,20 I will take a closer look at the narratives, images, and practices related to tourism, in order to trace to what degree tourism enabled the reconstruction of Austria as a coherent place and as a national, cultural, and, in some cases, even ethnic community.

Where, and What, Is Austria? In 1948, the Austrian Federal Press Service decided it was time for an official act of postwar Austrian self-representation. Under the guidance of its director, Ernst Marboe, the service published The Book of Austria. A hybrid of popular

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history, visitor’s guide, and pocket museum, the volume was distributed widely as an official gift for diplomats and foreign visitors.21 Despite the editor’s claim that the book “does not set out to be . . . a Baedeker . . . nor an encyclopedia,” the sequence of chapters, the stylistic blend of journalistic, literary, and scholarly writing, and the extensive use of pictures and maps firmly embed the book in the discourse of tourism.22 Unsurprisingly, the volume provides a highly nostalgic perspective on Austria’s Habsburg past and delivers a general overview of Austria’s history up to the beginning of the twentieth century, followed by a chapter-by-chapter description of all nine provinces that form the Second Austrian Republic. One of the book’s central aims, the retroactive construction of a quasi-eternal Austrian-ness (as opposed to German-ness), becomes apparent with the very first section heading, “Unborn Austria.” While allegedly about Austria’s Stone Age origins, the heading more than invites analogies to the “rebirth” of Austria in 1945. The section’s first paragraph connects the country’s prehistoric beginnings with its twentieth-century birth pangs in a paradoxical act of describing a not-yet-existing place via a historically over-determined name: “He who would find Austria on the globe must turn the round ball of the earth slowly on its slanting axis, otherwise he might easily overlook the Austria of the 20th century. Where is this much-talked-of Austria? What is her place in space and time, in history and culture?”23 How should one understand the two questions about Austria’s time-space coordinates and its historical meaning in a book that brims with examples of and references to Austria’s presumed greatness? On one level, these rhetorical questions illustrate what philosopher Edward Casey has called a “place-panic,” a fear of chaos and disorder inherent in many (Western) creation myths.24 The Book of Austria clearly deploys this narrative pattern when describing how even the heroes of Greek mythology would have been ignorant of Austria, whose geographic location “north-east of Mount Olympus was long held by the Greeks to be the kingdom of the dead. A riddle; a realm of impenetrable darkness; the mystery of birth and death wrapped in the magic mist of creation and mythology.”25 In line with classical creation myths, The Book of Austria combines the presentation of a historical tabula rasa, or “zero hour,” with signs “of [an] emerging order.”26 Embedded in the center of the page and framed by the above-cited paragraph is a photograph of the Venus von Willendorf, a small statuette of an antique goddess of fertility dating back to 25,000 years BCE and found in Lower Austria in 1908. Considered to be one of the most significant and oldest archeological finds in Austria, the statuette establishes a pre-historical foundation for the “new” post-1945 Austria.27 By projecting the historical genealogy of Austria back tens of thousands of years, the turbulences of the pre-1945 decade morph into a mere blip on Austria’s supposedly much longer historical timeline. On another level, these two questions draw attention to the element of performativity in the reconstruction of Austria in 1945. The simple use of the label

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“Austria,” in light of the historical and cultural developments of the four decades before World War II, contradicts the questioner’s supposed lack of knowledge about Austria’s place and role. To put it differently, it is impossible to write about “Unborn Austria” as if it were located outside of history. The very act of naming pulls the allegedly unknown into the discursive system of historical knowledge production. As Judith Butler argues, to address a “thing” means to pull it into the system of cultural discourses, which, rather than depicting the “thing” neutrally and objectively, categorizes and labels it in culturally and historically contingent ways.28 Similarly, as much as The Book of Austria proclaims to simply educate its readers about Austria’s pre-historical roots, it actually creates it by citing from and reiterating existing discourses about Austria. Consequently, the Venus von Willendorf does not simply introduce the reader to one of the oldest pieces of evidence for Austria’s existence, nor does it provide a neutral starting point for the Second Austrian Republic. Instead, the statuette, as pars pro toto for the nation, embodies the performative reconstruction of a feminine, non-aggressive, and harmless Austria, projected back into the fog of history. The historical overview following the photographic reproduction of the Venus von Willendorf further elaborates on the chain of gendered logic through which Austria is presented as a feminized, passive, and, therefore, supposedly innocent actor on the stage of world history. The Book of Austria presents the country as a space that had to endure repeated acts of trespassing, beginning with the “primitive tribes of Illyrans, Celts, . . . Teutons, . . . Huns, Goths, . . . Slavs,” for whom the land “became a bridge.” The process allegedly continued with the Romans and morphed into the contemporary—and economically much more desirable—“occupation” of the country by a stream of tourists.29 Over the course of The Book of Austria, the Second Austrian Republic takes shape by quite closely following the Western cultural practice in which “time . . . is typically coded masculine and space . . . feminine.”30 The idea of Germany as an active historical agent and Austria as a passive spatial backdrop proved to be expedient for successive post-1945 Austrian governments, which deflected Austria’s responsibility for National Socialist crimes onto the German aggressor. The annexation of 1938 was, in this context, simply a repeat of earlier Teutonic/ Prussian acts of aggression against the “softer” and more feminine version of German culture embodied by Austria. As historian Siegfried Mattl pointed out, while this gendered representation of Austria became a convenient point of reference for the postwar “victim thesis,” it cited much older discourses that have shaped the relations between Austria-Hungary and Prussian Germany for a long time.31 No matter how often a particular discourse is cited, it remains open to different interpretations, and the feminized representation of postwar Austria is no exception. Representatives of the occupying powers took the misogynist imagery one step further when discussing Austria’s complicity in its annexation by Nazi Germany as follows: “It should be remembered that Austria yielded with so little

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opposition and afterwards accepted her violator with such enthusiasm that it was legitimate to wonder whether it was a case of rape or seduction.”32 The narration and depiction of Austria’s space as feminized is an important, but, given the cultural discourse at the time, an ultimately unsurprising aspect of the performative reconstruction of the nation in The Book of Austria. What was novel, however, was the book’s deployment of an imagined tourist whose presence would alleviate the “place-panic” and whose allegedly objective male gaze would validate the feminized Austrian self-image. The phrase “he who would find Austria on the globe must turn the round ball of the earth slowly on its slanting axis” evokes the image of an explorer, a traveler, or even a tourist researching a potential journey (long before Google Earth made the virtual turning of the globe a common practice). This imaginary figure of the tourist is positioned outside the globe and, by extension, outside of Austria’s compromised recent history, from where the tourist can vouch for Austria’s existence from an allegedly objective perspective. By way of searching for the “much-talked-about” Austria, this imagined tourist not only acknowledges the existence of this place but also simultaneously invokes the already existing matrix of facts, narratives, and images that form the basis for reconstructing Austria within familiar and desirable space-time coordinates. The reference to tourism as an external authority that legitimizes a specific national community resonates with analyses of tourism as a compensatory practice to mitigate the disruptive processes of modernity. Sociologist Dean MacCannell defines the tourist as a paradigmatic representative of modernity who longs to find authenticity “in other historical periods and other cultures, in purer, simpler lifestyles.”33 This longing will, of course, never be satisfied but it continues to drive the growth in tourism and sparks new practices. In reverse, one might conclude that a community’s popularity among tourists is proportional to the degree of “authenticity” in its identity narrative. Obviously, this is as delusional as the thought that tourists might find out the “truth” about the communities they visit, but it offers meaningful insights into how the discourse of tourism facilitates the reshaping of identity narratives. In the example from The Book of Austria, the country’s self-representation through the supposedly objective and uncompromised (and presumably uncompromising) eyes of an imaginary tourist indicates a perhaps unconscious acknowledgement that the nation’s victim status was not so self-evident after all. In this context, the appeal to the tourist-as-witness can also be interpreted as an appeal for absolution from the outside, a powerful idea in a predominantly Catholic society. (This, of course, is not to say that mainstream Austria had accepted its share of responsibility for the National Socialist crimes. My reading only points to the possibility of a collective guilty conscience.) As the 1952 film satire 1. April 2000 demonstrates, The Book of Austria’s reference to a validating, masculine, and external tourist gaze was not a one-time exception. Based on a script by Ernst Marboe and Rudolf Brunngraber, director

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Wolfgang Liebeneiner presents an Austrian government that unilaterally cancels the occupation agreement with the four major allies after fifty years of futile negotiations. As a consequence, Austria must face a tribunal by the Weltschutzkommission, a fictitious global protection commission under the leadership of a stern woman with a decidedly masculine appearance (played by actress Hilde Krahl). The tribunal is composed of representatives from all continents who are intent on sanctioning Austria for its violation of world peace. Over the course of the film, however, the members of the commission succumb to the “natural” charm and innocent demeanor of Austria. To demonstrate the country’s innocence, the bumbling, effeminate, but charming Austrian chancellor, played by actor Josef Meinrad, presents to the commission an overview of Austrian history as a series of foreign invasions. Whenever the country had to use violence, he argues, it only did so as defensive measure and as a means of last resort. During the tribunal session’s breaks, the commission’s members are hosted like tourists and are presented with samplings of Austria’s, and especially Vienna’s, cultural wealth and beautiful landscapes. The chancellor’s arguments clearly impress the commission, but what finally helps to clear Austria of any wrongdoing is the discovery of a copy of the 1943 Moscow Declaration in the national library. The prolonged postwar occupation of Austria and its trial before the tribunal are declared a misunderstanding. In a rather transparent way, the Weltschutzkommission’s members have been transformed into foreign tourists who not only discover the “true” Austria but also absolve it from any responsibility for historical violence. This tourist gaze on Vienna also supports a final plot twist in terms of gender: throughout the film, the country’s passive historical stance is represented through a sympathetic but also effeminate chancellor, whose non-virile character traits become even more pronounced in contrast to the female president of the Weltschutzkommission, whose decisive and stern demeanor is amplified by her costumes, which signal phallic power. Towards the end of the film, the chancellor gives the commission’s president a private tour through some of Vienna’s touristic highlights. As they stand in front of a portrait of Empress Maria Theresa, the chancellor points out that she had to juggle sixteen children while governing a nation. He then pleads with the president to show mercy for Austria, appealing to her gender: “You are a woman, too!” (Sie sind doch auch eine Frau! ).34 Although the president initially maintains her distance, this scene proves to be pivotal, as she eventually gives in to the chancellor’s pleas, abdicates her position as president, and stays in Austria to marry the chancellor. Not only does this particular foreign tourist stay in Austria, and thereby provide the ultimate validation for the country, but she also rescues the country’s patriarchal system by submitting herself to a traditional heterosexual marriage that reaffirms the effeminate chancellor’s manhood.35 Where The Book of Austria invents an imaginary male tourist who spins the globe in search of Austria, 1. April 2000 foregrounds the cinematic apparatus as

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a transmitting and mobilizing device for the tourist gaze. Animated sequences depict the transcontinental flight of the Weltschutzkommission’s space rockets and their initial and mistaken arrival in Australia. The spaceship’s landing in Vienna is visualized via the self-referential deployment of the then novel genre and technology of live TV coverage. Throughout the film, cameras model a reassuring and validating external tourist gaze with crucial implications for domestic politics. Although the film pretends to address international audiences with the plea to finally end the Allied occupation, its nuanced and ironic commentaries on Austrian cultural and political events were likely lost on international audiences. Instead, they served as an emotional outlet for domestic audiences frustrated with the stalemate in the geopolitical negotiations. In this context, the filmic renditions of the tourist gaze can be read as modeling a perspective for domestic political purposes, as an attempt to retrain the domestic visual perception in such a way that the country’s history, culture, and politics can be recognized as whole despite the continuing political fragmentation and geopolitical uncertainties.36 While The Book of Austria and the film 1. April 2000 appealed to a benevolent outside tourist gaze, the prospect that actual tourists might soon populate a still war-damaged tourism infrastructure generated mixed feelings in tourism officials across the Austrian provinces. Eager to rebuild its war-wrecked tourism infrastructure and obtain hard foreign currencies, the Austrian Stelle für den Wiederaufbau der Fremdenverkehrsindustrie (Office for the Reconstruction of the Tourism Industry) in 1946 tried to obtain funds in the form of a credit from the economics division of the US Allied Commission for Austria (USACA). When this plan failed because of internal disagreements in the Austrian government, the Wiederaufbaustelle, as it came to be called, devised the first of several Ausländer-Hotelaktionen (Foreigner Hotel Campaigns).37 Under this label, tourists from the United Kingdom, France, and the Netherlands, among others, were distributed among a few select Austrian hotels. The foreign participants had to pay for lodging and food vouchers in advance in their respective currencies, enabling the Austrian government to buy food for the hotels involved in the project.38 At that time, practically all European states were restricting their citizens’ international travels for fear of losing much-needed currency to foreign markets. Therefore, organized international travel sometimes required intergovernmental bartering. In 1948, the Viennese newspaper Die Presse reported that the Netherlands had granted 2,500 Dutch residents a travel permit to Austria only after Austria committed to buy Dutch tulip seeds and vegetables.39 Despite the seemingly slapdash way in which these Ausländer-Hotelaktionen were organized, the director of the Stelle für den Wiederaufbau could report more than seven million schillings of net profit for Austria.40 For tourism officials throughout Austria, the prospect of a critical foreign tourist gaze was rather worrisome, as the following reactions by representatives of tourism organizations in Austria’s provinces illustrate. While several letters to

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the Stelle für den Wiederaufbau point to the serious food shortages in Austria as the main obstacle for a large-scale revival of foreign tourism,41 the majority of the comments indicate that officials were afraid that Austria’s tourism infrastructure would be compared unfavorably with those of other important tourist destinations, especially Switzerland. As the Carinthian tourism offices stated: “As we see it, English tourists would receive such a negative impression of our hotel infrastructure, the damage would exceed the benefits, as tourists would likely stop visiting our country in the future.”42 The Upper Austrian tourism office voiced similar concerns: “It would be better to avoid rushed activities now, rather than destroy one’s reputation through precipitous marketing and the difficulties to find lodging and accommodations.”43 Such concerns about “our” (national) reputation underscore to what degree tourism’s by then quite-established role as an international arbitration system had become a sandbox for testing a “new” Austrian national identity. This too was a citation of older discourses. The emerging mass tourism of the nineteenth century functioned as a kind of international evaluation system where tourists increasingly recorded and understood cultural differences as indicative of national differences. Traveling English aristocrats of the early nineteenth century interpreted their experiences with more oppressive political systems on the continent as an affirmation of the superior and progressive status of their own nation.44 German travelers, on the other hand, developed a greater appreciation of the idea of nationality and used encounters with other nations to borrow ideas for the German process of nation-building.45 Throughout the nineteenth century, the touristic encounter with an “other” always doubled as encounter with a potential future self in the evolving framework of the nation. This is of particular interest in the German context. When German tourists brought a touristic perspective to bear on their own communities and nations it resulted in a noticeable change in the way standardized travel guides such as the Baedeker wrote about Germany for a German audience. By producing more and more guidebooks about German regions—and eventually the German nation—for German readers, the publishers simultaneously benefited from and shaped the process of nation-building in the context of tourism.46 Judging by the increasing frequency with which post-World War II Austria appeared in English-language guidebooks, the reconstruction of a positive national image through tourism continued to work quite well in the twentieth century. In 1948, Fielding’s Travel Guide to Europe still declares Germany as off-limits for US tourists due to the completely destroyed infrastructure. The guide does not even mention Austria.47 In 1950, however, General Mark W. Clark, former commanding general of US Forces in Austria, enthusiastically recommends Austria to his countrymen in a preface to the guidebook All about Austria.48 Geared toward the US market, the guidebook describes Austria as a tourist paradise, deploying a language very similar to The Book of Austria. Where the latter exhorts the reader

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to “[l]earn to recognize the Austria that is in your very blood, for it is a large part of you,”49 Virginia Creed’s All about Austria extols Austrians’ allegedly infectious hospitality as follows: “If you stay in the country for more than a week, you will no longer be a stranger, for Austria is actually everyone’s country.”50 Rather than being agents in historical events, Austrians appear as quasi-mythical beings “who seem so flexible and adaptable, [but] do not change. It is those who come in contact with them who change.”51 The growing Cold War tensions between the Soviet Union and its former Western allies France, the United Kingdom, and the United States played an important role in this validation of Austria’s presumed lack of responsibility for the recent war. A military pocket guide for soldiers stationed in Austria references the 1943 Moscow Declaration, which envisioned a restored Austria in its pre1938 borders, and describes Austria as a “liberated country, like France—not as a defeated nation, like Germany,” thus using the same abbreviated, and therefore distorted, reading of the Moscow Declaration preferred by the Austrian government and many Austrians.52 The guidebook admonishes soldiers to treat Austrians with respect and encourages them to take advantage of the tourist activities without dropping their guard—for “Austria, a favorite area for seekers of pleasure and old-world culture, is also the nation that bulges deepest into the Iron Curtain line across Europe. Beneath the soft string music in the cafes, Cold War intrigues are plotted nightly.”53 Such tourism images and narratives were initially targeting an international audience but they also played a crucial role in reconstructing the notion of a cohesive Austria for domestic audiences. Devised for external readers, these narratives reflected back onto the internal Austrian scene where they were discussed, questioned, and criticized. In the following section, I will focus on how the discourse of tourism shaped the performative construction of Austria as a unified nation with tourism functioning as a kind of projection foil for Austrian “wholeness” under the realities of occupation politics.

Governing through Tourism Practically simultaneous to the editing and publishing of The Book of Austria, politicians, civil servants, and tourism associations pondered ways to revitalize Austria’s tourism economy. One of the most active Austrian government officials with regard to tourism, Dr. Langer-Hansel, department head within the Ministry for Trade and Reconstruction, bemoaned that “in many places there is little understanding of tourism’s importance, even among immediately affected circles.”54 What Langer-Hansel expresses in somewhat byzantine language is this: Austrians cannot continue to complain about economic difficulties while simultaneously displaying open hostility to foreigners. “Even though the term ‘foreigner’ has

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acquired a negative taste due to the political developments, one must remember a time when this same word meant substantial cash flow both for the state and its citizens and when Austrians open-mindedly welcomed and hosted their guests.”55 Ostensibly focused on tourism’s economic importance, the discussions frequently spilled over into more philosophical and sociological territory, as the exposé by another consultant exemplifies: “Tourism is a matter for the entire state, the entire people. Each misstep produces negative results not only for the one who caused it but for the entire nation, for Austria’s reputation at home and abroad; and therefore it has the potential to cause irreparable damage.”56 As this statement indicates, the discourse of tourism transformed into a crucial tool for disciplining the subjects of the Austrian nation and, in doing so, emerges as a central element of “governmentality” for postwar Austria. Michel Foucault’s term, coined to describe how the idea of governing changed from a Machiavellian system of direct coercion into internalized disciplinary systems accepted as “necessary by the governed subjects,” proves helpful in analyzing the role of tourism in postwar Austria in general and of the Wiederaufbaustelle in particular.57 Founded in 1946 as part of the Ministry for Trade and Reconstruction, the Wiederaufbaustelle became the designated clearinghouse for all tourism-related activities in Austria. More than simply an administrative control center, the Wiederaufbaustelle organized and controlled spaces and places, shaped mental attitudes toward the nation, and scrutinized the everyday bodily practices of those who governed and those who were being governed.58 In light of these functions it is not surprising that the creation of this office was initially met with considerable resistance from the Austrian provinces. Regional and local tourism officials interpreted the establishment of a central tourism office as power grab by the federal government at the cost of the provinces under whose domain Fremdenverkehr had resided before World War II. What constituted, in the words of historian Günter Bischof, a “classical case study of unresolved conflicts in Austrian federalism,”59 also illustrates how this central office tried to implement and control national standards and, in doing so, model a sense of Austrian-ness. Aside from organizing the above described Ausländer-Hotelaktionen, the tasks of the Wiederaufbaustelle included taking stock of the war-damaged tourism infrastructure; issue directives for hotel and restaurant owners who were trying to figure out how and what to rebuild; and address complaints ranging from corruption among government officials to the behavior of occupation soldiers. Hotel owners and innkeepers had to provide detailed information about the status of their properties and the progress of their renovations. Local tourism officials reported violations of food-safety regulations and lodging standards to the supervising organizations.60 In some instances the discourse of tourism offered opportunities for addressing the otherwise silenced Austrian collaboration with National Socialism. In 1946, Dr. Hans Becker, consultant for tourism affairs in the Ministry for Trade

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and Reconstruction and founding member of the Wiederaufbaustelle, used his personal network for an informal survey of conditions in Austria’s tourism industry. In one of the response letters preserved in the Austrian State Archive, a correspondent from Carinthia complains that former Nazis still work in key positions in politics and business and protect each other from prosecution: “There are quite a few hotel owners and innkeepers who, on account of their political record, would already have been taken over by a public administrator if they lived in Vienna.” By pointing out the different standards for dealing with former National Socialist collaborators, the writer uses the discourse of tourism to put into relief the limited power of Austria’s central government under Allied occupation.61 At first glance most of these correspondences and conversations are concerned with Austria’s economy and not with the nation’s identity. Yet, to quote Erica Carter, economic processes express themselves simultaneously in symbolic (textual) forms: “there is no separate economic ‘sphere’ or ‘level’ external to . . . cultural forms and relations.”62 Read in this context, Austrian worries about fremdenverkehrsschädigendes Verhalten (behavior detrimental to the tourism industry), unclean facilities, and unfair practices in the tourism industry function as helpful indicators for the status of the Austrian process of identity formation. Although the Wiederaufbaustelle in this form and under this name existed only until 1948, it contributed decisively to the emerging shape of Austrian-ness in spatial, cultural, and ideological terms.63

Educating for Tourism Another important socio-cultural arena where the impact of tourism discourse can be traced is Austria’s postwar educational system. For obvious reasons, the education sector was crucial for the country’s reorientation from a German-focused national identity to an autonomous Austrian identity. The Allied occupation forces had a significant stake in this transformation, insofar as they wanted to prevent the two countries from joining forces yet again. From the perspective of the Austrian government, the development of a distinct Austrian national identity was directly linked with the attempt to transfer all responsibilities for National Socialist crimes onto Germany. Yet, how would it be possible to forge a new Austrian national and cultural identity without renouncing most of the “older” discourses about Austria, many of which centered on Austria’s Germanic identity and on the discursive legacy that distinguished the German-speaking regions of the former Habsburg Empire from its Eastern provinces and populations? Historian Peter Thaler identified the centralized structure of Austria’s educational system as a central player in this rewriting of the national narrative. It allowed for a relatively quick rewriting of history textbooks and curricula, which in turn resulted in the surprisingly rapid acceptance of the concept of an Austrian

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nation.64 As Thaler highlights, it is no small feat that by the end of the 1980s, a clear majority of Austrians accepted the Austrian state as their nation as well, especially when considering that only decades earlier most Austrians had viewed themselves as being part of the German “imagined community.”65 Thaler’s analysis of how changes in higher education, in school curricula, and in textbook publishing precipitated the development of Austrian national identity is compelling but discusses this “Austrification” mostly as an intellectual project. It leaves out processes of national identification that rely on everyday actions, popular images, and performances by individuals and groups that “strengthen affective and cognitive links, consolidate a sense of shared action and doxa to constitute a habitus.”66 Austrian school curricula did not just teach young Austrians what to think about Austria, they also taught them how to behave as Austrians, and tourism provided the discursive realm for the performative enactment of these instructions. In a 1950 brochure with the bureaucratic title “Enlightening the Austrian Youth about Tourism Combined with an Essay Competition” (Fremdenverkehrsaufklärung der österreichischen Schuljugend verbunden mit einem Preisausschreiben), the Ministry of Education and the Ministry for Trade and Reconstruction joined the Österreichische Fremdenverkehrswerbung (successor of the Wiederaufbaustelle) in the urgent plea that Austrian educators teach “tourism” at all levels of instruction. The brochure is sixteen pages long, half featuring black and white photographs illustrating key arguments in the text. The brochure’s author, Karl Melchard, provides several pages of introduction emphasizing the economic importance of tourism for Austria. After citing statistics showing the steady increase in income from tourism before World War II, Melchard regretfully states that “the known events in the years after 1938” (die bekannten Ereignisse der Jahre nach 1938) prevented “the ultimate success, the sustained designation: Austria—a tourism country” (de[n] letzte[n] große[n] Erfolg, de[n] dauernde[n] Begriff: Österreich—ein Fremdenverkehrsland). He notes that “Austria in 1945 needs to start from scratch its efforts to become a definitive tourism destination” (Österreich 1945 wieder am Anfang seiner Bemühungen stand).67 The phrase “Austria—a tourism country” underlines how the discourse of tourism frames the reconstruction of Austrian national identity. Additional passages in the text describe support for tourism as “service for the Heimat” (Werk an der Heimat) and refer to Austrians as naturally qualified hosts: “After all, their reputation as amiable and courteous precedes every [Austrian] citizen like a herald. It is everyone’s obligation to amplify this advantage through adaptation and education.”68 As these introductory admonitions underline, Austrian-ness requires knowing one’s history and exhibiting a tourism-appropriate habitus. Thus, like The Book of Austria, this educational brochure demonstrates the performative process through which the discourse of tourism produces Austria as simultaneously new and old. By selectively citing and reiterating pre-1938 tourist

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images and narratives that once celebrated Austria’s Germanic identity within the Habsburg monarchy, the brochure contributes to the performative construction of an Austria that, so it seems, has always been content to offer the international traveler its mountains and lakes, its cuisine, and its aristocratic legacy in the form of “palaces and castles, old towns and art collections, witnesses of high culture and treasure troves for those who know and love art.”69 The same historical VIPs who only recently stood for the country’s relation to German culture were now called upon to exemplify Austria’s allegedly timeless historical and cultural autonomous existence: It’s no wonder, therefore, that this country and this people fascinated many a great person and had him make Austria his homeland forever: Prinz Eugen, Ludwig van Beethoven, Brahms, Liszt, Lehàr and many other creators of high culture who, welltraveled and with an eye for grace and beauty, found in Austria the altar of creation, which inspired them to their most beautiful and best works.70

Only fifteen years earlier, high-culture icons such as Beethoven, Brahms, and Liszt served as guarantors of Austria’s German identity, as evidenced by the following passage in a grade school book from the Austrian Ständestaat period: “We Austrians are Germans. We belong to the German people. Whoever is a good Austrian is at the same time a good German.”71 In 1945, Austria emerges, Sleeping Beauty-like, as a place without agency waiting to be discovered by those with distinguished taste, proper education, and a discerning tourist gaze. A noticeable cause-and-effect reversal between the historical personae and the presumed Austrian genius loci evidences the performativity of this particular identity construction. Where the brochure suggests that Austria’s “grace and beauty” not only convinced the likes of Beethoven to settle here, but also enabled them to produce their “most beautiful and best works,” it is actually the brochure’s author deploying the cultural and political aura of these historical VIPs to support his claim of Austria’s unique cultural identity. To paraphrase The Book of Austria, if these “tourists”-turned-locals have found Austria on the globe, so can the contemporaries after 1945. Such protestations of greatness notwithstanding, a tangible trace of insecurity permeates the brochure’s reinvention of Austria. After renarrating Austrian history through a tourism matrix, the author compels teachers to take stock of the Heimat in a very hands-on fashion. A one-page questionnaire attached to the brochure asks teachers to provide brief reports about their towns and regions. Appealing to their status as local learned men and women, the brochure encourages teachers to report on tourist attractions and sites in their neighborhood so that, as the author puts it, new tourist attractions can be promoted and older ones can be saved from being forgotten. The text summons teachers to be brief but comprehensive in their reporting to compile a “gapless and orderly collection” (lückenlos[e] and übersichtlich[e] Sammeltätigkeit) of all attractions. Sites should

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be listed and categorized as follows: “natural attractions; artistic attractions; historical events; special tourist infrastructure; economic infrastructure and events; miscellaneous attractions.”72 Information should be coded for greater efficiency, such that a town with two doctors, one veterinarian, four hotels, two garages, and one car repair shop would appear as follows: “2 A, 1 T, 4 Ho, 2 Gg, 1 Rep.”73 Mimicking the opening chapter of The Book of Austria, this questionnaire contributes to the performative reconstruction of Austria as a nation via the virtual mapping of the country. The very Austria that supposedly attracts its visitors so much that they become locals, as Beethoven, Brahms, and others were said to have done, is retroactively performed by collecting and charting pieces of evidence that in themselves have become meaningful only because they have been looked at through the prism of tourism in the first place. This performative construction of Austria must not be confused with the staging of Austria for the outside world. By mixing tourist attractions with everyday “sites” such as veterinarian clinics, gas stations, and other mundane elements, this map recreates Austria for Austrians. It illustrates to what degree tourist discourses facilitated the development of an Austrian “normality” after 1945 in the term’s multiple levels of meaning: the construction of a normative Austrian-ness on the one hand; the opportunities for citizens to imagine a return to normal— ordinary—ways of living on the other. I discuss examples for both in more detail below.

Disciplining, Shaping, and Cleansing Austrian Bodies and Spaces through Tourism The questionnaire for teachers highlights the thin line that separates survey and surveillance and underscores the impossibility of interpreting tourism’s role in postwar Austria solely in economic terms. The curricula brochure and the double role of the Wiederaufbaustelle as both economic jump-starter and administrative authority illustrate Michel Foucault’s observation that the creation of a state-level economy “also means exercising towards its inhabitants . . . a form of surveillance and control.”74 In the brochure, this disciplining of Austrian-ness manifests itself most clearly in the enforcing of gender norms and in the (metaphorical and actual) cleansing of bodies and spaces along the lines of traditional, patriarchal ideas of society observed in The Book of Austria. Among the pictures that accompany the brochure, a contrasting pair of images shows first a house in dire need of repair and then the same house after it has been renovated and decorated according to the standards promoted by the discourse of tourism. The façade looks painted, flowers frame the windows, and a smiling young woman sitting on a bench completes the arrangement. Quite innocuous on the surface, the woman’s posture with her legs modestly crossed and with her straightened back nonethe-

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less symbolizes tourism’s role in the construction and dissemination of patriarchal gender codes during the reconstruction of Austria as a nation. In the context of other images and narratives about women in tourism, this picture becomes a significant indicator of how the idea of female mobility sparked male anxieties in postwar Austria. A flyer issued by the tourism office of Styria in 1953 exemplifies how the discovery of women as potential tourists was combined with often clumsy attempts to rein in female mobility. Drawing on fairy-tale vocabulary, the leaflet tells the story of the fictitious character Margit setting out on her own to explore Styria, a region allegedly unknown and somewhat mysterious to her. Margit soon realizes that she lacks basic geographical and cultural knowledge as well as the requisite travel experience for a successful completion of her journey. Luckily, an elderly man in native Trachtenanzug and a white beard—a cartoonish reincarnation of Emperor Franz Josef—offers himself as her travel companion. This “Opa,” as Margit calls him, serves as the female traveler’s helpful chaperone who prevents her from getting lost and fills the presumed gaps of her knowledge about the country with historical details and humorous anecdotes. “Opa” knows what is best for her in all areas of life and allows her to enjoy the trip without worrying about logistical details such as train schedules and hotel locations. In the end, “Opa” drops his disguise and transforms himself back into Egon, a young, handsome Styrian man with whom Margit, quite unsurprisingly, has already fallen in love.75 In the mid-1950s the tourism industry discovered younger women as potential customers, yet the Styrian tourism brochure’s patronizing language and contorted narrative illustrate how disconcerting the idea of an independently traveling woman still was. Although Margit is encouraged to get to know her country better, her autonomy is constantly undermined by the text’s description of Margit as “little” (klein), “little girl” (kleines Mädchen), or “dear child” (liebes Kind), and her mobility is tightly controlled by the male companion.76 Both the woman in the curricular brochure and the female traveler in Styria’s travel leaflet exemplify the ideologically framed “habitual performances” that contribute to the weaving of the nation’s fabric by constituting “practical, embodied codes which guide what to do in particular settings. Where these are communally shared, they help to achieve a working consensus about what are appropriate and inappropriate enactions.”77 The discourse of tourism becomes the shared arena for modeling a process through which these young women’s bodies become remolded and repackaged to fit the patriarchal idea of Austrian-ness. Efforts to discipline bodies via the discourse of tourism were not contained to the realm of gender but included concepts of hygiene and beauty. The curricular brochure’s mention of cleanliness occurs in the context of the focus on “good behavior” (der gute Ton), a behavioral code that traditionally included “polite greeting” (der liebe Gruß ), “courteous communication” (die freundliche Auskunft), “good deeds” (die gute Tat), and “proper care for one’s body and clothing” (die

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Figure 1.1. Cover image of Styrian tourism brochure, “Schöne Ferien” (Beautiful Holiday), 1953. Atelier Koszler Landesfremdenverkehrsamt Steiermark. Reprinted with permission from the Austrian State Archive.

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Pflege des eigenen Körpers und der Kleidung).78 Initially, the brochure states that this focus on cleanliness is simply dictated by the standards of tourism: “A clean body, a nice hair style, and proper clothing are important educational accomplishments from the perspective of tourism.”79 Soon however, the author connects the theme of cleanliness with the idea of Heimat, with morality, and thus with a discourse reminiscent of the most recent past, the very era the “new” Austria was striving to disown. In the context of the brochure’s moralistic tone, the request that children impress foreigners with their “bodily purity” (Reinheit des Körpers), and the declaring of cleanliness as “best deed for the Heimat, that encompasses high moral, social, and civic values” (beste Tat für die Heimat, in der gleichzeitig hohe sittliche, soziale und staatsbürgerliche Werte heranreifen), the author’s use of cleanliness comes very close to connecting notions of purity with politics and, in doing so, evokes Austria’s collaboration in National Socialist eugenics.80 The performative element of this emphasis on cleansing is visible not only in the problematic linking of notions of hygiene and purity with ideas of belonging. It is also apparent in the fact that the brochure cites, perhaps unwittingly, the visual aesthetics of National Socialist tourism. Similar to the before-and-after photo of the beautified house, the brochure uses a series of photos to visualize the dos and don’ts with regard to cleanliness. In doing so it invokes a standard representational practice of the Kraft durch Freude (strength through joy) association (KdF), the major National Socialist tourism organization. According to Shelley Baranowski, among the most successful projects of the KdF were its campaigns to “clean up” work and private spaces in order to recreate those “typical” German factories and villages that modernization had supposedly destroyed: “Detailed guidelines for the ‘Beautiful Village’ project specified ‘cleanliness and order’ even in work buildings, and consistency in architectural style, landscape and furnishings so as to reify villages as ‘typically’ German.”81 The “passion for cleanliness” promoted by the KdF formed the aesthetic complement to the “arrests, emergency decrees, and concentration camps that destroyed the Socialist and Communist movements.”82 In the disciplining of workers’ bodies, Baranowski writes, the enforcement of cleanliness amounted to acts of racial “decontamination.”83 To be sure, a clear distinction must be made between cleanliness, “racial hygiene,” and mass murder under National Socialism on the one hand, and the emphasis on Sauberkeit in the context of tourism in postwar Austria on the other. And yet, the latter leads toward the slippery slope where cleaning the body easily turns into cleansing the “body” of the nation. During a small polio epidemic in 1948 in Upper Austria, the Wiederaufbaustelle immediately urged the Ministry for Social Administration “to direct its subordinate health departments to refrain, whenever possible, from publishing statistical information about epidemics and other contagious diseases during the height of the tourism season in July and August.”84 In Vienna, journalists who planned on writing about Austria’s health system had to have their interviews cleared by the deputy mayor.85

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The racist implications of these concerns about unhealthy bodies came to the fore when illness intersected with foreignness, especially in the form of displaced persons (DPs), of whom about 520,000 were still living in Austria in 1947.86 In April of that same year, the daily newspaper Oberösterreichische Nachrichten reported that the population of Spital am Pyhrn protested against the plan to move 150 DPs suffering from tuberculosis to barracks near the town. Fear of contagion was only one reason, as the newspaper wrote. More important was “that this wonderful vacation destination in a most healthy location, which has, after a long hiatus, readied itself to host tourists again, must now fear that the old friends of Spital am Pyhrn will stay away if this plan is implemented.”87 On the surface, the rejection of a particular group of foreigners with a contagious disease can be read as a legitimate quarantine measure for protecting public health. However, the judicious use of the terms Gäste (guests) and alte Freunde (old friends) allows for a reading of the article in a somewhat different context. During the interwar period, Spital am Pyhrn was an important destination for Austrian and German hikers and the writer worries that these “old friends” from the traditional mountaineering community might not appreciate the company of DPs, among whom were many Eastern European Jewish concentration camp survivors whose presence in the mountains collided with the then still unreflected anti-Semitic bias of the German-Austrian Alpine Association.88 In post-1945 Austria, the discourse of tourism offered rhetorical wiggle room for the rejection of ethnic and racial “others” without running afoul of publicly endorsed anti-National Socialist policies and Allied oversight. Already in 1946, an editorial in the Socialist Arbeiter Zeitung criticized conditions at an unnamed spa in the province of Salzburg, where the US military had repurposed some of the upscale hotels into housing for DPs, who had ended up in Austria’s Western sectors after fleeing the various European battlegrounds: There too we see an embarrassing picture of poor people with nothing to do but loiter all day. Many are engaged in black marketeering . . . and muggings have been reported recently. There are enough unsympathetic Austrian characters there, local Nazis as well as Vienna’s Nazis, smugglers, and ne’er-do-wells. But the development of a healthy phobia against these domestic parasites is hampered by the sentiment of rejection against the many and much more visible strangers. . . . We want to be liberated of all displaced persons, no: We want to be liberated of all loitering foreigners! . . . Let’s get rid of all this!89

This editorial illustrates how even an apparently peripheral connection to the discourse of tourism can play a crucial role in the performance of an Austrian identity. The writer first criticizes the presence of three “foreign” groups, namely the DPs, regional Nazis, and Nazis from Vienna. The latter two, however, quickly recede as separate entities. Presumably, the two different groups of Austrian Nazis merge with the writer’s “we,” the imagined community of Austrians, whose at-

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tempts at denazification are purportedly being prevented by the presence of these other foreigners, the DPs. Peeling away the Austrian “we” from a foreign “them” is based on an awareness of appropriate bodily behavior in a tourist resort. The DPs are so highly visible because they “loiter” in the alpine towns, whereas the Austrian Nazis, so the implication goes, at least know how to behave properly in a tourist location. In other words, the discursive context of tourism is necessary to fully understand the concerns of the writer, and the discourse of tourism also becomes the arbiter of a normative Austrian-ness. As this example shows, tourism facilitated the legitimization of a post-1945 Austrian politics of memory in which “almost everyone was explicitly mentioned as a victim, except those who bore the brunt of Nazi persecution” and, at the same time, allows for the nuanced analysis of these processes.90 The discourse of tourism also enabled the reaffirmation of a white, Christian Austrian-ness against racial and ethnic “others” serving in the ranks of the Western allies. In July of 1952, the Salzburger Nachrichten reported that two African-American GIs had beaten up Swedish tourists in Salzburg. The article describes in great detail how the two “negroes” beat the male tourist and then fled when his two female companions screamed for help. The newspaper uses the incident as casus belli in its vociferous and racist campaign against black troops in the city of Salzburg: “What we have feared would happen, and what we foretold to the American headquarters would happen, namely the destruction of Salzburg’s prestige among tourists due to undisciplined occupation troops, especially black GIs, has now actually happened: the beating up of foreign tourists has started.”91 The article wraps Austrians’ prejudices against black occupation troops into concerns about foreigners’ safety, but the underlying violent racism becomes apparent in the subsequent jab at the US liberators and their teaching of democratic values: “We do not even want to describe in detail what would happen to such colored rioters in the American South.”92 The foreign guests under attack are Swedish and therefore conform to the ideal of whiteness that also informs constructions of Austrian nationality and ethnicity. Proper behavior at a tourist location is once again invoked as the ultimate criterion for belonging when the writer demands that the US command, if it is unable to conduct its business without Negertruppen, should at least keep black soldiers out of “old Europe” (im alten Europa): “Our foreigners do not come to Salzburg in good faith only to find themselves in New Africa.”93 Similar to the editorial of the Arbeiter Zeitung, whose author initially takes pains to dissociate from “the Nazis” but then eventually prefers them over the much more “visible” DPs, the article in the Salzburger Nachrichten moves from a distinction between Austrians and foreigners to a constellation that groups Austrians with “their” foreigners—white Swedish tourists—in one group and unwanted foreigners— African-American GIs—in the other. The tourism discourse provides an allegedly logical and, in the context of the 1950s, politically acceptable framework for in-

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tegrating Austria into an ethnically and racially defined international community without apparently compromising too much the country’s official disavowal of National Socialist racism.

Tourism Discourses as a Window into Austrian “Normality” Perhaps the best common denominator for summarizing the performative processes of reconstructing Austrian national identity in the discourse of tourism is to describe them as the production of “normality.” As Confino has shown for Germany, the “rhetoric of tourism” was important in remembering and defining a normality based on supposedly positive, apolitical memories of the Nazi past, from the Autobahn to KdF vacations for workers. By contrast, the normality constructed in Austria transfers the “good” memories of the Nazi period back to the pre-1938 memory landscape, thereby framing negative memories from between 1938 and 1945 as related to German deeds and positive memories as indications of Austrian endurance. What we can thus observe is a process of selective memory qua tourism. The Austrian national body is literally being “re-membered,” with the parts of a once dominant affiliation with the German national body now being stitched together via processes whereby older tourist narratives and images become evidence for an always already existing autonomous Austrian space and identity separate from (Nazi) Germany. This Austrian normality was not only produced by enforcing governmentissued directives but also by citizens who explored what it means to be Austrian via the discourse of tourism. An example of this process can be found in the 1950 essay competition attached to the already discussed curricular brochure about Fremdenverkehrsaufklärung. Copies of the typescripts of the prize-winning essays were stored in the Austrian State Archives, and while these texts obviously aimed to impress a jury looking for the most supportive and quotable essay on tourism, the students’ submissions nonetheless reveal how the discourse of tourism shaped the attitudes and desires of young Austrians. Depending on their grade level, students were asked to submit an essay about one of the following three topics: “I helped a guest” (Ich habe einem Gast geholfen), for students from grades one through four; “What I can and will do so that guests have a pleasant stay in my Heimat” (Was ich tun kann und will, um den Gästen den Aufenthalt in meiner Heimat schön zu gestalten), for grades five through eight; “My contribution to the promotion of tourism in Austria (Mein Beitrag zur Fremdenverkehrsförderung in Österreich), for students from the upper grades of the Gymnasien.94 Unsurprisingly, most students reported stories about how their actions positively impacted a visitor’s experience in Austria. Students from the first category, grades one through four, focused on stories in which they helped guests who were either disoriented, involved in an accident, or otherwise

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incapacitated. Common themes in the essays of this age group are politeness and helpfulness as specific Austrian traits. A typical story is the account by Walter L. from Klagenfurt, Carinthia, who describes how he once helped an elderly woman with limited German-language skills to exit the train from Italy. The author cites how his mother commended him for helping this foreigner, who “will surely remember the polite Carinthian children and will return next year.”95 The emphasis on these points reflects to some extent how students made strategic use of the talking points included in the brochure and likely stressed by teachers. But such caveats notwithstanding, this reiteration of Austrian politeness must be read in contrast to the stereotyping of Germans as forward and direct, qualities that often were read as arrogant. Thus, by underscoring politeness and friendliness as quasi-natural elements of Austrian-ness, these essays affirm the notion of a separate Austrian identity, one that might have been somewhat lost during the preceding years but that is distinct enough to once again function as different from German-ness. Not all students found the proclaimed Austrian humbleness inspiring. For instance, young H. Heininger proudly declares that his hometown Salzburg counts among the “most beautiful on earth” (schönste auf der Welt). He enjoys showing guests particular parts of the city and admits that he likes to boast about his Vaterstadt. Most importantly, he does not just wait around until he is asked by foreigners but actively counsels them. In turn he expects to be recognized as knowledgeable insider: The tourists often stand outside the hotel . . . and discuss what to do in the afternoon. Last year, as I was standing nearby once again, I boldly walked up, greeted them, and asked: “Have you already visited Hellbrunn? That’s the famous summer palace of [archbishop] Markus Sittikus with its waterworks!” A fine lady laughed in a surprised manner, took me by the arm and led me into the midst of their circle, telling her fellow tourists: “Look, our little Salzburger knows his town.”96

Being recognized and commended for knowing one’s region and country is an important element of the performative construction of Austria in these essays. In this particular scene, the student’s performance is based both on listing iconic Salzburg places so that they become a part of his identity and on being recognized as and named a Salzburger. The female tourist’s act of identifying the student as belonging to Salzburg amounts to a validation of his performative construction of Austrian-ness. Knowledge of region and country also features prominently in the essays of the second group, which responded to the prompt “What I can and will do so that guests have a pleasant stay in my Heimat” and were written by students from grades five through eight (ages ten through fourteen). Traude P. from Carinthia clearly cites and reiterates staple phrases from prewar tourist brochures when she describes Austria’s “high mountains with their eternal ice, the many lakes,

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the narrow valleys, the tumbling waterfalls, the wide meadows, the glorious castles, [which] all sing the song of beauty and divine creation.”97 But this second group of prize-winning essays also reflects the (self-) disciplining elements of the tourism discourse referenced above. D. Fischer, a young woman from a Tyrolean school, uses her essay to discuss the dos and don’ts in interactions with tourists. In addition to politeness, she emphasizes cleanliness as a requisite quality, echoing the tourism brochure’s admonishments almost verbatim: “It is not a pretty view if children appear with dirty hands, dark edges under their finger nails, with hair hanging into their faces, and with torn and unwashed clothes.”98 The same student underscores that children must never openly demand monetary compensation or gifts for their services. If this particular student’s moralistic fervor would not already reveal that the opposite was quite common, other students’ essays provide ample evidence that covert and overt solicitation of tips was standard practice. Essays in this age group once again illustrate tourism’s role in reconstructing Austrian national space, sometimes quite literally so. J. Wöhrer, a student from Lower Austria, describes how he and a friend plan to put up a bench, plant flowers around it, and mark hiking paths for tourists.99 These seemingly trivial activities reflect an awareness that the Austrian landscape, and by extension Austria, is not simply there—it becomes intelligible as attractive only when the respective markers and itineraries guide the visitors. The third and last group of winning essays were composed by students from grades five through eight at the Gymnasium level (ages fifteen through eighteen) in response to the prompt “My contribution to the promotion of tourism in Austria.” Most of these essays are written in a persuasive style, often with pathosladen, dramatic phrases that repeat the tourism brochure’s overview of tourism’s importance for Austria and predict dire consequences if Austrians do not improve in this area: As a country, Austria is not as lucky as other countries that can rely on their own industrial and agricultural production to supply their population, we have to import many goods. . . . But Austria can tip the scale with its beautiful mountains, which are beyond comparison, with its spas and lakes, which attract hundreds of thousands of foreigners annually and with them foreign currencies.100

At least some of these student authors had received early schooling under the National Socialist period, a fact that might account for the sometimes disturbing conflation of preparedness for tourism with the fight for “inner purity” (innere Reinheit).101 Wolfgang D. from Carinthia, for instance, demands to revive the “old spirit of the hiking movement” (alte Wandergeist) in order to rejuvenate “limp, bloodless souls” (schlaffen, blutlosen Gemüter) and pull the young people from behind the ovens and the movie theaters out into nature: “A healthy generation of people will blossom in a country whose youth explore it through hiking.”102

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Franz M., also from Carinthia, imagines his work for tourism as a civic duty that requires him to report not only missing signage or unsafe road conditions, but also to “fight with all my youthful energy against the dirt and filth, which unfortunately still pours its pernicious floods over our country, undermining Austria’s international reputation and its tourism. With solemn dedication I will join the fight for purity and cleanliness, especially in literature and film.”103 As these examples demonstrate, the prize-winning essays allow an insightful look at the performative construction of Austrian-ness on behalf of young people who reiterate, reuse, and recombine elements of prewar Austrian identity within the tourism discourse after 1945. Even though they try to construct Austria as supposedly extra-discursive entity that has existed outside human time and space, the essays reveal how these students re-inscribe their subject identity as Austrians qua tourism and, in the process, also “author” a new Austria. Unsurprisingly, the archived essays overwhelmingly affirm the role of tourism for Austria laid out in great detail in the competition brochure. What is interesting, though, is that even such a skewed sample of essays reveals how tourism facilitated another kind of travel, namely imagining oneself in different places and in different life situations, not all of them in line with the officially desired version of Austria and the role of youth in it. Several students used these essays to voice their frustration about desolate living conditions and expressed a desire to experience life beyond the limited mobility and the constraints on self-development that seemed to dominate their lives in postwar Austria. One student, for instance, imagined the future possibility of working as permanent assistant for a wealthy family whom he would accompany on their trips; another student imagined himself as the skipper of a wealthy tourist’s yacht.104 After spending most of the chapter discussing tourist discourses related to the reconstruction of Austrian national identity for the imagined foreign tourist’s gaze, these essays underscore another potential offered by tourism, namely imagining oneself not only to be elsewhere but to be someone else entirely, even if only for a fleeting moment. *** As this chapter has demonstrated, the discourse of tourism played a crucial role in putting Austria back onto the map of the international community. But tourism provided more than just a familiar system of geographical coordinates. With more conventional arenas of national self-definition and self-imagination severely contaminated by Austria’s collaboration with Nazi Germany, the discourse of tourism became a central space for the performative reconstruction of an Austrian national imaginary. On the one hand, tourism’s reputation as supposedly non-political leisure practice allowed for the renegotiation of touchy political topics without immediately causing diplomatic complications. On the other hand, tourism’s longstanding role as a transmission belt for Austria’s cultural sphere—a role going back into the nineteenth century, as I will show in later chapters—and

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as an important economic sector added considerable political clout to decisions taken in the realm of tourism. In the context of Allied occupation, the discourse of tourism served as displaced terrain for issues of “governmentality” and for debating the ramifications of an Austrian national identity in relation to German language and culture. Moreover, and somewhat contradictory, the discourse of tourism became the realm for expressing lingering xenophobic and anti-Semitic attitudes. While Austrian officials were engaged in concerted efforts to present evidence for Austria’s victimization by National Socialism and, therefore, tried to stifle chauvinistic attitudes, the discourse of tourism, closely linked to the Allied nations’ attempts to rebuild Austria’s economy, legitimized anti-Semitic outbursts disguised as concern about the country’s denazification efforts. But tourism was not just the discursive channel for disseminating among the people an Austrian narrative devised by its elites. As the final section of this first chapter has shown, the tourism discourse invited practices of daydreaming and mind traveling that repeatedly transcended the parameters of the national imaginary provided by official government agents and agencies. The various student essays discussed above demonstrate how the discourse of tourism facilitated the imaginary crossing of national, cultural, and class boundaries, sometimes in alignment but often also in opposition to normative visions of Austrian-ness. Practices of imaginary and mediated tourism will be the focus of the next chapter. The popular (and notorious) Heimatfilm genre of the 1950s and 1960s has often been cited as hastening the transformation of Austria into a vacation theme park for German tourists.105 My analysis will show that they can also be read as visual tourism maps that facilitated Austrians’ “journey” toward the performative reconstruction of a national identity after the catastrophe of World War II.

Notes 1. From April to December 1945, Karl Renner served as chancellor of the Second Austrian Republic. From December 1945 to December 1950 Renner served as president of Austria. 2. “Wir lieben unsere Heimat, aber wir brauchen die Fremde! Wir brauchen den Fremdenverkehr und laden alle Welt zu uns zu Gaste. Wien und Salzburg werden als Stätten der Kunst, unsere Alpen als touristische Ziele ersten Ranges die Fremden mit Freude begrüßen.” Wiener Zeitung, 23 September 1945, n. p.; quoted in Alois Brusatti, 100 Jahre österreichischer Fremdenverkehr: Historische Entwicklung 1884–1984 (Vienna: Republik Österreich, Bundesministerium für Handel, Gewerbe u. Industrie, 1984), 143. All translations into English are mine unless otherwise noted. An earlier version of this chapter was published as Gundolf Graml, “‘We Love Our Heimat but We Need Foreigners!’: Tourism and the Reconstruction of Austria 1945–55,” Journal of Austrian Studies 46, no. 3 (2013): 51–76.

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3. Alon Confino, Germany as a Culture of Remembrance: Promises and Limits of Writing History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press Books, 2006), 220. 4. Brusatti, 100 Jahre österreichischer Fremdenverkehr, 100. 5. Ibid., 86. 6. Pieter M. Judson, “‘Every German Visitor Has a Völkisch Obligation He Must Fulfill’: Nationalist Tourism in the Austrian Empire, 1880–1918,” in Histories of Leisure, ed. Rudy Koshar (New York: Berg, 2002), 147–68; Pieter M. Judson, “The Bohemian Oberammergau: Nationalist Tourism in the Austrian Empire,” in Constructing Nationalities in East Central Europe (New York: Berghahn Books, 2009), 89–106. 7. Brusatti, 100 Jahre österreichischer Fremdenverkehr, 107–9. 8. Ibid., 117. 9. Ibid. 10. Ibid., 123–24. 11. Ibid., 127. 12. Ibid., 119. 13. John Dos Passos, “Vienna: Broken City,” Life Magazine, 4 March 1946, 96. 14. Karl Vocelka, Trümmerjahre in Wien 1945–1949 (Vienna: Jugend und Volk, 1985), 11. 15. Manfried Rauchensteiner, Der Krieg in Österreich 1945, 3., unveränderte Aufl. (Vienna: Österreichischer Bundesverlag, 1985), 454. For details on the various plans by the Western Allies to break up Austria, see Rolf Steininger, Austria, Germany and the Cold War: From the Anschluss to the State Treaty, 1938–1955 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2008). For more on the problem of communication between the Western and Eastern zones, see Günter Bischof, Austria in the First Cold War, 1945–55: The Leverage of the Weak (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999). 16. Roman Sandgruber, Ökonomie und Politik: Österreichische Wirtschaftsgeschichte vom Mittelalter bis zur Gegenwart (Vienna: Ueberreuter, 1995), 454. 17. Cynthia Weber, “Performative States,” Millennium 27, no. 1 (1998): 91. 18. Brusatti, 100 Jahre österreichischer Fremdenverkehr. 19. Günter Bischof, “‘Conquering the Foreigner’: The Marshall Plan and the Revival of Postwar Austrian Tourism,” in The Marshall Plan in Austria, ed. Günter Bischof, Anton Pelinka, and Dieter Stiefel (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2000), 366. 20. David Crouch, “Introduction: Encounters in Leisure/Tourism,” in Leisure/Tourism Geographies: Practices and Geographical Knowledge, ed. David Crouch (New York: Routledge, 1999), 4. 21. The Book of Austria to this day can be found in libraries all over the world. The bibliographic database WorldCat lists 550 libraries in North America alone that still house accessible print copies of the 1948 English edition. 22. Ernst Marboe, The Book of Austria (Vienna: Österreichische Staatsdruckerei, 1948), x. The list of contributors includes the renowned Austrian historian Friedrich Heer and the ethnologist and later representative to the Austrian parliament, Hanns Koren. Among the translators who worked on the English version referenced here is British journalist and former intelligence officer Gordon (Brook-) Shepherd. For more about the political and cultural spirit in which the book appeared, see Wolfgang Müller-Funk, “So viel Österreich—Mutmaßungen über die Erfindung eines Landes,” Wespennest, 2011. 23. Marboe, Book of Austria, 3. 24. Edward S. Casey, The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 8.

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25. Marboe, Book of Austria, 4. 26. Casey, The Fate of Place, 8–9. 27. Walpurga Antl-Weiser, Die Frau von W.: Die Venus von Willendorf, ihre Zeit und die Geschichte(n) um ihre Auffindung (Vienna: Verlag des Naturhistorischen Museums, 2008); Walpurga Antl-Weiser, “The Time of the Willendorf Figurines and New Results of Palaeolithic Research in Lower Austria,” Anthropologie XLVII, no. 1–2 (2009): 131–41. 28. “This production of sex as the prediscursive ought to be understood as the effect of the apparatus of cultural construction designated by gender.” Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 2011), 10. 29. Marboe, Book of Austria, 5. 30. Doreen B. Massey, Space, Place, and Gender (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 6. 31. Siegfried Mattl, “Geschlecht und Volkscharakter: Austria Engendered,” Österreichische Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaften 7, no. 4 (1996): 499–515. I will take up the gendered representation of Austria in more detail in my discussion of tourism in selected Austrian films. 32. Caccia to Eden, Nov. 16, 1951, Foreign Office 371/93597, Public Record Office; cited in Bischof, Austria, 10. 33. Dean MacCannell, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 3. 34. 1. April 2000, directed by Wolfgang Liebeneiner (Vienna: Wien Film, 1952). 35. For a comprehensive analysis of the film in the context of Austrian film history, see Ernst Kieninger et al., eds., 1. April 2000, Edition Film und Text 2 (Vienna: Filmarchiv Austria, 2000). 36. Oliver Rathkolb highlights the symbolism created by the leading artists working on the film: script writers Rudolf Brunngraber (SPÖ) and Ernst Marboe (ÖVP) represented Austrian grand-coalition politics, while the former Nazi propaganda filmmaker Wolfgang Liebeneiner’s role as director indicates the continuities in the Austro-German relations despite all protestations to the opposite. And while the film goes to great lengths to depict the alleged discriminatory practices of the Weltschutzkommission, i.e. the Allied occupation forces, it never thematizes why the country was occupied in the first place. As Rathkolb puts it, “it was not causes that counted but effects.” Oliver Rathkolb, The Paradoxical Republic: Austria 1945–2005, English language edition (New York: Berghahn Books, 2014), 244. 37. AdR, 104.890/46, Box Fremdenverkehr Varia 1946/48, letter from Sept. 19, 1946. For details about the eventually unsuccessful application for a credit in the amount of 10 million dollars and for the role of the Marshall Plan funding in postwar tourism, see also Bischof, “Conquering,” 364–65. 38. Protocol of a meeting in the BM für Handel und Wiederaufbau on Sept. 4, 1946. AdR, Sign. 130, Gesch.Zn. 192.741/23/46 in Gr.Z. 192741. 39. “Neue Wege des Fremdenverkehrs,” Die Presse, 5 April 1948. 40. Letter from Dr. Anton Krogner, Interim Director of the Stelle für den Wiederaufbau to Dr. Kolb, Minister for Trade and Reconstruction. AdR 85.614/48, Box 711d. 41. In a letter from 18 June 1946, the Landesverband für den Fremdenverkehr in Vorarlberg writes that the province’s Landesernährungsamt (provincial nutrition agency) will not issue food vouchers for foreigners, “because it cannot justify such a favorable treatment

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42.

43.

44.

45. 46.

47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54.

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56.

57.

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of foreigners” (weil eine derartige Bevorzugung der Fremden von der übrigen Bevölkerung wohl nicht verantwortet werden könnte). AdR, Sign. 130, Gr.Z. 106303/1946, Gesch.Zn. 190485. “Unserer Ansicht nach, würde der Eindruck den die englischen Reisenden von unserer Hotelerie gewinnen würden ein derart schlechter sein, sodass vom fremdenverkehrsmässigen Standpunkt aus ein viel grösserer Schaden entstehen würde, weil die Reisenden dann wahrscheinlich nicht mehr in unser Land kommen würden.” In AdR, 106.303/1946, Box Fremdenverkehr Varia. “Es ist besser nichts zu unternehmen, als durch eine verfrühte Werbung und die Schwierigkeiten der Unterkunft und der Versorgung uns den guten Ruf für später zu verscherzen.” In AdR, 106.303/1946, Box Fremdenverkehr Varia. Hermann Bausinger, “Regional and National Orientations in Nineteenth-Century Tourism,” in Regional and National Identities in Europe in the XIXth and XXth Centuries, ed. Heinz-Gerhard Haupt, Michael G. Müller, and S.J. Woolf, 1 (Alphen aan den Rijn: Kluwer Law Intl., 1998), 41; James Buzard, The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature, and the Ways to “Culture”, 1800–1918, Reprinted 1993 edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). Bausinger, “Regional and National Orientations in Nineteenth-Century Tourism,” 39. Rudy Koshar, “‘What Ought to Be Seen’: Tourists’ Guidebooks and National Identities in Modern Germany and Europe,” Journal of Contemporary History 33, no. 3 (1998): 328–32. Temple Fielding, Fielding’s Travel Guide to Europe, New York: William Sloane Associates, Inc., 1948. Virginia Creed, All about Austria (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1950), v. Marboe, Book of Austria, x. Creed, All About Austria, 16. Ibid., 38. A Pocket Guide to Austria, Department of the Army 20–281 (Washington, DC: Office of Armed Forces Information and Education, Department of Defense, 1953), 9. Ibid., 1. “vielerorts das Verständnis in dieser Hinsicht noch fehlt und zum Teil auch von den unmittelbar beteiligten Kreisen die Situation völlig verkannt wird.” Draft of an article by Dr. Langer-Hansel for the Zeitschrift der Gesellschaft zur Pflege des Fremdenverkehrs, 15 March 1948. In AdR, Sign. 130/1-3, BM für Handel und Wiederaufbau, 88653/48. “Wenn auch durch die politischen Verhältnisse das Wort ‘Ausländer’ in Österreich einen üblen Beigeschmack bekommen hat, so sei doch auch an jene Zeit erinnert, in welcher das gleiche Wort klingende Münze für Staat und Bevölkerung dargestellt, und der Österreicher aufgeschlossen den Gast empfangen und beherbergt hat.” Draft of an article by Dr. Langer-Hansel for the Zeitschrift der Gesellschaft zur Pflege des Fremdenverkehrs, 15 March 1948. In AdR, Sign. 130/1-3, BM für Handel und Wiederaufbau, 88653/48. “Der Fremdenverkehr ist Angelegenheit des ganzen Staates, des gesammten [sic] Volkes. Jeder Missgriff schädigt nicht nur den Einzelnen der sie verschuldete, sondern den ganzen Staat, das Ansehen Österreichs im In- und Ausland und kann dadurch schwer wiedergutzumachenden Schaden anrichten.” “Exposé Szinovacz”. AdR, Sign. 130, 160.373/46, BM für Handel und Wiederaufbau, Box Fremdenverkehr Varia 1946/48. Michel Foucault, “Governmentality,” in Michel Foucault: Power, vol. 3: Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984 (New York: New Press, 2000), 204–6.

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58. Ibid., 205. 59. Bischof, “Conquering,” 359. 60. AdR, Sign. 130, BM für Handel und Wiederaufbau, Box Fremdenverkehr Varia, 106.303/ 1946. In a letter from 13 July 1946, the Landesverkehrsamt Tirol requests that the Wiederaufbaustelle recognize Tirol’s inability to receive tourists for the following reasons: a lack of supplies for its local citizens; the requisition of hotels by French occupation troops; and the severe destruction of the tourism infrastructure. Similar concerns are addressed by a letter from the Verkehrsverein St. Gilgen, in AdR, Sign. 130, BM für Handel und Wiederaufbau, Box 711c, 85.614. 61. “Auch unter den Hotelbesitzern und Gastwirten befinden sich heute noch eine grosse Anzahl solcher, die in Wien auf Grund ihres Vorlebens schon längst einen öffentlichen Verwalter auf ihrem Betrieb hätten.” Letter L. Farniok from Oct. 30, 1946, in AdR, BM für Handel und Wiederaufbau, Box Fremdenverkehr Varia, Sign. 130, 160.261/46. 62. Erica Carter, How German Is She?: Postwar West German Reconstruction and the Consuming Woman (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 13. 63. AdR, Sign. 130, BM für Handel und Wiederaufbau, Box Fremdenverkehr Varia 1946/48, 104.890-23/1946. 64. Peter Thaler, The Ambivalence of Identity: The Austrian Experience of Nation-Building in a Modern Society (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2001), 125. 65. Thaler references a 1988 survey in which 58 percent of those asked disagreed with the statement “Austrian national consciousness was produced somewhat artificially. In reality we are part of the German nation.” Albert Reiterer, ed., Nation und Nationalbewußtsein in Österreich (Vienna: VWGÖ, 1988), 61. It must be pointed out that such widespread acceptance did not prevent right-wing groups such as Austria’s Freedom Party (FPÖ) under Jörg Haider and its temporary successor organization, the Alliance for Collaboration Austria (Bündnis für Zusammenarbeit Österreich, BZÖ) to question the validity of Austrian national identity. Most notorious in this regard is Haider’s 1988 statement in which he described Austria as an ideologische Missgeburt (ideological freakish birth). Leila AlSerori, “Jörg Haider Doku Fang Den Haider: Ein Rückblick in Zitaten,” Kurier.At, 28 May 2015, https://kurier.at/politik/inland/joerg-haider-doku-fang-den-haider-ein-rueckblickin-zitaten/132.706.809. However, judging by ongoing polling results, these provocations did not undermine the general acceptance of an Austrian identity in any lasting way. Historian Oliver Rathkolb highlights that, if anything, the commitment to Austria as an independent national identity became stronger during the 1990s, despite the fact that accelerating globalization and Austria’s entry into the European Union weakened some of the traditional pillars of Austrian national identity. Rathkolb, Paradoxical Republic, 5–6. 66. Tim Edensor, National Identity, Popular Culture and Everyday Life (New York: Routledge, 2002), 90. 67. Karl Melchard, “Fremdenverkehrsaufklärung der österreichischen Schuljugend verbunden mit einem Preisausschreiben: Beilage zum Verordnungsblatt für den Dienstbereich des Bundesministeriums für Unterricht 5” (Bundesministerium für Unterricht, 1950), 3. 68. “Läuft doch jedem Bewohner [Österreichs] gleichsam als Herold die Vorstellung voraus, daß er liebenswürdig und zuvorkommend ist. Diesen Vorteil durch Anpassung und Erziehung auszubauen ist angesichts der vorerwähnten Umstände selbstverständliche Pflicht.” Ibid., 2. 69. “Schlösser und Burgen, alte Städtchen und Kunstsammlungen, Zeugen hoher Kultur und Fundgruben für den Kunstkenner und Kunstliebhaber.” Ibid., 2.

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70. “Es ist deshalb kein Wunder, daß dieses Land und dieses Volk manchen Großen in Bande schlug und ihn für immer hier seine Heimat finden ließ, wie: Prinz Eugen, Ludwig van Beethoven, Brahms, Liszt, Lehàr und viele andere, Träger hoher Kulturleistungen, die weit gereist und mit geweitetem Blick hier Anmut und Schönheit, hier gleichsam den Altar der Schöpfung fanden, der sie zu schönsten und besten Leistungen beflügelte.” Ibid., 3. 71. Mein Vaterland, mein Österreich, Vienna: ÖBV, 1935, 5; quoted in Peter Utgaard, Remembering and Forgetting Nazism: Education, National Identity, and the Victim Myth in Postwar Austria (New York: Berghahn Books, 2003), 21. 72. “Natursehenswürdigkeiten; Kunstsehenswürdigkeiten; Geschichtliche Ereignisse; Besondere Fremdenverkehrseinrichtungen; Wirtschaftliche Einrichtungen und Veranstaltungen; Sonstige Seltsamkeiten.” Melchard, “Fremdenverkehrsaufklärung,” 8. 73. Ibid. 74. Foucault, “Governmentality,” 207. 75. “Schöne Ferien-Steiermark” (Landesfremdenverkehrsamt Steiermark, 1953). 76. Ibid. 77. Edensor, National Identity, 90. 78. Melchard, “Fremdenverkehrsaufklärung,” 3–4. 79. “Ein reiner Körper, eine nette Frisur, eine ordentliche Kleidung sind demnach auch vom Gesichtspunkt des Fremdenverkehrs beachtenswerte Leistungen” Ibid., 4. 80. Ibid. 81. Shelley Baranowski, Strength through Joy: Consumerism and Mass Tourism in the Third Reich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 101. 82. Ibid., 91. 83. Ibid., 92. 84. “Einvernehmen herzustellen, damit die ihm unterstehenden Gesundheitsämter Zusammenstellungen über Epidemien und sonstige ansteckende Krankheiten nach Tunlichkeit nicht während der Hauptfremdenverkehrsmonate Juli, August erscheinen lassen.” Letter from Dr. Kohl, Stelle für den Wiederaufbau, to the BM für Handel und Wiederaufbau, May 21, 1948. In AdR, Sign. 130, BM für Handel und Wiederaufbau, Box 711c, 88.653/48. 85. Letter from Dr. Fischer, office of the deputy mayor, to Dr. Langer-Hansel, BM für Handel und Wiederaufbau, May 31, 1948. In AdR, Sign. 130, BM für Handel und Wiederaufbau, Box 711c, 88.653 V/48. 86. Tara Zahra, “‘Prisoners of the Postwar’: Expellees, Displaced Persons, and Jews in Austria after World War II,” Austrian History Yearbook 41 (April 2010): 191. 87. “daß sich diese herrliche Sommerfrische in gesündester Lage nach jahrelangem Stillstand nun wieder zur Beherbergung von Gästen gerüstet hat und bei Durchführung jener Absicht das Fernbleiben alter Freunde Spitals befürchten muß.” “Gefahr für eine Sommerfrische,” Oberösterreichische Nachrichten, 5 April 1947. 88. More than a decade before the Third Reich annexed Austria, the Alps had turned into a haven for Austrian National Socialists, who were banned from organizing in early 1933. Already in 1924, the section “Donauland” of the German-Austrian Alpenverein section, originally founded by the association’s Jewish members, was expelled from the umbrella organization. Lee Wallace Holt, “Mountains, Mountaineering and Modernity: A Cultural History of German and Austrian Mountaineering, 1900–1945” (PhD dissertation, University of Texas at Austin, 2008), 130–31. For more on the history of the relationship between Jewish culture and alpine mountaineering, see Albert Lichtblau, “Ambivalenzen der Faszination: Sommerfrische & Berge,” in Hast Du meine Alpen Gesehen?: Eine jüdische

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90.

91.

92. 93. 94.

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Beziehungsgeschichte, ed. Hanno Loewy and Gerhard Milchram (Vienna: Bucher Verlag, 2009), 116–31; Bernhard Tschofen, Berg, Kultur, Moderne: Volkskundliches aus den Alpen (Vienna: Sonderzahl, 1999); Tait Keller, Apostles of the Alps: Mountaineering and Nation Building in Germany and Austria, 1860–1939 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016), especially chapters 5 and 7. “Auch dort ein peinliches Bild armer Menschen, die den ganzen Tag nichts zu tun haben, als wartend herumzulungern. Viele von ihnen treiben Schleichhandel . . . und in letzter Zeit kommen auch Überfälle vor. Es sind genug unsympathische Österreicher dort, heimische und aus Wien “verlagerte” Nazi, Schieber und Fresser. Aber die heilsame Ablehnung dieser heimischen Parasiten wird völlig zurückgedrängt durch die Abneigung gegen die vielen und viel stärker sichtbaren Fremden. . . . [W]ir wollen von allen Verschleppten [sic] Personen, mehr noch: wir wollen von allen herumlungernden Ausländern befreit sein! . . . Fort mit all dem!” Arbeiter Zeitung 21 Aug 1946; quoted in Gert Kerschbaumer, “Die Wiederbelebung der Glanzzeiten in den Nachkriegsjahren,” in Weltbühne und Naturkulisse: Zwei Jahrhunderte Salzburg-Tourismus, ed. Hanns Haas, Robert Hoffmann, and Kurt Luger (Salzburg: Anton Pustet, 1994), 129. In the years after World War II, the province of Salzburg was home to the highest concentration of DPs and refugee camps on the territory of the former Third Reich, many of them Jewish Holocaust survivors or members of other ethnic groups persecuted by the Nazis. Ingrid Bauer, “‘Die Amis, die Ausländer und Wir’: Zur Erfahrung und Produktion von Eigenem und Fremdem im Jahrzehnt nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg,” in Walz Migration Besatzung: Historische Szenarien des Eigenen und des Fremden, ed. Ingrid Bauer, Josef Ehmer, and Sylvia Hahn (Klagenfurt: Drava Verlag, 2002), 200. The image of the loitering foreigner became code for Jewish Holocaust survivors and DPs, but also a marker of differentiation between the allegedly industrious and orderly German expellees hailing from regions close to the Austrian border and those Volksdeutsche or Alt-Österreicher, who were perceived as having lost their connection to German-ness and Austrian-ness. Zahra, “‘Prisoners of the Postwar,’” 199–200. Bischof, Austria, 58. A prominent spokesperson for the widely held view of Austria as a victim was provisional Chancellor and later President Karl Renner, a Socialist who had promoted annexation to Germany after 1918 and who, after 1945, worked diligently to make it next to impossible for Austrian Jewish survivors to return to Austria and either reclaim their stolen properties or at least receive compensation. For historian Oliver Rathkolb, Renner’s perspective was based on a combination of “still cherished prejudices about the control of the economy by Jews” and the fear that conservative political parties might again exploit Austria’s latent anti-Semitism to “stigmatize . . . the Social Democrats . . . as the ‘Jewish party.’” Rathkolb, Paradoxical Republic, 55. “Was wir seit Wochen befürchtet und dem amerikanischen Hauptquartier mit aller Deutlichkeit vorausgesagt haben, nämlich den Rufmord an Salzburgs Fremdenverkehrsprestige durch die Disziplinlosigkeit vor allem schwarzer Besatzungstruppen, ist nun tatsächlich eingetroffen: Die Verprügelung ausländischer Gäste hat begonnen.” “Schwarzer Saisongruß an Salzburg,” Salzburger Nachrichten, 2 July 1952. For a discussion of this newspaper article in the context of relationships between Austrian women and (black) GIs see Bauer, “Die Amis.” “Wir wollen hier gar nicht näher schildern, was man etwa in den amerikanischen Südstaaten mit derartigen farbigen Rowdies anstellen würde.” “Schwarzer Saisongruß.” “Unsere Fremden kommen nämlich nach Salzburg im guten Glauben, hier nicht NeuAfrika vorzufinden.” Ibid. Melchard, “Fremdenverkehrsaufklärung,” 7.

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95. “Das war recht, dass du der Fremden geholfen hast. Bestimmt wird sie sich gerne an die höflichen Kärntner Kinder erinnern und nächstes Jahr wieder kommen.” “Preisgekrönte Arbeiten Fremdenverkehr Preisausschreiben,” n.d., Box 105/15864/50 3d, AdR. 96. “Da stehen sie oft vor dem Hotelportal . . . und beraten, was sie mit dem Nachmittag anfangen sollen. Als ich im Vorjahr einmal ganz in der Nähe dabeistand, bin ich ganz frech hingegangen, habe gegrüsst und gesagt: ‘Waren Sie schon in Hellbrunn? Das ist das berühmte Lustschloss von Markus Sittikus mit seinen Wasserkünsten!’ Lachend und erstaunt hat mich dann eine feine Dame beim Arm genommen, in die Mitte geführt und hat zu den anderen gesagt: ‘Schaut einmal, unser kleiner Salzburger weiss Bescheid!’” Ibid. 97. “Die hohen Berge mit ihrem ewigen Firn, die vielen Seen, die engen Täler, die stürzenden Wasserfälle, die weiten Fluren, die herrlichen Burgen, sie alle singen das hohe Lied von Schönheit und göttlicher Schöpfungskraft.” Ibid. 98. “Es ist kein schöner Anblick, wenn überall Kinder auftauchen, mit ungewaschenen Händen, Trauerrändern an den Nägeln, in das Gesicht hängenden Haaren, zerrissenen, unsauberen Kleidern.” Ibid. 99. Ibid. 100. “Österreich ist ein Land, das nicht in der glücklichen Lage ist, seine Bevölkerung mit industriellen sowie landwirtschaftlichen Erzeugnissen voll zu versorgen, so dass wir vieles einführen müssen. . . . Aber dafür hat Österreich etwas anderes in die Waagschale zu legen, seine unvergleichlich schöne Bergwelt, seine Bäder und Seen, die uns jährlich Hunderttausende von Fremden ins Land bringen und damit die so geschätzten Devisen.” Ibid. 101. Ibid. 102. “Ein gesundes Menschengeschlecht erblüht dem Lande, dessen Jugend wandernd es durchzieht.” Ibid. 103. “Nicht zuletzt will ich mit meiner ganzen jugendlichen Tatkraft gegen den Schmutz und Schund kämpfen, dessen verderbliche Fluten sich leider immer noch über unser Land ergiessen, und das Ansehen Österreichs im Ausland untergraben, auch zum Schaden des Fremdenverkehrs. Mit feierlichem Ernst trete ich in den Kampf für Reinheit und Sauberkeit, besonders in Literatur und Film.” Ibid. The verderbliche Fluten reflect conservative cultural warnings of the allegedly harmful influx of American music, literature, and film. See Reinhold Wagnleitner, Coca-Colonization and the Cold War: The Cultural Mission of the United States in Austria after the Second World War (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1994). 104. “Preisgekrönte Arbeiten.” 105. Kurt Luger, “Fun-Factory Salzburg: Sound of Music, Salzburg Festival, and Tourism,” in Satchmo Meets Armstrong, ed. Reinhold Wagnleitner (Innsbruck: Studienverlag, 2006), 125; Sandgruber, Ökonomie, 518; Gertraud Steiner, Die Heimat-Macher: Kino in Österreich 1946–1966 (Vienna: Verlag für Gesellschaftskritik, 1987), 46.

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Judson, Pieter M. “The Bohemian Oberammergau: Nationalist Tourism in the Austrian Empire.” In Constructing Nationalities in East Central Europe, 89–106. New York: Berghahn Books, 2009. ———. “‘Every German Visitor Has a Völkisch Obligation He Must Fulfill’: Nationalist Tourism in the Austrian Empire, 1880–1918.” In Histories of Leisure, edited by Rudy Koshar, 147–68. Leisure, Consumption and Culture. New York: Berg, 2002. Keller, Tait. Apostles of the Alps: Mountaineering and Nation Building in Germany and Austria, 1860–1939. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016. Kerschbaumer, Gert. “Die Wiederbelebung der Glanzzeiten in den Nachkriegsjahren.” In Weltbühne und Naturkulisse: Zwei Jahrhunderte Salzburg-Tourismus, edited by Hanns Haas, Robert Hoffmann, and Kurt Luger, 129–33. Salzburg: Anton Pustet, 1994. Kieninger, Ernst, et al., eds. 1. April 2000. Edition Film und Text 2. Vienna: Filmarchiv Austria, 2000. Koshar, Rudy. “‘What Ought to Be Seen’: Tourists’ Guidebooks and National Identities in Modern Germany and Europe.” Journal of Contemporary History 33, no. 3 (1998): 323–40. Lichtblau, Albert. “Ambivalenzen der Faszination: Sommerfrische & Berge.” In Hast Du meine Alpen gesehen?: Eine jüdische Beziehungsgeschichte, edited by Hanno Loewy and Gerhard Milchram, 116–31. Vienna: Bucher Verlag, 2009. 1. April 2000. Directed by Wolfgang Liebeneiner. Vienna: Wien Film, 1952. Luger, Kurt. “Fun-Factory Salzburg: Sound of Music, Salzburg Festival, and Tourism.” In Satchmo Meets Armstrong, edited by Reinhold Wagnleitner, 119–28. Innsbruck: Studienverlag, 2006. MacCannell, Dean. The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. Marboe, Ernst. The Book of Austria. Vienna: Österreichische Staatsdruckerei, 1948. Massey, Doreen B. Space, Place, and Gender. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994. Mattl, Siegfried. “Geschlecht und Volkscharakter: Austria Engendered.” Österreichische Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaften 7, no. 4 (1996): 499–515. Melchard, Karl. “Fremdenverkehrsaufklärung der österreichischen Schuljugend verbunden mit einem Preisausschreiben: Beilage zum Verordnungsblatt für den Dienstbereich des Bundesministeriums für Unterricht 5.” Bundesministerium für Unterricht, 1950. Müller-Funk, Wolfgang. “So viel Österreich—Mutmaßungen über die Erfindung eines Landes.” Wespennest, 2011. “Neue Wege des Fremdenverkehrs.” Die Presse. 5 April, 1948. Rathkolb, Oliver. The Paradoxical Republic: Austria 1945–2005. English language edition. New York: Berghahn Books, 2014. Rauchensteiner, Manfried. Der Krieg in Österreich 1945. 3., unveränderte Aufl. Vienna: Österreichischer Bundesverlag, 1985. Reiterer, Albert, ed. Nation und Nationalbewußtsein in Österreich. Vienna: VWGÖ, 1988. Sandgruber, Roman. Ökonomie und Politik: Österreichische Wirtschaftsgeschichte vom Mittelalter bis zur Gegenwart. Vienna: Ueberreuter, 1995. “Schöne Ferien-Steiermark.” Landesfremdenverkehrsamt Steiermark, 1953. “Schwarzer Saisongruß an Salzburg.” Salzburger Nachrichten. 2 July 2, 1952. Steiner, Gertraud. Die Heimat-Macher: Kino in Österreich 1946–1966. Vienna: Verlag für Gesellschaftskritik, 1987. Steininger, Rolf. Austria, Germany and the Cold War: From the Anschluss to the State Treaty, 1938–1955. New York: Berghahn Books, 2008.

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Thaler, Peter. The Ambivalence of Identity: The Austrian Experience of Nation-Building in a Modern Society. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2001. Tschofen, Bernhard. Berg, Kultur, Moderne: Volkskundliches aus den Alpen. Vienna: Sonderzahl, 1999. Utgaard, Peter. Remembering and Forgetting Nazism: Education, National Identity, and the Victim Myth in Postwar Austria. New York: Berghahn Books, 2003. Vocelka, Karl. Trümmerjahre in Wien 1945–1949. Vienna: Jugend und Volk, 1985. Wagnleitner, Reinhold. Coca-Colonization and the Cold War: The Cultural Mission of the United States in Austria after the Second World War. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1994. Weber, Cynthia. “Performative States.” Millennium 27, no. 1 (1998): 77–95. Zahra, Tara. “‘Prisoners of the Postwar’: Expellees, Displaced Persons, and Jews in Austria after World War II.” Austrian History Yearbook 41 (April 2010): 191–215.

Chapter 2

DESTINATION HEIMAT Mobilizing Identity Discourses in Der Hofrat Geiger (Privy Councilor Geiger) (1947)

d T

ourists are everywhere in postwar Austrian films. From Géza von Cziffra’s Glaube an mich (Believe in Me) (1946), the first Austrian film produced after World War II, to the travel comedy Zwei in einem Auto (Two in One Car) (1951), and from Der Hofrat Geiger (Privy Councilor Geiger) (1947) to Eva erbt das Paradies (Eva Inherits Paradise) (1951), Austrian postwar cinema features almost frantic travel activity. And the phenomenon is not limited to the genre of the “tourist film.” The widely popular Heimatfilm genre of the 1950s and a number of costume films also thematize traveling in various ways. In Ernst Marischka’s popular Sissi trilogy (1955–57), Bavarian Princess Elisabeth (Romy Schneider) first encounters Austria as a tourist, guided through the Salzkammergut mountains by her future husband, Emperor Franz Josef I (Karl Böhm). When Sissi later enters Austria as the new empress, she doubles as subject and object of the tourist gaze: as she looks admiringly at the spectacular landscapes along the Danube from her bridal float, she is also being gazed at by crowds of Austrians who enjoy the spectacle of the imperial convoy with the young bride at its center from the river banks. Sissi’s travels to Hungary, Madeira, and Italy in the two sequels, Sissi: Die junge Kaiserin (Sissi: The Young Empress) (1956) and Sissi: Schicksalsjahre einer Kaiserin (Sissi: The Fateful Years of an Empress) (1957), mirror the widening reach of 1960s European working- and middle-class tourists. Critics interpreted this focus on tourism immediately after the war as a telling manifestation of Austrians’ escapist mentality, which quickly glossed over the events between 1938 and 1945 and then moved on to more pleasant pastures. Al-

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ready the contemporary reviewer of Glaube an mich called the film embarrassing Schmarren (kitsch) and hoped for better films to come.1 Addressing a different form of escapism, film historian Maria Fritsche acknowledges that these tourist films “offered a kind of ‘ersatz holiday’ for urban citizens of the war-damaged cities, who simply could not afford to go on holiday for a change of scenery, but went to the cinema instead.”2 In general, however, critics discussed mainstream commercial Austrian cinema within the analytical framework of the Frankfurt School’s notion of the “culture industry,” arguing that the triangular connection of cinema, tourism, and Heimat was indicative of how Austria put its cinema into the service of a hypocritical attitude toward the National Socialist past. As Georg Tillner polemically puts it, “the parallels between Austrian postwar films and tourist marketing are not an exception but constitute the very nature of ‘Austrian’ film.”3 As compelling (and entertaining) as such diagnoses appear to be, they actually build on the very same ideological mindset they proclaim to criticize. The wholesale dismissal of Austrian cinema as tourist marketing conceives of tourism solely as economic activity whose relationship to capitalist consumerism results in the atrophy of “authentic” forms of culture, history, and identity. Such criticism implies that more “authentic” cinematic renditions of society, ones that are not related to tourism, would yield a more accurate impression of Austrian culture, history, and identity. But would they? This is not to argue that tourist films, Heimatfilme, and costume films à la Sissi are somehow underappreciated aesthetic documents. They are not, and I agree with much of the critique of the films’ patriarchal and reactionary tendencies. However, as I will show in this chapter, the role of tourism in postwar Austrian cinema can actually be analyzed as doing more than simply flagging a film’s lowbrow quality. Rather, a discursive understanding of tourism sheds light on the identity processes of postwar Austrians as they shifted from a quickly-deteriorating allegiance to the Third Reich to a hesitant endorsement of the newly-founded, democratic Second Austrian Republic, all the while transposing earlier elements of identity into this new political constellation. Article I and II of the declaration of independence announced by interim Chancellor Karl Renner on 27 April 1945 emphasize that “Austria has been recreated in the spirit of the 1920 constitution” and the “forced annexation of 1938 has become null and void.”4 It became obvious rather quickly that this pronouncement of a clear-cut caesura between National Socialism and postwar Austria was hardly representative of the much more complicated and slower transformation of Austrians’ mentality, for whom the Rückbruch (rebreak) meant a strenuous split between a nostalgic longing for the past before 1938 and a desire to move on from 1945.5 The declaration of a politically independent Austria did not result in an immediate upsurge of a positive sense of national identity. If one accepted a separate Austrian national identity at all, it was more due to a lack of

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viable alternatives, and not because of the sudden discovery of an affective commitment to the Austrian nation-state. In his first official statement, Chancellor Renner was unequivocal about that: It was Adolf Hitler who first of all falsified the Anschluss and got it wrong, and in the end gambled it away forever. The three world powers . . . agreed to restore an independent Austria . . . and we are left with no option but to give up of our own accord the very idea of an Anschluss. This may well be hard for quite a few of us, but on the other hand, after what has happened, after this dreadful catastrophe, what is now a fait accompli is for all of us at the same time a release and a fait libérateur.6

The chancellor’s statement—not exactly a ringing endorsement of the Austrian nation—illustrates the main problem with postwar Austrian-ness, namely that one could rather quickly restore the political structures and even the physical infrastructure, “but not the sense of Heimat in this country, not the term Heimat,” as the Austrian writer Robert Menasse phrased it.7 Historically, Heimat has been a pivotal term for determining a person’s sense of belonging to a particular region. Heimat initially meant the right to live in and to belong to a certain place.8 Over time, Heimat became a more elastic concept that helped to reconcile the local and regional sense of belonging with the nineteenth-century development of a supra-regional German nation under Prussian control.9 For citizens of the German-speaking part of the Habsburg Empire the idea of belonging to Austria had to be negotiated with the belonging to a panGerman culture that became increasingly identified with the Prussian-dominated German nation.10 These nuanced understandings of Heimat disappeared when the National Socialists appropriated the term, turned it into a synonym for the German people, and “changed [Heimat] from a conservative value into a dynamic token of expansionist ambitions or a reactionary expression of German identity under threat.”11 Many Austrians enthusiastically endorsed this Heimat concept when Austria was annexed to the National Socialist Reich in 1938 and renamed Ostmark, a process that in turn only intensified the confusion about Austria’s German-ness in 1945. In many ways, the construction of a post-1945 Austrian national Heimat followed the recipes of the pre-1938 Austrian Ständestaat, with the packaging and invention of an Austrian peasant and folk culture intended to keep “PrussianGerman” National Socialism at bay and to designate “the Austrian as the better German.”12 In the era after World War II, “[t]he ‘Heimatkultur’ of the 1950s helped to develop an Austrian identity and support the move away from ‘deutsch’ nationalism; at the same time, though, it helped to conserve nationally dominated prejudices (often in turn based on the constructs of radical ‘deutsch’ nationalism from the late nineteenth century).”13 Critical discussions of post-1945 Austrian Heimatkultur rarely address this dialectical function of Heimat. Instead of analyzing the various cultural manifestations of this Heimatkultur—folkloric

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dress, music, and, their popularized cousin-genre, Heimatfilme—critics referenced this “Austrification” as evidence for Austrians’ continued embrace of a Fascist ideology in disguise and for the country’s self-colonization for the benefit of (German) tourists. Many of the postwar Austrian Heimatfilme—the one area of Heimatkultur I single out for discussion in this chapter—do not seem to allow for alternative readings. Their hunters and foresters can only praise the landscape in a manner reminiscent of the blood-and-soil discourse of the National Socialists; their women seem to only long to subordinate themselves to the patriarchy; and their patronizing quasi-aristocrats scheme to weaken an already underdeveloped sense of democracy. A more nuanced reading does become possible, though, once we apply a discursive concept of tourism and a dynamic notion of space. The films do not suddenly become subversive, nor will I argue for their reappraisal as film-aesthetic gems. Rather, as I will show below, a reading of Heimatfilme through a discursive concept of tourism will turn them into maps that allow us to trace the complex identity processes around postwar Austrian-ness.

Tourism, Nation, and Film Imagination is the key term that connects national identity, tourism, and film. Nations are, in Benedict Anderson’s seminal phrase, “imagined communities,” whose fabric relies on shared narratives and images that are understood as representative of a particular national identity.14 Tourism is intimately linked with this process. We form our images of who “we” are in comparison to—and often in competition with—our images of who “they” are. Thus, notwithstanding the plethora of theorizations and definitions of tourism, at its core “the activity of tourism itself makes sense only as an imaginative process which involves a certain comprehension of the world and enthuses a distinctive emotional engagement with it.”15 Before we travel, we picture ourselves in the tourist destination of our choice, we imagine what it will be like to walk the streets of a particular city, to lie on a beach, or to hike up a hill. “Picturing,” “imagining,” enjoying the “picturesque”—the frequency of these terms in the language of tourism underscores the central role of what John Urry has labeled the “tourist gaze” in the development of identity discourses.16 Anthropologist Orvar Löfgren interprets the Western history of traveling and tourism that started in the mid-eighteenth century as a history of cultural conditioning. On the Grand Tour through Europe first the sons of the aristocracy and later also poets, painters, and scholars learned to see natural landscapes and man-made environments in ways that were related both to their respective sociocultural backgrounds and to the scientific and philosophical discourses of their times. The places they saw through this particular cultural matrix shaped and

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reflected these travelers’ identities. When cultural modes of perception changed, the meaning of specific places changed in tandem with identity constructions. For Löfgren, this evolving cultural history of expressing oneself by way of images and narratives gathered and produced while traveling makes tourism “a cultural laboratory where people have been able to experiment with new aspects of their identities, their social relations, or their interaction with nature and also to use the important cultural skills of daydreaming and mindtraveling.”17 The references to “daydreaming” and “mindtraveling” not only underscore the discursive nature of tourism but also build a bridge to cinema, whose moving images offer up temporary escape from reality as well as alternative role models for identification. From its earliest days onward, cinema has imitated the “view of the tourist . . . , placing natural or cultural sites on display, but also miming the act of visual appropriation, the natural and cultural consumed as sights.”18 Whether it showed locomotives rushing toward the audience or trains navigating treacherous gorges on flimsy wooden trestles, early cinema repeatedly responded to an apparent desire by viewers to see other places, to imagine themselves as experiencing other environments. In an ever-evolving feedback loop, films were inspired by memories of traveling and inspired the imagination of future travel.19 In the context of German-speaking cinema, touristic and cinematic imagination intersected most famously in the mountain films of the 1920s and 1930s. Aside from featuring the same group of people in changing roles as directors and actors, Arnold Fanck’s Der heilige Berg (The Holy Mountain) (1926), Leni Riefenstahl’s Das blaue Licht (The Blue Light) (1932), and Luis Trenker’s Der verlorene Sohn (The Prodigal Son) (1934) share references to the tourist gaze and to the tourist imagination as important modes of perceiving and experiencing the world. The quasi-mythical mountain topography in The Holy Mountain, which plays such a crucial role in the negotiation of 1920s gender identities, was a contemporary media response to the touristic desires of then emerging urban audiences and delivered courtesy of modern technological reproduction.20 In Riefenstahl’s The Blue Light, the discourse of tourism frames the entire plot in an attempt to rationalize and historicize the violent destruction of tradition and female agency in the service of progress and civilization.21 In Trenker’s The Prodigal Son, finally, the imaginative practice of tourism is at the heart of the main hero’s rite of passage from unappreciative inhabitant of the German mountains to repentant member of the Heimat community.22 During the time of the Third Reich, films drew on the tourist discourse to either foreground the beauty and alleged safety of Germany over dangerously exotic tourist destinations, or, to compensate for decreasing civilian travel opportunities as World War II turned much of the world into a battlefield. Detlef Sierck’s La Habanera (1937), in which Swedish tourist Astrée (Zarah Leander) falls in love with and subsequently marries rich Puerto Rican landowner Don Pedro (Ferdinand Marian), is an illustrative case in point. What initially looks like

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a tourist dream come true turns into a nightmare when the increasingly jealous and possessive husband, whose negative character traits are clearly attributed to the island’s history of racial mixing, forces Astrée to live a secluded domestic live. As a cautionary tale about transgressive female agency, La Habanera tries to redirect the imaginative forces of the tourist discourse back home by sending a dashing Swedish scientist to the rescue.23 A more compensatory depiction of the link between touristic mobility and imagination is offered by Universum Film AG’s 1943 colorful fantasy Münchhausen (The Advenutres of Baron Munchhausen). Released shortly after the German defeat at Stalingrad, the film dazzles viewers with a series of special effects that emphasize the ability to effortlessly cover vast distances and easily transport one’s body between places real and imagined. Thus, at a time when the war moved ever closer to Germany, Münchhausen’s flights of fantasy offered imaginary and temporary opportunities to “get away from it all.”24 With regard to Austria, tourism, film, and national identity processes intersected in unique ways right after World War II ended. Going to the movies was often the only “journey” affordable and—considering the destroyed transportation infrastructure—manageable. As a consequence, the movies were a booming business. The number of movie theaters grew steadily until it peaked at 228 theaters in 1953 in Vienna alone. And even when those numbers began to decline, new movie theaters continued to open up in the rest of Austria. In 1953, about 108 million Austrians attended screenings in 1,143 movie theaters. Five years later, the number of theaters had expanded to 1,244 and the number of visitors had grown to 120 million.25 A closer look at what exactly Austrians went to see on the silver screen shows how the movies functioned as the kind of “cultural laboratory” that Löfgren invoked when describing tourism’s impact on identity processes. To be sure, the end of the war also marked the beginning of American popular culture’s triumphant entry into Austria’s (and Europe’s) cultural landscape.26 But the “daydreaming” and “mindtraveling”27 in the movie theaters was not exclusively reserved for Hollywood’s productions. The pronouncements of a “zero hour” and of “denazification” notwithstanding, the cinematic legacy of the German film production of the 1930s and 1940s remained alive on Austrian movie screens. In the process of liberation, the US Army had taken possession of Wien Film, including its approximately one thousand copies of films produced before and during the war. From July 1945 on, these films were screened in Viennese theaters, while actual postwar Austrian film production had to wait for permission to start filming until early 1946, when director Geza von Cziffra received the green light for the first truly postwar film, Glaube an mich (1946).28 But even when the recycling of older, pre-1945 German-Austrian films had stopped, US productions, while highly popular, did not completely dominate the Austrian movie scene. Although the number of Hollywood films screened in Austria grew rapidly, from 48 films in 1948 to 102 films in 1949 and 488 films in 1953, Austrian (and German)

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films often stayed in the theaters considerably longer than US films.29 In 1953, for instance, the distribution of 488 films of US origin compared to only 57 Austrian films seems to underscore Hollywood’s dominance, except for the fact that the Austrian film 1. April 2000 (1952) boasted 387 screening days, topping Gone with the Wind ’s 358 screening days.30 As Tillner writes, “if one multiplies the number of screened films in 1953 with the number of screening days, it becomes apparent that Austrian audiences have watched three times as many Austrian and West German movies as American ones.”31 In the end, the exact numbers are less relevant than the following general conclusion: when Austrians engaged in the imaginative practice of moviegoing in the late 1940s and early 1950s—that is, when they escaped their reality and let their minds travel—their attempts to get away frequently led them full circle and confronted them with (cinematically imagined) versions of themselves and their lives. Many of the films in question here were so-called tourist films, prompting film historians to interpret this constellation as a kind of tourism marketing to a “national [Austrian] audience, providing reassurance that the war had left their beautiful countryside intact” and “utilising the discursive theme of mobility”32 for the “promise of a new beginning.”33 In her book, Homemade Men in Postwar Austrian Cinema, film historian Maria Fritsche convincingly analyzed the trope of mobility with regard to gender. Fritsche demonstrated that at least some of the early tourist films allowed glimpses at homosocial and homosexual relations as well as at gentle men and strong women, in short: at gender configurations that would soon be stifled by the reconstructed patriarchal structures of postwar Austrian society. The theme of mobility was not confined to gender, however, nor should the role of tourism be understood only as a form of visual trauma therapy meant to reassure Austrians that, while things looked quite dire, at least Austria as a landscape, a place, was still intact. On the contrary, the frequent references to and depictions of tourism in postwar Austrian cinema underscore tourism’s crucial function in the modeling of mobilized identity processes. Some of the most popular films from the tourist film and Heimatfilm genres do not just project nostalgic representations of the typical Austrian landscapes. Rather, they draw onto the mobility of the tourism discourse to mobilize identity processes, to show how it is possible to literally put together Austria as a place and as foundation for a coherent Austrian identity that is both new and historic. Such a combined reading of tourist films and Heimatfilme goes against more orthodox film histories of the Heimatfilm genre.34 With its earliest manifestations going back to 1920s cinema and overlapping with the history of the mountain film, the Heimatfilm genre after 1945 developed into one of German cinema’s most recognizable “waves.” Starting in the early 1950s, German-speaking films with Heimat in their title proliferated dramatically, with images of green heaths, silver forests, and the Salzkammergut maintaining a strong grip on movie audiences in Austria and Germany until at least the early 1960s. They have contin-

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ued to experience innumerable reruns on German and Austrian television ever since.35 Also in the 1950s, Heimat became a code word to describe German society’s alleged desire to focus inward, away from politics. The Heimatfilm soon became the “quintessential ‘bad object’” of German film historiography, with critics describing it as the “epitome of the culture industry, arguing that it served to obfuscate political realities by offering its ‘consumers’ false escapes into nonexistent, premodern idylls, thus aligning them with the reactionary ideology of the decade.”36 Austrian writer Franz Schuh’s sarcastic praise of the genre exemplifies how the Heimatfilm became a cipher for the connection between the consumerism of the postwar period and the legacy of fascism: The Heimatfilm is the missing link in the aesthetic education of German-speaking man; the Heimatfilm connects what was considered pleasant under Hitler with that what one should not like about Hitler, without requiring him to forbid it outright. . . . How could the new German culture industry have turned those into consumers who had received their aesthetic education under National Socialism, if it had not been for the Heimatfilm?37

From an Austrian perspective, the films’ proximity to the discourse of tourism only intensified this line of criticism, turning the Heimatfilm genre into the farcical evidence for the country’s alleged self-colonization for German tourists. Part of the reason for this line of criticism is that the phase of intensified German-Austrian co-productions of Heimatfilme overlaps with the rapid increase in overnight stays by German tourists in the wake of the 1951 bilateral agreements between Austria and Germany, which revived trade relations and soon also tourist traffic between the two countries. From a statistically insignificant level in 1950, the number of German tourists rapidly rose to make up 54 percent of all foreign tourists only two years later.38 The agreements also enabled West German film producers to take advantage of lower production costs in Austria and Austrian producers to access their until then frozen revenue streams in West Germany. The result was a “noticeable ‘Germanisation’ of the language spoken in Austrian films and an increasingly monotonous replication of themes and storylines deemed popular with German audiences.”39 This, and the strong symbolic patronage Austrian cinema received from the state apparatus, made the Austrian Heimatfilm a symbol for the country’s avoidance of its recent past as well as for its Faustian willingness to sell its “soul”—its landscape, culture, and traditions—to (mostly German) tourists.40 “Heimat and folklore became commodities for sale” (Heimat und Folklore wurden zu Waren, die sich verkaufen ließen),41 and the term Heimat turned into a synonym of Heimatfilm, evoking “everything that (German) tourists would like to see when visiting Austria’s countryside.”42 In recent years, Heimat and the Heimatfilm genre have been reevaluated by a number of scholars, most notably by Johannes von Moltke in his pathbreaking study, No Place Like Home (2005).43 Drawing on Celia Applegate’s and Alon

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Confino’s analyses of Heimat as a concept that eased the friction between Germans’ regional loyalty and expected affiliation with the emerging German nation, Moltke argues for a revisiting of the Heimatfilm genre as a “site where the 1950s (film) culture negotiated central concerns with home, space, and belonging in the ongoing process of national reconstruction.” Categorizing Heimatfilm images as simply the continuation of Fascist blood-and-soil imagery to some extent reaffirms the National Socialist appropriation of Heimat as an equivalent of an expansionist Germany and ignores its “dialectical” function.44 Similarly, if we view the films simply as reified marketing images sponsored by the tourism industry we neglect the genre’s potential as a visual archive through which people’s interactions with processes of modernization become accessible. Moltke highlights how the repeated criticism of the genre as presenting a narrow and inward-looking world is to a large degree the result of binary frameworks, retroactively applied by critics who themselves understand the “local as opposed to the foreign, or place as opposed to space, or tradition as opposed to modernity.”45 He convincingly argues for a different reading of place in the Heimatfilm: first, the genre’s presentation of an “ostensibly bounded realm” of the local must be balanced by a critical reading of the “various processes of social, technological, and spatial modernization” that construct and shape places in the films;46 second, Heimat itself must be mobilized in critical readings that do not assume the concept’s a priori and stable definition but trace “the place(s) of Heimat in modernity.”47 Moltke’s revised perspective on the “Heimatfilm . . . as a veritable (if selective) map to a postwar national space” does indeed offer refreshing insights into the function of the Heimatfilm as a site for the negotiation of modern identities.48 Yet, it almost looks as if he ignored his own advice to not repeat the contaminated equation of Heimat and German nation when it comes to the connection of Heimat and film in an Austrian context. Moltke acknowledges the significant number of Austro-German co-productions and demands that “we should look south from the Federal Republic,”49 but he does not specify what it is that we should look at, leaving unaddressed how postwar developments of national identity in Austria and Germany, despite all their similarities, have followed somewhat different paths. While Heimatfilme in the German context have been reinterpreted in a more dynamic framework and with regard to their function within processes of identity formation, Heimatfilme with an Austrian focus continue to be discussed as fixed reflections of an always already-established and problematic national identity. For Ines Steiner, the frequent references to small, local, and allegedly closed-off places in postwar Austrian films reflect the selective memory of the country’s involvement in the Holocaust.50 Many Austrian Heimatfilme do indeed play in a kind of no-man’s-land “outside all national boundaries,”51 or in spatial environments where “geographical and national boundaries [appear] deliberately blurred.”52

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But too often, even critics who observe these phenomena read Austrian Heimatfilme as reflections of either German national identity processes, or, at best, of ongoing Austro-German affinities, and pay only scant attention to specifically Austrian processes of identity formation. In the rare instance where the difference of Austrian Heimatfilme is acknowledged, it appears via a negation, as in Fritsche’s claim that the reconciling function that Moltke identified for the German Heimatfilm does not apply to the Austrian Heimatfilm, for the latter supposedly blocks any modern developments.53 The following close analysis of two popular mainstream Heimatfilme—Der Hofrat Geiger (1947; often also cited as a tourist film) and Echo der Berge/Der Förster vom Silberwald (Echo of the Mountains/The Forester of the Silver Wood) (1954)—through the lens of tourism will demonstrate how the films allow us to trace the processes through which Austrians constructed and performed what came to be known as typical postwar narratives of Austrian national identity. The various manifestations of the tourist discourse in these films—from actual tourists to hosts and to the representation of tourist sites and tourist mobility—are less a distraction from any kind of “real” or “authentic” history but visualizations of a dynamic understanding of place, space, and identity. More importantly, these films temporarily reveal the existence of simultaneous and alternative histories of Austria. The depiction of allegedly bounded places after a closer look appears to be an attempt to synchronize and homogenize the historical narrative, a process that allows viewers to catch a glimpse of the socio-cultural and historical negotiations that undergirded this allegedly “new” and simultaneously “eternal” Austrian-ness.

Hofrat Geiger: Touristic Memories and the Performative Reworking of History Der Hofrat Geiger (DHG) was Austrian cinema’s first postwar hit. Between 2.3 and 2.5 million viewers saw the film following its premiere in December 1947.54 The movie also drew large audiences in Germany’s Western occupation zones and in several other European countries.55 The film tells the story of Councilor Franz Geiger (Paul Hörbiger) and his loyal Clerk (Hofministerialbeamter) Lechner (Hans Moser). Both resigned in 1938, ostensibly protesting Austria’s annexation by Nazi Germany, and have since led a rather secluded life through the Anschluss and World War II years up until 1947, the year in which the film is set. To keep his boss busy, Lechner regularly steals old documents from the government’s archive and hands them to Geiger for comment, pretending that Geiger’s successor in office has asked for his predecessor’s assistance to cope with the workload of the newly reconstituted government of the Second Austrian Republic.

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Their quiet and pedantic existence takes a dramatic turn when, in one of the files, Geiger stumbles across the name of a woman with whom he once had a love affair during a prewar vacation in Spitz an der Donau, a small town in the wine-growing region of the Wachau and a popular tourist destination during the interwar period. Based on the information in the file, Geiger and Lechner conclude that Geiger must have fathered an out-of-wedlock daughter back then. Geiger decides to travel back to the Wachau and belatedly join what he perceives to be his family. At first, Geiger’s re-acquaintance with Marianne Mühlhuber, his former love interest, and her now eighteen-year-old daughter, Mariandl, is not as joyful as he envisioned. Still bitter about Geiger’s sudden departure eighteen years ago, Marianne rejects Geiger’s attempts to rekindle their relationship. Although the small inn she manages is unprofitable, Marianne wants to maintain the independence she has gained by experiencing the war years without Geiger. Only after a prolonged and often comedic turn of events do Geiger and Marianne end up as a happy couple with a married daughter, a grandchild, and a renovated and profitable hotel. As popular as the film was with audiences, as bad was its fate among critics. Both its production history and its depiction of tourist trips, hotels, and commerce have turned the 1947 release into a prototypical example of how tourism and cinema have been used to create a deceptive and manipulative version of Austrian history. The script for DHG was based on a highly successful 1942 comedy by Martin Costa, a connection to the Nazi period that undermined any claim of a cinematic new beginning. An even more compelling reason to suspect strong continuities between war and postwar cinema was the fact that Willi Forst’s Wien Film produced the movie and Forst’s former assistant, Hans Wolff, directed it. Forst, who had become notorious for his light Revue- and Operettenfilme during the Nazi period, later tried to portray his work as a kind of aesthetic resistance against the cinematic visions of Goebbels’s propaganda ministry.56 For many critics, however, DHG seemed to underscore that “postwar Austrian cinema displays no immediately visible break with the cinema of the Third Reich, neither aesthetically nor in terms of narrative.”57 While postwar Westand East-German rubble films such as Wolfgang Staudte’s Die Mörder sind unter uns (Murderers among Us) (East Germany, 1946) and Rotation (East Germany, 1949), as well as Helmut Käutner’s In jenen Tagen (Seven Journeys) (West Germany, 1947), showed traumatized characters contemplating their guilt amid expressionistically illuminated rubble heaps, DHG appeared to exemplify Austrian cinema’s attempts to show a harmonious society where “the countryside and its inhabitants provide an escapist backdrop . . . and served as a form of escapist ‘vacation’ for an audience tired of the war-torn occupation.”58 Later remakes with German teen idols Connie Froebess and Peter Alexander also sealed DHG’s fate as “original sin” with regard to cinema’s use of tourism to cover up

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Austria’s past and promote the country’s self-commodification as German tourist colony.59 By far the majority of critical literature about the film emphasizes how DHG uses tourism to enable its audiences to exchange the war-damaged urban environments of Vienna for the supposedly untouched natural landscapes of the countryside. This tradeoff includes swapping out the painful realities of postwar Austrian politics and history for the allegedly orderly world of the interwar period. These interpretations are convincing, but they are based on two implicit assumptions: first, that tourist mobility always means dodging any serious engagement with history and politics in favor of trivial entertainment and leisure; second, that time is mobile and space is immobile. These assumptions color most readings of the film’s central element, namely the “escapist” vacation of a post1945 character to Spitz, a place that resembles a time capsule where the undisturbed idyll of pre-1938 Austria has allegedly been preserved. A characteristic interpretation can be found in Dassanowsky’s authoritative history of Austrian film, where DHG is described as “an allegory of national reconstruction in the renewal of the hotel, and of rapprochement between the classes . . . in the marriage of Mariandl and Hans [Marianne’s butler], which also results in a child—a new and innocent beginning.”60 I do not dispute that the film’s intent, inasmuch as we can discern it, was to deploy the mobility of tourism in order to construct a supposedly seamless continuity between pre- and postwar Austrian national identity, and to portray the National Socialist years as alien to the concept of Austrian-ness. But most analyses in this context only allow for time to be mobile, while space and place are assumed to be static. In other words, Councilor Geiger can go back in time to find a “younger” and allegedly innocent Austria, whereby the latter is assumed to exist within the same spatial framework as the film’s postwar Austria. Such readings assume Spitz and Vienna as part of the same spatial framework of Austria and conceive of the mobility of the tourism discourse mainly as tool for time travel. What if the tourist mobility in this film is not simply an escapist tool, but also an attempt to mobilize encrusted notions of Austria’s historical time-space coordinates in order to facilitate a symbolic merging of some very different ideas of prewar Austrian national identity? The following analysis argues that Spitz and Vienna are not simply two spatial manifestations of one and the same Austrian history, but two different places that stand for the two unreconciled (hi)stories of interwar Austria, for the conflict between the Socialist left and the Christian Socialist right that exploded in the 1934 civil war and whose underlying antagonisms remained unresolved throughout the authoritarian Ständestaat and the National Socialist period. By approaching DHG from this perspective, I aim at making visible the simultaneity of historical narratives that existed in the postwar period and shed light on the performative work that was required to arrive at officially desirable and homogenized versions of Austrian-ness.

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Space-Time/Time-Space Configurations of Austrian-ness An insert at the film’s very beginning draws attention to the peculiar ways in which DHG represents the relationship between history and space: “This film plays in contemporary Austria, which is poor and filled with sorrow. But—do not fear—you won’t see much of that. The film does not ignore the times, but it will tell you that, if you only try, a lot of things can have a bright side.”61 What appears to be a programmatic statement in support of reading the film as a trivial and history-distorting tourist soap opera is quickly undermined by the subsequent sequences. While not exactly reaching rubble film dimensions, DHG’s mise-en-scène offers a surprising panoply of postwar Austria’s troubles. In an acknowledgement that Hamsterfahrten rather than tourist trips were the main drivers of mobility right after the war, the film shows Clerk Lechner roaming the black markets of Vienna, where he tries to exchange objects of questionable value in order to obtain eggs for Geiger’s breakfast. Repeatedly, handwritten signs indicate shortages of heating materials and electricity. In one brief shot the bombedout ruins of a government building are visible. When a new maid arrives and Lechner orients her by stressing the importance of the domestic protocols and routines, his proclamation that “everything has been this way for twenty years, and that things won’t change”62 is contradicted by the councilor’s subsequent first on-screen appearance, which shows him enraged about the cold draft caused by the open windows, about his messy office desk, and the missing cushion on his chair.63 At this point, the audience already knows that Geiger’s self image as an irreplaceable element of the Austrian government’s administrative process is mere fantasy. Nobody cares about his comments on the outdated files stolen by Lechner. Life in postwar Austria, these scenes suggest, is anything but stable and quiet, and any declaration of permanence and continuity is delusional. And yet, throughout the first ten minutes Geiger and Lechner are shown as clinging to this delusion and the film arrives at a narrative dead-end: while the two protagonists strive to build a quiet postwar existence, the audience knows about the fraudulent act on which it is based. If the film were to endorse this corrupted version of history, it could end right here. But it continues, and the way it solves the impasse is telling: instead of confronting the protagonists (and Austrian audiences) with their historical lies, it resorts to the mobility of the discourse of tourism to reconcile very divergent historical perspectives. At the very moment when the fake domestic idyll appears most pronounced—Lechner rolls new cigarettes out of tobacco secured from used stumps, and Geiger browses the outdated files while soft string music adds to the sense of a bourgeois Biedermeier atmosphere in the dimly lit living room—history intrudes again via tourist memory. In one of the files, Geiger reads the petition of a single mother from Spitz an der Donau, who requests

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that her daughter be transferred to a Viennese school in order to escape the social ostracism she experiences as a result of her out-of-wedlock birth. Geiger, at first, is outraged that “something like this still exists in our supposedly modern age.”64 Considering that the petitioner hails from Spitz, he sarcastically laments the backward atmosphere of the provincial town: “Of course, a lot is possible in Spitz an der Donau. [Pause. Geiger smiles, looks off-screen, and then continues in a softer voice.] Even very beautiful things are possible there.”65 As he repeats the term “possible,” Geiger changes the word’s meaning from an expression of incredulity to one signifying a positive, expectant attitude of pleasant things to come. Geiger’s phrase that “very beautiful things are possible in Spitz” alludes to the role of tourism as a realm of possibilities, as the “cultural laboratory” (Löfgren) that enables the imagination of new versions of one’s identity in other times and other places. Geiger’s subsequent discovery that the petitioner is his former lover and that he is the father of an eighteen-year-old daughter prompts a visit to Spitz. It is this return to Spitz that commentators have criticized as escapist flight from war-damaged Vienna into the unspoiled countryside, and into the arms of a woman and a family who make the councilor’s life whole again. Such readings, however, ignore how the discourse of tourism actually mediates the complex relationship between history and space represented in the constellation of Spitz and Vienna. At first, Geiger’s explanation for the daughter’s social exclusion is based on an understanding of Spitz being behind the times. This view gives priority to history (time), as it suggests that different places might be at different historical stages, but that they still follow the universal historical narrative and will eventually undergo developments similar to more “advanced” places. Spitz, in other words, has just not caught up with Vienna’s modern attitudes. A closer look at the above-described shot reveals, however, that Spitz is also a place of “opportunities,” as Geiger’s flashback to his holiday fling suggests, and therefore a place that challenges the primacy of time over space and of history over place. On one level, the memory of Spitz introduces the possibility of happier times, as suggested by the councilor’s immediate transition into a more pleasant mood; on another level, Spitz is the place that represents a different possible history of Austria. In this scenario, Geiger’s return trip is not so much an escape as an attempt to eradicate the challenge this alternative history poses for the desirable mainstream narrative of Austrian national identity after 1945. To read the tourist location of Spitz as a symbolic manifestation of an alternative version of Austrian history requires a rethinking of the relationship between time and place/space in critical discourse. Places are not simply particular geographical locations in space, cultural geographer Doreen Massey argues, but “particular moments in . . . intersecting social relations, nets of which have over time been constructed, laid down, interacted with one another, decayed and re-

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newed.”66 Thinking about places this way has profound consequences for the link between place and identity, as well as for notions of national identity in general and for the idea of Heimat in particular. If places are the ever-changing manifestations of social interactions, it means that places “are not so much bounded areas as open and porous networks of social relations;” it also means that no place is in and of itself representative of a particular and authentic (national or cultural) identity.67 Consequently, the critic’s work must look beyond simple declarations of a particular identity-place relationship as “inauthentic” or ideologically suspect. What matters is an understanding of how relationships between place and identity have been created and what their function is in the larger framework of historical and cultural developments. This reconceptualization of the connection between place, space, and time necessitates a change in the way we write about it. The common assumption is that space has the power to conquer time, which is why we draw diagrams and maps, we “space things out” in the hope to arrest time’s mindboggling dynamic by forcing it into the allegedly synchronic spatial.68 This practice, however, subordinates space to time, as it reinforces the idea that space is “somehow a lesser dimension than time: one with less gravitas and magnificence, it is the material/phenomenal rather than the abstract; it is being, rather than becoming and so forth; and it is feminine rather than masculine.”69 Such an understanding of space as passive and immobile severely limits our historical understanding, especially our awareness for the multiplicity and simultaneity of social, cultural, and historical phenomena. In other words, we assume that different places follow the same trajectory of historical development, even if they might represent different stages in that development. In order to correct this view, Massey argues that we move away from a “spatialisation of time (understood as the rendering of time as space)” and strive for a form of representation that focuses on both time-space (the chronological and historical ramifications of spatial configurations) and space-time (the spatial implications of history).70 History, Massey argues, is imprisoned in space only if we define space a priori as passive and immobile, but “[t]here is no stable moment, in the sense of stasis, if we define our world, or our localities, ab initio in terms of change.”71 In DHG, the spaces represented by the film, and the film as space, interfere with the movie’s stated intention to offer escapism by temporarily projecting a different and fictionalized narrative onto the supposedly stable, albeit destroyed, place of Austria. Space repeatedly intrudes: in the form of black market encounters; in the shape of improvised domestic arrangements; via destroyed urban architecture; and, most significantly, in the form of ignored and forgotten archives. When the government archivist discovers Lechner stealing yet another file for his boss, Lechner finally admits to his elaborate scheme, but he angrily rejects the notion that he and the councilor have been forced to retire: “We [Geiger and

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Lechner] left voluntarily. . . . We care about who governs us, and if we do not like the people in government, we will leave on our own. You do not simply send a Geiger and a Lechner into retirement.”72 What sounds like an act of defiance against the Nazi takeover of Austria is almost immediately undermined when Lechner explains that he started to comfort Geiger with stolen files because the councilor’s professional pride and self-image suffered when he witnessed how well the mechanisms of government continued to work without him under the new regime. Thus, the continuing, secret use of the government archive after the annexation means that Geiger and Lechner are in fact connected with the political regime, which they claim to have defied by “resigning” on their own terms. The role of the archive as space that challenges history becomes even more pronounced when the archivist, after scolding Lechner for his repeated thefts of government property, leads the former clerk to a bombed-out building. Pointing at the rubble heap, the archivist explains that Lechner will find the files of the pre-National Socialist Austrian registry under the pile of bricks: “Since the bombing raid, no one has bothered to clean this up. So if you search the rubble, you will find enough files that nobody cares about.”73 The files buried in the rubble heap contain the birth certificates, registrations documents, and other records that commonly constitute the core knowledge base for a state’s administration. By claiming that nobody is interested in these files, the archivist implies that, contrary to claims of reviving Austria’s prewar status quo, the country’s post-1945 administration continues to work with the National Socialist administrative apparatus rather than reconnect with the prewar threads of governmental history. Thus, the film undermines a tenet of postwar Austrian identity, namely that the end of World War II marked the immediate removal of all traces of National Socialism. Although the film allows space to repeatedly poke holes into Lechner’s and Geiger’s prioritization of historical time, simply identifying these alternative versions of history does not result in critical action. In fact, rather than showing concern or outrage about this willful neglect of prewar Austria’s “institutional memory,” Lechner is more than willing to use the files of the old registry as occupational therapy for his irritable councilor. Lechner’s goal is not a critical working through of history but the avoidance of excitement at all cost. The spatial challenge to the primacy of official history does not come from the archive per se but via the discourse of tourism. For it is in one of the files from the old registry that Geiger stumbles across the name of his holiday fling and decides to take another vacation in Spitz. At first, the town seems to symbolize simply a younger, not-yet-contaminated Austria. But, gradually, Spitz is revealed to house an inconvenient alternative to the official version of Austrian history, one that resists easy usurpation by those who quickly try to move on by glossing over the violence and turmoil of the recent past.

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Tourist Memories and Alternative Histories In order to understand how the town of Spitz and Geiger’s former lover Marianne Mühlhuber represent an alternative Austrian history, it becomes necessary to revisit the moment in which Geiger recognizes Marianne’s name in the document. Not knowing that he works with outdated archival documents, Geiger’s initial excitement about the find quickly abates when he reads that the daughter mentioned in the file is only eight years old, while his visit to Spitz dates back almost two decades. At this point, Lechner finally admits to his scheme and points out the file’s original submission date as being 1938. Instead of scolding Lechner, Geiger quickly tries to recalculate the probability of him having fathered a child: GEIGER [upon realizing that the daughter mentioned in the file is eight years old and the file had been submitted nine years ago]: Just a moment, let me calculate: So, eight and nine is seventeen. Right? (Moment, lass mich einmal rechnen: Also acht und neun ist siebzehn. Oder?) LECHNER: I didn’t say anything. (Ich hab’ nichts gesagt.) GEIGER: You shouldn’t say anything, all you do is confuse me. Hold on. So, 1929, and today it’s 1947—that’s how many years? (Du sollst auch nichts sagen, du störst mich nur. Moment. Also 1929, und heute haben wir 1947—wieviel Jahre sind das?) LECHNER: Eighteen. The child is eighteen years old. (Achtzehn. Das Kind ist achtzehn Jahre alt.) GEIGER: Why? Seventeen, you idiot. (Wieso denn? Siebzehn, du Depp.) LECHNER: Twenty-nine and forty-seven is eighteen. (29 und 47 ist 18.) GEIGER: You have no idea, let me calculate this on my own. Let’s try it the other way. How old was I when I was in Spitz? (Aber das verstehst du nicht, lass mich allein rechnen. Probier’n wir’s einmal anders herum. Wie alt war ich wie ich in Spitz war?) ... LECHNER [takes a sheet of paper]: Let’s calm down and calculate it in writing. (Ich will das einmal in aller Ruhe aufschreiben.) GEIGER: Good. I was thirty-two back then. . . . Today I am fifty. . . . How many years ago was I in Spitz? (Also gut. Ich war damals 32. . . . Heute bin ich 50. . . . Vor wievielen Jahren war ich in Spitz?) LECHNER: Eighteen years. (18 Jahre.) GEIGER: Eighteen years. Well, there you have it. The petition is nine years old, the child was eight back then, how old is it today? (18 Jahre. Ja bitte, es stimmt. Das Gesuch ist neun Jahre alt, das Kind war damals acht, wie alt ist es heute?) LECHNER: Seventeen. GEIGER: Of course. And it is my child. (Na ja, natürlich. Und es ist mein Kind.)74

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Film historian Karl Sierek interprets Lechner’s calculation as an “attempt at actualization . . . that retroactively tries to inscribe a semblance of reason and logic into past events by referring to allegedly irreversible ‘facts.’”75 In this context, Geiger’s concluding sentence in this dialogue—“And she is my child”—retroactively gives meaning to the councilor’s disrupted life and establishes closure where critical questions would be more appropriate. The repetition of the trip to Spitz appears, then, as an easy way out of historical responsibility, as a time-traveling device for its main character and, by extension, for postwar Austria at large: tourism becomes the displaced means of transmission for remembering the past in the form of a holiday trip, it opens up the possibility of escaping the dreary postwar existence, and it enables the councilor to travel back in time and pick up history (“his-story”) in the form of a waiting woman just where he left her in 1929—aspects of mobility that must indeed have appeared highly desirable for 1947 Austrian audiences. But even though Geiger does rejoin his family by the end of the film, things do not go as smoothly as he had envisioned and as the above-summarized critical reviews of the film might suggest. When the councilor shows up in Spitz to reclaim his status as paterfamilias, he tells Marianne that he would like to “indemnify” (wiedergutmachen) his past mistakes. Marianne angrily rejects his offer: “Because we live in the age of indemnification. Indemnify, indemnify, I can’t hear that term anymore. If I have managed to get through these challenging years without your indemnification, I certainly will be able to do so now.”76 Wiedergutmachung, in the sense of financially compensating the victims and surviving relatives of those murdered by the National Socialist death machinery, was indeed heavily discussed during these years, and mostly in a negative way. In keeping with the official stance of Austria as Hitler’s “first victim,” the Austrian government and Austrian public opinion long rejected any payment requests. Members of the government even argued that surviving Austrian Jews should not be compensated for their “Aryanized” properties, as this would be unfair to the former National Socialists whose properties were destroyed in the war as well.77 But, since DHG does not address these specific debates directly, the use of the term invites further speculation, especially in light of Marianne’s forceful rejection of any Wiedergutmachung. A first clue about the film’s specific interpretation of the term can be found in the rapidly changing gender constellations in postwar Austria. As a hardworking and autonomous innkeeper and single mother, Marianne recognizes and tries to resist the return of patriarchal structures in Geiger’s rueful advances. In this context, DHG is paradigmatic for the representation of gender in postwar tourist films, which allowed for significant experimentation with gender codes and, at least temporarily, for “celebrat[ing] female independence” before they ultimately advocated for a “return to traditional gender roles, albeit superficially modernized.”78

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But the term Wiedergutmachung also invites a reading of Marianne’s singleparent existence in Spitz as allegory for the democratic First Austrian Republic, the Heimat that had been abandoned by many Austrians, first during the authoritarian Ständestaat years, and then at the time of the Anschluss. One reason why Geiger fails at calculating his presumed daughter’s age is that he tries to force the new information into the corset of his corrupted personal and professional historical narrative. Geiger’s repeated question “When was I in Spitz?” illustrates the attempt to establish the authority of his history over the alternative history of Austria as it happened in the place of Spitz. Yet, the main question is not how old Geiger was when he was in Spitz. Rather, the question is, what year was Geiger in Spitz, met Marianne, and then abandoned his pregnant lover. Thus, it is Lechner’s odd addition of “twenty-nine and forty-seven is eighteen” that correctly yields the daughter’s age and sheds light on the ways in which Marianne Mühlhuber and Spitz represent an alternative version of Austrian history, a version the film attempts to realign with the dominant official version via the mobility discourses of tourism. Clerk Lechner’s method of calculation is a subtraction of 1929 from 1947, two years that are crucial for the history of democratic Austria. In 1929, Austria was first hit by political and economic crises.79 Constitutional amendments made during the same year weakened the First Republic’s parliamentary democracy and strengthened the emergency powers of the executive.80 Historians generally agree that this move expedited the republic’s descent into authoritarian rule and later annexation.81 1947, the year in which DHG was released and in which its plot is situated, also marks the faint beginnings of postwar reconstruction. The crucial chronological markers of Geiger’s and Marianne’s encounters therefore double as important waypoints for Austrian history. Marianne’s abandonment by a youthful and careless civil servant—a quasi-official representative of the First Republic’s socio-political order—becomes representative of the First Republic’s abandonment by people who, instead of protecting democracy, first contributed to its weakening under Austro-Fascism and then either collaborated with or, as the film suggests, arranged themselves with the National Socialist regime. After 1945, they are once again in charge of constructing the official postwar Austrian national identity by declaring the annexation null and void and the Austria of 1929 as resurrected.82 Thus, Marianne’s rejection of indemnification must be read as a critique of the all-too-easy reappropriation and rewriting of an older and alternative Austrian history by the new postwar Austrian order. Marianne’s “forgotten” existence in the place of Spitz suggests that this older Austria has not simply disappeared. Her reference to the years of hardship challenges a selective postwar historical narrative that simply tries to remove from Austrian history those troubling eighteen years during which democracy had been suppressed. And Marianne’s eighteenyear-old daughter, Mariandl, emerges as physical reminder of this alternative

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Austria, as an embodiment of the question “What if a democratic Austria had been supported by its citizens?” Put differently, Marianne and Mariandl Mühlhuber can be read as imagined exile Austrians whose memories pose an inconvenient obstacle for the new postwar Austria. While Geiger might have envisioned his visit to Spitz as a visit to a historical moment frozen in time and space, Spitz turns out to be a place constituted by “intersecting social relations” (Massey) that form their own history. Marianne and her daughter Mariandl, who, although fathered by Geiger, has been raised by Marianne and is thus a living and tangible legacy of that abandoned Austria, demonstrate that space is not simply a reflection of history but can harbor alternative and challenging versions of history. Consequently, the trope of tourism in DHG transcends simple escapism and becomes a representation of the mental mobility that would be required to realign this challenging alternative version of Austrian history with the mainstream postwar version, to stitch together the fragmented Austrian national place by establishing a new “net” of “intersecting social relations.”83 To put it differently, it is the discourse of tourism that will enable Geiger to reconstruct the paradigmatic Austrian “family” as a suitable foundation for postwar national identity and to reinstall himself as legitimate heir to democratic prewar Austria.

Taming the Austrian Shrew into a Tourist In his by now classic book, The Tourist, sociologist Dean MacCannell interprets tourism as a response to the fragmented experience of modern life where “reality and authenticity are thought to be elsewhere: in other historical periods and other cultures, in purer, simpler lifestyles.”84 The tourist, consequently, becomes the prototypical “modern-man-in-general”85 who tries to “overcome the discontinuity of modernity” and to “incorporat[e] its fragments into a unified experience” so that he can “discover or reconstruct a cultural heritage or a social identity.”86 This characterization of the tourist forms a helpful blueprint for a reading of tourism’s representation in DHG. As a postwar “Austrian-in-general,” Geiger is confronted with the fragmentation of his personal and professional identity as well as with the discontinuity of the national-cultural narrative. It is the discourse of tourism that enables him to suddenly remember a different past. And it is tourist mobility that allows him to reconstruct a national and cultural tradition that matches the postwar narrative this prototypical Austrian needs in order to regain wholeness. The fact that MacCannell’s definition of a tourist as a “modern-man-in-general” offers a decidedly male image of the tourist only strengthens its relevance for the film. As will become apparent, Geiger eventually reconstructs himself as Austrian by forcefully taking advantage of the revived patriarchal structures that shape Austria’s post-World War II socio-cultural fabric.

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The spatial challenge to the desired historical narrative is grounded in the place of Spitz, a place constructed and defined by the social relations embodied by Marianne Mühlhuber and her daughter. To defend the dominant historical narrative from this spatial challenge, the relationship of Marianne and her daughter to the place of Spitz must be reconfigured. The film solves this problem by first expelling Marianne from her place and then, quite literally, “putting her into her place” again, making clear to whom she owes her sense of being at home in Spitz. At the very moment when Marianne has rejected Geiger’s marriage proposal, Pfüller, the town’s mayor and proprietor of the rival hotel Goldener Ochse, sees an opening and combines his repeated courting of Marianne with a legal threat: he has found out that Marianne was born in Znaim, a town that had belonged to the Czech region of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire, but has since become part of post-World War I Czechoslovakia. This voids Marianne’s Austrian citizenship, makes her a foreigner, and disrupts her self-authorized belonging to the place of Spitz. Moreover, this dislocation of Marianne is the first step in a process that will ultimately silence the alternative historical narrative embodied by Marianne’s existence in Spitz. Marianne agrees with Pfüller that marrying an Austrian is the easiest way to maintain Austrian citizenship. But instead of accepting Pfüller’s marriage proposal, she informs Geiger that she would accept a formal marriage “in name only” as a form of Wiedergutmachung. Geiger agrees, and the formal arrangement is made even easier when Geiger suddenly receives news that his reinstatement as councilor for the new postwar Austrian government requires his return to Vienna immediately after the wedding. Angered by Marianne’s move, Pfüller threatens to reveal the arranged marriage to the authorities. Marianne decides to travel to Vienna and apply for citizenship on her own terms in order to settle the matter of her national identity once and for all. Unbeknownst to her, the application ends up with Geiger, who sends his wife on a Kafkaesque (and highly misogynistic) months-long journey through the byzantine labyrinth of Austrian bureaucracy, only to finally give her a dressing-down in his office. In official Beamtendeutsch, he informs Marianne that her application has been denied on the grounds of her existing marriage to an Austrian (himself ); in a more conciliatory and patronizing tone, he tells her to be grateful for this decision, as another councilor might have indicted her for deceiving the authorities. An exhausted and chastened Marianne accepts Geiger’s offer to accompany her back to Spitz. Spitz is symbolic of the triangular definition of place as feminine (and therefore as home) in Western culture. Doreen Massey’s observation that it is usually a man “setting out to discover and change the world” who assigns a woman “most particularly a mother, . . . the role of personifying a place which did not change,”87 applies to DHG, with one crucial deviation: Marianne has accepted the patriarchal definition of a feminized place (as opposed to masculinized time), but she temporarily takes charge of this place instead of accepting male superior-

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ity. By rejecting as cynical Geiger’s attempt at Wiedergutmachung, she also rejects dominant postwar Austria’s efforts to retroactively rewrite and appropriate the marginalized prewar history. As she initially dismisses the councilor’s invitation to return to the fold of the bourgeois family, she disrupts the patriarchy’s social order. Marianne’s desire to continue her autonomous existence in Spitz thus rebukes the male authority that usually relegates women to the place called home. Still identified with place by her identification as woman, Marianne temporarily asserts her right to guard the boundaries of this place and to obstruct the quasi-automatic reappropriation of her place as his home. Geiger’s second postwar trip to Spitz illustrates that these relations have fundamentally changed, that place has once again become subordinate to time and history. During Geiger’s first postwar return to Spitz, Lechner had to prepare the room in Marianne’s hotel, the Blaue Gans, to make Geiger feel as comfortable as possible away from home. On Geiger’s second postwar trip such preparations are irrelevant, for this time Geiger’s journey is a homecoming. While Marianne had been away on her futile quest to ascertain her citizenship and, implicitly, her right to belong to Spitz and to an autonomous history, Geiger has secretly financed the modernization of the Blaue Gans as a state-of-the-art tourist hotel. In doing so, he has also made Spitz his home. Marianne still has her citizenship and, as the happy ending suggests, will continue to live in Spitz. But it has now become impossible to read her situation as representative of an alternative version of Austrian identity, or, of Spitz as a place where the specific intersections of social relations generate a different version of Austrian history. All lines of power now intersect in Geiger, the newly reinstated civil servant, who has achieved full control over the narrative of Austrian national identity and determines membership in the community both in a domestic and a professional-public sense.88 The renovation of the hotel at the film’s end anticipates the massive investment in Austria’s tourism infrastructure made possible by the 1948 start of European Recovery Program (ERP) funding. But this is not the main link between DHG and tourism. The more important function of the discourse of tourism in this film is the way it showcases how Austrians can establish an apparently coherent and plausible national narrative out of the contested versions of pre-World War II Austrian-ness the film alludes to in the opening sequence. As a new Austrian “man-in-general,” Geiger becomes the prototypical Austrian tourist who creates one Austrian national narrative and one Austrian national place by merging Vienna and Spitz. Through the union with the “alternative” Austria embodied by Marianne, he retroactively legitimizes his own position. Narrative conventions alone do not provide sufficient motivation for Geiger’s repeated travels to Spitz. Rather, the reiterative journeys indicate the performative nature of identity construction depicted in the film. Geiger’s repeated trips exemplify the “reiterative practice by which discourse produces the effects that it names.”89 During his first postwar trip, Geiger realizes that the situation he

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encounters in Spitz challenges the “effect” he envisions, namely the confirmation of his version of Austrian-ness as the only viable genealogy of postwar Austrian identity. Thus, he has to change conditions in order to generate this desired effect. Upon his second return, the then reinstated councilor has not only regained power and authority over the place of Spitz and over Marianne, he has also reclaimed his role as father of Mariandl. Raised by Marianne, the eighteen-year-old daughter is the personified legacy of the abandoned democratic First Austrian Republic and, therefore, embodies a potentially threatening alternative to the councilor’s national narrative. But Geiger asserts his paternal rights over Mariandl during Marianne’s forced absence. He permits her to marry the inn’s chief waiter, and, when Marianne eventually returns, this union has already produced a child. Geiger’s emphasis that Marianne’s grandchild comes out of a “legitimate” union is more than a joking reference to her own experience of single motherhood. More importantly, it legitimizes Geiger’s performative construction of Austrian-ness. The councilor has now reconfigured the discursive conditions such that they produce the desired effect, namely the definitive legitimization of his version of Austrian-ness—the opportunistic arrangement with the powers that were and are. Tourism plays a crucial role in this process, not as an escape from history, but as an opportunity to reimagine it. While Geiger and Lechner desperately cling to the notion of linear history and stable geography, the discursive framework of tourism breaks open such rigid notions and allows for the existence of multiple and simultaneous histories within and across dynamic notions of space and place. Tourism legitimizes the reimagination of places and identity constructions as mobile, enables the performative reconfiguration of Austrian national identity, and makes it possible to claim that, in the end, things are as they were always meant to be.

Notes 1. Erika Müller, “Glaube an mich,” Die Zeit, 5 June 1947, http://www.zeit.de/1947/23/ glaube-an-mich. Believe in Me constituted a paradigmatic case in point for the diagnosis of escapism, as one of the film reels bought on the black market had to be discarded when the director discovered that his shots in the ski resort were double-exposed with images of marching German soldiers flying the swastika: “The film had been exposed twice: once by us, who filmed skiing scenes and dramatic scenes in the Zürs mountains; and prior to that by an unknown cinematographer who had filmed hours of marching German soldiers with swastikas flying in the wind” (Der Film wurde also doppelt belichtet: einmal von uns, die wir Skiaufnahmen und Spielszenen in den Zürser Bergen drehten; und vor uns von einem unbekannten Kameramann, der stundenlang marschierende deutsche Soldaten mit wehenden Hakenkreuzfahnen fotografiert hatte). Geza von Cziffra, Kauf dir einen bunten Luftballon, Munich/Berlin 1975, S. 338; quoted in Elisabeth Büttner and Christian Dewald, Anschluß an Morgen: Eine Geschichte des österreichischen Films von 1945 bis zur Gegenwart

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4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

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10.

11. 12.

13. 14. 15.

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(Salzburg: Residenz Verlag, 1997), 21. All translations into English are mine unless otherwise noted. Maria Fritsche, Homemade Men in Postwar Austrian Cinema: Nationhood, Genre and Masculinity (New York: Berghahn Books, 2013), 136. “Die Nähe österreichischer Nachkriegsfilme zur Fremdenverkehrswerbung . . . ist also nicht als Sonderfall, sondern geradezu als Wesensbestimmung des ‘österreichischen’ Films anzusehen.” Georg Tillner, “Österreich, ein weiter Weg: Filmkultur zwischen Austrofaschismus und Wiederaufbau,” in Ohne Untertitel: Fragmente einer Geschichte des österreichischen Kinos, ed. Ruth Beckermann and Christa Blümlinger (Vienna: Sonderzahl, 1996), 185. “Art. I: Die demokratische Republik Österreich ist wiederhergestellt und im Geiste der Verfassung von 1920 einzurichten. Art. II: Der im Jahre 1938 dem österreichischen Volke aufgezwungene Anschluss ist null und nichtig.” “Österreichische Unabhängigkeitserklärung,” Wikipedia, 12 November 2014, http://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=%C3%96ste rreichische_Unabh%C3%A4ngigkeitserkl%C3%A4rung&oldid=132822980. Historian Ernst Hanisch’s term Rückbruch denotes the attempt to move on while also connecting back to an earlier process. Ernst Hanisch, Der lange Schatten des Staates: Österreichische Geschichte, 1890–1990 (Vienna: Ueberreuter, 2005), 395. Gertrude Enderle-Burcel, Rudolf Jerabek and Leopold Kammerhofer (eds.), Protokolle des Kabinettsrates der Provisorischen Regierung Karl Renner 1945 (Vienna: Verlag Österreich, 1995), 1:55; transl. and quoted in Oliver Rathkolb, The Paradoxical Republic: Austria 1945–2005, English-language edition (New York: Berghahn Books, 2014), 2–3. “Die Infrastruktur des Landes [konnte nach dem Krieg] bald wieder in Betrieb genommen werden, aber nicht das Heimatgefühl in diesem Land, nicht der Heimat-Begriff.” Robert Menasse, Das Land ohne Eigenschaften: Essay zur österreichischen Identität (Vienna: Sonderzahl, 1993), 94. Elizabeth Boa and Rachel Palfreyman, Heimat—A German Dream: Regional Loyalties and National Identity in German Culture 1890–1990 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 1. See Celia Applegate, A Nation of Provincials: The German Idea of Heimat (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); Alon Confino, The Nation as a Local Metaphor: Württemberg, Imperial Germany, and National Memory, 1871–1918 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press Books, 1997). For an excellent overview of the complex history of a German-Austrian national identity, see Peter Thaler, The Ambivalence of Identity: The Austrian Experience of Nation-Building in a Modern Society (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2001), 51–109; Ruth Wodak et al., The Discursive Construction of National Identity (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), 49–69. Boa and Palfreyman, Heimat, 5. Gernot Heiss, “Pan-Germans, Better Germans, Austrians: Austrian Historians on National Identity from the First to the Second Republic,” German Studies Review 16, no. 3 (1993): 417. Rathkolb, Paradoxical Republic, 24. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, revised edition (New York: Verso, 2016). David Crouch, Rhona Jackson, and Felix Thompson, “The Media and the Tourist Imagination,” in The Media and the Tourist Imagination: Converging Cultures, ed. David Crouch, Rhona Jackson, and Felix Thompson (New York: Routledge, 2005), 1.

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16. John Urry, The Tourist Gaze (London: Sage Publications, 1990). 17. Orvar Löfgren, On Holiday: A History of Vacationing (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 7. 18. Tom Gunning, “Before Documentary: Early Nonfiction and the ‘View’ Aesthetic,” in Uncharted Territory: Essays on Early Nonfiction Film, ed. Daan Hertogs and Nico de Klerk (Amsterdam: Stichting Nederlands Filmmuseum, 1997), 15. 19. Crouch et al. also point out the limits to these parallels between the tourist and the filmic imagination. Whereas the tourist imagination initially requires the (at least theoretical) notion that anything and everything could happen on a trip—even though most trips end up being carefully scripted and circumscribed by travel agents—the filmic imagination, as a form of aesthetic expression, is already curtailed by conventions of genre and narration. Crouch, Jackson, and Thompson, “Media and Tourist Imagination,” 3. As I write this chapter, the ubiquitous smartphone with its visual production and instant publishing capabilities is adding an interesting digital twist to this tension between tourist discourses and media production/consumption. Ibid., 7. 20. For in-depth analyses of the tension between modernity and nature as well as of the role of tourism in the mountain films, see Eric Rentschler, “Mountains and Modernity: Relocating the Bergfilm,” New German Critique 51, Autumn (1990): 137–161; Nancy P. Nenno, “‘Postcards from the Edge’: Education to Tourism in the German Mountain Film,” in Light Motives: German Popular Film in Perspective, ed. Randall Halle and Margaret McCarthy (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2003), 61–84. 21. Eric Rentschler, The Ministry of Illusion: Nazi Cinema and Its Afterlife (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 27–52. 22. Trenker’s film uses the tourist imagination to reinforce the notion of German masculinity as white masculinity, as shown by the contrastive portrayal of the hero’s “blackening” experience in New York and his “whitening” upon returning to the mountains. See Gundolf Graml, “Black Bodies on White Snow: The Reconstruction of Germanness as White in Luis Trenker’s Der Verlorene Sohn (1934),” in From Black to Schwarz: Cultural Crossovers between African America and Germany, ed. Maria Diedrich and Jürgen Heinrichs (Münster: LIT Verlag, 2011), 161–85. 23. Rentschler, The Ministry of Illusion, 125–48. Even in the final moment of rescue, the imaginative power of the tourist gaze remains visible: instead of exhibiting relief about her liberation from the tyrannical marriage, Astrée casts a longing look back onto the island as the ship leaves the harbor, maintaining her perception of the island as space for experimenting with alternative identity narratives despite her negative experience. 24. Rentschler, The Ministry of Illusion, 193–214; Linda Schulte-Sasse, Entertaining the Third Reich: Illusions of Wholeness in Nazi Cinema (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), 302–18. 25. Fritsche, Homemade Men in Postwar Austrian Cinema, 22. Any discussion of moviegoing in the context of leisure and tourism in postwar Austria would be incomplete if it did not address the specific constitution of the movie theater as a place and economic venture. Vienna’s postwar movie landscape continued especially to reflect the Nazi politics of Arisierung: after 1945, the Austrian government returned movie theater real estate and licenses in separate processes. Screening licenses were only returned to previous license holders or their immediate heirs. In those cases where Jewish theater owners and their heirs had been murdered, the license was automatically returned to the Viennese city government’s movie company, KIBA, which would then often buy the associated real estate

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27. 28.

29. 30. 31.

32. 33. 34.

35.

36. 37.

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at a discount from the heirs, as the buildings were basically worthless without a screening license. Thus, when Austrians went to the movies in order to recreate a sense of civilian “normalcy” and to temporarily escape the destruction of their surroundings, they also visited places shaped by an experience of loss, expropriation, and often murder. Tillner, “Österreich,” 180. See Reinhold Wagnleitner, Coca-Colonization and the Cold War: The Cultural Mission of the United States in Austria after the Second World War (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1994). Löfgren, On Holiday, 7. According to film historian Georg Tillner, these screenings generated about one million schillings per month, revenue that was used to finance the distribution of Hollywood films at least until 1946. As the US Army’s cultural affairs officer Eugen Sharin stated it, “this is the only operation in the history of motion pictures where business was done, and is still being done, for Uncle Sam and the American Motion Picture Industry without any expense whatever.” Report of Eugen Sharin to the Office of War Information, Motion Picture Bureau, Oct 11 1945, p. 10. National Archives, RG 260/64 [59.029-2], Folder Film Section; quoted in Tillner, “Österreich,” 182. Ibid., 183. Österreichisches Statistisches Zentralamt, 1959b, Beiträge zur österreichischen Statistik, Vienna, vol. 39, 146; quoted in Fritsche, Homemade Men in Postwar Austrian Cinema, 27. “Multipliziert man die Zahl der im Jahr 1953 gezeigten Filme mit der Anzahl der Spieltage, ergibt sich, daß das österreichische Publikum jeweils dreimal mehr österreichische und westdeutsche als amerikanische Filme gesehen hat.” Tillner, “Österreich,” 183. Fritsche, Homemade Men in Postwar Austrian Cinema, 136. Ibid., 139. Referring to the tourist film’s “forward looking” perspective compared to the Heimatfilm’s “retrospective” sentiments, Fritsche makes a strong argument for treating these genres separately (134). However, my focus in this chapter is on the ways in which the trope of tourism shows up in postwar Austrian mainstream cinema, and I therefore agree with Sabine Hake that, “[f ]requently, the Heimatfilm overlapped with the quintessential consumerist genre of the 1950s, the travel or vacation film.” German National Cinema (New York: Routledge, 2002), 110. My list of generic film locations also identifies some of the signature films of the Heimatfilmwelle, namely Grün ist die Heide (The Heath is Green), 1951; Im Weissen Rössl (White Horse Inn), 1952; Echo der Berge/Der Förster vom Silberwald (Echo of the Mountains/The Forester of the Silver Wood), 1954. Johannes von Moltke, “Evergreens: The Heimat Genre,” in The German Cinema Book, ed. Tim Bergfelder, Erica Carter, and Deniz Göktürk (London: BFI Publishing, 2002), 18–19. “Der Heimatfilm ist das missing link in der ästhetischen Erziehung des deutschsprachigen Menschengeschlechts; er verbindet, was unter Hitler gefiel, mit dem was an Hitler nicht mehr unbedingt gefallen sollte, ohne daß es von ihm direkt hätte verboten werden müssen. . . . Wie hätte die neue deutsche Kulturindustrie ohne Vermittlung des Heimatfilms die unter dem Nationalsozialismus ästhetisch Erzogenen bei ihrem Geschmack packen und als Konsumenten rekrutieren können?” Franz Schuh, “Heimat bist du großer Filme: Thesen zur Kitschindustrie,” in Ohne Untertitel: Fragmente einer Geschichte des österreichischen Kinos, ed. Ruth Beckermann and Christa Blümlinger (Vienna: Sonderzahl, 1996), 255.

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38. Günter Bischof, “‘Conquering the Foreigner’: The Marshall Plan and the Revival of Postwar Austrian Tourism,” in The Marshall Plan in Austria, ed. Günter Bischof, Anton Pelinka, and Dieter Stiefel (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2000), 382. 39. Fritsche, Homemade Men in Postwar Austrian Cinema, 42. 40. Even though the Austrian government saw film mainly as a “lucrative economic asset,” it understood cinema’s importance for national identity. Unable to offer substantial material support, the political and cultural elites offered symbolic patronage by attending film premieres and generally lending the air of the state’s authority to the film industry. Ibid., 41–43. 41. Roman Sandgruber, Ökonomie und Politik: Österreichische Wirtschaftsgeschichte vom Mittelalter bis zur Gegenwart (Vienna: Ueberreuter, 1995), 518. 42. “In Österreich denkt man bei der Erwähnung des Begriffs Heimat ganz spontan an den ‘natürlich’ rosa glänzenden Überguß des Heimatfilms, und . . . an all das, was die (deutschen) Touristen sehen wollen, wenn sie nach Österreich aufs Land kommen.” Robert Buchschwenter, “Ruf der Berge—Echo des Fremdenverkehrs: Der Heimatfilm: Ein österreichischer Konjunkturritt,” in Ohne Untertitel: Fragmente einer Geschichte des österreichischen Kinos, ed. Ruth Beckermann and Christa Blümlinger (Vienna: Sonderzahl, 1996), 282. 43. For nuanced discussions of Heimat in a German context, see Applegate, Nation of Provincials; Peter Blickle, Heimat: A Critical Theory of the German Idea of Homeland (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2004); Boa and Palfreyman, Heimat; Confino, The Nation; Moltke, “Evergreens.” 44. Johannes von Moltke, No Place Like Home: Locations of Heimat in German Cinema (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 14. 45. Ibid., 13. 46. Moltke, “Evergreens,” 19. 47. Moltke, No Place, 17. 48. Ibid., 23. 49. Ibid., 25. 50. “[Österreich] ist in eine Ansammlung von Orten zerfallen, anhand derer Erinnerungsakte und affektive Reaktionen je nach Belieben zu veranlassen oder zu unterlassen sind. . . . Erinnerung wird an Orte gebunden, und das Aufsuchen solcher Orte dient zur Selbstinszenierung des kulturellen Gedächtnisses. Die derart von Fall zu Fall hergestellte Einheit von Zeit und Raum kann . . . das vergleichsweise stabile . . . raumzeitliche Kontinuum, auf das andere ihre nationale Identität gründen, nicht nur ersetzen, sie ist diesem womöglich gar vorzuziehen.” Ines Steiner, “Österreich-Bilder im Film der Besatzungszonen,” in Besetzte Bilder: Film, Kultur und Propaganda in Österreich 1945–1955, ed. Karin Moser (Vienna: Filmarchiv Austria, 2005), 204. 51. Hake, German, 110. 52. Fritsche, Homemade Men in Postwar Austrian Cinema, 104. 53. Ibid., 124. 54. Ibid., 159; Gerald Trimmel, “‘Der Hofrat Geiger’—Die Auferstehung des ‘Homo Austriacus’ im Wachau-Film,” in Draußen in der Wachau: Der etwas andere Reisebegleiter, ed. Walter Grond (Vienna: Haymon Verlag, 2013), n.p. 55. Gertraud Steiner, Die Heimat-Macher: Kino in Österreich 1946–1966 (Vienna: Verlag für Gesellschaftskritik, 1987), 69–70. Dassanowsky points out that the film was also popular in the Netherlands and in Belgium, although its title had to be changed to Viennese Hearts before its premiere in Antwerp to emphasize the Austrian (as opposed to German)

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57. 58. 59. 60. 61.

62. 63.

64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72.

73.

74. 75.

76.

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production background. Robert von Dassanowsky, Austrian Cinema: A History (London: McFarland & Company, 2005), 126. Hake, German, 66; Tillner, “Österreich,” 184. Forst’s claims do not hold up against the actual developments in Austrian film. Austrian production companies quickly adapted the National Socialists’ racial decrees of 1934/35, preemptively implementing Nazi laws several years before the Anschluss actually made them mandatory. Ibid., 178–79. Fritsche, Homemade Men in Postwar Austrian Cinema, 21–22. Dassanowsky, Austrian Cinema, 125. Schuh, “Heimat,” 256. Dassanowsky, Austrian Cinema, 125–26. “Dieser Film spielt im heutigen Österreich, das arm ist und voller Sorgen. Doch—haben Sie keine Angst—davon zeigt er Ihnen wenig. Er geht an der Zeit nicht vorbei, er erzählt nur, daß vieles—wenn man will—auch eine heitere Seite haben kann.” Der Hofrat Geiger. “Bei uns ist alles genau festgelegt seit zwanzig Jahren, daran wird nichts geändert” Ibid. As Maria Fritsche has shown in a highly innovative analysis of the film, the domestic arrangement between the cranky councilor and his clerk can also be read as a homosexual relationship that points to the unstable gender relations of the immediate postwar period only to then reaffirm the dominant heterosexual norm. Homemade Men in Postwar Austrian Cinema, 154–59. “Es ist traurig, dass es so etwas in unserer angeblich so modernen Zeit überhaupt noch gibt.” Der Hofrat Geiger. “In Spitz an der Donau ist natürlich allerhand möglich. [Pause.] Sogar sehr viel Schönes ist dort möglich” Ibid. Doreen B. Massey, Space, Place, and Gender (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 120. Ibid., 120–21. Doreen B. Massey, For Space (London: SAGE Publications, 2005), 20. Ibid., 29. Ibid., 27. Massey, Space, Place, and Gender, 136. “Wir sind freiwillig gegangen. Denn uns ist es nicht egal, wer uns regiert. Und wenn uns jemand nicht passt, dann gehen wir eben, verstehst du. Einen Geiger und einen Lechner, die schickt man nicht in Pension.” Der Hofrat Geiger. “Seit dem Bombenangriff hat sich bis jetzt niemand gefunden, der das aufräumt. Wenn du also ein bisschen herumstöberst, findest du genug Akten, die kein Mensch mehr braucht.” Ibid. Ibid. “als Vergegenwärtigungsversuch: als Unterfangen, das vergangenen Ereignissen durch Berufung auf festgeschriebene ‘Tatsachen’ nachträglich den Schein von Sinnhaftigkeit und Folgerichtigkeit verleiht.” Karl Sierek, “Der lange Abschied: Bilderfaltung und temporale Disjunktion im Österreichischen Nachkriegsfilm,” in Ohne Untertitel: Fragmente einer Geschichte des österreichischen Kinos, ed. Ruth Beckermann and Christa Blümlinger (Vienna: Sonderzahl, 1996), 109. “Weil wir ja im Wiedergutmachungszeitalter leben. Wiedergutmachen, wiedergutmachen, ich kann das Wort schon nicht mehr hören. Die ganzen schweren Jahre bin ich ohne deine Wiedergutmachung ausgekommen, also werde ich es auch weiterhin schaffen.” Der Hofrat Geiger. It was not until the early 1990s that Austria’s government, reeling from international cov-

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78. 79. 80. 81.

82.

83.

84. 85. 86. 87. 88.

89.

erage of the so-called Waldheim affair, eventually acknowledged Austria’s co-responsibility for the Holocaust and created a national “reconciliation fund (Versöhnungsfonds) where all victims of National Socialist crimes could apply for compensation. See Rolf Steininger, Austria, Germany and the Cold War: From the Anschluss to the State Treaty, 1938–1955 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2008), 22–23; Rathkolb, Paradoxical Republic, 260–62. For evidence that DHG still functions as symbol of the reparations debate is visible, see Gerhard Zeillinger, “70 Jahre ‘Hofrat Geiger’: Schuld war keine politische Kategorie,” DerStandard .At, retrieved 26 December 2017 from https://derstandard.at/2000070888456/70-JahreHofrat-Geiger-Wiedergutmachung-Kann-ich-nicht-mehr-hoeren. Fritsche, Homemade Men in Postwar Austrian Cinema, 144–45. Sandgruber, Ökonomie, 388–89. Gernot D. Hasiba, Die Zweite Bundes-Verfassungsnovelle von 1929: Ihr Werdegang u. wesentl. verfassungspolit. Ereignisse seit 1918 (Vienna: Böhlau, 1976). Even in the years before 1929, the young democratic republic had been plagued by violent skirmishes between the armed militias of the Social Democrats (Schutzbund) and the Christian Conservatives (Heimwehr). In 1927, the palace of justice was burned down after the police had fired at people protesting the acquittal of right-wing militia members who had shot and killed a war veteran and a child. The police attack on the demonstration killed at least eighty-nine civilians. Ernst Hanisch, Der lange Schatten des Staates: Österreichische Geschichte, 1890–1990 (Vienna: Ueberreuter, 2005), 289–91. Quite interestingly, the film never elaborates on the fact that Marianne Mühlhuber asked for her daughter to be moved to a new school in 1938, the year of the Anschluss. The fact that she asked for her daughter to be admitted at a Viennese school could be an indirect indication of the more conservative social norms in Spitz. The fact that the petition was never followed up on could be a sign that Vienna also became more conservative and reactionary after the Anschluss. I thank Daniel Gilfillan for pointing this out to me. Karl Schlögel quotes historian Fernand Braudel as having described space as historiography’s “[e]nemy number one” (Feind Nummer eins). Karl Schlögel, Im Raume lesen wir die Zeit: Über Zivilisationsgeschichte und Geopolitik (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 2003), 51. But when Schlögel refers to those geographers and philosophers who work on the “liberation of the historical narrative from the ‘prison of an exclusive temporality’ (Befreiung des historischen Narrativs aus dem ‘Kerker einer ausschließlichen Temporalität’ ) (Edward Soja),” space becomes once again the stagnant tableau where chronological history’s threatening multiplicity and simultaneity of events can be laid out (Schlögel 49). In order to actually release the power of space as generator of different and alternative histories, it is imperative, as Massey writes, to develop a dynamic understanding of place. Dean MacCannell, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 3. Ibid., 1. Ibid., 13. Massey, Space, Place, and Gender, 166–67. Fritsche points out, correctly I think, that the DHG ’s success with female audiences indicates that the idea of men taking on responsibilities again and relieving women of some of the many roles they had assumed over the course of the war was also popular among women. Fritsche, Homemade Men in Postwar Austrian Cinema, 152. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993), 2.

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Bibliography Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Revised edition. New York: Verso, 2016. Applegate, Celia. A Nation of Provincials: The German Idea of Heimat. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990. Bischof, Günter. “‘Conquering the Foreigner’: The Marshall Plan and the Revival of Postwar Austrian Tourism.” In The Marshall Plan in Austria, edited by Günter Bischof, Anton Pelinka, and Dieter Stiefel, 357–401. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2000. Blickle, Peter. Heimat: A Critical Theory of the German Idea of Homeland. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2004. Boa, Elizabeth, and Rachel Palfreyman. Heimat—A German Dream: Regional Loyalties and National Identity in German Culture 1890–1990. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Buchschwenter, Robert. “Ruf der Berge—Echo des Fremdenverkehrs: Der Heimatfilm: Ein österreichischer Konjunkturritt.” In Ohne Untertitel: Fragmente einer Geschichte des österreichischen Kinos, edited by Ruth Beckermann and Christa Blümlinger, 259–83. Vienna: Sonderzahl, 1996. Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” New York: Routledge, 1993. Büttner, Elisabeth, and Christian Dewald. Anschluß an Morgen: Eine Geschichte des österreichischen Films von 1945 bis zur Gegenwart. Salzburg: Residenz Verlag, 1997. Confino, Alon. The Nation as a Local Metaphor: Württemberg, Imperial Germany, and National Memory, 1871–1918. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press Books, 1997. Crouch, David, Rhona Jackson, and Felix Thompson. “The Media and the Tourist Imagination.” In The Media and the Tourist Imagination: Converging Cultures, edited by David Crouch, Rhona Jackson, and Felix Thompson, 1–13. New York: Routledge, 2005. Das blaue Licht (The Blue Light). Directed by Leni Riefenstahl and Bela Balazs (uncredited). Germany: Leni Riefenstahl Production, 1932. Dassanowsky, Robert von. Austrian Cinema: A History. London: McFarland & Company, 2005. Der heilige Berg (The Holy Mountain). Directed by Arnold Fanck. Germany: Universum Film AG, 1926. Der Hofrat Geiger (Privy Councilor Geiger). Directed by Hans Wolff. Vienna: Sascha, 1947. Der verlorene Sohn (The Prodigal Son). Directed by Luis Trenker. Germany: Universal Film AG, 1934. Die Mörder sind unter uns (Murderers among Us). Directed by Wolfgang Staudte. East Germany: Deutsche Film AG, 1946. Echo der Berge/Der Förster vom Silberwald (Echo of the Mountains/The Forester of the Silver Wood). Directed by Alfons Stummer. Vienna: Rondo Film, 1954. Eva erbt das Paradies (Eva Inherits Paradise). Directed by Franz Antel. Vienna: Alpenländische Filmgesellschaft, 1951. Fritsche, Maria. Homemade Men in Postwar Austrian Cinema: Nationhood, Genre and Masculinity. New York: Berghahn Books, 2013. Glaube an mich (Believe in Me). Directed by Géza von Cziffra. Vienna: Löwen-Film, 1946. Graml, Gundolf. “Black Bodies on White Snow: The Reconstruction of Germanness as White in Luis Trenker’s Der verlorene Sohn (1934).” In From Black to Schwarz: Cultural Crossovers between African America and Germany, edited by Maria Diedrich and Jürgen Heinrichs, 161–85. Münster: LIT Verlag, 2011.

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Grün ist die Heide (The Heath is Green). Directed by Hans Deppe. West Germany: Gloria Filmverleih, 1951. Gunning, Tom. “Before Documentary: Early Nonfiction and the ‘View’ Aesthetic.” In Uncharted Territory: Essays on Early Nonfiction Film, edited by Daan Hertogs and Nico de Klerk, 9–24. Amsterdam: Stichting Nederlands Filmmuseum, 1997. Hake, Sabine. German National Cinema. New York: Routledge, 2002. Hanisch, Ernst. Der lange Schatten des Staates: Österreichische Geschichte, 1890–1990. Vienna: Ueberreuter, 2005. Hanisch, Ernst, and Robert Kriechbaumer, eds. Salzburg: Zwischen Globalisierung und Goldhaube. Vienna: Böhlau Verlag, 1997. Hasiba, Gernot D. Die Zweite Bundes-Verfassungsnovelle von 1929: Ihr Werdegang u. wesentl. verfassungspolit. Ereignisse seit 1918. Vienna: Böhlau, 1976. Heiss, Gernot. “Pan-Germans, Better Germans, Austrians: Austrian Historians on National Identity from the First to the Second Republic.” German Studies Review 16, no. 3 (1993): 411–33. Im Weissen Rössl (The White Horse Inn). Directed by Willi Forst. West Germany: Gloria Filmverleih, 1952. In jenen Tagen (Seven Journeys). Directed by Helmut Käutner. West Germany: Camera-Filmproduktion, 1947. La Habanera. Directed by Detlef Sierck. Germany: Universum Film AG, 1937. Löfgren, Orvar. On Holiday: A History of Vacationing. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. MacCannell, Dean. The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. Massey, Doreen B. For Space. London: SAGE Publications, 2005. ———. Space, Place, and Gender. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994. Menasse, Robert. Das Land ohne Eigenschaften: Essay zur österreichischen Identität. Vienna: Sonderzahl, 1993. Moltke, Johannes von. “Evergreens: The Heimat Genre.” In The German Cinema Book, edited by Tim Bergfelder, Erica Carter, and Deniz Göktürk, 18–28. London: BFI Publishing, 2002. ———. No Place Like Home: Locations of Heimat in German Cinema. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. Müller, Erika. “Glaube an mich.” Die Zeit. 5 June 5, 1947. http://www.zeit.de/1947/23/ glaube-an-mich. Münchhausen (The Adventures of Baron Munchhausen). Directed by Joseph von Báky. Berlin: Universal Film AG, 1943. Nenno, Nancy P. “‘Postcards from the Edge’: Education to Tourism in the German Mountain Film.” In Light Motives: German Popular Film in Perspective, edited by Randall Halle and Margaret McCarthy, 61–84. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2003. “Österreichische Unabhängigkeitserklärung.” In Wikipedia, 12 November, 2014. http:// de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=%C3%96sterreichische_Unabh%C3%A4ngigkeitser kl%C3%A4rung&oldid=132822980. Rathkolb, Oliver. The Paradoxical Republic: Austria 1945–2005. English language edition. New York: Berghahn Books, 2014. Rentschler, Eric. The Ministry of Illusion: Nazi Cinema and Its Afterlife. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996.

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———. “Mountains and Modernity: Relocating the Bergfilm.” New German Critique, no. 51 (1990): 137–161. Rotation. Directed by Wolfgang Staudte. East Germany: Deutsche Film AG, 1949. Sandgruber, Roman. Ökonomie und Politik: Österreichische Wirtschaftsgeschichte vom Mittelalter bis zur Gegenwart. Vienna: Ueberreuter, 1995. Schlögel, Karl. Im Raume lesen wir die Zeit: Über Zivilisationsgeschichte und Geopolitik. Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 2003. Schuh, Franz. “Heimat bist du großer Filme: Thesen zur Kitschindustrie.” In Ohne Untertitel: Fragmente einer Geschichte des Österreichischen Kinos, edited by Ruth Beckermann and Christa Blümlinger, 247–57. Vienna: Sonderzahl, 1996. Schulte-Sasse, Linda. Entertaining the Third Reich: Illusions of Wholeness in Nazi Cinema. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996. Sierek, Karl. “Der lange Abschied: Bilderfaltung und temporale Disjunktion im österreichischen Nachkriegsfilm.” In Ohne Untertitel: Fragmente einer Geschichte des österreichischen Kinos, edited by Ruth Beckermann and Christa Blümlinger, 101–19. Vienna: Sonderzahl, 1996. Sissi. Directed by Ernst Marischka. Vienna: Sascha Filmverleih, 1955. Sissi: Die junge Kaiserin (Sissi: The Young Empress). Directed by Ernst Marischka. Vienna: Erma-Film, 1956. Sissi: Schicksalsjahre einer Kaiserin (Sissi: The Fateful Years of an Empress). Directed by Ernst Marischka. Vienna: Erma-Film, 1957. Steiner, Gertraud. Die Heimat-Macher: Kino in Österreich 1946–1966. Vienna: Verlag für Gesellschaftskritik, 1987. Steiner, Ines. “Österreich-Bilder im Film der Besatzungszonen.” In Besetzte Bilder: Film, Kultur und Propaganda in Österreich 1945–1955, edited by Karin Moser, 203–55. Vienna: Filmarchiv Austria, 2005. Steininger, Rolf. Austria, Germany and the Cold War: From the Anschluss to the State Treaty, 1938–1955. New York: Berghahn Books, 2008. Thaler, Peter. The Ambivalence of Identity: The Austrian Experience of Nation-Building in a Modern Society. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2001. Tillner, Georg. “Österreich, ein weiter Weg: Filmkultur zwischen Austrofaschismus und Wiederaufbau.” In Ohne Untertitel: Fragmente einer Geschichte des österreichischen Kinos, edited by Ruth Beckermann and Christa Blümlinger, 175–95. Vienna: Sonderzahl, 1996. Trimmel, Gerald. “‘Der Hofrat Geiger’—Die Auferstehung des ‘Homo Austriacus’ im Wachau-Film.” In Draußen in der Wachau: Der etwas andere Reisebegleiter, edited by Walter Grond. Vienna: Haymon Verlag, 2013. Urry, John. The Tourist Gaze. London: Sage Publications, 1990. Wagnleitner, Reinhold. Coca-Colonization and the Cold War: The Cultural Mission of the United States in Austria after the Second World War. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1994. Wodak, Ruth, et al. The Discursive Construction of National Identity. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009. Zeillinger, Gerhard. “70 Jahre ‘Hofrat Geiger’: Schuld war keine politische Kategorie.” DerStandard.At, 26 December 2017. https://derstandard.at/2000070888456/70-Jahre-Hof rat-Geiger-Wiedergutmachung-Kann-ich-nicht-mehr-hoeren. Zwei in einem Auto (Two in One Car). Directed by Ernst Marischka. Vienna: Erma-Film, 1951.

Chapter 3

GERMAN TOURISTS AS GUARDIANS OF THE AUSTRIAN HEIMAT Renegotiating German-Austrian Relations in Echo der Berge/Der Förster vom Silberwald (Echo of the Mountains/The Forester of the Silver Wood) (1954)

d I

n Privy Councilor Geiger, the councilor slips into the role of tourist in order to model how postwar Austrians can reassemble their fragmented national narratives and disrupted national space into a coherent place image of Austria. The film’s focus is on the domestic version of tourism, but the renovation of the inn as the family’s new home and as a place for guests already points to yet another function of the tourist discourse, namely its role in renegotiating the relationship between Austria and the world around it, specifically with its neighbor Germany. Echo der Berge (EdB)/Der Förster vom Silberwald (DFvS) (Echo of the Mountains/The Forester of the Silver Wood) (1954) is a film that directly addresses how difficult it was to endorse the new Austrian Heimat and, at the same time, claim a Germanic cultural legacy severely contaminated by the crimes of National Socialism.1 Similar to Councilor Geiger, EdB presents tourism as more than a simple means for marketing the Austrian countryside to German tourists. It is the realm where one can experiment with new versions of identity construction; where one can engage in the performative enactment of Heimat and national identity concepts; and where one can nonetheless embrace the resulting identity narratives as quasi-natural and eternal. Although Councilor Geiger and EdB both belong to the Heimatfilm genre at large, they were produced under quite different political and economic circumstances. The renovation of the inn in Councilor Geiger anticipates the massive European Recovery Program (ERP) investment in Austria’s tourism infrastruc-

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ture from 1948 on. Between 1950 and 1955, the tourism industry alone received 404 million schillings (of 525.4 million in total ERP aid) for hotel renovations, with an impressive return on investment:2 foreign currency income from tourism—a much needed source of revenue to cover the export deficit—rose from 9.5 million schillings in 1948 to more than 2 billion schillings in 1954.3 Changing Austro-German relations had much to do with this development. Following the capitulation of Nazi Germany in May 1945, cross-border traffic and trade were severely restricted between the two once again separate countries. Aside from obvious political reasons, there were worries that German tourists would spend West German currency abroad and thereby further endanger the fragile economic recovery of the Western occupation zone. The restrictions caused much concern in Austria’s tourism industry and came up repeatedly in letters of complaint to the Wiederaufbaustelle. In 1946, for instance, a Carinthian hotelier asked not to be misunderstood when pleading for the opening of the Austro-German border, “but it is evident and will be admitted even by the greatest haters of Germans that a broad-based tourism economy will flourish only when we can be visited again by the not always pleasant but flush German clientele.”4 In 1951, this hotelier would finally get what he wished for. After prolonged and tense negotiations between West Germany, Austria, and the respective Allied High Commands, travel and commerce restrictions between Austria and West Germany were lifted. German tourists began to spend their vacations in less expensive Austria again, accounting for 54 percent of all foreign tourists in Austria in 1952/53. According to historian Günter Bischof, the “[r]esumption of normal Austro-German relations was the all-important accelerator for Austrian economic recovery in general and the revival of tourism in particular.”5 But what exactly were “normal” Austro-German relations? The Carinthian hotelier’s rather pejorative description of Germans as merely tolerated paying customers as well as his use of the term Deutschenhasser (haters of Germans) indicate that a change in border formalities would not be sufficient to resolve the complex tensions between Austrian-ness and German-ness. Analogous to Austrians’ slow but gradual recognition and endorsement of the abruptly declared independent and democratic Second Austrian Republic, “normal” Austro-German relations needed time to evolve amid the multilayered sediments of recent and distant historical events. By all accounts, a great majority of Austrians after 1945 voiced negative sentiments about National Socialism and blamed both the latter’s crimes and the former’s suffering on “the Germans.” But this did not mean that Austrians automatically hated all things German. For better or worse, the image of an Austria connected to and playing a significant role within a German sphere of culture persisted in the realms of high culture and academia. When historian Hugo Hantsch, a Benedictine monk and fervent anti-National Socialist, took over the Austrian history chair at the University of Vienna in 1946, he maintained that Austrian glory would “always be German achievement and glory.”6

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Popular cinema is a site where the imaginative processes of tourism and film intersect, and where the complex negotiations between these various Heimat concepts can be traced best. EdB was shot and produced in 1953 and released in 1954, a timespan that overlaps with the changes in Austro-German relations and their dramatic impact on tourism. Moreover, while the film’s final version deviates significantly from the initial idea, it originated as a marketing device for tourism: Baron Franz Mayr-Melnhof, chairman of the Austrian Federal Hunting Association, wanted to produce a Kulturfilm—the contemporary term for documentary—that would promote Austrian ideals of hunting and environmental protection at the 1954 International Hunting Exhibition in Düsseldorf, Germany. Advised that the long nature sequences exceeded the genre format for a documentary and would try the audience’s patience, the production team added a contrived plot in which a young woman renounces her modern urban ways of life and her love to an avant-garde artist in favor of the alpine Heimat and a down-to-earth gamekeeper. The Austrian Trade Ministry recognized the film’s potential as a tourist marketing tool and generously supported the production with funds earmarked for Österreichwerbung.7 The film Echo der Berge opened with great fanfare in November 1954, with the Austrian chancellor and president as honorary guests at a luxurious opening party.8 In West Germany the film premiered under the title Der Förster vom Silberwald and inaugurated a series of so-called Silberwaldfilme, turning the unknown actors Anita Gutweil and Rudolf Lenz into the Heimatfilm couple par excellence.9

Heimat Austria—Between the Garden of Eden and a Tourism Resort EdB tells the story of Liesl Leonhard (Anita Gutweil), a modern artist living in Vienna, who begins to question her emancipated lifestyle and her relationship with a modernist sculptor during a visit to her grandfather, Councilor Leonhard, in his alpine estate in Hochmoos. Long hikes through the mountains with the grandfather’s forester and game warden, Hubert Gerold (Rudolf Lenz), a refugee from East Prussia, open Liesl’s eyes to nature’s supposedly organic order and beauty. They also result in her falling in love with Gerold. Tension arises when Liesl’s Viennese fiancé, the artist Max Freiberg (Erik Frey) arrives. Jealous of Liesl’s interest in the game warden, Freiberg tries to impress her by poaching a stag. Gerold catches him in the act, but lets him go after mistakenly identifying Freiberg’s rifle as one of Councilor Leonhard’s guns and assuming, wrongly, that Liesl has provided Freiberg with the weapon. When the councilor keeps pressing Gerold to reveal the identity of the poacher, the game warden refuses and turns in his resignation. Liesl, who remains unaware of the dramatic events, is disappointed by what she perceives to be Gerold’s sudden disinterest in her and returns to Vienna. Only after Freiberg eventually tells her what happened does Liesl

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return to Hochmoos, where the councilor, after learning the truth, reinstates Gerold as forester and paves the way for the film’s happy ending and a number of Silberwald sequels. For film historian Walter Fritz, “the Austrian people have never been represented more simplistically than in these films, which would even be exported as business cards of this country.”10 Fritz’s damning statement anticipates the general criticism of the film as contributing to Austria’s self-commodification for German tourists by presenting these visitors with a (crypto-Fascist) Heimat ideal “glaringly absent in the hollowed-out landscapes of the soul in postwar Germany.”11 In the face of such withering criticism it is difficult to find redeeming qualities of this film. But salvaging the film’s reputation is not the goal of the following analysis. Instead, I offer a reading of the film’s function in the process of renegotiating postwar Austro-German relations. The film’s representation of a constructed Heimat—the Austrian landscape as “synthetically assembled place” (synthetisch zusammengesetzter Ort)12—actually points to the constructedness and dynamic quality of places in general, and to the need for reimagining new places as sites for new postwar identities in Austria (and Germany) in particular. For all its flaws and trivial elements, and even though its landscape images and narrative are painfully close to the blood-and-soil images of the Fascist era, EdB also illustrates a 1950s contemporary present in which Austrians needed to mobilize the concept of Heimat in order to find their footing again.

A Community on the Move The film’s beginning depicts a community on the move and complicates a longstanding criticism of the Heimatfilm as mainly representing a backward-looking, static societal image. The first sequence of shots presents a herd of game grazing on a snow-covered clearing in the alpine forest, accompanied by the film’s majestic score, non-diegetically produced by the Vienna Symphony Orchestra. After several shots of various deer strolling across the mise-en-scéne, Forester Hubert Gerold and his assistant are shown restocking the feeding places, a scene that demonstrates that the “natural” idyll actually needs a helping human hand. The cracking sound of falling trees breaks apart the pastoral tableau and sends the deer scrambling for cover in the forest. Logging crews have begun to cut down the Silberwald in order to generate revenue for the town of Hochmoos. Alarmed by his game warden, Councilor Leonhard pleads with the town’s mayor to stop the clear-cutting of the Bannwald, a patch of forest that protects the village from mudslides and snow avalanches and is “a small miracle of nature that the creator has given to us in one of his best moments.”13 Anxious to keep the councilor as tenant of the hunting grounds around Hochmoos, the mayor quickly capitulates and decides to generate the needed revenue by mortgaging the town’s real

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estate. Just like the game preserve needs the helping hand of the game warden to become a peaceful place for the deer to graze, the allegedly divine place of the Silberwald only exists as the result of a very earthly capitalist exchange. There is an important parallel here between the representation of the game preserve’s fragile idyll and the town community’s precarious financial situation. At a basic level, both places, as well as the communities whose sense of identity they undergird, appear threatened by invisible but powerful forces. Just as the animals flee upon hearing the sound of falling trees before they (and the audience) can visually identify the loggers as the source of the threat, so the town’s mayor begins to destroy or at least mortgage off some of its lands to address the debt problems of his community caused by a largely invisible modern capitalist system. From the very beginning, places are thus shown as already tied to other places, even if the latter are off-screen and present only via their noticeable absence. Such spatial instabilities are at the center of my discussion of the film’s role in the discourses about Austrian identity, insofar as they illustrate that a quasiautomatic and natural conflation of a community’s identity with a specific place has become untenable in the postwar era. Instead, EdB illustrates Doreen Massey’s observation that “[t]here is, in that sense of a timeless truth of an area, built on somehow internally contained character traits, no authenticity of place.”14 Again and again the film attempts to fix this instability by severing the ties between rural and urban spaces, between tourists and locals, and even by countering the lure of the moving image with postcard-like still images of landscapes. To no avail, as we will see, for once places have been revealed to be constructed and inherently dynamic, any containment strategy is bound to fail. Cinematically, this spatial instability becomes apparent in the peculiar use of lateral camera pans and tracking sequences that disrupt the otherwise dominating postcard-like still shots and mark the moments when the boundaries and the desired wholeness of the imagined Heimat landscape are being violated. For instance, the quick lateral pan that tracks the fleeing deer at the beginning of the film is mirrored by the technically quite intriguing pans that show how an eagle hunts a fox. Later in the film, a panning shot of Liesl’s dog, Rolf, jumping across the creek is used twice. (As it turns out, Liesl has ignored the local laws that require dogs to be leashed and the roaming German shepherd has already poached several deer before Gerold can kill him.)15 As if the film attempts to calm its rhythm after such disruptive panning shots, their accelerated pace is usually followed by cuts to Game Warden Gerold, whose erect and unmoving figure serves as vertical physical barrier against the horizontal camera movements. His role as guardian is foregrounded whenever urban outsiders—tourists—violate the order of the alpine community. When Liesl Leonhard ignores the game preserve’s no skiing rule, the shots of her gliding down the snow-covered slopes are interspersed with shots of Gerold standing rigidly on his skis and tracking Liesl’s movements with a telescope before eventually chasing her down.

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The most obvious example of this attempt to block horizontal movement through vertical barriers is the sequence of shots depicting the arrival of Liesl’s fiancé, the Viennese artist Max Freiberg. Having become suspicious of Liesl’s prolonged stay in Hochmoos, Freiberg decides to visit her on the same day that Liesl and Gerold finally give in to their feelings for each other during a challenging hike to an eagle’s nest. Repeated shots of Freiberg moving across the screen from left to right as he races his noisy red convertible to Hochmoos disrupt the still image-like shots of Gerold and Liesl, who are shown gazing quietly off-screen to observe an animal or to admire the landscape. Freiberg’s sports car, a modern and supposedly liberating means of transportation, is no match for the vertically organized space of Hochmoos. Before Freiberg makes it to Hochmoos, Liesl and Gerold already embrace each other for their first kiss. As the red convertible drives up to the councilor’s estate, it comes to a halt right in front of Gerold, whose upright body not only seems to guard the entrance to the councilor’s house but also suggests that this will likely be the limit of Freiberg’s intrusion into Hochmoos. Erica Carter has interpreted a similar occurrence of lateral camera movements in Ernst Marischka’s Sissi trilogy as indications of the main character’s—Sissi’s— victim status and her desire to “escape the static frame and seek release in untrammeled flight.”16 By contrast, lateral camera movements in EdB are visual reminders of spatial instability and unstable identities. The film exhibits significant effort to stifle mobility where it seems to be most apparent, namely in those characters who embody the modern and urban tourist: Max Freiberg and Liesl Leonhard. Avant-garde Viennese sculptor Freiberg is the negative version of the tourist as “modern-man-in-general” (see my discussion of this concept in the introduction and in the previous chapter about Councilor Geiger.) Rather than potentially productive and unifying, his mobility is shown to be superficial, immoral, and threatening. Although he is in a relationship with Liesl, Freiberg openly courts other women. With their straight lines and sharply contrasting color schemes, the interior designs of the artist’s living and working quarters signal a spatial dynamic and restlessness that contrasts starkly with the earthen colors and the thick round walls of Liesl’s grandfather’s house in Hochmoos.17 The artist’s last name, Freiberg (literally: free mountain), invokes liberal and libertine character traits that threaten the Austrian Heimat’s integrity and boundaries.18 Instead of accompanying Liesl to her grandfather right away, Freiberg prefers to attend an exhibition in Paris, and he unabashedly parades his cosmopolitanism when he greets Liesl with “Paris was a big success, I need to tell you all about it” (Paris war ein großer Erfolg, ich muss dir unbedingt davon erzählen).19 Councilor Leonhard is depicted as man of art-historical sophistication—he immediately dates a wooden statue given to him by Liesl to the “first half of the sixteenth century” (erste Hälfte sechzehntes Jahrhundert)—but Freiberg dismisses his taste as quaint and announces that he will convert the grandfather to the camp of modernism. In light of Freiberg’s apparent international orientation and his disinterest in the

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local community, it is only fitting that the doors of the councilor’s estate remain closed to him: instead of spending the night at the grandfather’s house and under the same roof with Liesl, Freiberg takes a room at the local inn. As liminal space and buffer zone between outside and inside, a hotel seems to be the only appropriate accommodation for this urban tourist. So threatening is Freiberg’s transgressive mobility that he eventually needs to be removed from the Heimat space altogether. Freiberg’s exit from the Heimat community is triggered by a conversation with the inn’s waitress, whose curiosity about his hunting abilities he deflects with the sarcastic remark that for the people of Hochmoos “a man apparently needs to be a hunter in order to be a man.”20 The waitress replies that this certainly applies to Liesl’s interest in the hunter and game warden Gerold. When she teasingly asks if Freiberg perhaps does not know how to shoot, he caustically notes that “once we all had to learn how to shoot.”21 Rather than complicating the representation of the Austrian alpine idyll by following up on this reference to Austrian soldiers’ role in the Nazi Wehrmacht, the film uses the comment to recategorize the crimes of National Socialism as German rather than Austrian. Qua Freiberg’s associative connection to other and foreign places and concepts—Paris and modernism—his flippant remark about all men’s soldierly past appears just as alien to the construction of an Austrian national identity in the microcosm of Hochmoos as his cosmopolitan flair as an avant-garde artist does to Councilor Leonhard’s traditionalism.22 Provoked by the waitress’ comments, Freiberg takes her up on her offer of a gun and poaches the estate’s best stag; Warden Gerold catches him in the act. Freiberg first ridicules the game warden’s outrage, only to then meekly offer payment for the damage, which the warden refuses. Gerold misinterprets the initials on the rifle and suspects that Freiberg received the gun from Liesl. To protect her, he lets Freiberg go, and the latter departs from Hochmoos immediately. Despite pressure from the councilor, Gerold refuses to identify the poacher and submits his resignation. Freiberg finally admits the truth to Liesl during an argument in his Viennese apartment, a scene that also marks the last appearance of the modern sculptor and clears the path for Liesl’s eventual reunion with Forester Gerold. Liesl is the other character whose tourist mobility and connection to outside places the film recalibrates. Instead of removing her from the plot like Freiberg, Liesl is converted into someone who belongs in Hochmoos. After Gerold has caught Liesl in her most touristic act, as illegal trespasser in the game preserve, she claims to have missed the sign. When Gerold accuses her saying “urban citizens like you only see what you want to see” (ihr Stadtmenschen seht auch nur das, was ihr sehen wollt). Liesl replies: “Then why don’t you teach me how to see correctly?” (Warum zeigen Sie mir dann nicht, wie man richtig sieht?). Gerold’s subsequent lectures on the hunter’s role in society are interesting not because of their social-Darwinist moralism but because of the ways in which they model the

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use of the modern tourist gaze as a tool for envisioning a place as quasi-natural and allegedly pre-modern Heimat. When Gerold takes Liesl under his wing, he claims to remove her urban and modern blinders and teach her an older way of seeing the supposedly unfiltered and “real” beauty of Hochmoos. Gerold’s mentoring amounts to a crash course in applying a highly constructed tourist gaze in order to identify temporary stability amid the complex dynamics of modern life. Gone are the logging crews as signs of a capitalist economy whose growth paradigm depends on the destruction of natural resources; gone, too, is Freiberg, the personified link to a history of modern urban existence that has developed the touristic perception of rural landscapes in the first place, but also an unwelcome reminder of Austrian entanglement in National Socialism. Liesl’s un-learning of a modernist, abstract, but also critical mode of perception, and her relearning of how to view landscapes in a “natural” way, a way that makes them relevant for a particular identity construction, illustrates yet again the function of tourism as a “cultural laboratory.”23 Evidence for this can be found in her drastically changing artistic style from sculpting to drawing. The abstract three-dimensional clay sculptures Liesl creates at the beginning of the film indicate a desire to transcend the boundaries of realism through expressionist artistic means. At the end of the film, these reminders of a dangerous and dynamic experimentation have been replaced by a decidedly more harmless form of art, namely the naïve drawings and paintings of deer on alpine meadows. The “perhaps . . . most ‘modern’ woman in Austrian Heimatfilm,” as Maria Fritsche writes, is ultimately shown as “unsure whether she actually wants to be independent.”24

Heimat and the Femininization of Austrian Places Why does the touristic mobility result in Freiberg’s expulsion but supports Liesl’s transformation into a quasi-local? The answer I propose here is once again closely linked to the reconstruction of national identity as a patriarchal concept in which the place identified as home/Heimat is symbolized by a woman who functions as firm terrain for a man in search of stability. Just as in Councilor Geiger, where Marianne symbolizes an alternative version of Austrian history, which, in turn, forms the basis for her temporary autonomous existence, Liesl, too, appears as a rather emancipated woman at the film’s beginning. Her ability to travel between different places and different identities undermines the traditional male concept of identity, exemplified by Councilor Leonhard and Game Warden Gerold. Although the latter two are depicted as core representatives of Hochmoos, as more native than the actual locals, they are in fact also outsiders and tourists, albeit with a more traumatic experience of mobility. With his title, his authority as landowner, and his quasi-aristocratic demeanor, Councilor Leonhard evokes

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the lost world of the Habsburg aristocracy on Sommerfrische in the countryside. Hubert Gerold, on the other hand, is one of the many refugees from the former East German provinces who populate the Heimatfilm genre in the late 1940s and early 1950s.25 Unlike Freiberg and Liesl Leonhard (in her initial position as avant-garde sculptor), who seem to have found a way to accept the spatial instability and changing identity narratives as an inherent basic condition of modern life, Gerold and Councilor Leonhard strive for a traditional connection between identity and a bounded place where outside influences can be held at bay. In order to accomplish the performative reconstruction of Austrian-ness according to this template, the film needs to remove Freiberg but keep Liesl, whose gradual conversion from modern and independent city dweller into content Austrian local serves as a blueprint for Austrian female audiences that must be retained as a feminine embodiment of the Austrian nation. Quite appropriately, the performative reconstruction of Austrian-ness starts with a dressing scene before the hunter’s ball at Hochmoos. Liesl wants to acknowledge the local importance of this event by changing into her new evening gown, a long, shimmering, golden dress that bares parts of her shoulders and her neck and tightly hugs her figure. Her grandfather instantly disapproves of this stunning outfit for a very particular reason: COUNCILOR LEONHARD: We do not want to signal too strongly to our hunters that you are only a visitor . . . (Wir wollen unseren Jägern nicht zu sehr zeigen, dass du nur auf Besuch bist.) LIESL: I don’t understand you, grandfather. I think the dress fits me perfectly. (Ich versteh’ nicht, Großvater. Ich denke, das Kleid passt mir wunderbar). COUNCILOR LEONHARD: It fits you, but it does not fit us. (Es passt dir, aber es passt nicht zu uns.) LIESL: You have to take me the way I am, I cannot simply turn into a different human being. (Ihr müsst mich schon nehmen, wie ich bin, ich kann mich nicht einfach in einen anderen Menschen verwandeln.) COUNCILOR LEONHARD: That’s not what I am asking of you, but for tonight I have envisioned something very different for you. (Das verlangt auch keiner von dir, aber für heute abend habe ich mir etwas ganz anderes vorgestellt.)26

Despite his disavowal, changing Liesl into a different human being is precisely what the grandfather wants to do. The fact that he starts with her dress does not simply indicate a superficial desire for conformity. Rather, it shows the councilor’s intuitive understanding that it is the discourse that shapes the idea of substance—the dress that changes the person—and not the other way round. Thus, when Liesl gives in and wears the local Dirndl, she does not simply change “for tonight only” (nur für heute abend).27 Her change will be permanent, as the subsequent episodes in the film demonstrate, which closely track her gradual trans-

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formation into the symbol of a feminine, passive, and, therefore, stable Heimat, where she then functions as an anchor for two male characters (and a postwar audience) desperate for stability amid a rapidly accelerating postwar world. EdB undeniably offers up an image of Austria for tourist consumption, but the function of the discourse of tourism in this film goes further. Although the film ridicules and dismisses all overtly visible forms of modern tourism and transportation, its presentation of a supposedly closed-off place as a new Heimat for the disoriented male characters relies on the sophisticated deployment of a culturally conditioned tourist gaze. Max Freiberg is expelled from the narrative not because he is unable to understand the value of a fixed and stable identity, but because his self-image is too stable. He is dangerously self-assured of his identity as artist, so much so that he can feel at home whether he is in Vienna, Paris, or Hochmoos. He delineates his identity without any kind of natural connection to a place or a woman. His jealousy of Liesl is temporary, and when she leaves him for good he is already embracing another woman at a party. This kind of multi-spatial identity is also too active and virile for the desired postwar Austrian masculinity, whose proclaimed soft and non-aggressive appearance, as Maria Fritsche has shown, formed an important element in Austria’s postwar self-representation as an innocent and passive place trampled upon by the more virile and aggressive Prussian-German neighbor.28 Ironically, by removing Freiberg from the plot, the film also removes an Austrian from the miseen-scène and makes the German game warden into the prototypical Austrian. This is more than a nod to German tourists, who might have seen in Austria a place that was more receptive to nostalgic views of the recent past. It is also a use of the discourse of tourism to recalibrate the connection between Austrian-ness and German-ness in general. In contrast to the modern sculptor Freiberg, whose artistic vision looks to foreign horizons, Gerold’s artistic occupation merges old German and Austrian culture. He performs works by the German composer Johann Sebastian Bach on the church organ and rejects a dinner with Liesl in order to listen to a live radio broadcast of Austrian composer Anton Bruckner’s Eighth Symphony. At first, EdB might indeed appear more reactionary than most of the German Heimatfilme.29 But while it does not utilize the overt symbols of modern tourism to signal the dialectical function of Heimat that Johannes von Moltke has so convincingly distilled in his discussion of German Heimatfilme, EdB is also an attempt to negotiate the insecurity and confusion that the lost war has wrought on familiar discourses of identity. The film’s last scene assembles the councilor, the forester, and the hunter community under the auspices of the Catholic priest in a remarkably conservative social tableau reminiscent of the Austrian authoritarian period, the Ständestaat of the 1930s. But the priest’s sermon in which he admonishes the hunters and foresters to take care of the natural environment simultaneously admits that the assembled social forces will not be able to stop

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the progress of civilization and modernization. For better or worse, the representation of Hochmoos as symbolic Austrian Heimat, with a simple social structure and clear boundaries, will provide only temporary rest and stability. *** In light of the historical and political developments under National Socialism and during the decade under Allied occupation, the films discussed in the previous two chapters certainly offered temporary escapism and contributed to the beautified tourism image of Austria. This specific function makes them crucial documents for studying how the discourse of tourism facilitated not only Austria’s performative self-reinscription on the (imaginary) map of the international community but also Austrians’ journey toward a new national self-image after 1945. Because these films, and much of the Heimatfilm-genre in general, tried so hard to generate an image of Austria as undisturbed and ahistorical idyll, they also function as blueprints for the processes of national reorientation. I agree with Fritsche that the “discursive theme of mobility . . . offers the promise of a new beginning,” but my analysis also shows that the discourse of tourism does not only “suggest that ties of (personal and national) history can be easily shed” but that tourism, as a complex set of practices and discourses, is at the center of performative re-enactments of national identity.30 On the one hand, the films’ focus on tourist images and practices seem to take viewers away from contemporary political events; on the other hand, history and politics shine through in plot developments, dialogues, and mise-en-scène of both Councilor Geiger and EdB. By connecting with audiences through the discourse of tourism, the films also invite viewers to mobilize notions of place and identity, a process that was crucial for the performative reconstruction of a national Austrian-ness across political divides and historical caesuras. There is nothing in these films that indicates a self-critical Austrian awareness with regard to the country’s co-responsibility for the crimes of National Socialism; but they reveal much about the complex processes through which Austrians were able, for better or worse, to forge a new national narrative for the postwar period. And in doing so, the films address the negative and unpleasant elements of Austria’s past in small but crucial details: in the awkwardness in which they represent gender relations; in the contrived nostalgia of their cinematography; and in the utterings of character lines, where the gaps, omissions, and non-sequiturs often speak louder than any words. The three chapters in the following section will take a much more direct look at the connection between the discourse of tourism and Austria’s role under National Socialism. The representation of Austria’s National Socialist past during the 2009 European Capital of Culture program in the Upper Austrian city of Linz will open up a discussion of the limitations of communicating historiographic knowledge through tourism. The subsequent close readings of Elfriede Jelinek’s

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Die Kinder der Toten (The Children of the Dead) and Christoph Ransmayr’s Morbus Kitahara (The Dog King) will revisit the connection between history and space and also highlight how imaginary, fictional spaces created by tourism discourse might provide a more accurate route to a confrontation with the horrors of history than actual geographical coordinates.

Notes 1. Since I discuss the film’s function within tourism discourse and its connection to Austrian national identity narratives I use the title of the Austrian release, Echo der Berge, henceforth cited as EdB in the text and in the notes. 2. Günter Bischof, “‘Conquering the Foreigner’: The Marshall Plan and the Revival of Postwar Austrian Tourism,” in The Marshall Plan in Austria, ed. Günter Bischof, Anton Pelinka, and Dieter Stiefel (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2000), 379. 3. Roman Sandgruber, Ökonomie und Politik: Österreichische Wirtschaftsgeschichte vom Mittelalter bis zur Gegenwart (Vienna: Ueberreuter, 1995), 518. 4. “Es ist aber evident und auch von den grössten Deutschenhassern zugegeben, dass ein Fremdenverkehr in die Breite . . . nur möglich ist, wenn uns auch das nicht immer angenehme, so doch zahlungsfähige deutsche Publikum wieder besuchen kann.” In OeSta/AdR BM für Handel u. Wiederaufbau K711/e 1946-1948 Abt. Fremdenverkehr Varia, Geschäftszahl 160.261/46; emphasis added. All translations into English are mine unless otherwise noted. 5. Bischof, “Conquering,” 382. 6. Hugo Hantsch, Österreichs Schicksalsweg (Österreich, Schriftenreihe der kath. Akademikergemeinde in Österreich, Heft 1, Innsbruck, Vienna, and Munich, 1934), 3; quoted in Gernot Heiss, “Pan-Germans, Better Germans, Austrians: Austrian Historians on National Identity from the First to the Second Republic,” German Studies Review 16, no. 3 (1993): 417. As Heiss points out, many Austrian historians considered the negative developments under National Socialism as belated proof that a großdeutsche Lösung—a German Empire under Habsburg and not Prussian leadership—would have been the better solution: “Austrian historians were simply convinced that by holding the anti-Prussian point of view they had had the correct Austrian point of view all along. Thus they were in good antifascist company, for both communist and conservative propagators of the Austrian nation founded their historical constructions upon the cliché of the bad Prussians having been responsible for all German misery.” Heiss, “Pan-Germans,” 421. 7. Mayr-Melnhof ’s personal connections to then Minister of Trade Udo Illig certainly helped in obtaining 700,000 schillings, about a fifth of the overall production costs. Since the Austrian government secured a proportionate amount of potential profits, the film’s unexpected popularity eventually produced additional revenue Austria’s coffers. Gertraud Steiner, Die Heimat-Macher: Kino in Österreich 1946–1966 (Vienna: Verlag für Gesellschaftskritik, 1987), 162. 8. Ibid., 164. 9. The Bavarian Union Film bought the West German distribution rights for 300,000 marks and made 5 million marks profit. Steiner, Die Heimat-Macher, 164. In 1956, EdB received the Bambi Film Award, West Germany’s award for commercially successful films.

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10.

11.

12. 13. 14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

19. 20. 21.

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Robert Buchschwenter, “Ruf der Berge—Echo des Fremdenverkehrs: Der Heimatfilm: Ein österreichischer Konjunkturritt,” in Ohne Untertitel: Fragmente einer Geschichte des österreichischen Kinos, ed. Ruth Beckermann and Christa Blümlinger (Vienna: Sonderzahl, 1996), 263. “Simpler ist das österreichische Volk eigentlich nirgends dargestellt worden als in diesen Filmen, die dann auch als Visitenkarten dieses Landes exportiert wurden.” Fritz Walter, Kino in Österreich 1945–1983: Film zwischen Kommerz und Avantgarde (Vienna: Österreichischer Bundesverlag, 1984), 82. “das in den unterwühlten Seelenlandschaften der (deutschen) Nachkriegszeit als Verlustposten klaffte.” Buchschwenter, “Ruf der Berge,” 264. Ironically, the actor Rudolf Lenz, who played Hubert Gerold in EdB and also appeared in several of the sequels, played into the hands of the critics when he later commented on the film as representation of Austria: “I believe that the film significantly contributed to the development of Austrian tourism. Looking back, I think it’s a shame that Austria does not focus more on its strengths. I believe that EdB . . . was an Austrian film that sold [sic] Austrian mentality (Ich glaube, daß der Film sehr viel zur Ankurbelung des Fremdenverkehrs beigetragen hat. Wenn ich nun zurückblicke, würde ich sagen, daß es eigentlich schade ist, daß sich Österreich nicht mehr auf sich selbst besinnt. Ich finde, daß dieser ‘Förster vom Silberwald’ . . . ein rein österreichischer Film war und die österreichische Mentalität verkaufte). Quoted in Walter, Kino in Österreich, 83. Steiner, Heimat-Macher, 168. “Der Silberwald ist ein kleines Naturwunder, das uns der Schöpfer in seiner schönsten Laune geschenkt hat.” EdB. Doreen B. Massey, Space, Place, and Gender (Minneapolis:University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 121. For a discussion of the film’s representation of environmentalist perspectives see Rachel Palfreyman, “Green Strands on the Silver Screen? Heimat and Environment in the German Cinema,” in The Culture of German Environmentalism: Anxieties, Visions Realities, ed. Axel Goodbody (New York: Berghahn Books, 2002), 171–86. The warden’s killing of Rolf is an essential element in the reeducation of the urbanized and deracinated Liesl; although Liesl is initially shocked by Gerold’s killing of her dog and accuses the warden of emotional coldness, she ultimately comes around to accept the warden’s act as necessary for the greater good of the hunting preserve. Erica Carter, “Sissi the Terrible: Melodrama, Victimhood, and Imperial Nostalgia,” in Screening War: Perspectives on German Suffering, ed. Paul Cooke and Marc Silberman (New York: Camden House, 2010), 91. For a detailed discussion of the role of architecture in the Austrian Heimatfilm, see Irene Nierhaus, “Wie im Film: Heimat als Projekt des Wiederaufbaus,” in Ohne Untertitel: Fragmente einer Geschichte des österreichischen Kinos, ed. Ruth Beckermann and Christa Blümlinger (Vienna: Sonderzahl, 1996), 287. On a subconscious but no less important level, the surname’s prominence as a GermanJewish last name marks Freiberg as outsider by tapping into a carefully camouflaged but still prevalent Austrian anti-Semitism after 1945. “Freiberg Genealogy,” retrieved 1 December 2019 from https://www.hebrewsurnames.com/FREIBERG. EdB. “Bei euch fängt der Mann erst wohl beim Jäger an.” Ibid. “Das haben wir ja alle einmal lernen müssen.” Ibid.

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22. For an insightful analysis of Freiberg’s poaching in the context of postwar masculinities, see Jennifer Kapczynski, “Postwar Ghosts: ‘Heimatfilm’ and the Specter of Male Violence. Returning to the Scene of the Crime,” German Studies Review 33, no. 2 (2010): 322. 23. Orvar Löfgren, On Holiday: A History of Vacationing (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). 24. Maria Fritsche, Homemade Men in Postwar Austrian Cinema: Nationhood, Genre and Masculinity (New York: Berghahn Books, 2013), 115. 25. Johannes von Moltke, No Place Like Home: Locations of Heimat in German Cinema (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 135–42. 26. EdB. 27. Ibid. 28. “It is highly interesting, then, that images of hard, virile men, so dominant in the public sphere, were largely absent from postwar Austrian films. This helps to show that the function of Austrian cinema was different to that of, for instance, public imagery: popular cinema sought to appease and harmonise, and thus promoted a distinct, cultured, softer masculinity to imbue Austrian identity with new meaning.” Fritsche, Homemade Men in Postwar Austrian Cinema, 45–46. See also my discussion of the gendered representation of Austria’s post-1945 identity in chapter 1. 29. Ibid., 48–49. 30. Ibid., 147.

Bibliography Bischof, Günter. “‘Conquering the Foreigner’: The Marshall Plan and the Revival of Postwar Austrian Tourism.” In The Marshall Plan in Austria, edited by Günter Bischof, Anton Pelinka, and Dieter Stiefel, 357–401. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2000. Buchschwenter, Robert. “Ruf der Berge—Echo des Fremdenverkehrs: Der Heimatfilm: Ein österreichischer Konjunkturritt.” In Ohne Untertitel: Fragmente einer Geschichte des österreichischen Kinos, edited by Ruth Beckermann and Christa Blümlinger, 259–83. Vienna: Sonderzahl, 1996. Carter, Erica. “Sissi the Terrible: Melodrama, Victimhood, and Imperial Nostalgia.” In Screening War: Perspectives on German Suffering, edited by Paul Cooke and Marc Silberman, 81– 101. New York: Camden House, 2010. Echo der Berge/Der Förster vom Silberwald (Echo of the Mountains/The Forester of the Silver Wood). Directed by Alfons Stummer. Vienna: Rondo Film, 1954. Fritsche, Maria. Homemade Men in Postwar Austrian Cinema: Nationhood, Genre and Masculinity. New York: Berghahn Books, 2013. Heiss, Gernot. “Pan-Germans, Better Germans, Austrians: Austrian Historians on National Identity from the First to the Second Republic.” German Studies Review 16, no. 3 (1993): 411–33. Kapczynski, Jennifer. “Postwar Ghosts: ‘Heimatfilm’ and the Specter of Male Violence. Returning to the Scene of the Crime.” German Studies Review 33, no. 2 (2010): 305–33. Löfgren, Orvar. On Holiday: A History of Vacationing. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. Massey, Doreen B. Space, Place, and Gender. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994.

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Moltke, Johannes von. No Place Like Home: Locations of Heimat in German Cinema. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. Nierhaus, Irene. “Wie im Film: Heimat als Projekt des Wiederaufbaus.” In Ohne Untertitel: Fragmente einer Geschichte des österreichischen Kinos, edited by Ruth Beckermann and Christa Blümlinger, 285–303. Vienna: Sonderzahl, 1996. Palfreyman, Rachel. “Green Strands on the Silver Screen? Heimat and Environment in the German Cinema.” In The Culture of German Environmentalism: Anxieties, Visions Realities, edited by Axel Goodbody, 171–86. New York: Berghahn Books, 2002. Sandgruber, Roman. Ökonomie und Politik: Österreichische Wirtschaftsgeschichte vom Mittelalter bis zur Gegenwart. Vienna: Ueberreuter, 1995. Steiner, Gertraud. Die Heimat-Macher: Kino in Österreich 1946–1966. Vienna: Verlag für Gesellschaftskritik, 1987. Walter, Fritz. Kino in Österreich 1945–1983: Film zwischen Kommerz und Avantgarde. Vienna: Österreichischer Bundesverlag, 1984.

Part II

DARK PLACES Tourism and the Representation of Austria’s Involvement in National Socialism and the Holocaust

d The country needs lots of space on top so that its late ghosts are able to hover above the waters. —Elfriede Jelinek, The Children of the Dead (1995) Come back to the quarry? I didn’t come back. I was in the quarry even when I was walking through the rubble of Vienna or Dresden or any of the other harrowed cities. . . . I never left. —Christoph Ransmayr, Morbus Kitahara (1995)

Chapter 4

LINZ09 Tourism and History on Local, Regional, and European Levels

d S

tanding on the baroque main square of Linz on a bright and sunny day in June 2015, I am struck by the extent to which the negative parts of Austria’s twentieth-century history have become part of tourism marketing. In many locations frequented by tourists and locals alike, brochures, posters, and leaflets announce events and exhibits related to the city’s historical role under National Socialism. For instance, the prominently placed display cabinet on the façade of the historic city hall does not advertise theater performances or music concerts. Instead, the window presents a large map of Linz with the sites of persecution and murder during National Socialism.1 Also during this same visit, the Linz steel plant VÖEST (United Austrian Steel Works), one of the successor companies of the infamous Hermann Göring conglomerate, advertises the opening of an exhibit about its exploitation of forced laborers from the nearby Mauthausen and Gusen concentration camps;2 a temporary show in the city museum Nordico depicts how the people of Linz experienced the city’s division between the occupying US Army and the Soviet Red Army;3 and visitors can participate in guided tours through a network of tunnels under the hills of Linz built by concentration camp inmates.4 These highly visible presentations and promotions of Austria’s and Linz’s problematic past in the summer of 2015 were no coincidence. In 2015, Austria commemorated the seventieth anniversary of the country’s liberation from National Socialism and the sixtieth anniversary of the end of postwar Allied occupation. These anniversaries presented a welcome opportunity for promoting Linz as booming regional capital that confronts its dark history without reviving the long dominant narrative of Austria as first victim of National Socialist aggres-

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Figure 4.1. The baroque façades of the main square of Linz are mirrored on the window display of a map showing sites of National Socialist persecution. Photo by author.

sion.5 The blueprints for this marketing strategy were developed several years earlier in the context of Linz09, the city’s year-long celebration of its designation as a European Capital of Culture in 2009. As Linz’s deputy mayor underscored in 2015, “[b]y working through the topic [of National Socialism] in the cultural arena we continue the direction of Linz09 and courageously approach the history of the twentieth century.”6 Not so long ago politicians and tourism managers shied away from referencing Austria’s involvement in National Socialism and the Holocaust. Now they were eager to offer “both the city’s guests and the local citizens a suspenseful presentation of the topic in museums and in tourist media.”7 As a frequently returning former local, as a scholar with an interest in cultural representations of history, and as someone who also engages in tourist activities when visiting my former home country, I was intrigued to see how a historically sound and comparatively critical narrative of Austria’s collaboration with National Socialism seemed to have become part of the city’s official image. At the same time, I wondered to what extent the stated intention to present a “suspenseful” version of this history would also result in a sustained dissemination of historical knowledge among tourists and locals. The desire to entertain, while not surprising from a tourism marketing standpoint, brings up a series of important questions for the communication and representation of history: will

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local Austrians develop a sense of responsibility and accountability for the crimes their parents or grandparents might have witnessed or even been involved in? Does the historical remapping of Linz and Upper Austria result in a transformed experience of spaces and places for contemporary tourists and locals? Will visits to museums and guided tours that focus on the National Socialist history simply be an addition to window-shopping in the historic downtown’s pedestrian zone? Or will tourists and locals actually encounter the ghosts of history and develop a sense of haunting during their explorations of the city? This is the first of three chapters that explore tourism’s complex role in the presentation of history and memory both in the forms of museum exhibits and in literary texts. I will first discuss the Linz09 program to probe the opportunities and limitations of experiential approaches to history in the context of tourism. Drawing on Avery Gordon’s concept of ghosts as indicators of historical hauntedness and Alison Landsberg’s notion of “prosthetic memory,” I will show that attempts to make history tangible and affective in and through the touristic infrastructure can indeed result in increased accessibility and new forms of knowledge. But, as some of the Linz09 examples demonstrate, the desire to generate affect via conventional historiography can stretch, and sometimes breach, the boundaries of historical accuracy. My subsequent close readings of two fictional literary texts suggest that fictional narratives can in some instances provide more meaningful affective and tangible approaches to memory and history than the methodologies of historiography, and they can do so without corrupting the latter. Two separate chapters in this part analyze Elfriede Jelinek’s Die Kinder der Toten (The Children of the Dead) (1995) and Christoph Ransmayr’s Morbus Kitahara (The Dog King) (1995) as narratives that use Austria’s familiar tourism landscape as a “transferential space,” which provides “prosthetic” access to the memories of those persecuted and murdered by the National Socialist regime.8

Telling a New Story: How the European Capital of Culture (ECOC) Program Changed the Representation of Upper Austrian History How Linz prepared for and then executed its role as an ECOC constitutes a unique case study for analyzing the intersection between history and tourism in Austria within local, regional, national, and supra-national/European frameworks. Ever since its inception in 1985, the ECOC program has brought together tourism and culture in a sometimes uneasy relationship.9 As the program’s guidelines stipulate, applications should be grounded in a city’s cultural and historical heritage, address European connections and transnational movements such as migration, and generate long-term benefits for the local and regional population, especially its creative and cultural institutions.10 But tourism remained an important criterion, especially when it came to assessing a particular city’s

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performance: “Previous ECOCs have reported a legacy based on . . . [g]reater European and international understanding and profile, often seen in increased tourism and reputation.”11 It is thus not surprising that Linz designed its application with an eye toward the city’s opportunities on the European tourism market. Conscious of Linz’s historical role in Adolf Hitler’s biography and in National Socialist architectural planning, the more than one-hundred-page application booklet includes multiple nods to the city’s National Socialist past and references Hitler’s personal ambition to transform the “provincial town . . . into a cultural metropolis in the Danube region.”12 Nonetheless, the EU’s selection committee apparently disagreed with the authors’ claim that Linz was one of the first larger European cities to address its National Socialist past “in a comprehensive, radical and therefore exemplary fashion.”13 Instead, the EU commission demanded more critical attention to the city’s National Socialist past not just in the overall vision but in the program itself: “[R]ecent history should not be discounted from the programme and . . . it would be a real benefit if the Linz programme included material referring to the city’s history in the context of the Third Reich.”14 In response to this conditional approval, the organizational committee of Linz09 hastened to acknowledge the need for addressing the National Socialist period more directly: “In light of the significance of this period and the special role Linz played in the NS system, the National Socialist period will form a programmatic focus throughout the program year and across a range of cultural areas.”15 This exchange suggests the ECOC program amounted to a form of European “governmentality” through culture and tourism. Building on prior programs such as European Cultural Roads, Europe Days, and European Theme Years, the ECOC program establishes a Verortungsmaßnahme (process of localization) that anchors the EU’s otherwise abstract authority in space and time and “Europeanizes” spaces and places in annual intervals.16 The application process constitutes an act of “writing heritage” that incentivizes cities to reinvent themselves as “authentic” local manifestations of European regional and cultural diversity via a practice of “discursively and textually rearticulating a place’s meaning, authenticity and historical significance in the application dossiers.”17 The Linz09 mission statement illustrates the Europeanization of historical time and space patterns by identifying the city and its surroundings as crucial waypoints on the discursive map of contemporary European and international Holocaust commemoration: The program will focus especially on the period in which today’s capital of culture was called “Führerstadt” and was surrounded by a ring of extermination locations (Mauthausen, Gusen, Ebensee and Hartheim). The traces of National Socialism can not only be found in the outer districts of Linz but in the city center itself, where they shape the city’s architecture and infrastructure to this day—in the form of the so-called “Hitler buildings,” in the industrial plant of the VOEST (whose origins can

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be traced back to the “Hermann Göring Werke”), and in the construction materials of apparently innocuous buildings, which were made from Mauthausen granite, for which concentration camp inmates paid with their lives.18

By describing Linz as the hub of a ring of “extermination locations” that connect to the mundane spaces people frequent in their daily lives, the mission statement reinserts historically “contaminated” places such as Mauthausen and Gusen into Austria’s everyday geographical and political imagination. At the same time, the map envisioned in the mission statement can easily be connected with other German and European maps of Holocaust memorials and former concentration camps that form the basis for “dark tourism” on a European and international level.19 The mission statement also previews the particular ways of historical representation that would draw criticism from journalists and scholars as soon as Linz’s ECOC program premiered in 2009. For instance, by pointing out how the legacy of National Socialism is still “tangible” and traceable through the construction materials in the city’s housing stock, the organizers foreground their ambition to communicate and represent history in an experiential fashion and with the intent to disrupt historiographical and curatorial conventions via new “narrative formats.”20 Instead of focusing on “pure transmission of knowledge” and on a debate about guilt and responsibility, the organizers prioritize the critical reflection of facts in the context of contemporary questions: “The focus on scientific accuracy must be accompanied by the still relevant question about what kinds of developments and social mechanisms enabled the historical events. The questions about our own history have changed: the National Socialist past needs to be analyzed in its urban, aesthetic, and artistic perspective without relativizing or ignoring the horrors of the past.”21 Existing research on the city’s National Socialist past was considered a necessary foundation for the Linz09 program, but for the organizers the intersections between politics, history, and culture had to be highlighted: “After all, National Socialism did not simply attract followers for its social and political agenda. . . . Many who considered National Socialism their political Heimat reacted to a cultural politics that simultaneously disparaged modernity while putting it into the service of its ideological goals.”22 To accommodate these different perspectives, Linz09 organizers envisioned a diverse range of narrative formats that would address the audience “in polemical, constructive, somber, and provocative ways.” Visitors and participants should be enabled “to find their own approaches to history and internalize it as a result of autonomous learning.”23 Sensitive to the rapidly and constantly changing habits within cultural tourism, as well as to innovations in knowledge production and consumption, the organizers emphasized an experiential and affective approach to Linz’s problematic history. Facts and knowledge matter, they suggest, but instead of encountering historical knowledge through conventional formats and

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documents, audiences should have the opportunity to performatively construct their own spatial experience based on a multisensory representation of history.24 The organizers’ vision resonates with interdisciplinary discussions of how affect shapes people’s responses to and processing of information. Analyses of affective responses take into account the receptive capacities of the whole human body that enable “access to a range of processual, sensually immersed knowledge that would be difficult to acquire by purely cognitive means.”25 Affective responses are frequently considered only connected to emotions and, therefore, as the opposite of rational knowledge. Yet, as Sather-Wagstaff clarifies, “sensory experiences may become feeling through an individual’s assessment and cultural categorization of a set of sensations; feeling may then be displayed as emotion; and emotion may further be propelled into forms of knowledge and social actions that change over time with every new experience—that which fails interpretation and categorization is the excess of affect.”26 Alison Landsberg argues that such affective responses become crucial for people’s experience of “prosthetic memories,” which are “the memories of a past through which they did not live” but can access through films, museum exhibits, and a range of other cultural formats.27 This is not to say that mass media and popular culture provide film audiences or museum visitors with “a first-hand” experience of an event. Rather, prosthetic memories offer a form of “second-hand witnessing to institutionally mediated representations of the past.”28 As Landsberg points out, prosthetic memories emphasize the “subjective, affective relationship to the past, while history strives to maintain a sense of distance from the past.”29 The difference between historiography’s more distanced representation of the past and affective representations’ more subjective approach does not mean that the latter disregards historical facts. On the contrary, as Landsberg demonstrates in her close analysis of Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel Maus, meaningful affective representations of history are firmly grounded in historiographical research. But they seem to transcend historiographical approaches when it comes to fostering “ethical thinking precisely by encouraging people to feel connected to, while recognizing the alterity of, the ‘other.’”30 Landsberg argues that “prosthetic memories” are usually generated via the following strategies: by inviting mimetic identification between film characters and their audiences; via the “leakage” of the past into the present in artistic and aesthetic representations of history; and in the affective interaction between visitors and exhibits in museums.31 Landsberg does not explicitly mention tourism but acknowledges that her concept is inspired by the capacity of early travel films to transport people into different perceptive modes and emotional states. Both the medium of film and the discourse of tourism draw to a significant extent on people’s fantasies of themselves in locations and destinations different from their everyday settings. In this context, then, the representation of history as part of the tourism-focused ECOC program of Linz09 emerges as a significant manifestation for tracing the impact of affective, prosthetic memory constructions.32

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Linz09 and the Ghosts of History Out of the more than 160 projects of Linz09, fourteen focused specifically on the history of Linz and Upper Austria under National Socialism.33 Out of these fourteen projects, three are especially pertinent for an analysis of the affective representation of history in the context of tourism. They demonstrate how particular representative formats can indeed address the perceptive sensorium of the whole human body with the “potential to elicit intense embodied, physiological responses with very powerful effects.”34 At the same time, these three projects also illustrate some of the pitfalls of combining tourism, historical representation, and the desire for affective impact. The first exhibit, “Kulturhauptstadt des Führers”: Kunst und Nationalsozialismus in Linz und Oberösterreich (“The Fuhrer’s Cultural Capital”: Art and National Socialism in Linz and Upper Austria), focused on the city’s role in National Socialist cultural and urban planning and as site for Hitler’s envisioned museum of visual art. Housed in the centrally located Linz Schlossmuseum (castle museum), visitors to this exhibit encountered samples of the architectural models developed by Hitler’s architect, Albert Speer, together with photos of Hitler as he studies architectural models for a future Linz.35 The exhibit strove to present the homegrown aspects of National Socialism to local and outside visitors as a truly unheimliche (uncanny) experience.36 Two other projects focused expressly on eliciting embodied and multisensory reactions. Already the full title of Berlin artist Hito Steyerl’s project—Unter uns. Dekonstruktion eines Gebäudes. Eine Installation (In our Midst. Deconstruction of a Building. An installation)—alludes to her project as a complex spatial intervention. Steyerl chiseled a stylized map based on the escape routes of Linz’s Jewish citizens before and during the National Socialist takeover into the façade of the so-called Brückenkopfgebäude (bridgehead building), one of the few buildings from Hitler’s blueprints that was realized during the National Socialist regime. An installation composed of video screens, display boards, and heaps of rubble in an empty shop on the building’s first floor completed the project.37 Steyerl’s work disturbed the everyday visual and aesthetic routines of locals and undermined the expectations of visiting tourists. Rather than beholding one of Europe’s largest integrated urban places, visitors encountered what looked like a demolition in progress.38 In yet another project, In Situ: Zeitgeschichte findet Stadt (In Situ: Contemporary History Happens/Finds City), a team of historians and artists stenciled sixty-five brief historical annotations on the pavement in front of buildings and places that had played a significant role in the National Socialist system of persecution and murder.39 The organizers of In Situ wanted their project to be experienced not as event but as an attempt at “visualizing and inscribing the multilayered dimensions of Nazi extermination policies into daily perceptions.”40 The stenciled annotations in front of school buildings, factories, and residential apart-

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Figure 4.2. Berlin artist Hito Steyerl chiseled a stylized map of escape and deportation routes of Linz’s Jewish citizens into the façade of one of the Brückenkopfgebäude designed and built as part of Adolf Hitler’s Führerstadt concept for Linz. Photo by Andreas Kepplinger. Reprinted with permission.

ment complexes inserted themselves into the everyday lives of Linz’s residents and the city’s visitors, forcing the latter to step on or over the inscriptions, and reminding them that the mundane places and buildings in which they spend their days and nights had at one time doubled as places of torture and murder. All three of these projects from the Linz09 history-related program responded directly to the mission statement’s emphasis on different narrative formats for telling history. They took seriously the role of “affect . . . as a part of politics of place making, memory, and social identity” and tried to create a prosthetic experience of history.41 The Kulturhauptstadt des Führers, for instance, strove for a mimetic identification with the history of Holocaust victims and survivors by dedicating significant space to their personal narratives. In the parts of the exhibition that focused on the National Socialist censorship of the arts and on the architectural plans for Linz, narrow walkways and crammed walls produced an affective, claustrophobic experience of space. At various points in the exhibition, the curators asked for the visitors’ intuitive reactions (“like” or “do not like”) to the presentation of Austro-Fascist art in the painting gallery.42 Additionally, the curators expected visitors to engage in complex reflections on history, archival

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practices, and representation, as exemplified by the room that displayed the desk on which Hitler signed the city’s guest book during his short stay in 1938. A Hitler bust on the floor counterbalanced the presentation of the desk and the guest book, prompting one journalist to wonder what to do with historically contaminated artifacts and monuments: “Destroy? Hide? Label? Explain?”43 Recognizing how affective presentations of history have “the potential to elicit intense embodied, physiological responses with very powerful effects,”44 some reviewers imagined additional changes in the exhibit’s format: “How would visitors’ perception of the presented content change, if . . . they had to bow their heads to the ground in order to watch the sequence of Hitler’s entry into Linz?”45 While mimetic forms of communicating the past were most noticeable in the Kulturhauptstadt project, all three projects illustrated affective presentations of history where the past “leaked” into the present. In the Kulturhauptstadt project, this leakage presented itself in the form of an advertising banner displayed on the façade of the Schlossmuseum, which overlooks the Danube. Imitating the colors and typography of the National Socialist swastika flag, the banner challenged simplistic binary distinctions between past and present, between museal artificiality and outside reality, allowing past and present urban topographies to collide in tangible and provocative ways. Hito Steyerl’s project In Our Midst took this concept of leakage as a constitutive element of prosthetic memories even further. The process of inscribing the escape paths and deportation routes of Linz’s Jewish population into the (then recently renovated) façade of an iconic building of the Nazi era did not only reinsert this repressed part of Austria’s history into the field of vision of locals and tourists. It also affected the bodies of pedestrians and visitors in the form of noise, dust, and rubble. The In Situ project, finally, permitted the past to leak into the present via the captions and labels that transformed seemingly innocuous urban places and buildings into life-size experiential artifacts and, in doing so, turned the city into an open-air museum. Every time the stencils interacted with the bodies of locals and tourists by slowing them down, forcing them to turn, to step back, or bend over to read the inscriptions on the ground, elements of the past affected the bodies of those present, creating a second-hand physical experience of history. As these brief comparisons demonstrate, all three projects produced experiential representations of history that allowed visitors to engage affectively with events they either did not live through or which they remember very differently. The last point is especially important in the context of Linz and Upper Austria, where the National Socialist past has been researched extensively in scholarly publications, but where, at least until Linz09, public debates about this past tended to downplay the National Socialist legacy in economy, culture, and architecture. When I discussed this topic with students during a seminar I taught at Linz University in 2015, a small but very vocal group considered the steel plant’s exhibit on the use of forced laborers and concentration camp inmates a

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kowtow before foreign pressure and not an overdue attempt to process the local and regional legacy of National Socialism. It is precisely such a negative reaction that validates history projects that conjure up the ghosts of a haunting past in ways that are more difficult to dismiss than the historiographic record, as comprehensive and accurate as it may be. If the exhibit Kulturhauptstadt des Führers evoked the ghosts of Hitler and Speer hovering over their grandiose architectural models for the imagined Linz of the future, In Our Midst and In Situ called up the ghosts of both victims and perpetrators: the Jewish Austrians who lived in the city and were deported, disappeared, and murdered, on the one hand; the ghosts of common (and not-so-common Austrians such as the fervently National Socialist Gauleiter Eigruber) who collaborated with National Socialism or stood by as the atrocities were committed, on the other. At a time when neo-Nazis and right-wing politicians across many European countries continue to contest even the most basic established facts about the Holocaust it might seem dangerous to connect the crimes of National Socialism with references to ghosts, a term that invokes the supernatural, the spooky, and the unreal. However, ghosts have made regular cameo appearances in interdisciplinary approaches to history, especially in the context of “difficult heritage.”46 For sociologist Avery Gordon, the “ghost is not simply a dead or missing person, but a social figure,” which indicates that the world around us does not function the way we have been told it should. The appearance of ghosts indicates a “haunting, and haunting is a very particular way of knowing what has happened or is happening.”47 This haunting “mak[es] the injustices of life walk among the living” and reminds them that something must be done to address an unacknowledged crime.48 As locations where multiple layers of contested historical narratives intersect, contemporary cities have proven to be fertile ground for such ghostly encounters. In a European context, Berlin has emerged as paradigmatic site that illustrates the multiple roles of ghosts in exemplary fashion. In some instances, specifically designed places of memory invite the ghosts to make visible the haunting fears and traumata of today’s living; in other instances, places are made to forget and wall in the ghosts, creating a haunting precisely via such forced absences and exclusions. What appear to be contradictory actions are simply reminders that places are in a process of constant remaking: “Places of memory both remember pasts and encrypt unnamed, yet powerfully felt, absences—absences that might be considered modernity’s ghosts of the nation.”49 Unlike Berlin, Linz has not (yet?) become a permanent and intentional home to the ghosts of history. The Kulturhauptstadt des Führers exhibit closed its doors by March 2009, a mere three months into the Linz09 program.50 The projects In Our Midst and In Situ continued for the duration of the festival but left few longterm traces. If any lingering sense of a haunting could be traced after the ECOC year, it manifested itself mostly in the ways in which journalists and scholars con-

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tinued to criticize the Linz09 history projects for their actual or perceived flaws. For instance, a review of the Kulturhauptstadt exhibit in the German weekly magazine Der Spiegel cited anecdotal reports about visitors’ positive reactions to the art exhibits showcasing paintings from the Austro-Fascist era and wondered how the depiction of “harmless peasant scenes, conservative portraits and nudes, lovely landscape paintings, and the partisan documentation of the war” would help the average layperson in critically engaging with authoritarian history.51 The reviewers’ palpable skepticism is representative of concerned public commentaries in general: “The explicit intention to enlighten the viewer notwithstanding, the exhibit repeatedly displays the very artifacts that communicate central tenets of National Socialist doctrine, thereby transforming the whole project Kulturhauptstadt des Führers into a questionable enterprise.”52 Another wave of criticism came from academic historians who voiced strong reservations about what they perceived as unorthodox approaches to the presentation of history by their colleagues.53 The stenciled annotations of the In Situ installation especially drew professional historians’ ire for a series of embarrassing factual errors, from the misidentification of buildings to inflated victim numbers at specific sites. Likely a result of the desire to emphasize the “monstrosity of National Socialism” such errors seriously undermined the validity of the entire lineup of historical projects for Linz09, some of which the critics appreciated for their combination of historiographical research and artistic perspective.54 For instance, Linz historian Brigitte Kepplinger commended Hito Steyerl’s intervention In Our Midst for its combination of “conceptual accuracy, the readiness to accept the results of historical research and adapt the concept accordingly.”55 However, even in Steyerl’s project Kepplinger identified an interventionist tendency to charge “trivialities such as the deconstructed façade of the bridgehead building with a religious meaning.”56 For Kepplinger, the historical projects of the Linz09 program operated on the—as she considers it—unproven assumption that contemporary Linz avoids engaging with its problematic history and therefore needs “historicopolitical interventions.” Rather than contributing to a better understanding of the problematic history, these interventions first stylized “Linz” into “an auratic place of National Socialism” and then engaged in “a cleansing of ‘Linz.’”57 I agree with Kepplinger’s critique that historical accuracy is a non-negotiable criterion for all historical exhibits and project. But her and other historians’ criticism also reveals a not uncommon “middle-brow” aversion to experiential modes of learning and knowing and a prioritizing of cognitive frameworks.58 Kepplinger, for instance, diagnoses the Linz09 projects as lacking “analytical depth and essential historiographical expertise.”59 Similarly, Walter Schuster, a local historian and archivist, bemoans how an alleged focus on activism and provocations only intended to feed international media curiosity and sidelined professional knowhow: “It is important to compile historical information through demonstrated professional knowledge but also with the required ethical sense of responsibility

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and in a didactically appropriate manner.”60 Such statements reveal more about the critics than the exhibits they criticized. The quoted concerns mask an “anxiety about the threat posed to the hegemony of the cognitive by an experiential mode of knowledge” and illustrate the not uncommon “academic devaluations of experiential, senses-inclusive meaning-making in the world over presumably purely cognitive forms of knowledge construction.”61 Without a doubt, experiential modes of knowing must be grounded in historical scholarship. But the latter’s prioritization of a cognitive mode often fails to make historical events part of people’s memory. This is especially true for the history of the Holocaust, which can only maintain its power as negative historical referent if it is also preserved in memory, as Elie Wiesel made clear in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech.62 The insight that the very complexity and complicatedness of life cannot be captured in the narrowly defined operational categories of scientific discourses eventually leads back to the discussion of ghosts as analytical figures.63 To write about ghosts is an attempt to think and write about affect. It means to experiment with the boundaries of conventional scholarly discourses while maintaining an analytical perspective. The efforts to conjure up the ghosts and create a haunting must not be misunderstood simply as recreating a sense of trauma for the children’s generations of survivors or a feeling of guilt for the offspring of the perpetrators. As Karen Till states, writing about ghosts is a crucial reminder that the notion of the past as “settled, sedimented, neatly arranged in horizontal layers”64 is only a conceptual crutch serving our respective present narratives of identity and our desire for “fixed time.”65 Till adapts Walter Benjamin’s notion of memory and describes the efforts to create historical knowledge as a kind of “digging for the past through place. It is a process of continually remaking and remembering the past in the present rather than a process of discovering objective historical ‘facts.’” As soon as one pushes the (virtual) shovel into the ground, the past “becomes a ghostlike presence” and “we may feel haunted by that which appears not to be there in material space but is, in fact, a powerful presence.”66 Ghosts are similar to wormholes in space, allowing theoretical access to different folds in time and for the co-presence of experiences that we normally ascribe to different, and distant, historical periods. They make present what we abstractly write about: the absence of the victims; the extinction of the Austrian Jewish culture; the violent cutting short of innumerous lives. What, then, is the best way to conjure up the ghosts? The three projects analyzed in this chapter combined scholarly forms of representation with an appeal to embodied and emotional modes of perception. In doing so, they affirmed an understanding of affect that values “domains of experience ‘beyond discourse’ [as] somehow more ‘real’ or ‘authentic’ than those expressed in words.”67 But discourse and language must be considered in studying how meaningfully affective communication of history and heritage happens. This includes “imagined (versus actually experienced) sensory stimuli [and] acknowledges the power that acts of

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oral or written narration have for invoking sensory responses.”68 Linz09 director Martin Heller pointed in this direction when he demanded that the history projects needed to demonstrate an Übersetzungskompetenz (translation competence) often lacking in scholarly works published about Linz’s National Socialist history. Heller emphasized the role of discourse when he comments on the connection between form and content: “Whoever must tell what he knows might actually learn more. After all, it is not the same to publish history according to scientific rules or to communicate history in a culturally animated and artistically challenging way.”69 Ironically, the three Linz09 projects did not heed this advice. Conceived as projects that would challenge conventional historiographic representations of history and prioritize an affective communication of historical events, they nonetheless remained too beholden to the confines of disciplinary scholarly conventions. The attempts to generate affect within these confines resulted in the above described exaggerations of numbers and distortions of historical events. The remedy, as I propose below, would have been to use historical scholarship as foundation but create affective experiences by intentionally drawing on the role of art and fictional stories. Instead of producing affect through verisimilitude, as some of the Linz09 projects clearly tried, the creative visual and literary arts generate alternative worlds that facilitate critical perspectives on our discursive constructions of reality.

Tourism and the Literary Remapping of Historical Space Investigating Austrian memory spaces related to National Socialism and the Holocaust via fictional texts is a tricky proposition. At a time when right-wing political parties and politicians in Germany and Austria call for an end to commemorating the Holocaust, Austrian writer Martin Pollack’s advocacy for a forensic archeology of “contaminated landscapes” sounds much more appropriate. Pollack perceives the sites where atrocities happened to be objective archives that are “neutral, non-partisan, they do not discriminate, they accept everyone regardless of origin, religion, or ethnicity.”70 In order to make “the invisible visible and, consequently, comprehensible,” he proposes a thick geography of suspicious landscapes, mapped according to the disciplinary and authoritative rules of cartography and science.71 The resulting maps need to show not only the criminal events as they relate to specific geographical locations, but also “the related stories, the timeline of events, the names of victims, their number, as well as the names of perpetrators and other circumstances.”72 Recent trends in Holocaust and memory research seem to prove Pollack right. Archeological work has produced new insights about what happened in (and around) Austrian places such as the Mauthausen concentration camp and its subcamps at Gusen and Ebensee.73 Throughout Europe, cities and towns fea-

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ture Stolpersteine (stumbling stones) that geographically mark the former living spaces of murdered Jewish citizens.74 In a tourist guidebook, titled Im Schatten von Hitler’s Heimat (In the Shadow of Hitler’s Heimat) (2010), co-authored by a historian and two journalists, readers can explore “Upper Austria’s brown topography” in a way that includes not only “the places of the victims, but also those of resistance fighters and dissidents as well as perpetrators.”75 At first glance, these surveys, maps, and guidebooks appear to make visible and erfassbar historical events and experiences not included in textual representations.76 Yet, as my discussion of the experiential and affective representation of history in the Linz09 projects has shown, interacting with the material legacy of historical events does not automatically result in deeper understanding. Historian Karl Schlögel cautions against allocating too much evidentiary power to the scientific disciplines of cartography and (conventional) geography. Their means of representing history’s manifestation in space are, as he writes, “hopelessly helpless when facing the realities of life and death.”77 Maps of the Holocaust and the Gulag offer—“even if they are accurate, which is sometimes doubtful”—nothing but silence. These maps “are empty, they do not say anything and acquire meaning only once we walk into these maps.”78 Schlögel’s phrase, “walk into the maps,” should not be confused with socalled dark tourism, visits to places of violence such as former concentration camps or battlefields that have become a staple of tourist itineraries, from individual trips to group travel and institutionalized study-abroad designs.79 There certainly are good and meaningful reasons why survivor families visit places where family members perished.80 But there is also a misguided expectation that visiting these places automatically fosters a better understanding of the historical events to which they are connected and results in a cathartic experience.81 Holocaust survivor and literary studies scholar Ruth Klüger dismisses the idea that former concentration camps are places where subsequent generations can experience the past: “The museum culture of the camp sites . . . is based on a profound superstition, that is, on the belief that the ghosts can be met and kept in their place, where the living ceased to breathe.”82 Klüger’s comment does not per se reject an affective, ghostly encounter with the past. Rather, she criticizes a scenario where visitors expect a carefully scripted encounter with ghosts who, “kept in their place,” will not haunt the tourists but instead create a fake experience of emotional uplift.83 By contrast, Schlögel’s call for walking into the maps is a reminder that the tools of the humanities, of language and art, have the power to generate memory discourses in which ghosts are not representations of the “other” in a foreign space. Instead, ghosts become forces that meaningfully “other” one’s own identity spaces. Whoever wants to encounter the ghosts of history this way must become a tourist in the “landscapes of the mind, . . . must get people to talk, must listen to their stories. . . . Such landscapes are hidden in novels or in paintings.”84

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Schlögel identifies the disciplinary and genre boundaries that the curators of Linz09 and their critics pushed up against but dared not cross. The various history projects of the European Capital of Culture program were clearly aimed at disrupting the spatial experiences of visitors by creating alternative historical spaces within or adjacent to the everyday places traversed, used, and performed by the citizens and visitors of Linz. By clinging to an overall format shaped by the disciplinary conventions of historiography, these projects fell short of conjuring up the ghosts of the past and producing the “narrative of simultaneity” that would do justice to “the breaks, the catastrophes, the cataracts and cataclysms of the twentieth century.” The Linz09 projects tried to create affect mainly through scale—by inscribing history into the streets and exaggerating victim numbers— instead of through the crucial dramaturgical means of “interruptions, caesuras, shocks, discontinuities, edits,” which can be found in literature, film, and in visual art more readily than in traditional historiography.85 Such an understanding of literary fiction’s power to breach disciplinary conventions resonates with Avery Gordon’s conceptualization of ghosts and haunting as analytical categories. Gordon increasingly experienced her academic home discipline, sociology, as engaged in a struggle against the “fictive,” which had to be “exiled to ordain the authority of the discipline.”86 But in doing so, the resulting scholarly perspectives ignore “the ensemble of cultural imaginings, affective experiences, animated objects, marginal voices, narrative densities, and eccentric traces of power’s presence” that make up the complex ways in which humans experience the past.87 For Gordon, literature is one of the few areas not “restrained by the norms of a professionalized social science.” It is through literature, therefore, that we can enter the ghostly rooms of our existence, realms “we need to know but cannot quite get access to with our given rules of method and modes of apprehension.”88 Gordon echoes theories that developed earlier in the field of literary studies. Wolfgang Iser’s notion of “literary anthropology,” for instance, considers literary narratives relevant for “anthropological” insights, insofar as they provide a “means of overstepping the given [and thereby] cause a transformation of what is.”89 Our everyday use of the term “fiction” implies that the fictional has less bearing on what we call reality than either our tangible experience of reality or its rendition through agreed-upon evidence. But, so Iser claims, the fictional exerts power over our reality precisely because it escapes the conventions of plausibility that usually fence in realistic thinking. Fiction can let animals talk, for instance, and escape the rules of evidence and proof that govern scholarly arguments with a simple defense: it’s only fiction. At the same time, this very act of stepping outside the realms of conventional reality also “offers a standpoint from which to investigate the anthropological makeup of man.”90 For Iser, literature negotiates the relationship between the fictional and the imaginary.91 While we commonly treat these terms as synonyms, they actually

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differ in crucial ways. The fictional is “an instrument . . . that taps our imaginary resources” and helps us to see the world from a new perspective.”92 Fictional narratives thus function as “the medium” through which the imaginary can “assume a tangible gestalt.”93 While the fictional narrative as medium is indispensable for communicating the substance of a new imaginary, the imaginary always offers more than the “perspective imposed by the medium.” The imaginary “manifests itself, rather, as a difference [from reality] that cannot be deduced from the medium itself.”94 The imaginary worlds of a novel would never become intelligible if they were not given form and shape by the fictional narrative and its respective conventions of storytelling and character development. At the same time, the imaginary takes on a life of its own and, in the encounter with the reader, generates new perspectives on reality that exceed whatever the fictional format might have initially envisioned. Once the forces of the imaginary have been unleashed by way of the fictional, they potentially change how we conceive of our reality: It must be stressed again that literature does not reflect that reality, but mirrors its reverse side, which would otherwise remain hidden by the cultural context itself, and it is the mirroring that conditions literature’s formation of cultural reality. By throwing into relief the uncharted regions of the prevailing culture, [literature] changes the map, which is overlaid by the imagery of what remains cognitively unfathomable.95

Iser’s quote ties together the multipronged argument on tourism, space, and affective historical representation that is at the heart of the three chapters in this section. I do not suggest that the Linz09 organizers and curators should have completely replaced the various projects with fictional texts. Rather, with Alan Rice, I am arguing for “dialogising history with other forms, such as biography, folklore, memorials and artistic representation, [which] helps to fill that contested history with the memories and experiences it needs in order to reflect a more accurate and human face.”96 One of the discussed projects, Hito Steyerl’s In Our Midst, can be considered especially illustrative of such dialogizing. By chiseling a stylized map of the actual escape routes of Linz’s Jewish citizens onto the façade of a building connected to National Socialism, Steyerl makes visible Iser’s “uncharted regions of the prevailing culture.” The map offers a visualization of the “cognitively unfathomable,” the trauma, the suffering, and the horror by eschewing a scientifically valid reproduction of the geographical coordinates of these escape patterns in favor of an artistic and affective rendition that combines a critical cognitive experience with an emotional and bodily one. The other two projects got stuck midway in this process. Rather than intentionally integrating fictional narratives and imagined representations of history, Kulturhauptstadt des Führers and In Situ tried to generate affective responses within the disciplinary conventions of scholarly historiography, which, in case of the latter, resulted in the already mentioned exaggeration of victim numbers and invited the general accusation of professional sloppiness.

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Ultimately, all three of the discussed projects failed to create a more long-term and comprehensive sense of ghostly presence and haunting, and, consequently, were unsuccessful in inciting sustained engagement with the meaning of Austria’s National Socialist past for present and future generations. The following chapter on Elfriede Jelinek’s The Children of the Dead (1995) takes up the discourse of tourism in order to expand, distort, and redraw the imaginary map of Austria. By taking the reader on a virtual tourism trip through alternative spaces and places of postwar Austrian history, Jelinek’s novel becomes a literary manifestation of an affective reaction to the memory of the Holocaust while also generating affect in its readers. In doing so, Children of the Dead demonstrates how tourism can serve as the discursive terrain for using fictional and imaginary discourses to create “prosthetic memory” landscapes roamed by the ghosts of Austria’s repressed history.

Notes 1. See also “Erinnerungsorte Nationalsozialistischer Verfolgung” (Linz: Archiv der Stadt Linz, 2013), http://www.linz.at/geschichte/de/42208.asp. 2. Oliver Rathkolb, ed., NS-Zwangsarbeit: Der Standort Linz der Reichswerke Hermann Göring AG Berlin, 1938–1945 (Vienna: Böhlau Verlag, 2001); Alexandre Collon and Ulrike Schwarz, Zeitgeschichteausstellung 1983–1945, ed. Voestalpine Stahlwelt GmbH (Linz: Lentia-Verlag, 2014). 3. “Nordico Stadtmuseum Linz—GETEILTE STADT,” n.d., retrieved 8 November 2019 from http://www.nordico.at/html/de/1153.aspx. 4. ARGE Limonistollen, “Zeitgeschichtliche Führungen in den Linzer Luftschutzstollen,” retrieved 4 May 2015 from http://www.limonistollen.at. 5. The development and the effects of this narrative are by now well documented. For comprehensive overviews, see Gerhard Botz and Gerald Sprengnagel, eds., Kontroversen um Österreichs Zeitgeschichte: Verdrängte Vergangenheit, Österreich-Identität, Waldheim und die Historiker (Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag, 2008); Oliver Rathkolb, The Paradoxical Republic: Austria 1945–2005, English language edition (New York: Berghahn Books, 2014). For a detailed discussion, see Heidemarie Uhl, “Das ‘Erste Opfer’: Der österreichische Opfermythos und seine Transformationen in der Zweiten Republik,” Österreichische Zeitschrift für Politikwissenschaft 30, no. 1 (2001): 19–34. 6. “Interesse für Zeitgeschichte ist auch touristisch nutzbar,” Oberösterreichische Nachrichten, 10 February 2015, http://www.nachrichten.at/oberoesterreich/linz/Interesse-fuer-Zeitge schichte-ist-auch-touristisch-nutzbar;art66,1643615. All translations into English are mine unless otherwise noted. 7. Ibid. 8. Alison Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 113. 9. The program initially started under the title Kulturstadt Europas (European cultural city) in 1985. In 2001, after a significant enlargement of the number of European Union member states, the program went from one city per year to two cities per year. There were occasional exceptions such as in 2010, when Istanbul was invited as representa-

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tive of a non-EU country. Daniel Habit, “Europäische Kulturhauptstädte: Zwischen lokaler Eigenlogik und gesteuerter Harmonisierung,” Clio Online, 2013, http://www .europa.clio-online.de/essay/id/artikel-3775. For an overview of the history of the ECOC program, see Jürgen Mittag, ed., Die Idee der Kulturhauptstadt Europas: Anfänge, Ausgestaltung und Auswirkungen europäischer Kulturpolitik (Essen: Klartext Verlag, 2008). For the tourism aspect of the program, see Jürgen Mittag, “Die Idee der Kulturhauptstadt Europas: Vom Instrument europäischer Identitätsstiftung zum tourismusträchtigen Publikumsmagneten,” in Die Idee der Kulturhauptstadt Europas: Anfänge, Ausgestaltung und Auswirkungen europäischer Kulturpolitik (Essen: Klartext Verlag, 2008), 92–93. Habit, “Europäische Kulturhauptstädte”; “European Capitals of Culture—Creative Europe—European Commission,” Creative Europe, n.d., retrieved 8 November 2019 from https://ec.europa.eu/programmes/creative-europe/actions/capitals-culture_en. “Kulturhauptstädte Europas—Kreatives Europa—European Commission,” Kreatives Europa, n.d., 3, retrieved 8 November 2019 from https://ec.europa.eu/programmes/creativeeurope/actions/capitals-culture_de; emphasis added. “Linz 2009. Bewerbung” (Büro Linz Kultur/Magistrat Linz, 2004), 22–23, retrieved 8 November 2019 from http://www.linz09.at/de/bewerbung.html. Ibid., 19. See also the statement of Linz09 director Martin Heller in the scholarly volume that accompanied the exhibit Kulturhauptstadt des Führers: “Wie kaum eine andere [Stadt] war [Linz] . . . schon früh bemüht, . . . [seine] Rolle im Nationalsozialismus aufzuarbeiten. Die Resultate dieser Selbsterforschung sind beeindruckend. Wer wissen will, kann lesen. Und wird erfahren, was war zwischen Mauthausen, Gusen, Hartheim und all den anderen Arbeitslagern und Vernichtungshöllen, der Rüstungsproduktion der Hermann Göring Werke und dem Alltag einer Stadt und einer Region, die ihrem ‘Führer’ einen begeisterten Empfang bereitet hatten.” Martin Heller, “Linzer Torte und Hitler,” in “Kulturhauptstadt des Führers”: Kunst und Nationalsozialismus in Linz und Oberösterreich, ed. Birgit Kirchmayr (Weitra: Bibliothek der Provinz, 2008), 15. The Selection Panel for the European Capital of Culture (ECOC) 2009, Report on the Nominations from Austria and Lithuania for the European Capital of Culture 2009, 7, http://ec.europa.eu/culture/pdf/doc672_en.pdf (24 Oktober 2010). Since this link has become inactive, I am referencing the extensive quotations in Brigitte Kepplinger, “Die Europäische Kulturhauptstadt Linz 2009 und ihr Zeitgeschichteprogramm,” in Stadtkultur-Kultur(Haupt)Stadt, ed. Ferdinand Opll and Walter Schuster (Vienna: Österreichischer Arbeitskreis für Stadtgeschichtsforschung, 2012), 228. “Linz 2009 Kulturhauptstadt Europas—Mission Statement.,” 2004, retrieved 8 November 2019 from http://www.linz09.at/de/mission-statement.html. Habit, “Europäische Kulturhauptstädte.” Ibid. “Linz09 Mission Statement.” For an example of such a map, see “Main Nazi Camps and Killing Sites—Education & E-Learning—Yad Vashem,” Education & E-Learning—Yad Vashem, retrieved 30 August 2017 from https://store.yadvashem.org/main-camps-and-killing-sites-17. “Linz09 Mission Statement.” Ibid. “Denn es waren nicht allein soziale und politische Konstellationen, die den Nationalsozialismus möglich und attraktiv gemacht haben. . . . Eine Kulturpolitik, welche die Moderne sowohl radikal zu disqualifizieren als auch im Dienste der eigenen Ideologie zu

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23. 24. 25. 26.

27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

33. 34. 35.

36.

37. 38.

39. 40.

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beerben suchte, entsprach der Bedürfnisse vieler, denen der Nationalsozialismus Heimat und Heilslehre bedeutete.” Heller, “Linzer Torte,” 15. “Linz09 Mission Statement.” Ibid. Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory, 113. Joy Sather-Wagstaff, “Affect, Memory, Heritage,” in Heritage, Affect and Emotion: Politics, Practices and Infrastructures, ed. Divya P. Tolia-Kelly, Emma Waterton, and Steve Watson (New York: Routledge, 2016), 18. Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory, 8–9. Sather-Wagstaff, “Affect,” 20. Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory, 19. Ibid., 9. Ibid., 14; 119; 129. Tom Gunning, “Tracing the Individual Body: Photography, Detectives, and Early Cinema,” in Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life, ed. Leo Charney and Vanessa R. Schwartz (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 15–45; Tom Gunning, “Before Documentary: Early Nonfiction and the ‘View’ Aesthetic,” in Uncharted Territory: Essays on Early Nonfiction Film, ed. Daan Hertogs and Nico de Klerk (Amsterdam: Stichting Nederlands Filmmuseum, 1997), 9–24; Dean MacCannell, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). For a comprehensive list of the events focusing on National Socialism, see Kepplinger, “Zeitgeschichteprogramm,” 232–33. Sather-Wagstaff, “Affect,” 12. See “Kulturhauptstadt des Führers” Kunst und Nationalsozialismus in Linz und Oberösterreich—Oberösterreichisches Landesmuseum,” retrieved 2 January 2018 from http:// www.landesmuseum.at/de/ausstellungen/detail/kulturhauptstadt-des-fuehrers-kunst-undnationalsozialismus-in-linz-und-oberoesterreich.html. For more on the history of Linz as potential cultural capital of the Third Reich, see Fritz Mayrhofer, Walter Schuster, and Kurt Tweraser, National Socialism in Linz (Archiv der Stadt Linz, 2002). A concise historical overview with many illustrations is provided by Ingo Sarlay, “Adolf Hitler’s Linz: Architektonische Visionen einer Stadt,” in “Kulturhauptstadt des Führers”: Kunst und Nationalsozialismus in Linz und Oberösterreich, ed. Birgit Kirchmayr (Weitra: Bibliothek der Provinz, 2008), 65–78. For a detailed overview of the exhibition and reflections on the curators’ perspectives, see Birgit Kirchmayr and Peter Assmann, “Vorwort,” in “Kulturhauptstadt des Führers”: Kunst und Nationalsozialismus in Linz und Oberösterreich, ed. Birgit Kirchmayr (Weitra: Bibliothek der Provinz, 2008), 11–14. “GABU Heindl Architektur,” retrieved 11 December 2015 from http://www.gabu-wang .at/bau.html. See, for instance, the description of the main square of Linz as “one of the largest urban squares in Europe since the 13th century.” “Hauptplatz,” n.d., retrieved 8 November 2019 from http://www.donauregion.at/oesterreich/poi/430000116/hauptplatz.html. The project’s German title plays with the phonetic similarity of die Stadt finden (to find the city) and stattfinden (to happen, to take place). Dagmar Höss, Monika Sommer, and Heidemarie Uhl, “In Situ: Zeitgeschichte findet Stadt: Linz im Nationalsozialismus,” 2009, retrieved 8 November 2019 from http://www .insitu-linz09.at/de/projekt.html.

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41. Karen Till, The New Berlin: Memory, Politics, Place (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 23. 42. Kepplinger, “Zeitgeschichteprogramm,” 240. 43. Bernhard Lichtenberger, “Die Kunst, Adolf Hitler zu bewältigen,” Oberösterreichische Nachrichten, 12 September 2008. 44. Sather-Wagstaff, “Affect,” 12. 45. Monika Sommer, “Experiment und Leerstelle: Zur Musealisierung der Zeitgeschichte in den österreichischen Landesmuseen,” in Zeitgeschichte ausstellen in Österreich: Museen— Gedenkstätten—Ausstellungen, ed. Dirk Rupnow and Heidemarie Uhl (Vienna: Böhlau Verlag, 2011), 334. 46. Sather-Wagstaff, “Affect,” 13. 47. Avery F. Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 8. 48. Steve Pile, “Spectral Cities: Where the Repressed Returns and Other Short Stories,” in Habitus: A Sense of Place, ed. Jean Hillier and Emma Rooksby (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), 235. 49. Till, New Berlin, 9. 50. Even though the end of the exhibit had always been scheduled for March 2009, some critics perceived it as evidence that the Linz09 organizers wanted to quickly move beyond history to more entertainment-based programming. See Kepplinger, “Zeitgeschichteprogramm,” 235. 51. Nicole Büsing and Heiko Klaas, “Kulturhauptstadt Linz: Und täglich grüßt der Führer,” Spiegel Online, 16 September 2008, sec. Kultur, http://www.spiegel.de/kultur/gesell schaft/kulturhauptstadt-linz-und-taeglich-gruesst-der-fuehrer-a-578460.html. 52. Ibid. 53. Kulturhauptstadt des Führers and In Situ were designed and curated by historians, In Our Midst had a historian as scientific advisor. 54. Kepplinger, “Zeitgeschichteprogramm,” 248–49. For instance, In Situ doubled the number of murdered victims in the Mauthausen concentration camp and hugely inflated the numbers of forced sterilizations in the Allgemeine Krankenhaus. Ibid., 249. 55. Kepplinger, “Zeitgeschichteprogramm,” 247. 56. Ibid., 272. 57. Ibid. 58. Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory, 131. 59. Kepplinger, Oberösterreichische Nachrichten, 26 March 2009; quoted in Monika Sommer, “Experiment,” 330. 60. Sommer, “Experiment,” 330. 61. Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory, 131; Sather-Wagstaff, “Affect,” 12. 62. “Elie Wiesel—Nobel Lecture: Hope, Despair and Memory,” Nobelprize.Org. Nobel Media AB, 2014, retrieved 8 November 2019 from http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/ peace/laureates/1986/wiesel-lecture.html. 63. Gordon, Ghostly Matters, 98. 64. Till, New Berlin, 10. 65. Ibid., 14. 66. Ibid., 10, 13. 67. Sharon Macdonald, Memorylands: Heritage and Identity in Europe Today (New York: Routledge, 2013), 81.

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68. Sather-Wagstaff, “Affect,” 17. 69. Martin Heller in Kronen Zeitung, 31 August 2008; quoted in Sommer, “Experiment,” 2011, 327. 70. Martin Pollack, Kontaminierte Landschaften (Salzburg: Residenz Verlag, 2014), 59. 71. Pollack’s use of the German term erfassbar means both tangible and comprehensible. Ibid., 106–7. 72. Ibid. 73. For a brief but insightful overview of how the representation of the Mauthausen concentration camp memorial has changed based on insights gained through archeological research, see Bertrand Perz, “Exhibiting the Concentration Camp: Old and New Historical Exhibitions at Mauthausen,” in The Mauthausen Concentration Camp 1938–1945: Catalogue to the Exhibition at the Mauthausen Memorial, ed. Association for Remembrance and Historical Research in Austrian Concentration Camp Memorials (Vienna: new academic press, 2013), 293. 74. For a (tentative and non-exhaustive) attempt to map Europe’s Stolpersteine memorial, see “List of Cities by Country that Have Stolpersteine,” Wikipedia, 20 May 2017, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_cities_by_country_that_have_stolpe rsteine&oldid=781365202. 75. Susanne Rolinek, Gerald Lehner, and Christian Strasser, Im Schatten von Hitlers Heimat: Reiseführer durch die braune Topografie von Oberösterreich (Vienna: Czernin Verlag, 2010), 11. The book’s role as quasi-official remapping of historical space is reaffirmed by the fact that it received funding from the Austrian Republic’s National Fund for Victims of National Socialism. 76. Pollack, Kontaminierte Landschaften, 107. 77. Karl Schlögel, Im Raume lesen wir die Zeit: Über Zivilisationsgeschichte und Geopolitik (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 2003), 431. 78. Ibid. 79. See Richard Sharpley and Philip Stone, eds., The Darker Side of Travel: The Theory and Practice of Dark Tourism (Bristol: Channel View Publications, 2009); Leanne White and Elspeth Frew, Dark Tourism and Place Identity: Managing and Interpreting Dark Places (Oxon: Routledge, 2013). 80. Carol A. Kidron, “Being There Together: Dark Family Tourism and the Emotive Experience of Co-Presence in the Holocaust Past,” Annals of Tourism Research 41 (April 2013): 191. 81. For representative and recent examples, see “KZ als Touristenmagnet: Das Grauen hat Konjunktur,” DerStandard.At, retrieved 16 July 2017 from http://derstandard.at/ 2000061324812/KZ-als-Touristenmagnet-Das-Grauen-hat-Konjunktur; “Dark Tourism: Urlaub in der Wirklichkeit,” DerStandard.At, retrieved 16 July 2017 from http://derstan dard.at/1369363313163/Dark-Tourism-Urlaub-in-der-Wirklichkeit. 82. Ruth Klüger, Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered (New York: The Feminist Press at CUNY, 2001), 66. 83. For more on the role of ghosts in Klüger, see Sandra Alfers, “Voices from a Haunting Past: Ghosts, Memory, and Poetry in Ruth Klüger’s Weiter Leben. Eine Jugend (1992),” Monatshefte 100, no. 4 (Winter 2008): 519–33. 84. Schlögel, Im Raume, 243. 85. Ibid., 504. Schlögel’s emphasis on thinking together “space, time, and action” (Raum, Zeit und Handlung) echoes Doreen Massey’s argument for a rethinking of place as amalgam

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86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96.

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of time-space/space-time configurations. Doreen B. Massey, For Space (London: SAGE Publications, 2005), 27. Gordon, Ghostly Matters, 26. Ibid. Ibid., 25. Wolfgang Iser, “Towards a Literary Anthropology,” in The Future of Literary Theory, ed. Ralph Cohen (New York: Routledge, 1989), 214. Ibid., 215. Ibid., 228. Ibid., 218. Ibid., 222. Ibid., 224. Ibid., 228; emphasis added. Alan Rice, “Museums, Memorials and Plantation Houses in the Black Atlantic: Slavery and the Development of Dark Tourism,” in The Darker Side of Travel: The Theory and Practice of Dark Tourism, ed. Richard Sharpley and Philip Stone (Bristol: Channel View Publications, 2009), 232.

Bibliography Alfers, Sandra. “Voices from a Haunting Past: Ghosts, Memory, and Poetry in Ruth Klüger’s Weiter Leben. Eine Jugend (1992).” Monatshefte 100, no. 4 (Winter 2008): 519–33. ARGE Limonistollen. “Zeitgeschichtliche Führungen in den Linzer Luftschutzstollen.” Retrieved 4 May 2015 from http://www.limonistollen.at. Botz, Gerhard, and Gerald Sprengnagel, eds. Kontroversen um Österreichs Zeitgeschichte: Verdrängte Vergangenheit, Österreich-Identität, Waldheim und die Historiker. Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag, 2008. Büsing, Nicole, and Heiko Klaas. “Kulturhauptstadt Linz: Und täglich grüßt der Führer.” Spiegel Online, 16 September 2008, sec. Kultur. http://www.spiegel.de/kultur/gesellschaft/ kulturhauptstadt-linz-und-taeglich-gruesst-der-fuehrer-a-578460.html. Collon, Alexandre, and Ulrike Schwarz. Zeitgeschichteausstellung 1983–1945. Edited by Voestalpine Stahlwelt GmbH. Linz: Lentia-Verlag, 2014. “Dark Tourism: Urlaub in der Wirklichkeit.” DerStandard.At. Retrieved 16 July 2017 from http://derstandard.at/1369363313163/Dark-Tourism-Urlaub-in-der-Wirklichkeit. “Elie Wiesel—Nobel Lecture: Hope, Despair and Memory.” Nobelprize.Org. Nobel Media AB, 2014. Retrieved 8 November 2019 from http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/ laureates/1986/wiesel-lecture.html. “Erinnerungsorte Nationalsozialistischer Verfolgung.” Linz: Archiv der Stadt Linz, 2013. http://www.linz.at/geschichte/de/42208.asp. “European Capitals of Culture—Creative Europe—European Commission.” Creative Europe, n.d. Retrieved 8 November 2019 from https://ec.europa.eu/programmes/creative-europe/ actions/capitals-culture_en. “GABU Heindl Architektur.” Retrieved 11 December 11 2015 from http://www.gabu-wang .at/bau.html. Gordon, Avery F. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997.

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Gunning, Tom. “Before Documentary: Early Nonfiction and the ‘View’ Aesthetic.” In Uncharted Territory: Essays on Early Nonfiction Film, edited by Daan Hertogs and Nico de Klerk, 9–24. Amsterdam: Stichting Nederlands Filmmuseum, 1997. ———. “Tracing the Individual Body: Photography, Detectives, and Early Cinema.” In Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life, edited by Leo Charney and Vanessa R. Schwartz, 15–45. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. Habit, Daniel. “Europäische Kulturhauptstädte: Zwischen lokaler Eigenlogik und gesteuerter Harmonisierung.” Clio Online, 2013. http://www.europa.clio-online.de/essay/id/artikel3775. “Hauptplatz,” n.d. Retrieved 8 November 2019 from http://www.donauregion.at/oesterreich/ poi/430000116/hauptplatz.html. Heller, Martin. “Linzer Torte und Hitler.” In “Kulturhauptstadt des Führers”: Kunst und Nationalsozialismus in Linz und Oberösterreich, edited by Birgit Kirchmayr, 15–16. Weitra: Bibliothek der Provinz, 2008. Höss, Dagmar, Monika Sommer, and Heidemarie Uhl. “In Situ: Zeitgeschichte findet Stadt: Linz im Nationalsozialismus,” 2009. Retrieved 8 November 2019 from http://www.insi tu-linz09.at/de/projekt.html. “Interesse für Zeitgeschichte ist auch touristisch nutzbar.” Oberösterreichische Nachrichten, 10 February 2015. http://www.nachrichten.at/oberoesterreich/linz/Interesse-fuer-Zeitge schichte-ist-auch-touristisch-nutzbar;art66,1643615. Iser, Wolfgang. “Towards a Literary Anthropology.” In The Future of Literary Theory, edited by Ralph Cohen, 208–28. New York: Routledge, 1989. Kepplinger, Brigitte. “Die Europäische Kulturhauptstadt Linz 2009 und ihr Zeitgeschichteprogramm.” In Stadtkultur-Kultur(Haupt)Stadt, edited by Ferdinand Opll and Walter Schuster, 221–74. Vienna: Österreichischer Arbeitskreis für Stadtgeschichtsforschung, 2012. Kidron, Carol A. “Being There Together: Dark Family Tourism and the Emotive Experience of Co-Presence in the Holocaust Past.” Annals of Tourism Research 41 (April 2013): 175–94. Kirchmayr, Birgit, and Peter Assmann. “Vorwort.” In “Kulturhauptstadt des Führers”: Kunst und Nationalsozialismus in Linz und Oberösterreich, edited by Birgit Kirchmayr, 11–14. Weitra: Bibliothek der Provinz, 2008. Klüger, Ruth. Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered. New York: The Feminist Press at CUNY, 2001. “‘Kulturhauptstadt des Führers‘ Kunst und Nationalsozialismus in Linz und Oberösterreich—Oberösterreichisches Landesmuseum.” Retrieved 2 January 2018 from http://www .landesmuseum.at/de/ausstellungen/detail/kulturhauptstadt-des-fuehrers-kunst-und-natio nalsozialismus-in-linz-und-oberoesterreich.html. “Kulturhauptstädte Europas—Kreatives Europa—European Commission.” Kreatives Europa, n.d. Retrieved 8 November 2019 from https://ec.europa.eu/programmes/creative-europe/ actions/capitals-culture_de. “KZ als Touristenmagnet: Das Grauen hat Konjunktur.” DerStandard.At. Retrieved 16 July 2017 from http://derstandard.at/2000061324812/KZ-als-Touristenmagnet-Das-Gra uen-hat-Konjunktur. Landsberg, Alison. Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004. Lichtenberger, Bernhard. “Die Kunst, Adolf Hitler zu bewältigen.” Oberösterreichische Nachrichten, 12 September 2008.

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“Linz 2009. Bewerbung.” Büro Linz Kultur/Magistrat Linz, 2004. Retrieved 8 November 2019 from http://www.linz09.at/de/bewerbung.html. “Linz 2009 Kulturhauptstadt Europas—Mission Statement.,” 2004. Retrieved 8 November 2019 from http://www.linz09.at/de/mission-statement.html. “List of Cities by Country that Have Stolpersteine.” In Wikipedia, 20 May 2017. https:// en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_cities_by_country_that_have_stolpersteine& oldid=781365202. MacCannell, Dean. The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. Macdonald, Sharon. Memorylands: Heritage and Identity in Europe Today. New York: Routledge, 2013. “Main Nazi Camps and Killing Sites—Education & E-Learning—Yad Vashem.” Education & E-Learning—Yad Vashem. Retrieved 30 August 2017 from http://www.yadvashem.org/yv/ en/education/learning_environments/sites_map.asp. Massey, Doreen B. For Space. London: SAGE Publications, 2005. Mayrhofer, Fritz, Walter Schuster, and Kurt Tweraser. National Socialism in Linz. Archiv der Stadt Linz, 2002. Mittag, Jürgen, ed. Die Idee der Kulturhauptstadt Europas: Anfänge, Ausgestaltung und Auswirkungen europäischer Kulturpolitik. Essen: Klartext Verlag, 2008. ———. “Die Idee der Kulturhauptstadt Europas: Vom Instrument europäischer Identitätsstiftung zum tourismusträchtigen Publikumsmagneten.” In Die Idee der Kulturhauptstadt Europas: Anfänge, Ausgestaltung und Auswirkungen europäischer Kulturpolitik, 55–96. Essen: Klartext Verlag, 2008. “Nordico Stadtmuseum Linz—GETEILTE STADT,” n.d. Retrieved 8 November 2019 from http://www.nordico.at/html/de/1153.aspx. Perz, Bertrand. “Exhibiting the Concentration Camp: Old and New Historical Exhibitions at Mauthausen.” In The Mauthausen Concentration Camp 1938–1945: Catalogue to the Exhibition at the Mauthausen Memorial, edited by Association for Remembrance and Historical Research in Austrian Concentration Camp Memorials, 287–94. Vienna: new academic press, 2013. Pile, Steve. “Spectral Cities: Where the Repressed Returns and Other Short Stories.” In Habitus: A Sense of Place, edited by Jean Hillier and Emma Rooksby, 218–39. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002. Pollack, Martin. Kontaminierte Landschaften. Salzburg: Residenz Verlag, 2014. Rathkolb, Oliver, ed. NS-Zwangsarbeit: Der Standort Linz der Reichswerke Hermann Göring AG Berlin, 1938–1945. Vienna: Böhlau Verlag, 2001. ———. The Paradoxical Republic: Austria 1945–2005. English language edition. New York: Berghahn Books, 2014. Rice, Alan. “Museums, Memorials and Plantation Houses in the Black Atlantic: Slavery and the Development of Dark Tourism.” In The Darker Side of Travel: The Theory and Practice of Dark Tourism, edited by Richard Sharpley and Philip Stone, 224–46. Bristol: Channel View Publications, 2009. Rolinek, Susanne, Gerald Lehner, and Christian Strasser. Im Schatten von Hitlers Heimat: Reiseführer durch die braune Topografie von Oberösterreich. Vienna: Czernin Verlag, 2010. Sarlay, Ingo. “Adolf Hitler’s Linz: Architektonische Visionen einer Stadt.” In “Kulturhauptstadt des Führers”: Kunst und Nationalsozialismus in Linz und Oberösterreich, edited by Birgit Kirchmayr, 65–78. Weitra: Bibliothek der Provinz, 2008.

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Sather-Wagstaff, Joy. “Affect, Memory, Heritage.” In Heritage, Affect and Emotion: Politics, Practices and Infrastructures, edited by Divya P. Tolia-Kelly, Emma Waterton, and Steve Watson, 12–29. New York: Routledge, 2016. Schlögel, Karl. Im Raume lesen wir die Zeit: Über Zivilisationsgeschichte und Geopolitik. Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 2003. Sharpley, Richard, and Philip Stone, eds. The Darker Side of Travel: The Theory and Practice of Dark Tourism. Bristol: Channel View Publications, 2009. Sommer, Monika. “Experiment und Leerstelle: Zur Musealisierung der Zeitgeschichte in den österreichischen Landesmuseen.” In Zeitgeschichte ausstellen in Österreich: Museen—Gedenkstätten—Ausstellungen, edited by Dirk Rupnow and Heidemarie Uhl, 313–35. Vienna: Böhlau Verlag, 2011. Till, Karen. The New Berlin: Memory, Politics, Place. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005. Uhl, Heidemarie. “Das ‘Erste Opfer’: Der österreichische Opfermythos und seine Transformationen in der Zweiten Republik.” Österreichische Zeitschrift für Politikwissenschaft 30, no. 1 (2001): 19–34. White, Leanne, and Elspeth Frew. Dark Tourism and Place Identity: Managing and Interpreting Dark Places. Oxon: Routledge, 2013.

Chapter 5

ALPINE VAMPIRES The Haunted Landscapes of Elfriede Jelinek’s Die Kinder der Toten (The Children of the Dead) (1995)

d “T

he country needs lots of space on top so that its late ghosts are able to hover above the waters” (Das Land braucht oben viel Platz, damit seine seligen Geister über den Wassern ordentlich schweben können).1 The first sentence of Jelinek’s novel already establishes the connection between Austria’s national identity space, the mountains, and the ghosts of the past. And the topic of tourism follows soon thereafter when the narrator introduces the village of Tyrol at the foot of the Wildalpen region in the province of Styria,2 a “peripheral tourist region, barely developed,” as locus horribilis for a complex, complicated, and often contradictory plot (KdT 7). The novel starts out with a road accident that interrupts the idyllic and somewhat sedated vacation atmosphere at the Pension Alpenrose, mostly frequented by “elderly people and large families” from Germany and the Netherlands (KdT 7). The inexplicably quick recovery of Karin Frenzel, one of the accident victims, from her seemingly fatal injuries, initiates a series of unsettling episodes: unexplained deaths occur in the hotel’s vicinity; a locked car mysteriously appears in the parking lot, blood dripping through its doors; and strange environmental phenomena unnerve the vacationers. The reader gradually realizes that Karin Frenzel belongs to a group of three zombies roaming the area: Karin Frenzel, the childless, middle-aged woman under constant tutelage of her “phallic mother,”3 is joined by Gudrun Bichler, “the student,” and Edgar Gstranz, a former ski-star turned salesman and right-wing politician (KdT 29–30; 115).

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Readers familiar with Jelinek’s oeuvre will recognize these three protagonists as representing a particular series of Austrian “types” that populate Jelinek’s texts: Gudrun Bichler represents the student of the “wrong kind of knowledge,” Gstranz the Austrian fascination with masculine athletes and right-wing ideologies, and Karin Frenzel the woman suffering under patriarchy.4 As Jelinek’s narrator puts it, “out of the meat heap . . . of Austrian cities . . . three people were picked out, who only wanted a bit of entertainment but then became inhabited by a force unrecognizable to themselves” (KdT 28).5 Seemingly unaware of their role as zombies, the three protagonists function as portals for yet another group of ghosts, namely the returning Austrian and German Jews murdered during the Holocaust. Gradually, they take over pieces of the three zombies’ bodies and clothing and crowd out the other tourists in the Pension Alpenrose: The new guests climb the narrow wooden staircase with heavy steps and spread out in their rooms, of which there are not nearly enough to house all these guests as the landlady anxiously realizes; . . . And yet, more and more new people climb up the catwalks and stairs, in pairs and groups, some by themselves. Behind the reception desk, cardboard suitcases already form mountains, bulky parcel goods that one has not seen in a long time. (KdT 517)6

An unceasing rain softens the soil and eventually causes a huge landslide that buries the Pension Alpenrose with its guests. The search and rescue teams are puzzled. Not only does the number of recovered bodies exceed by a large margin the number of registered resort guests, but the conditions of the corpses suggests that these people appear to have been dead for a long time. At the end of the novel, the government declares the area off limits and tourist Karin Frenzel dies in the hospital as a result of the severe injuries she suffered in the car accident at the novel’s beginning (KdT 666–67). During the first decade after the novel’s publication in 1995, readers and critics alike seemed to pay little attention to it. In 2004, an authoritative list of publications about Elfriede Jelinek listed only a dozen or so scholarly publications related to Die Kinder der Toten (The Children of the Dead).7 After Jelinek won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2004, the republication of some of the author’s earlier texts also rekindled interest in The Children of the Dead, which has since been discussed in the context of violence, gender roles, vampire stories, memory discourses, tourism, and, most importantly, in relation to Austria’s involvement in the Holocaust.8 I will draw from and build on several of these approaches for my discussion of the novel as an alternative historical space that models an affective reaction to the memory of the Holocaust and also facilitates affective, prosthetic encounters between the living and the ghosts of history. Three separate but overlapping categories will be at the center of my analysis: constructions of space and place; tourism and tourists; the role of discourse and language to communicate the memory and history of the Holocaust.

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Haunted Spaces References to Austria’s twentieth-century tourism landscape and infrastructure saturate The Children of the Dead and form one of the main points of entry for the exploration of the text as affective rendering of history and memory.9 Frequently, these evocative descriptions of idyllic landscape scenes are deconstructed almost immediately, often within the same sentence. The “tranquility” one hopes to find in the mountains is torn apart by lightning (KdT 14). The “high and soft rustling in the tree tops” (hohes leises Rauschen in den Wipfeln), a staple accessory of Heimatliteratur and tourism marketing, “shoos tourists from everywhere into their shelters” (scheucht von überallher die Touristen in die Unterkünfte) (KdT 185). Just about every time readers allow themselves to be seduced by the familiarity of a particular landscape description, they are in for a sobering rhetorical slap in the face. The area around the Pension Alpenrose, for instance, is depicted as an almost prototypical Austrian landscape at the foot of the Alps, where “hiking paths, a small local train, creeks, a clear river” (Wanderwege, eine kleine Lokalbahn, Bäche, ein klarer Fluß ) reference a European romanticist wholeness, which the narrator’s description quickly countermands: “[B]ut when the technicians open the dam too quickly, the trout suffocate and float belly-up . . . near the bridge, scaring away the tourists” ((A)ber wenn die Techniker das Stauwerk zu schnell öffnen, dann ersticken die Forellen im Schlamm und treiben, die Bäuche nach oben . . . bei der Brücke herum und vertreiben die Ausflügler) (KdT 8). Children of the Dead depicts Austria’s tourism landscapes as shaped by acts of political, economic, social, and environmental violence. When a few guests plan to visit the lake district in the Wildalpen area, the narrator frames the site’s geographical and touristic significance through a multilayered historical perspective: They would like to visit the Wildalpen area with its lakes and the small castle of the Habsburg archduke, who married the postmaster’s daughter from Aussee and then dug up the landscape like a mole—there had to remain, in addition to the daughters above ground, sufficient iron ore for the sons below ground, which one could turn into ploughshares and cannons. . . . The earth would provide the iron ore, and the Hammerherren [name for the overlords of iron works in the eighteenth and nineteenth century; GG] from the Mürz valley and the iron lords from Vienna gifted back to her the country’s soft children, fodder for the cannons. (KdT 8)10

The castles on the tourists’ itinerary are connected to the Habsburg dynasty, whose political and entrepreneurial activities, in turn, have shaped the very landscape that locals and tourists strive to experience as supposedly untouched nature. The name of the region, Erzgebirge (iron ore mountain range), allows for an association with both Habsburg aristocracy—Erzherzog (archduke)—and the mining of iron ore. Raw material from this region fed the Habsburg monarchy’s armaments production up until the early twentieth century. Under National So-

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cialism it became an essential source of raw iron for the Linz steel works, the National Socialist Hermann Göring Werke (see also chapter 4).11 Thus, from the beginning, the novel’s multilayered references reveal as hypocritical the muchtouted Austrian self-image as a peaceful, cultured nation defined by its tranquil and beautiful landscape. The novel offers more than a simple diatribe against uncultured and uneducated tourists. Whatever “authentic” natural, historical, or cultural truths one might want to hold up as foil against the allegedly inauthentic tourism discourse, the multivocal and shifting narrative presents the former as always already implicated in acts of commodification, violence, and exclusion. Whether it is the romanticist notion of nature as a basis for, or as a reflection of, humanity’s supposed moral foundation; the enlightenment-based conceptualization of nature as a nonhuman force in need of taming and domestication; or, the neoromantic rendering of nature by twentieth-century ecologists—none of these intellectual realms provides the reader an escape from the text’s main message that “nature is irrevocably entangled with culture.”12 Not all culture is nature, but most of what we consider nature is actually a result of culture: “Man has a moral interest in the shiny surface that constitutes the beauty of nature, but he forgets that he equipped nature with this sheen by striving towards her in the first place” (KdT 27).13 The text implicates German-speaking culture and philosophy, in combination with traditional education, in the development of an exclusive and exclusionary identity that violently ostracizes the (imagined) “other”: “A bit of humus was collected there, but it was not enough to achieve humanity” (KdT 507).14 Over more than six hundred pages, The Children of the Dead remaps Austria’s nation space into a Geschichtsraum (history space), where the history of the Holocaust unfolds its affective presence through and within the discourse of tourism (KdT 99). As the novel makes clear, tourism landscapes and the tourism infrastructure play a central role in Austria’s warped relationship to its National Socialist past: “After all, keeping this landscape clean, until the skeletons gleam lily-white, is not cheap” (KdT 294).15 Repeatedly, the narrator refers to mountain ranges as a Menschenmassiv (human massif ), an accumulation of humans that would like to move out from their “earthen realm, out from their Disneyland” (aus ihrer Erdendimension, aus ihrem Disneyland) (KdT 105). In everyday language, it would be the tourism landscape above ground that would be characterized as Disneyland. In the quoted passage, however, it is the dead’s underground entrapment that is called Disneyland, a labeling that presents Austria’s iconic tourism landscapes as composed of murdered Austrian Jews and exemplifies how Jelinek subverts conventional conceptualizations of space in order to generate affect. As Jessica Ortner points out, the touristic references “make permeable the borders between the heterotope space of the ‘other’ and the cultural space of one’s ‘own.’”16 To compare a phenomenon to Disneyland usually means to accuse it of superficiality, commodification, and, most importantly, of blurring the boundaries

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between an original and its copy. In the writings of Jean Baudrillard, for instance, Disneyland is symptomatic of the corrosive power of Western capitalism. Although Baudrillard implicates all of Western commodity consumption, his focus on the United States as place where this development is most pronounced implies a European sense of cultural and intellectual superiority. Disneyland is, in Baudrillard’s words, the “simulacrum” that “exists in order to hide that it is the ‘real’ country, all of ‘real’ America that is Disneyland.”17 Jelinek draws on but rehistoricizes Baudrillard’s concept of the simulacrum within a European and German context. As Matthias Konzett has argued persuasively in his discussion of the play Totenauberg (1991), Jelinek does not consider the simulacrum “merely a semiotic cultural reflection of deceptive commodity realities” to which the masses fall prey and the culturally initiated can deconstruct from their educated vantage point. Rather, the simulacrum’s “commodity illusions mask more powerful discourses of race, gender and nationhood thought to have been overcome in Europe’s postwar society,” discourses in which German and Austrian cultural and intellectual traditions are thoroughly implicated.18 Culture and education do not provide a neutral, authentic position for criticizing the Austrian Disneyland. On the contrary, the nation’s soil that contains this Disneyland is contaminated precisely because culture and education have contributed to an essentialized, nature-based, and exclusive notion of Heimat. Disneyland is not the artificial and pop-cultural “other” to the imagined Austria based on high culture and beautiful landscapes. Disneyland is already part of the allegedly real Austrian national identity, and it is therefore in Disneyland where the living and the ghosts of the dead will eventually reconnect: “It is in Austria, as Jelinek suggests, where the Disney theme park of distraction and illusion truly comes undone.”19 Jelinek’s Disneyland passage is a powerful example of Wolfgang Iser’s observation that literary fiction “mirrors [reality’s] reverse side” and, in so doing, creates a new cultural reality, one that is enriched with the narratives, stories, and people usually absent from our everyday conversations and encounters. It is a reality in which the Heimat becomes “unheimisch” (KdT 93) in the true Freudian sense of showing itself in all its frightening familiarity. Jelinek’s language maps a haunted space populated by ghosts and, to draw on Karl Schlögel’s metaphor, facilitates the reader’s entry into this map.

Expressing and Creating Affect through Discourse and Language Since this chapter contrasts a literary text’s potential for generating affective historical representations with the Linz09 experiential projects, a brief discussion of the relationship between affect, bodily experiences, and language is necessary. Shaped by its genealogy in anthropology and, later on, museum and heritage studies, the interdisciplinary analysis of affect initially privileged the body and

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its sensual, felt reactions to physical experiences over culturally and linguistically mediated experiences.20 While this focus on the body diversified and enhanced the conceptual, critical toolkit in a range of disciplines, it also essentialized the body as an example of “domains of experience ‘beyond discourse’ [that] are somehow more ‘real’ or ‘authentic’ than those expressed in words.” However, by ignoring what people say and how they talk about their experiences in everyday language or through literary formats, we also run the risk of overlooking significant areas of affective knowledge production.21 Thus, in her argument for a “polysensual” understanding of affect, Joy Sather-Wagstaff makes a strong case for “acknowledg[ing] the power that acts of oral or written narration have for invoking sensory responses” and for including “imagined (versus actually experienced) sensory stimuli or responses.” As Sather-Wagstaff emphasizes, if we focus on affect as an attempt to understand the human “sensorium as a highly complex, culturally mediated, and thus varied, biologically grounded (but not biologically determined) processual meaning-making phenomenon,” then the “performance of language itself joins this expanded repertoire of sensory stimuli.”22 SatherWagstaff bases these references to language and narrative on her research with museum visitors and difficult heritage tourists who describe their bodily and emotional reactions in often intense metaphors and linguistic formats. For the purpose of my discussion, I expand the notion of generating affective responses via “narration” and “imagined sensory stimuli” to include literature. Evidence for doing so can be found both in the areas of ethnography and museum studies as well as in literary studies. In the context of the former, Sharon Macdonald reminds us that debates about the past usually are not confined to a non-discursive, experiential realm but happen mostly via narrative formats: “[H]ow the past is told and written, and the particular words and linguistic constellations used, can be highly significant.”23 Quite often, these debates about particular words prompt poetic and literary responses that are based on historical research but transcend the realm of conventional historiography to convey through language the emotional and physical experiences of specific historical periods. In the context of literary studies, and especially in relation to the Holocaust as the traumatic experience of the twentieth century, Theodor Adorno’s prominent but misunderstood phrase that one cannot write poetry after Auschwitz has haunted the field for a long time. Yet, “creative responses to the monstrous trauma of the Shoah . . . have been much more widespread throughout the twentieth and into the twenty-first century than is often acknowledged.”24 And Danilo Kis underscores the role of literary fiction when he points out that fiction can create a “deeper authenticity” when representing history than conventional historiographic approaches.25 Just as the theorizations of affect by scholars in the fields of museum and heritage studies emphasize that bodily experiences cannot be investigated as separate from their discursive connection, so literary scholars highlight the impact of bodily experiences onto literary fiction, especially in the context of com-

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municating traumatic experiences: “For a number of writers, bearing witness to traumatic experience means to articulate the complicated process from traumatic memory to conscious memory by attending not only to verbal signs but also to that nonverbal, sensorial, and perceptual experience that remains locked within the body.”26 Jelinek’s Children of the Dead exemplifies the literary articulation of affective, bodily experiences related to traumatic historical events. The linguistic constellations of the novel not only attempt to communicate in writing experiences that are located outside the linguistic discourse but are composed with such density and complexity that they generate an additional layer of affective impact in the reader who must decipher, decode, and rearrange them in order to produce meaning. Critics have repeatedly compared the role of language to a main character in Jelinek’s work—“Main protagonist: The Language” (Die Hauptdarstellerin: Die Sprache), as an essay intertitle states it succinctly.27 Juliane Vogel has analyzed how the linguistic and rhetorical structure of Children of the Dead mirrors the novel’s metaphorical descriptions of the Austrian alpine topography as a landscape of violence. Focusing on the repeated use of the term “to fold” ( falten) in many different variations, Vogel shows the dismantling of the boundaries between the “real” and the ghostly. The folds visible in ragged mountain ranges become equated to “skin folds” (Hautfalten) (KdT 103), which in turn are connected to the folds exhibited by the literary narrative, whose more than six hundred pages are the result of a consistent unfolding and expansion of narrated time—barely one day—into an overwhelming narrative time. The National Socialist past repeatedly and easily breaks through the text’s narrative, indicating that Austria’s National Socialist past resides just below the surface and that the ground on which postwar Austria built its national identity forms anything but a reliable foundation.28 Rather, it is a “‘software’ built from the very corpses it brings into relief ” (‘software,’ die in den Leichen, die sie enthält, zugleich enthalten ist).29 The Holocaust’s dead, thus, do not return from the depth of history but from “the depth of the surface, whose actual variation, modulation, development, and realization they are” (der Tiefe der Oberfläche, deren aktuelle Variante, Modulation, Entwicklung und Realisierung sie sind).30 Children of the Dead is the textual manifestation of this surface space, insofar as the novel imitates “the fabric’s modulations and variations thoroughly, completely, and with graphical precision” (Modulationen und Variationen des Gewebes gründlich, vollständig und mit graphischer Präzision).31 In doing so, Children of the Dead responds to Schlögel’s demands for new narratives that represent history’s “disruptions, caesuras, shocks, discontinuities, edits.”32 Rather than symbolizing an image of history as neatly sedimented layers that one can unearth through systematic digging, the past and the present appear as complexly and frustratingly intertwined spheres, whose exploration requires significant personal investment and thereby produces the conditions for an affective historical experience that combines bodily and cognitive stimuli in a discursive context.

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Throughout Jelinek’s novel, affect is generated via the reader’s exhausting encounter with “an oral performance[,] . . . a staged oratory”33 that challenges conventional reading practices. As a reader one cannot consume, master, understand, or finish this text (and, by extension, the history represented through this text). “Language is a dangerous commodity/cargo” (Die Sprache ist ein gefährliches Gut), the narrator emphasizes in one of many meta-reflexive comments (KdT 89). And readers are reminded of their responsibilities and likely frustrations from the beginning: “careful, watch your head, the present text is about to start. It will slip away under your hands, but no worries, another one must carry me to completion, a mountain guide, not you!” (KdT 15).34 The “heteroglot” and “polyphonic” narrative voices that repeatedly switch between “I” and “we” simultaneously impel and frustrate readers’ efforts at sorting out who among the various ghostly characters that represent victims and perpetrators actually speaks at any given moment.35 Drawing on Renate Lachmann’s work on intertextuality, Kecht analyzes Children of the Dead as a “commemorative space” (Gedenkraum) that prompts readers to engage in the work of “remembrance . . . by conjuring up and making visible what many Austrians would prefer to keep hidden, buried, or suppressed.”36 In this context Jelinek’s novel exemplifies the strengths of fictional narratives in producing affect compared to the Linz09 projects that remain beholden to conventional notions of evidence. Similar to these projects’ efforts to generate an embodied response by stopping visitors’ movements, by causing their bodies to interact with inscriptions on the ground, and by redirecting their gazes, the novel’s relentless barrage of polyvalent and multireferential sentences forces readers to pause and bend their minds to figure out the possible meanings. The historiography-based projects of Linz09 tried to generate affect by manipulating historical facts without abandoning the conventions of evidence. Anxiously anticipating their audience to be numb to the horrors of National Socialism, the curators of In Situ clung to “reality” but embellished historical facts and exaggerated victim numbers in order to produce affect. Furthermore, the Linz09 projects maintained a hierarchical and authoritative habitus for communicating history: historians provided facts and substance, while visitors were expected to contribute emotional and embodied responses. In such a scenario, one authoritative narrative overshadows the multidimensionality of history and the simultaneity of different stories. It prevents visitors from developing their own knowledge of particular historical episodes and places. Quite interestingly, while the projects seemed to foreground the bodily experience, they actually reaffirmed the dominance of a distanced, historiographic expertise by presenting the stenciled annotations as “walk-in” footnotes. By contrast, the novel’s ability to go deep into the realm of fiction enables it not only to play with the tension between presences and absences but to combine discursive and non-discursive reactions. By compelling readers to move back and forth within the text, consult their knowledge of

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other texts, and try to decode the meaning of oblique or distorted references, the novel challenges readers to participate in the affective representation of history as a quasi-democratic process.37 Children of the Dead reverses the process of telling history and levels the playing field by involving the readers and their knowledge of history (or the telling lack thereof ). Throughout the narrative, readers encounter characters that do and do not resemble actual historical figures: “The country’s great dead, to name only a few, are named Karl Schubert, Franz Mozart, Otto Hayden, Fritz Eugen Last Breath, Zita Trembling, Maria Theresiana, in addition to what her military academy in Wiener Neustadt produced until 1918 and then in Stalingrad, as well as a few million mangled people” (KdT 7).38 Sentences like this one from the novel’s opening page keep readers on their proverbial historical and political toes. The bizarre references to historical characters and events contain kernels of truth. Yet, when they become interwoven with hyperbolized details as well as ironic, polemical, or provocative name changes and interpretations, the historical truth is not presented as a fait accompli but must be rediscovered by the reader. A case in point in the above quote is the line drawn between the Habsburg military academy and Stalingrad. In official Austrian historiography, the service of Austrian soldiers in the Nazi Wehrmacht has long been treated as an example of soldierly duty unconnected to the crimes of National Socialism. For the reader who knows that Austrian soldiers’ and officers’ involvement in war crimes exceeded their statistical representation in the military apparatus, the narrator’s casual linking of Habsburg military pride and National Socialist war of aggression can be read as a nod to the historical record.39 For the reader lacking such knowledge, the resulting confusion might be a prompt to further investigate. The same applies to passages where the multivocal narrative includes what appear to be excerpts from actual National Socialist documents. Casual interjections by the narrator make the reader wonder whether these excerpts are historical or fictional: Dear Excellency! Allow me to tread heavily in this matter! To ask for your support, because I apply for a bicycle through the process of Aryanization, and would like the process to speed up. . . . I have been a member of the party since May 1938. Since a decision has to be made within a few days, pray, receive me, so that I can be dead sixty years hence and won’t be hit on the head by anything. Heil! Let’s say a lot more about this! I ain’t saying nothing no more. (KdT 481)40

At first, the grammatically incorrect language seems to underscore the authenticity effect of this unabashed request to benefit from the theft of Jewish property. Only when the letter’s author suddenly shifts the chronological anchoring point and worries how these actions might impact him sixty years later does the letter reveal its fictional quality. But at this point it has already become impossible for the reader to simply categorize the letter as fictional and move on, as the linguistic and cultural patterns of the National Socialist history are embedded quite visibly

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in the folds of the text. The obliquely referenced ethical questions by the letter’s author—“so that I can be dead sixty years hence and won’t be hit on the head by anything”—prompt the reader to wonder how she, or her predecessors, might have acted in similar circumstances. The final two sentences of the quote further complicate a straightforward reading. Can the collective exhortation “Let’s say a lot more about this!” be attributed to the dead, who push back into the contemporary Austrian presence and would like to address non-Jewish Austrians’ responsibility for the crimes of National Socialism? Is the vernacular response by a single voice, “I ain’t saying nothing no more!,” reflective of the narrator? Let me reiterate here that I do not advocate for a dismissal of historical facts. However, I argue that a fictional literary text such as Children of the Dead can complement the presentation and communication of history in meaningful ways. Rather than creating a hierarchical situation where a mostly passive audience has no leverage over the way history is presented, Jelinek’s novel shows that one can start with fiction and move toward a thoughtful and critical engagement with history. Obviously, such a process implies an understanding of history as process of ongoing negotiations between past and present rather than as a definitive account of the past. Children of the Dead creates an affective encounter with history as it confronts readers with their own cultural knowledge, which they inevitably must bring up when trying to make sense of the novel’s polyvalent references: “[T]he reader is asked either to gradually discern the missing pieces in the narrative as it unfolds in a meandering fashion, or to retrieve them from his/her own archive of culturally shared knowledge.”41 Either way, the reader cannot choose the path of neutral and unaffected bystander to the narrated historical accounts. Readers become collaborators in this performative construction of affective “history” and “memorial spaces” in the form of a fictitious text, and the discourse of tourism plays a crucial role in this process. In the case of the murdered victims of the Holocaust, the nostalgic and contemporary images of Austria’s tourism landscape and of the country’s cultural history are a reminder that Jewish Austrians once also considered these places as illustrative of Heimat. In the case of non-Jewish Austrian and German readers, the images can best be described as “hooks,” whose familiar appearances pull readers into the text but never allow them to behold said images in a nostalgic fashion, since the same tourism discourse that produced them in the first place also provides the rhetorical tools for their swift and complete deconstruction. In both instances, nostalgia evokes what Susan Stewart described as “sadness without an object,” albeit with very different ramifications.42 In the case of the victims and survivors of National Socialism, Jelinek’s brief and already compromised nostalgic references underscore the futility of any effort to salvage at least partially their affective attachment to an Austrian Heimat before the historical rupture of the Holocaust. For non-Jewish readers on the other hand, the nostalgic references elicit, and simultaneously foreclose, the opportunity to “make

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up” for crimes against their fellow Austrians. As Stewart writes, “the realization of re-union imagined by the nostalgic is a narrative utopia that works only by virtue of its partiality, its lack of fixity and closure: nostalgia is the desire for desire.”43 Jelinek’s specific realization of nostalgia as already compromised results in a redefinition of nostalgia as the impossibility of desire. The impossibility to cope with reality through desire is, then, what generates the novel’s affective impact for those Austrian readers who would like to find closure or would like to draw a Schlussstrich. In this context, Jelinek’s deployment of nostalgia is perhaps best described as a manifestation of what Linda Hutcheon calls the postmodern “ironic double vision that acknowledges the final impossibility of indulging in nostalgia, even as it consciously evokes nostalgia’s affective power.”44 Repeatedly Jelinek plays with the staple images and slogans of the tourist discourse, with references to supposedly untouched natural landscapes, and teases readers with nostalgic tableaus of alpine, rural life. But every time one would like to engage with these images one cannot avoid confronting the ghosts of the murdered. Such a “merciless negation of any positive affect”45 that Heidi Schlipphacke diagnoses in Jelinek’s oeuvre transforms Children of the Dead into a discursive example of “polysensual,” affective experiences in an imaginary landscape where the ghosts and vampires of history can no longer be ignored.

Zombies, Vampires, and Ghosts on Vacation Just as the novel’s construction of history and memory spaces tapped into the tourism imagery familiar to Austrian readers, so the text’s ghostly figures are intimately connected with the discourse of tourism as well. The narrator introduces Austria as a country defined by Fremdenverkehr, which is in turn described as a practice through which people, “instead of being worn out and being tossed aside, . . . return newer and better than they were when they started their vacation, but they also receive less for themselves, because their budget has been exhausted” (KdT 7).46 This sarcastic description sets the stage for readers’ ghostly encounters with a group of three undead vacationers who wreak havoc at the Pension Alpenrose. Each one of the three characters exemplifies a particular aspect of the connection between Austria’s leisure industry and the country’s problematic past. First there is Edgar Gstranz, a former ski racer turned sports articles salesman. Although he died in a car accident several years prior to the narrated time, he can be seen on daring downhill runs on a snowboard-like gadget and relaxing in the Pension Alpenrose’s garden (KdT 30, 34, 43). The second character, Gudrun Bichler, is a philosophy student who committed suicide five years ago and spends her time at the resort eagerly searching out opportunities that life had denied her the first time: “She wants to return, because she was not allocated enough life during her

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first time” (KdT 54).47 The third undead is Karin Frenzel, a middle-aged widow who vacations with her dominant mother, whom she simultaneously rejects and clings to in almost masochistic fashion (KdT 76–79). Fatally injured in the car accident at the beginning of the novel, Karin frequently rejoins the other ghostly tourists in cutting a deadly trail in the region surrounding the resort. In several intertextual asides, Jelinek’s narrator connects the appearance of these three undead in the Styrian hills with the role of Styria as Urheimat of the vampire story.48 But in contrast to familiar horror stories, Jelinek’s undead blend the characteristics of vampires and zombies and appear less as foreign threats and more as familiar representatives of common Austrians (and Germans) on vacation. Other tourists recognize with some bewilderment the late ski star Edgar’s apparent reawakening, wonder about the seemingly miraculous recovery of Karin, and are surprised by Gudrun’s sometimes anachronistic behavior. But, in a reflection of the self-centered attitude of vacationers, which in turn mirrors Austrians’ neglect of their problematic history, the guests simply do not care enough to investigate these phenomena more closely. The three characters themselves are vaguely aware that they have been alive before. Their permanent spatial and chronological confusion becomes the most pronounced indicator of their double role as “gruesome hybrids” (gruselige Zwischenwesen) who both haunt and are being haunted.49 Edgar, Karin, and Gudrun commit a series of murders during their stay at the resort, but they also become the victims of repeated mutilations and killings. Oblivious to their history, they walk around as zombie figures, whose varying states of dismemberment come to embody the reality of Austria’s imagined postwar normality. On a symbolic level, their ghost-like appearances enact the murderous continuity of postwar Austrian society and also model the very hauntedness this community tries to keep at bay. As Avery Gordon has pointed out, ghosts are markers of a “haunting, and haunting is a very particular way of knowing what has happened or is happening.”50 The experiences of the three zombie characters in Children of the Dead exemplify what that haunting could look like in the case of postwar Austria. For instance, the student Gudrun Bichler is suddenly ripped out of her familiar environment, tumbles “backwards into a time loop” (rücklings . . . in eine Zeitschleife hinein), and arrives at a point in time fifty years before the novel’s contemporary time (KdT 160–61). Calculating from the novel’s year of publication, Gudrun has been transported back to 1945. As she walks through a door, she suddenly finds herself in a deserted Central or Eastern European urban street setting: Metal shutters cover the shopping windows, they appear to have been closed for years. A trace of defiance in the form of company logos, jeweler, furs, delicatessen, that are able to make a stand, the shutters of the watch and jewelry shop have a barred hole, one can look into it . . . and see a few wrist watches and several pieces of jewelry, this shop looks dusty, but the watches work! Only they show a very different time. (KdT 162)51

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Representative of a series of passages in Children of the Dead, this quote illustrates the “narrative of simultaneity” that Karl Schlögel posits as the most appropriate form for integrating history’s spatial and chronological aspects. The deserted European streetscape, easily identifiable by readers familiar with historical accounts and with Hollywood’s cinematic renditions of the Holocaust, is a reminder that the totality of history’s impact can never be captured in the linear accounts provided by historiography. It is important to note that Gudrun’s encounter with a different, older historical universe is situated not before the novel’s present time but parallel to it. A contemporary of the novel’s mid-1990s setting, she encounters a rupture in her “space-time-continuum” (Raum-Zeit Kontinuum) and experiences the very haunting of history, the affective encounter with Austria’s problematic past (KdT 94, 119). Gudrun’s experience suggests that the past is not bygone but that somewhere, in a kind of “container,” the watches still tick at a different pace, indicating that National Socialism’s historical chronoscape continues to matter for its murdered victims (KdT 161). This particular passage in Children of the Dead disrupts discourses of history and memory that focus on mastering the past. It also undercuts attempts at commemorating the Holocaust by celebrating the richness of Austrian and Jewish life before the catastrophe. And it frustrates readers’ attempts to keep track of the text’s wildly meandering and disconnected narrative strands. In doing so, the novel morphs into a manifestation of “prosthetic memory” (Landsberg) that has the potential to make the violent termination of European Jewish lives in 1945 more tangible and affective than historiographically “correct” but also distancing scholarly accounts. While Gudrun explores this strange space, she begins to feel the presence of “millions of beings” (Millionen Wesenheiten) behind the walls of these deserted rooms (KdT 164). Simultaneously, she starts seeing groups of people that look strangely familiar. They are dressed as tourists, in the “costume of the alpinist and mountaineer, hiking boots, walking sticks with small stickers, wool hats or felt caps, with jackets tied around their hips, they share exuberant laughter behind round sunglasses that have swallowed their eyes” (KdT 165–66).52 She begins to recognize that she already saw some of these characters near the Pension Alpenrose. Gradually it dawns on her that she is not simply a witness of this return of the dead, but that she functions as their portal: “And Gudrun wonders: Am I THE PLACE?” (Und Gudrun denkt: bin etwa ich DER ORT? ) (KdT 166). As representatives of living, contemporary Austrians and Germans who are unwilling to be affected by their murderous history and to acknowledge the hauntedness of their existence, the bodies of Gudrun, Edgar, and Karin become portals through which the murdered of the Holocaust leave their transitory existence just below the surface.53 From there they push back into the realm of the living to generate that ghostly experience necessary for communicating the traumas of history in a more affective fashion. Similar to Gudrun Bichler, who wonders if

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her body has become an entry portal for the returning dead, Karin Frenzel suddenly experiences her body as a “history space” (Geschichtsraum), where a strange being gets a “a second chance at housing” (zweite Chance zum Wohnen): “Is Karin F. this stranger’s hotel room that she is entitled to, which she has booked?” (Ist Karin F. der Fremden Hotelzimmer, das ihr zusteht, das sie gebucht hat?) (KdT 99). Throughout the novel, Jelinek’s use of graphic metaphors but also of creative and bizarre linguistic constellations not only describes an affective representation of history but also makes it tangible for the reader. An unceasing stream of returning dead begin to crowd out the tourists at the Pension Alpenrose. The dead return as ghosts with their bodies incorrectly and incompletely assembled, with body parts taken from the zombie characters as well as from other buried dead. With ill-fitting false teeth, limbs mounted in reverse, and entire body parts missing, the returning dead become Frankenstein-like manifestations of the haunting that occurs when “things are not in their assigned places, the cracks and rigging are exposed, people who are meant to be invisible show up without any sign of leaving.”54 With uncanny precision Children of the Dead echoes this uncovering of a new reality when it compares Gudrun Bichler’s mutilated body to “an exploded city, whose corroded pipes and reinforcements have burst, were ripped apart, and then strewn into a stake made of Mikado sticks” (KdT 177).55 By showing the returning ghosts in a state of distortion and dismemberment, the text foregrounds that its attempts to generate affect are not directed at reviving the status quo of Jewish Austrian life before the Anschluss. Rather, the mutilated bodies of the returning dead amplify the novel’s focus on confronting the living with an irreparable and irredeemable condition of absence, created when Austrian Nazi collaborators engaged in murdering their own fellow citizens. Children of the Dead remaps the tourism landscape and the alpine topography—core building blocks of Austrian national identity—into spaces of history and memory that represent those who “have vanished from the very midst of Austria . . . in their ‘disappearedness’ rather than in their absence.”56 Jelinek’s radical fictionalization of the discourse of tourism simultaneously represents and critiques Austria’s involvement in National Socialism and brings into relief the limitations of the Linz09 projects. The latter tried to insert their representations of history into an existing tourism infrastructure, defined by the EU’s capital of culture program. By contrast, Children of the Dead confronts and questions the tourism discourse per se. The novel’s polyphonic and heteroglot linguistic structure reutilizes standard tourism language and imagery in order to reveal the blind spots and exclusionary attitudes underpinning the myth of Austrian hospitality. Precisely because the discourse of tourism has become a main terrain for negotiating the legitimacy and validity of political and economic questions in postwar Austria, the description of the returning dead as clients with unfulfilled booking claims matters from both a moral and ethical perspective.

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For the novel’s contemporary Austrian characters, the Jewish Austrians murdered in the Holocaust “have disappeared so completely, as if their remains were petrified fossils, primordial beings, whose movements had been wiped out thousands of years ago” (KdT 163).57 But rather than having disappeared in or under the earth, the dead have become the earth. As quasi-composted beings, they return to overwhelm the living in the form of the final mud avalanche that buries the resort and half the valley. The rising stream of dead people emerging from the earth and the eventual violence of the huge mudslide can be read as manifestation of that “leakage” of the past into the present, which Landsberg views as characteristic of “prosthetic memories.”58 But instead of simply illustrating Landsberg’s concept, Jelinek’s novel significantly complicates it by including the perpetrator position. When Landsberg shows how movies, TV series, and experiential museums provide “the occasion for individual spectators to suture themselves into history,” these spectators are implicitly defined as people from the United States who have little to no connection to the perpetrator perspective.59 Children of the Dead, by contrast, assumes a readership that is at least partially composed of Austrian perpetrators, collaborators, bystanders, or, as the years go by, their descendants. Thus, the prosthetic memories at stake in Jelinek’s novel are also the suppressed memories of criminal deeds, a fact that imbues Landsberg’s description of the spectators and readers as “sutur[ing] themselves into history” with additional complexity. And indeed, Children of the Dead takes the terms “suturing” and “prosthesis” quite literally: the returning dead appear as figures stitched together from body parts of other corpses. The three zombie characters Edgar, Gudrun, and Karin undergo repeated experiences of dismemberment, with their own bodies consisting of dead tissue and borrowed limbs, “as if the infinity of the conditions had reassembled one, or the other, out of the millions of dead, sometimes by using foreign spare parts, only to make sure that at least one experiences the convergence of the beginning and the end” (KdT 44).60 By recombining the bodies of the undead murdered European Jews and the walking dead Austrian and German characters, the novel creates a new form of co-presence of victims and perpetrators. It is a prosthetic space that allows the dead an, albeit unsatisfying, avenue of return, and simultaneously tries to deny the postwar characters the satisfaction of a life in wholeness. In Landsberg’s notion of “prosthetic memory,” spectators and readers gain mediated access to the experience of victims in a way that preserves the “alterity” of the latter and generates empathy, which can in turn become the basis for ethical thinking.61 In Jelinek’s reconstruction of Austria’s tourism landscape as a prosthetic memory space, the ghostly victims and undead perpetrators experience the opposite: they lose their alterity and find themselves sewn together in haunting ways. And while the development of ethical thinking is not explicitly ruled out, Jelinek’s text expresses a rather pessimistic stance: “we are mourning something that is not there

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and that has never been known” (wir trauern also über etwas, das nicht ist und nie gekannt wurde) (KdT 130). Jelinek’s Children of the Dead exemplifies how the discursive in the form of a fictional literary text can generate affect in ways that avoid protracted arguments about historical accuracy. While the short-term projects of Linz09 might have intervened in more prominent places, the intervention caused by Jelinek’s novel actually forms a more intense affective engagement as it demands and simultaneously presents an impossible encounter between the dead and the living: “the spirits of the dead, who have disappeared for so long, should return and visit their children”—such reads the German translation of the Hebrew inscription on a paper scroll depicted on the first page of the novel (KdT 5).62 Rather than stretching the “real” into the fictional, it is the power of the fictional that generates a forceful and affective reality effect. Throughout the text, readers are challenged to use their imagination and knowledge of history in order to conjure up images of ghostly and haunting spaces that are populated by the victims of the Holocaust and form alternatives to Austrian tourism landscapes. As they try to picture what these mangled and half-decayed revenants, who claw their way back into the Austrian national leisure space, might look like, Austrian and German readers cannot avoid questioning their own as well as their ancestors’ roles in this scenario.

Conclusion Children of the Dead brings out hidden crimes by forcing Austrian readers especially to map out that uncanny space “behind the people” with their knowledge of the past. As if to make sure that contemporary Austrians (and Austrian readers) will not be able to avoid an encounter with the various undead characters that populate the Domus Austriae,63 the Pension Alpenrose—the symbolic manifestation of the house of Austria—is fenced in by an “invisible faultline” (unsichtbare Bruchlinie) and appears to have no entry way: “Everyone just looks at the sales trays with the colorful postcards, nobody looks to verify if the actual situation behind those people who sell their Heimat compares to the one—they are all lying so-and-so’s—that is depicted” (KdT 148).64 I agree with Schlipphacke that Jelinek’s obsessive focus on the particular trajectories of Austrian and German postwar history can be described as “provincial” when compared to the overall European memory landscape. But rather than see her texts as reflecting a “fixed relationship to history that continues to resonate in the oddly ‘non-European’ spaces of Germany and Austria,”65 I read Jelinek’s sustained engagement with and strategic deployment of the discourse of tourism as a historicizing of otherwise abstract practices of critical deconstruction. From this perspective, then, I consider the Children of the Dead a template for commemorating historical and violent “absences” in a tangible and affective way and

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a crucial “revisionist” contribution to Austria’s national narrative, even if its circle of influence will remain small. For, as the novel’s narrator expresses in a somewhat resigned commentary: “Language is a dangerous commodity, . . . but it will not be utilized anymore today” (KdT 89).66

Notes 1. Die Kinder der Toten (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag, 2004), 7. Henceforth cited as KdT in the text. All translations into English are mine unless otherwise noted. Since the novel has not yet been translated into English, I include short original German quotes in the text and longer passages in the footnotes whenever the original German wording or phrasing is relevant to my analysis. 2. Sabine Treude, “Die Kinder der Toten,” in Jelinek Handbuch, ed. Pia Janke (Stuttgart: Metzler Verlag, 2013), 113. 3. Maria-Regina Kecht, “The Polyphony of Remembrance: Reading Die Kinder der Toten [The Children of the Dead],” in Elfriede Jelinek: Writing Woman, Nation, and Identity: A Critical Anthology, ed. Matthias Konzett and Margarete Lamb-Faffelberger (Plainsboro Township, NJ: Associated University Press, 2007), 196. 4. Treude, “Kinder der Toten,” 115; Kecht, “Polyphony,” 196. 5. “Aus dem Fleischhaufen . . . der österreichischen Städte . . . sind drei Personen herausgefischt worden, die nur ein wenig Unterhaltung wollten, und plötzlich wurden sie zum Unterhalt für eine Macht, die sie vorher nicht kannten.” 6. “Die neuen Gäste steigen polternd die schmale Holzstiege hinauf und verteilen sich in ihre Zimmer, die längst nicht mehr ausreichen können, wie die Wirtin verstört nachrechnet; . . . Und doch steigen immer neue Menschen, gruppen-, paarweise, manche auch allein, die Stege und Stiegen hinauf. Hinter der Rezeption stapeln sich Pappkoffer zu Bergen, sperriges Stückgut, wie man es lang nicht mehr gesehen hat.” 7. Kecht, “Polyphony,” 191. 8. For an exhaustive list of scholarly works, see Pia Janke, ed., Jelinek Handbuch (Stuttgart: Metzler Verlag, 2013). 9. My choice to focus on Jelinek’s Children of the Dead should not be understood as claim that this is the writer’s only work through which her engagement with Austrian history can be studied. As her longest non-dramatic work, it offers itself for a comparative reading with Ransmayr’s epic prose work, Morbus Kitahara, which was published the same year and which I discuss in the next chapter. However, from Jelinek’s Totenauberg (1991) to her play In den Alpen (2002), the role of sports and tourism as well as the affective encounter with Austria’s culture and history constitute important themes. See Matthias Konzett, The Rhetoric of National Dissent in Thomas Bernhard, Peter Handke, and Elfriede Jelinek (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2000); Allyson Fiddler, “Theorizing and ‘Playing’ Sport in Elfriede Jelinek: Some Notes on Ein Sportstück,” in From Perinet to Jelinek: Viennese Theatre in Its Political and Intellectual Context, ed. W. E. Yates, Allyson Fiddler, and John Warren (New York: Peter Lang, 2001), 273–83. 10. “Sie wollen das Wildalpengebiet mit seinen Seen und das Schlößchen des Erzherzogs der Habsburger besichtigen, welcher damals die Postmeisterstochter aus Aussee geheiratet und das Land daraufhin wie ein Maulwurf umgegraben hat—es mußte doch, außer den

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12. 13.

14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

26.

27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

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Töchtern über der Erde, auch noch etwas Eisen für die Söhne unter der Erde übriggeblieben sein, das man zu Scharen von Pflügen oder Kanonen . . . verarbeiten konnte. Die Erde gab das Erz, und die Hammerherren aus der Mürzfurche und die Eisenherren aus Wien gaben ihr des Landes weiche Kinder, Futter für die Kanonen, wieder zurück.” For an overview of the region’s role in the industrialization of the Habsburg monarchy, see Akos Paulinyi, “Industrialisierung eines Montangewerbes ohne eigene Steinkohle: Die Obersteiermark—Ein Sonderfall?,” in Die Industrialisierung europäischer Montanregionen im 19. Jahrhundert, ed. Toni Pierenkemper (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2002), 306– 7. For the connection with the Linz steel works, see Oliver Rathkolb, ed., NS-Zwangsarbeit: Der Standort Linz der Reichswerke Hermann Göring AG Berlin, 1938–1945 (Vienna: Böhlau Verlag, 2001). Christian van der Steeg, “Natur,” in Jelinek Handbuch, ed. Pia Janke (Stuttgart: Metzler Verlag, 2013), 284. “Der Mensch hat ein moralisches Interesse an diesem hellen Schein, der die Schönheit der Natur ausmacht, er vergißt, daß er es war, der der Natur diesen Schein gegeben hat, in dem er sich zu ihr bemühte.” “Dort hat sich ein bißchen Humus angesammelt, aber zur Humanität reichts nicht ganz.” See also Treude, “Kinder der Toten,” 114. “Es kostet schließlich was, diese Landschaft besenrein zu erhalten, bis die Skelette strahlerweiß blinken.” Jessica Ortner, Poetologie “Nach Auschwitz”: Narratologie, Semantik und sekundäre Zeugenschaft in Elfriede Jelineks Roman Die Kinder der Toten (Berlin: Frank & Timme, 2016), 61. Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 12. Konzett, Rhetoric, 101. Ibid. Joy Sather-Wagstaff, “Affect, Memory, Heritage,” in Heritage, Affect and Emotion: Politics, Practices and Infrastructures, ed. Divya P. Tolia-Kelly, Emma Waterton, and Steve Watson (New York: Routledge, 2016), 14–15. Sharon Macdonald, Memorylands: Heritage and Identity in Europe Today (New York: Routledge, 2013), 81. Sather-Wagstaff, “Affect,” 17. Macdonald, Memorylands, 81. Hubert Zapf, Literature as Cultural Ecology: Sustainable Texts (New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2017), 210. Danilo Kis, Homo Poeticus: Essays and Interviews, trans. Ralph Manheim and Francis Jones (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003); quoted in Zapf, Literature as Cultural Ecology, 211. Laura DiPrete, “Foreign Bodies”: Trauma, Corporeality, and Textuality in Contemporary American Culture (New York: Routledge, 2006), 10; quoted in Zapf, Literature as Cultural Ecology, 213. Treude, “Kinder der Toten,” 117. Juliane Vogel, “‘Keine Leere der Unterbrechung’—Die Kinder Der Toten oder der Schrecken der Falte,” Modern Austrian Literature 39, no. 3/4 (October 2006): 17. Ibid., 16. Ibid., 17. Ibid., 18.

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32. Karl Schlögel, Im Raume lesen wir die Zeit: Über Zivilisationsgeschichte und Geopolitik (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 2003), 504. 33. Kecht, “Polyphony,” 194. 34. “Achtung, ducken Sie sich, es beginnt der vorliegende Text. Er rutscht unter Ihren Händen weg, aber das macht nichts, muß mich halt ein andrer zur Vollendung tragen, ein Bergführer, nicht Sie!” 35. Kecht, “Polyphony,” 194; 203. 36. Ibid., 195. 37. In her authoritative reading of Children of the Dead as an example for commemorative literature “after Auschwitz,” Jessica Ortner describes the novel’s creation of a history space as characterized by Nachträglichkeit, the process of narrating events from the perspectives of different characters whose experiences of time and space do not align with the time-space coordinates of the main narrative thread. Ortner, Poetologie “Nach Auschwitz,” 16, 86. 38. “Die großen Toten des Landes, um nur einige von ihnen zu nennen, heißen Karl Schubert, Franz Mozart, Otto Hayden, Fritz Eugen Letzter Hauch, Zita Zitter, Maria Theresiana, zuzüglich dem, was deren Militärakademie in Wiener Neustadt bis 1918 und in Stalingrad 1943 hervorgebracht hat und noch ein paar Millionen Zerquetschte.” 39. Rolf Steininger, Austria, Germany and the Cold War: From the Anschluss to the State Treaty, 1938–1955 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2008), 14. 40. “Hochgeehrter! Gestatten Sie mir, in diese Angelegenheit kräftig zu treten! Um Unterstützung bitten, denn bewerbe mich auf dem Arisierungsweg, daß jetzt dorten Fahrrad bereitgestellt, damit schneller geht. . . . Bin Parteimitglied seit Mai 1938. Da in wenigen Tagen Entscheidung fallen muß, bitten, mich zu empfangen, damit 60 Jahren später ich tot sein kann und mir vorher nichts auf den Kopf fallt. Heil! Sagen wir noch viel dazu! Ich sag nix.” 41. Kecht, “Polyphony,” 195. 42. Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 23. 43. Ibid. 44. Linda Hutcheon, “Irony, Nostalgia, and the Postmodern,” in Methods for the Study of Literature as Cultural Memory, vol. 6: Proceedings of the XVth Congress of the International Comparative Literature Association “Literature as Cultural Memory,” ed. Raymond Vervliet and Annemarie Estor, (Leiden: Rodopi, 2000), 205. 45. Heidi Schlipphacke, Nostalgia after Nazism: History, Home, and Affect in German and Austrian Literature and Film (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2010), 65. 46. “die Leute, statt abgenützt und weggeschmissen zu werden, neuer und besser zurückkommen, als sie hineingegangen sind, aber weniger für sich kriegen, denn ihr Budget ist aufgebraucht.” 47. “Sie will zurück, weil sie beim ersten Mal zuwenig Leben zugeteilt bekommen hat.” See also KdT 49–50. 48. One of the earliest vampire texts, J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s novella Carmilla (1872) was set in Styria. Initially, Bram Stoker had set Dracula (1897) in Styria as well, but later changed the location to Transylvania. Bram Stoker, Dracula, ed. Nina Auerbach and David Skal, A Norton Critical Edition (New York: W.W. Norton, 1997), 331. Jelinek’s undead exhibit characteristics that can variously be associated with vampires, zombies, and ghosts. Rather than trying force the characters into rigidly defined categories I follow Jelinek’s practice of using the terms in interchangeable ways.

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49. Frank, “Blut tropft uns vom Kinn,” Stern, 32 (1995), 114; quoted in Kecht, “Polyphony,” 200. 50. Avery F. Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 8. 51. “Rollbalken vor den Auslagen, schon seit Jahren heruntergelassen, wie es scheint. Ein letzter Trotz von den Aufschriften, Juwelier, Pelze, Delicatessen, die sich noch behaupten können, der Rollbalken des Uhren- und Juwelenladens hat ein Loch, das grob vergittert ist, man kann aber hineinschauen . . . [und] ein paar Armbanduhren und etliche Schmuckstücke sehen, dieses Geschäft macht einen vertrockneten Eindruck, aber die Uhren gehen! Nur die Zeit ist eine ganz andere.” 52. “Tracht des Bergsteigers und Tourengehers, feste Bergschuhe, Stöcke, die mit kleinen Abzeichen beschlagen sind, Wollmützen oder Filzhüte, die Anoraks sind um die Hüften gebunden, hinter runden Sonnenbrillen, die die Augen geschluckt haben, lachen sie übermütig miteinander.” 53. Kecht, “Polyphony,” 194. 54. Gordon, Ghostly Matters, xvi. 55. “wie eine gesprengte Stadt, deren rostige Rohre und Armierungen, Röhren und Leitungen geborsten, aufgerissen, zu einem Scheiterhaufen aus Mikadostäben auseinandergefetzt worden sind.” 56. Jutta Gsoels-Lorensen, “Elfriede Jelinek’s Die Kinder der Toten: Representing the Holocaust as an Austrian Ghost Story,” Germanic Review 81, no. 4 (Fall 2006): 364. 57. “sind so gründlich verschwunden, als wären ihre Hinterlassenschaften Fossilien in Stein, Urwesen, deren Bewegungen vor Jahrtausenden verwischt worden sind.” 58. Alison Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 119. 59. Ibid., 14. 60. “als hätte die Unendlichkeit der Verhältnisse aus den Millionen Toten den einen oder anderen wieder zusammengebastelt, auch mittels Einfügen der Ersatzteile von Fremden, nur damit wenigstens für einen der Anfang mit der Ankunft zusammenfalle.” 61. Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory, 149. 62. Translation by R.-M. Kecht. “Die Geister der Toten, die solange verschwunden waren, sollen kommen und ihre Kinder begrüßen.” Kecht, “Polyphony,” 196. 63. Kecht describes the Pension Alpenrose as “a synecdoche for the Domus Austriae that Jelinek wants to see torn down and rebuilt on a new foundation and with much more space for many different kinds of guests.” Ibid., 201. 64. “Alle Augen richten sich immer nur auf die Bauchladen mit den bunten Ansichtskarten, kein Mensch schaut nach, ob es hinter den Menschen, die ihre Heimat verkaufen, auch wirklich so aussieht, wie es, die lügen ja wie gedruckt, hier so bunt abgebildet ist.” 65. Schlipphacke, Nostalgia after Nazism, 110. 66. KdT, 89.

Bibliography Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994. Fiddler, Allyson. “Theorizing and ‘Playing’ Sport in Elfriede Jelinek: Some Notes on Ein Sportstück.” In From Perinet to Jelinek: Viennese Theatre in Its Political and Intellectual Context,

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edited by W. E. Yates, Allyson Fiddler, and John Warren, 273–83. New York: Peter Lang, 2001. Gordon, Avery F. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. Gsoels-Lorensen, Jutta. “Elfriede Jelinek’s Die Kinder der Toten: Representing the Holocaust as an Austrian Ghost Story.” Germanic Review 81, no. 4 (Fall 2006): 360–82. Hutcheon, Linda. “Irony, Nostalgia, and the Postmodern.” In Methods for the Study of Literature as Cultural Memory, vol. 6: Proceedings of the XVth Congress of the International Comparative Literature Association “Literature as Cultural Memory,” edited by Raymond Vervliet and Annemarie Estor, 189–207. Leiden: Rodopi, 2000. Janke, Pia, ed. Jelinek Handbuch. Stuttgart: Metzler Verlag, 2013. Jelinek, Elfriede. Die Kinder der Toten. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag, 2004. Kecht, Maria-Regina. “The Polyphony of Remembrance: Reading Die Kinder der Toten [The Children of the Dead].” In Elfriede Jelinek: Writing Woman, Nation, and Identity: A Critical Anthology, edited by Matthias Konzett and Margarete Lamb-Faffelberger, 189–217. Plainsboro Township, NJ: Associated University Press, 2007. Konzett, Matthias. The Rhetoric of National Dissent in Thomas Bernhard, Peter Handke, and Elfriede Jelinek. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2000. Landsberg, Alison. Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004. Macdonald, Sharon. Memorylands: Heritage and Identity in Europe Today. New York: Routledge, 2013. Ortner, Jessica. Poetologie “Nach Auschwitz”: Narratologie, Semantik und sekundäre Zeugenschaft in Elfriede Jelineks Roman Die Kinder der Toten. Berlin: Frank & Timme, 2016. Paulinyi, Akos. “Industrialisierung eines Montangewerbes ohne eigene Steinkohle: Die Obersteiermark—Ein Sonderfall?” In Die Industrialisierung europäischer Montanregionen im 19. Jahrhundert, edited by Toni Pierenkemper, 301–42. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2002. Rathkolb, Oliver, ed. NS-Zwangsarbeit: Der Standort Linz der Reichswerke Hermann Göring AG Berlin, 1938–1945. Vienna: Böhlau Verlag, 2001. Sather-Wagstaff, Joy. “Affect, Memory, Heritage.” In Heritage, Affect and Emotion: Politics, Practices and Infrastructures, edited by Divya P. Tolia-Kelly, Emma Waterton, and Steve Watson, 12–29. New York: Routledge, 2016. Schlipphacke, Heidi. Nostalgia after Nazism: History, Home, and Affect in German and Austrian Literature and Film. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2010. Schlögel, Karl. Im Raume lesen wir die Zeit: Über Zivilisationsgeschichte und Geopolitik. Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 2003. Steeg, Christian van der. “Natur.” In Jelinek Handbuch, edited by Pia Janke, 282–85. Stuttgart: Metzler Verlag, 2013. Steininger, Rolf. Austria, Germany and the Cold War: From the Anschluss to the State Treaty, 1938–1955. New York: Berghahn Books, 2008. Stewart, Susan. On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993. Stoker, Bram. Dracula. Edited by Nina Auerbach and David Skal. A Norton Critical Edition. New York: W.W. Norton, 1997.

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Treude, Sabine. “Die Kinder der Toten.” In Jelinek Handbuch, edited by Pia Janke, 113–18. Stuttgart: Metzler Verlag, 2013. Vogel, Juliane. “‘Keine Leere der Unterbrechung’—Die Kinder der Toten oder der Schrecken der Falte.” Modern Austrian Literature 39, no. 3/4 (October 2006): 15–26. Zapf, Hubert. Literature as Cultural Ecology: Sustainable Texts. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2017.

Chapter 6

THE BLIND SHORES OF AUSTRIAN HISTORY Christoph Ransmayr’s Morbus Kitahara (The Dog King) (1995)

d I

n 1995, the same year that Jelinek’s Children of the Dead was published, Christoph Ransmayr’s novel Morbus Kitahara (The Dog King) also arrived in bookstores.1 At almost five hundred pages, Ransmayr’s novel provides readers with yet another hefty, fictionalized take on the connection between Austrian twentiethcentury history and the discourse of tourism. As a novel that connects one of Austria’s oldest and most renowned tourism destinations, the Salzkammergut, with places from the country’s darkest history, the concentration camps of Mauthausen and Ebensee, Morbus Kitahara is a significant component in my discussion of how the links between tourism and history in fictional literary texts can serve as models for affective experiences of memory and history. Morbus Kitahara tells the story of the community of Moor, a small town in an alpine lake region twenty-three years after a long, unnamed war had ended with the Peace of Oranienburg. The victorious Allied countries—the United States, the Soviet Union, Brazil, Great Britain, and France—have imposed a punitive occupation regime on their former enemies. As the site of a brutal labor camp during the war, Moor bears the brunt of the Allied troops’ retaliation. Once a thriving tourism destination, the alpine region’s infrastructure has either been dismantled or fallen into disrepair. Aside from subsistence farming, the granite quarry in the former labor camp is the only opportunity to earn a living. Overseen by Ambras, a survivor of the camp’s torture practices, the quarry also serves as central element for the atonement rituals imposed by the occupation command. After the occupation troops’ departure, Ambras assumes the post of highest civilian representative. He hires Bering, a local blacksmith and mechanic, as assistant, bodyguard, and driver. The two men live together in an abandoned

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lakeside villa, where they are occasionally joined by Lily, a young woman left behind by a trek of refugees right after the war. Called “the Brazilian” in reference to the original destination of her family’s refugee trek, Lily now makes a living by smuggling goods across the demarcation lines. When the granite quarry is exhausted, the occupation authorities decide to transform the region around Moor into a military training ground. Ambras, Bering, Lily, and the entire local population are shipped to Brazil, where they are promised a new life and employment in another quarry. Shortly after their arrival in Brazil, the three protagonists join a local Brazilian woman to explore a remote island off the coast, the location of a former prison. The remainders of the prison architecture trigger a traumatic relapse in Ambras and he jumps to his death, pulling Bering with him. Morbus Kitahara never directly mentions World War II or names countries such as Austria or Germany, but the scattered references to familiar geographical and topographical markers, as well as the novel’s publication exactly fifty years after the end of World War II, invited critics to connect the novel with this historical period. With more than twenty years hindsight, the reviewers’ reactions illustrate to what extent Morbus Kitahara further stirred up insecurities about European historical narratives that had already become mobilized by the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, which in turn led to the subsequent reunification of Germany and hastened the collapse of the Soviet Union. Arriving in the midst of these debates, the novel’s intentionally postmodernist style provided openings for a wide range of frequently contradictory interpretations. For instance, some reviewers ignored the direct references to a US postwar occupation force and read the novel as coded critique of the “commandeered anti-Fascism of the GDR” in which the actions of the local Occupation Commander Elliott symbolized a “moralistic crusade on behalf of a mean, old Washingtonian Stalin.”2 Other reviewers read Morbus Kitahara as a not-so-veiled manifestation of anti-Americanism and felt it necessary to teach the author a bit of history: This is how it could have come, maybe, if the American president (Roosevelt) had not resisted the plans of his advisor (Morgenthau). . . . The logic of the novel’s political fantasies amounts to nothing more than the insight that man is cruel and guilt is universal, that the weapons race and war will never end, that perpetrators are incapable of atonement and victims will remain victims. Maybe this is what the world looks like from Ransmayr’s bird’s eye view. But the truth is that the Americans liberated Europe from the brown terror, that the invention of chewing gum and Coca-Cola says more about humanity than these eternal references to Teutonic myths of battle and renunciation.3

Academic reviewers, as well as some of Ransmayr’s fellow writers, focused less on the novel’s direct references to World War II and occupation history and more on the text’s noticeable postmodernist elements. Ransmayr’s earlier novels, Die Schrecken des Eises und der Finsternis (The Terrors of Ice and Darkness) (1984)

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and Die letzte Welt (The Last World) (1988), had been widely celebrated as explorations of the state of humanity and art under postmodern conditions. Following this line of interpretation, several critics read Morbus Kitahara as yet another attempt by Ransmayr to examine experiences of homelessness and of non-linear historical trajectories. Jutta Landa, for instance, analyzes the novel’s alternative and dystopian plot as a protective barrier against ideological distortions.4 Carl Niekerk, on the other hand, cautions against separating the novel completely from any historical development and considers the narrative of post-civilizational decline an almost prophetic representation of the cyclical pattern of history: “The comforting end of history is nowhere to be found in Morbus Kitahara—on the contrary: postmodernity is followed by premodernity.”5 While some reviewers used the novel’s most obvious postmodernist characteristics—self-referentiality and non-linearity—as starting point for philosophical excursions,6 others perceived them as eroding the defenses against undemocratic movements. In the eyes of Ransmayr’s fellow Austrian writer Christoph Janacs, Morbus Kitahara transforms a unique historical event such as the National Socialist regime into an opportunity for experimental aesthetic bricolage in which “everything refers to something and therefore to nothing.” As a consequence, so Janacs contends, the novel opens itself up to misappropriation by right-wing groups, “which do not even bother to deny the committed injustices but rather decorate them as myths and elevate them aesthetically.”7 Reviewers have paid surprisingly little attention to Morbus Kitahara’s construction of an alternative history space in one of Austria’s most iconic tourism landscapes.8 The easily identifiable role of the Upper Austrian and Salzburg lake district in the novel receives merely passing nods. Brita Steinwendtner, for instance, observes that the topographical references do indeed point to a particular Austrian region—“the geographical coordinates could be mapped out”—but declares any further discussion of actual geographical reference points for the novel’s places to be meaningless “[b]ecause Ransmayr’s place is the world-place of violence, cowardice, infamy, deception, lack of peace, perpetual war.”9 Steinwendtner’s simultaneous expansion and flattening of Morbus Kitahara’s spatial environment overlooks the crucial role Ransmayr’s local environment played in his own conceptualization of the novel: I went to school on one end of Lake Traunsee, and on the other end was Ebensee, location of a former Mauthausen subcamp. . . . The topic has been with me since my earliest time as a narrator and . . . has threatened me. I thought, for the first and perhaps last time, I will take the material for a novel from the backdrops [Kulissen] of my own life.10

Ransmayr’s reference to a threatening history connected to the familiar Kulissen of his childhood home already points to the two thematic arcs that frame this chapter’s analysis of the novel. The term Kulissen invokes notions of staging and

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(in)authenticity, two concepts closely related to the analysis of places and national identity in the context of Austria’s tourism landscape. Analogous to my discussion of Jelinek’s Children of the Dead, the articulation of a threatening history through fictional and imaginative literary means forms the basis for an analysis of Morbus Kitahara as modeling a critical affective approach to Austria’s National Socialist past.

The Terror of the Sublime: From Kulturlandschaft to Landscape of Torture Readers with a basic knowledge of Austrian geography will easily discover the novel’s fictional landscapes as modeled on the Upper Austrian lake district, the Salzkammergut, which covers parts of Upper Austria, Styria, and the province of Salzburg, and whose combination of lakes and mountains is known as one of Austria’s oldest and most renowned leisure landscapes. More specifically, the novel’s description of the town of Moor as a settlement nestled between a lake and high mountains invites identifications of the novel’s fictional topography with the actual Upper Austrian town of Gmunden. A significant point of entry into the historical salt mining and logging region of the Salzkammergut, Gmunden is located at the Northern tip of the Traunsee, one of the deepest lakes in the Alps. Morbus Kitahara’s description of the “lovely view of the lake” reads like a postcard description of the scenery around the Traunsee, which like “a green fjord seemed to lie there far below, an arm of the sea spraying reflected light” (DK 23). But as soon as the novel’s description of this impressive “Naturtheater” has grabbed the reader’s attention, it redirects it onto the landscape’s scars of a dark past:11 Viewed by clear weather from across the expanse of water, the quarry’s terraces looked simply like bright, monstrous steps leading from the clouds down to the shore. And up there, somewhere high above the top of this giant granite stairway, high above dust clouds from the blasting, sagging roofs of the barracks by the gravel works, and any traces of all the agonies that had been suffered on the Blind Shore of the lake—high above it all, the wilderness began. (DK 23/MK 32)

The references to a camp, a quarry, and to torture practices anticipate the novel’s focus on how the legacy of Austrian and German National Socialist crimes impacted postwar society. Across the lake from the actual town of Gmunden lies Ebensee, a small town identifiable through the phrase “[v]iewed by clear weather from across the expanse of water” and notorious as former site of a subcamp of the Mauthausen concentration camp system in 1943.12 Morbus Kitahara links the otherwise disconnected places of Ebensee, located in the Salzkammergut mountains, and Mauthausen, located at the banks of the Danube, via the description of the quarry as a gigantic staircase, an image that invokes one of the most iconic

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and notorious instruments of torture at the Mauthausen concentration camp, namely the Todesstiege (stairway of death).13 This redrawing of the tourist map into a map tracing the Austrian landscape of torture and murder by moving around a series of iconic, topographical markers is central to the novel’s creation of an affective space of memory. The karst plateau rising next to the actual Lake Traunsee, named Totes Gebirge (dead mountains) for its treeless appearance, transforms into a Steinernes Meer (petrified ocean) in the novel, a name designating several Austrian mountain ranges, none of which are located in the Salzkammergut.14 Similarly, the novel reapplies the phrase Die Schlafende Griechin (sleeping Greek woman), a popular Austrian vernacular name for a mountain with a peak supposedly resembling the nose of classical Greek statues, to a sunken steam ship at the bottom of the lake.15 In its process of remapping, Morbus Kitahara redeploys the aesthetic conventions and kinesthetic experiences of tourism for the purpose of constructing an affective encounter with the spaces and places of Austria’s National Socialist history. In their analysis of the links between the development of the tourist gaze and the romanticist notion of the sublime, Claudia Bell and John Lyall emphasize how the visual perception of towering heights, threatening gorges, and panoramic vistas created bodily sensations that shaped the experience of the sublime.16 Morbus Kitahara reproduces these bodily sensations in a series of spatial descriptions that quickly shift between high and low angles as well as distant and near places. The view of the green lake amid the towering mountains conjures up serenity and inspires awe. It is reminiscent of the beautiful vistas and sublime panoramas that defined what John Urry described as the “tourist gaze.”17 The evocative depiction of how the gigantic steps of the granite quarry appear on the horizon during clear weather is an almost prototypical example of a sublime landscape experience. Adverbial phrases that describe distance—“viewed from across”—and sudden altitude shifts—“high up” and “deep down”—further enhance the sublime experience by adding descriptions of bodily movements that produce kinesthetic sensations. However, the affective quality of this reading experience acquires a more serious meaning when the narration slips from the description of conventional bodily sensations experienced in tourism to the dust clouds of detonations and the “traces of all the agonies that had been suffered on the Blind Shore of the lake.”18 The novel generates affect not only through its reconfiguration of the familiar tourism landscape as a landscape of terror and murder but by highlighting that the tourist gaze itself is compromised: the above quoted descriptions of the landscape occur from the vantage point of a “bulletriddled watchtower,”19 a perspective that puts the reader into the place of the guard watching the camp and, consequently, into the position of a potential perpetrator. It becomes clear that the beholder of the tourist gaze cannot claim to simply enjoy the view. Rather, whoever occupies the position from where this particular tourist gaze emanates is always already implicated in the violent

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events that occurred in this landscape and in the attempts to repress the memory thereof. In an insightful essay on Morbus Kitahara, Alexander Honold wonders if Ransmayr’s novel as a whole cannot be viewed as a monument that situates the “unspeakable” horror of genocide in the “crystal clear world of the high Alps . . . , where it might be safe from being erased by one of the many attempts at explaining the inexplicable after the fact?”20 At first, Honold’s reading of Morbus Kitahara as attempt to reinsert the Holocaust into the sublime can be understood as another way of underscoring the novel’s creation of an affective realm of history. After all, as Honold writes, enlightenment philosophers considered “the sublime” to signify both the divine but also the sensual impressions that exceeded human cognitive understanding.21 In this context, then, it appears meaningful to think of Morbus Kitahara as sublime and affective representation of genocide. However, when Honold worries that the historical event of the Holocaust needs to be protected from explanations after the fact, he also seems to imply that the historical event better stand on its own, outside of the discursive. In contrast to that, my reading of Morbus Kitahara emphasizes how the novel achieves the reintegration of the Holocaust into the discursive construction of Austrian national history by critically engaging with the role of the sublime as core element of the story Austria likes to tell about itself through the discourse of tourism. In this context, then, it is necessary to further examine the role of the Salzkammergut, which forms the template for the novel’s topographical and historical setting and constitutes a crucial link between tourism and Austrian national identity. In particular, the history of the Salzkammergut as a tourism region demonstrates how bourgeois modernity utilized peripheral landscapes to (re)create the very notion of authenticity that was felt lacking in the developed urban centers.22 Natural scientists, painters, and travel writers “discovered” the lake district around 1800. They explored and perceived the region through the lenses of natural science and ethnography, developing “a harmonious narrative that constructed the landscape of the Salzkammergut as positive antipode to the industrialized centers of ‘civilization.’”23 Over the years, this formerly isolated salt mining region became a “destination of desire” for various strata of Austrian society, including the Habsburg aristocracy, the Viennese bourgeoisie, and the urban proletariat.24 The often conflicting political attitudes of these groups notwithstanding, they transformed the lake district into a quasi-utopian space where one could be “human first and foremost, and only then aristocrat, bourgeois, peasant or proletarian.”25 The smoothing out of social strife in this “third space” found its parallel in the construction of a tamed wilderness.26 From a term associated with danger and a place to be avoided at all cost, wilderness, in its invented and romanticized version, developed positive connotations as the primitive, archaic, and uncontaminated space where one could recover from civilizations discontents. And while the proletarian version of the Salzkammergut

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narrative differed from the aristocratic and bourgeois ones, their perspectives met each other at the intersection of national identity. Thus, the narratives about the lake district as Austrian topography also illustrate how personal and mediated communal experiences transformed a particular landscape into a foundational element of Austrian national identity for a wide range of otherwise antagonistic social groups and strata.27 It is against this cultural and historical legacy that Morbus Kitahara reconfigures the Salzkammergut into an open-air museum to the murdered and into a haunted landscape where “things are not in their assigned places.”28 Instead of an idyllic vacation landscape the novel describes the ruins of a once thriving tourism industry: “Wild oats and grasses grew from the windows of the Grand Hotel by the lake, and the collapsed roof of the bandstand was covered with a chaos of broken chairs and sunshades, their canvas rotted long ago” (DK 51). And instead of the ubiquitous welcome signs that greet visitors at the entrance of almost every Austrian town and village, Moor welcomes potential visitors by advertising its crimes. Across five terraces of the former quarry, resembling five “monstrous steps,” a huge inscription reminds the people of Moor of their guilt and invokes the presence of the dead: “Here eleven thousand nine hundred seventy-three people lie dead / slain / by the inhabitants (Eingeborenen) of this land / welcome to Moor” (DK 23–24).29 By referencing the “wilderness” that starts behind the quarry, and by describing the locals as Eingeborene the novel introduces a reversed ethnographic and colonialist perspective that undermines the reader’s expectations of a sublime experience.30 Rather than a pre-industrial landscape that offers rejuvenation to weary city dwellers, the Salzkammergut in its ghostly remapping appears as a primitivized Austria where dangerous natives must be kept in check by external forces.

Performing Memory: Between Avoidance, Reconstruction, and Affect From the beginning, Morbus Kitahara foregrounds a tension between cognitive and experiential modes of dealing with a difficult past. While the stone inscription illustrates the efforts by the occupation regime to communicate the historical facts and force the locals into an acknowledgement of their involvement in the crimes committed in the labor camp, the locals themselves seem more interested in creating memories of their own victimhood. Exemplary for the latter is a description of the process through which Lily’s mother tries to come to terms with the disappearance of her husband, an SS guard, in the Soviet Union’s Gulags. As a former visual artist who “until the devastation of her city had painted scenery in a workshop of some Burgtheater [emphasis in original],” the mother takes up her former profession again and begins to depict the scenery that surrounds her

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now—“first, a Last Judgment on a freshly stuccoed wall of the rebuilt cemetery chapel; later, the solemn faces of farmers, miners, and fishermen” (DK 95). Eventually she painted a portrait of her missing husband based on a photograph that shows him in his black SS-style uniform: “[B]rushstroke by brushstroke, [she] substituted a loden suit with elkhorn buttons for the black uniform and a felt hat with a jaunty spray of heather for the brimmed cap” (DK 96). Against such an overpainting and repainting of history, the Allied commander has the perpetrators in Morbus Kitahara confront their criminal past through monuments and repentance rituals. In addition to having local workers erect the monument in the quarry, Occupation Commander Elliott has also implemented Stellamour’s Party, a bizarre commemoration event named after the fictional US president, Lyndon Porter Stellamour. Four times a year, Elliott orders the people of Moor to reenact torture scenes based on a photo album he found in the former camp files. The locals have to dress up as “Jews, as POWs, Gypsies, Communists, or race defilers” (DK 34). During one such party, Elliott orders the reenactment of a photo whose caption reads Die Stiege (the stairway) and that showed “hundreds upon hundreds of bent backs . . . , each bearing a wooden barrow on his back, and in each barrow was a large square-hewn stone” (DK 35). Elliott refrains from forcing the people of Moor to carry the full weight of the stones, however, allowing them instead to fill the barrows with cardboard, newspapers, pillows and to wrap themselves in coats and blankets as opposed to the thin rags worn by the actual inmates. When during one such performance Bering’s father tries to carry an actual stone up the stairway, he crumbles under the weight and tumbles down the terraces, prompting his son Bering to burst out into hysterical laughter (DK 36). The young Bering’s seemingly inappropriate laughter demonstrates the younger generation’s disinterest in these commemoration rituals. In an unsuccessful attempt to connect with younger generations, the occupation authorities try to create more accessible formats for commemorating the past, from photo exhibits to repentance pilgrimages to rock concerts. But instead of looking at photos of the dead, “Moor’s children” wanted to see the multilane highways of the United States, the skyscrapers of Manhattan, the Statue of Liberty. The younger generations rejected their responsibility for the past: “What did they care about black flags at the docks and at the ruins of the gravel works? Or about the message of the Grand Inscription at the quarry? . . . [F]or Bering and those like him, the rituals of remembrance . . . were only gloomy shows” (DK 142). Bering and his cohort’s disinterested attitude toward their ancestors’ involvement in a criminal regime illustrates that the form of commemoration propagated by the occupation troops was both ineffective and inaffective. The focus on photographic representation and numbers generates only limited empathy and understanding for the specific fate of the victims:

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Like many of Moor’s children, Bering sometimes believed the prisoners from the camp barracks had never had a voice of their own or any other face than the rigid features you saw on dead people in the army’s posters, their naked corpses piled atop one other outside barracks or lying naked and staked in great ditches. No show tent and no history lesson had ever failed to have such pictures, and they were often carried by sandwich men in the processions of the Societies of Penitence. (DK 141)

To be sure, neither German nor Austrian postwar generations experienced anything like the hyperbolic, fictionalized version of an oppressive memory culture depicted in Morbus Kitahara. Nonetheless, at a basic level the novel’s descriptions resonate with how survivor groups, historians, and political parties debated how best to commemorate the crimes of National Socialism after the end of World War II. For instance, when studying how the historical exhibits in the former concentration camps of Mauthausen and Ebensee have evolved over the decades, parallels between the novel’s depictions and the historical reality become visible. Similar to the occupation authorities in Morbus Kitahara, who try to communicate the horrors of the camp via a focus on numbers, authentic camp documents, and photographic verisimilitude, the Soviet occupation authorities, in concert with the provincial and federal Austrian governments and with survivor groups and historians, attempted to convey to postwar Austrians the traumatic camp experience through authentic visual and textual documents as well as archeological exhibits.31 For instance, in the immediate postwar years the Soviet high commissioner criticized the presentation of Mauthausen’s camp barracks as resembling more a “sanatorium” rather than one of “Hitler’s death factories,”32 prompting the Federal Association of Austrian Concentration Camp Inmates, Prisoners, and Politically Persecuted to demand a redesigned historical exhibit. Original photographs from the National Socialist period should document the “mountains of corpses and executed,” and “impressive statistics” were meant to inform visitors about the number of people in the barracks, the calorie rations for each inmate, and the daily death rates. Wherever photographs were not available, painters [sic] should be hired to render realistic depictions of the experience of “life and murder in the camp.”33 Both the novel’s imaginative creation of empty commemoration rituals and the debates about enhancing the affective impact via greater realism highlight the limitations of a form of remembrance that wants to let the numbers and images speak for themselves and ignores the power of fictional, discursive means for creating affect. At a certain point, visitors are numbed by victim figures, no matter how shockingly high and “impressive” they are. Similarly, realistic photographic or artistic representations of torture and murder seem to lose their shock value in a multimedia environment saturated with violent images.34 Both the Grand Inscription with its purportedly accurate victim number—“eleven thousand nine hundred seventy-three”—and the staging of scenes from camp life are thus caricatures of commemoration rituals gone awry. These fictional scenarios also once

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again resonate with the Linz09 projects, where the desire to reach audiences emotionally and physically without intentionally venturing into the realm of fiction resulted in distorted victim numbers and mislabeled places, all under the pretense of offering objective and accurate historiographical accounts. Morbus Kitahara’s depiction of atonement practices and historical reenactments of crimes as empty rituals prompted critics to position Ransmayr’s novel in the context of Austrian and German right-wing demands to end the debate about the Holocaust.35 Such criticism not only ignores the novel’s complexity but also overlooks Ransmayr’s thorough and often pioneering work in researching and writing about the legacy of National Socialism in rural Austrian regions as part of his travel essays.36 In an interview he later admits that the encounter with the archives during these writing projects was overwhelming: “These books with lists of the dead, the names and numbers, the court files, the testimonials—all of this is almost unbearable.”37 But, Ransmayr realizes, many would like to relegate these events to a distant past or deny outright that they ever happened. It is against such active attempts at forgetting that Morbus Kitahara provides an affective memory space grounded in the power of fictional narrative: “But if I transpose what was and what is documented into a narrative space, in my story, and tell it to myself, then everything reappears as real as never before.”38 In this one sentence, Ransmayr captures what it means to communicate history affectively through literature. Although expanded into the fictional, the narrative space is still connected to a historical past (to “what was and what is documented”). At the same time, it enables the reconstruction of past events in a subjectively authentic, and therefore affective, manner. Ransmayr argues that he took the images of the familiar Salzkammergut region and used them in a process of “transformation rather than representation. I am not narrating a place I experienced, but a place I created.”39 For Ransmayr, literature, as a more developed form of language, allows for a mapping of the Komplementärbild (complementary image) of reality: With language one can map out what exists objectively but has not been discovered as of yet, but literature far exceeds this objective reality: As a writer I can also create blank areas on a map. Thus with language I can on the one hand work on the reality that can be measured/surveyed and depicted, but I also have the opportunity to create a complementary image.40

This “complementary image” is the haunting of a repressed history that occurs, as Gordon writes, “when what’s been in your blind spot comes into view.”41 With its attempt to use fiction in order to make visible a haunting aspect of the real, the novel exemplifies the creation of affect through discursive means and imaginative construction. Representative for those who cannot, or do not want to, develop an affective reaction to the horrors of history, Ransmayr articulates through literary language that which affects him on a bodily, “polysensual” level: “It is impossible for me to be in the Salzkammergut, in Ebensee, in Mauthausen and walk through

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the backdrops of my own history without simultaneously thinking of this past and of a possibly threatening future.”42 This fusion of past, present, and future is a crucial element for affectively communicating history through fictionalized haunted places. For, as Michael Bell states, “the ghosts of place are always presences and as such appear to us as spirits of temporal transcendence, of connection between past and future.”43

Ghostly Encounters A ghostly presence shapes Morbus Kitahara’s plot from the first sentence: “Two bodies lay blackened in the Brazilian January”—the German term “Januar” and the English term “January” both phonetically and semantically invoke the Portuguese “Janeiro,” which designates both the month of the Portuguese colonizers’ landing as well as a topographical place, namely the Guanabara Bay on the Atlantic coast (DK 3).44 The novel’s first sentence thus introduces the recurring theme of overlapping time-space dimensions and immediately describes a ghostly scenario visible only to the reader: unaware of the corpses hidden under the foliage, the pilot of the surveillance plane flying over the island reports it as “Deserto. Uninhabited” (DK 4). (As it turns out later, the novel’s opening chapter actually describes the plot’s ending, a twist that underscores to what extent frame, angle, and depth of field determine how we see reality and anticipates the kinesthetic and affective elements of later passages.) Ghosts also frame the birth of young Bering who is born at the end of the war during the only bombing raid that ever hit Moor. Celina, a Polish forced laborer, pulls Bering’s pregnant mother out of the firestorm and into a wine cellar. As she plays midwife to Bering’s mother, Celina’s prayers transform into visions of revenge: The men of Moor . . . had risen up against the whole world—and in its fury the world with all its living and dead would come storming across the fields in a Last Judgment: angels with flaming swords, Kalmyks from the steppes of Russia, hordes of troubled souls deprived of their mortal remains without consolation of the Church, ghosts! (DK 7–8)

Soon Celina herself joins these armies of “troubled souls” and “ghosts” when an Allied soldier kills her as she tries to hide her personal war booty, a horse (DK 8). For Bering’s mother, visions of Celina’s ghost hovering over the water become recurring phenomena that usually anticipate some kind of accident (DK 40; 106–8). But it is neither these appearances of the dead Celina, nor the avenging ghosts of those killed by the soldiers of Moor that eventually haunt Bering and the other locals. Instead, it is the return of Ambras, inmate “Nr. 4273” of the former labor camp (DK 57). The occupation authorities initially tasked the

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taciturn survivor of the torture regime with running the quarry operations. Soon he also represents the occupation command in general. As an alleged protégé of the occupation authorities, Ambras receives otherwise unthinkable privileges and inspires hate and envy in the locals. The Hundekönig [dog king], so named after his daring feat of overpowering a pack of wild dogs with his bare hands, travels across the demarcation lines of occupied Europe at will, lives in a requisitioned villa, and was gifted the former US commander’s Studebaker, the only car “in a land of horse-drawn wagons, carts, and pedestrians” (DK 54–55; 64). This “ghostly symbol of authority” is also what brings Ambras in contact with Bering (DK 54). When Ambras crashes the Studebaker, Bering is the only one who can help repair the car, turning the scrap metal heap of old Jeep carriages, tank engines, jukeboxes, and toasters in front of his smithy into the “laboratory for the creation of a work of art” (DK 72): unable to return the Studebaker to its previous form, Bering creates a fearsome and powerful machine with doors in the “shape of a bird’s wings tucked tight to dive,” a hood that resembles a “crow’s beak” and a grille forged like “two talons opened to snatch their prey” (DK 75). Impressed by Bering’s craftsmanship, Ambras hires the blacksmith to assist him as driver and bodyguard. With Ambras as a representative of the dictatorship’s victims, and Bering as member of the postwar generation and perpetrator cohort, their cohabitation in the Villa Flora serves as a symbolic foil for the novel’s exploration of Austrian and German memory discourses. Similar to Jelinek’s Children of the Dead, Morbus Kitahara introduces Ambras as multifaceted character who prompts Bering, and eventually the readers, to tap their own knowledge of history to either verify the narrated accounts or fill in the gaps. When readers first encounter Ambras, his precise victim/survivor category has not yet been defined. The narrator explains a scar on Ambras’s left forearm as a trace of the former inmate number, which he erased with a hot iron file on the day of his liberation (DK 55). The scar evokes images of Holocaust survivors, but the novel’s other characters and the reader soon learn that Ambras was not Jewish. A fashion photographer in his prewar civilian life, he was persecuted and tortured by the previous authoritarian regime not because of his race or religion but because of his relationship with a Jewish woman (DK 172–73). In the context of actual postwar Austrian memory discourses, this difference is crucial. After all, anti-Semitism has continued to shape Austrian debates about reparations and compensation for the Jewish survivors of the Nazi camps.45 Confronting a non-Jewish survivor does not so easily allow the locals to rationalize their complicity in the crimes of the past as crimes inflicted on an “other” but brings up inconvenient questions about their own roles in the machinery of exclusion, persecution, and murder. While it undercuts implicit expectations for Ambras’s identity, the novel does introduce the “othered” Jewish Austrians and the “other” repressed history of the Holocaust when it describes the place Ambras has chosen as his living quarters in Moor:

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The Villa Flora had known no human beings for years. Its owner, a hotelier named Goldfarb, had operated the Bellevue and its affiliated spa as an old-fashioned sanatorium and always on the edge of bankruptcy; but one November night during the war, he, together with his wife and deaf-mute daughter, had been shoved into an unmarked car by officials of the secret police and hauled off to some unknown destination. Word in Moor at the time was: to a camp in Poland—but also, camp? Poland? Ha! To the next best woods. (DK 46)

Starting out with what at first seems like an attempt to explore Ambras’s precise identity, this passage ultimately explores the locals’ involvement in the murder of their fellow Jewish and disabled citizens. This shift underscores Ambras’s role as a ghostly figure through which absences become visible, but it also produces the very sense of hauntedness that is a precondition for an affective experience of history and an empathic commemoration of historical events. For much of Austria’s postwar period, this sense of haunting has been mostly ignored. Austrian debates about World War II and the crimes of National Socialism revolved around Austria’s role of “first victim.”46 Governmental decrees and official histories expended considerable energy to glorify the deeds of Austrian soldiers in the German Wehrmacht and “normalize” the extinction of Jewish Austrians as either somehow logical because of their alleged dominance in culture, politics, and finance, or as a tragic outcome of their already fraught relationship with non-Jewish Austrians.47 In both cases, Austrians deflected agency, either to external forces—the German Nazis—or to history. The passage quoted above taps into the discourse of tourism to return the focus on the long and multilayered relationship Jewish Austrians had to the core narratives of Austrian national identity. The description of the Jewish hotelier Goldfarb’s shaky leisure imperium draws on the role of nostalgia as a powerful element of the discourse of tourism and utilizes it to generate a revisionist and affective perspective on history. The “pillaged, ice-cold hotels—the Bellevue, the Stella Polaris, the Europa and the Grand Hotel, where long pennants of snow wafted from pagoda roofs” are not simply decorative elements of a fictitious dystopian landscape (DK 87–88). Vienna’s Jewish citizens had played an important role in shaping the Salzkammergut’s region as a tourist destination in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. And despite the region’s early embrace of Fascist anti-Semitic tendencies long before the Anschluss, it has remained an important lieu de mémoire for Jewish Austrian emigrants.48 By revisiting the complex role of the region as prototypically national Austrian landscape through the nostalgic lens of tourism, Morbus Kitahara reproduces a haunting awareness of the void constituted by the Jewish Austrian absence. At the same time, the novel highlights non-Jewish Austrians’ responsibility for this violent “disappearance” and for the subsequent silence. The narrator’s channeling of “knowing” local voices undermines the pretense of ignorance and innocence with regard to the crimes of National Socialism. The novel suggests that not

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only did the locals know of the camps and the regime’s murderous practices, but their knowledge of the actual murder of the hotelier and his family in the local woods reveals the collaboration of the local population in specific murderous deeds. Through the ghostly figure of Ambras the “children of Moor,” who are disinterested in the past, find a potential way for the combined experience of “space, time and action” which Karl Schlögel describes as precondition for an affective approach to history.49 As he listens to Ambras, Bering begins to recognize the transformation of the landscape of Moor into a landscape of torture. Simultaneously, the reader can identify in the Salzkammergut not just a tourist region but the emerging contours of the Third Reich’s connected topography of murder. When Ambras explains to Bering how his shoulders were permanently damaged during a torture practice called Schaukeln (swing), Bering must acknowledge that this is the first time he listens to a camp survivor’s first-person narrative (DK 139–41). By realizing that not all camp inmates had been killed, but that some survivors and families of the murdered share the perpetrators’ contemporary time and space, Bering recognizes “that the past was not past by a long shot” (DK 142). Ambras’s inability to escape the memories of his torture experience even after liberation draws attention to a past that is haunting and, therefore, very different from the tourism nostalgia that permeates the memories of Moor’s inhabitants. The locals of Moor dream of a glorious tourist past. Their longing for “the great freedom of the Mediterranean coasts” and the “riches of the booming south” echoes the postwar tourism waves sparked by the German and Austrian economic recoveries (DK 50). By contrast, Ambras’s postwar travels have been plagued by the inescapable, affective experience of Moor. When Bering asks him why he returned to Moor, Ambras responds: Come back to the quarry? I didn’t come back. I was in the quarry even when I was walking through the rubble of Vienna or Dresden or any of the other harrowed cities of the early Stellamour time. I just needed to hear the din of hammers and chisels somewhere or watch someone climb a staircase with some burden on his back, even just a sack of potatoes—and I was in the quarry. I did not come back. I never left. (DK 169)50

Ambras’s response is a powerful example for the difference literary fiction can make when it comes to constructing affective history spaces. Historical markers, museum exhibits, and critical guidebooks can point to historically relevant places in the Salzkammergut region. Yet, these latter accounts are beholden to a linear representation of history. Literary fiction makes it possible to create the disturbing co-presence of past and present, of victims and perpetrators in ways that challenge any notion of a Schlussstrich or closure. Ambras’s response is the literary manifestation of Ransmayr’s perspective on the past:

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It’s simply not true that the camp entrances opened in 1945 and that at least the survivors enjoyed a happy ending—that is not the whole truth. There are people, for whom the past never turned into history, all that exists for them is an un-time (Unzeit), in which all times, the past, the presence, and the future converge. People who are condemned to live in this un-time . . . return again and again to the places they were supposedly liberated from.51

Morbus Kitahara enables Bering and the reader to “walk into the maps,” as Schlögel calls it, and to recognize the “landscapes of the mind” as well as the contours of an affective history space.52 But as the novel applies its complementary gaze on the familiar tourism landscape and redraws the maps of postwar Austrian and German history to show the hauntedness that should have been, it also reminds readers how, with few exceptions, postwar generations remained indifferent to the ghosts of the past. In the very scene in which Bering learns of Ambras’s personal experiences, he also turns his attention back to the machines he is working on: After so many speeches, flyers, and messages of the great Lyndon Porter Stellamour, after the countless penitential and memorial rites in the backwater villages along the lake and on its Blind Shore, the first man, the only man among the men of Moor in whom Ambras had ever confided, still would rather listen to the pounding and hammering of engines than to the words of memory. (DK 182)

Bering rejects being affected by Ambras’s experience of history and this results in the titular eye disease, morbus kitahara.53 An army doctor tells Bering that the black holes clouding his field of vision are not uncommon among snipers and soldiers in high stress conditions: “But you? . . . What have you been staring at? You’re not a trench soldier or an AWOL sharpshooter. Whatever it is, let it go. Look at something else” (DK 53). Bering follows the doctor’s advice to look at something else and compensates for his deteriorating eyesight by relying more and more on his aural and, especially, his tactile senses—he “saw what he wanted to see with his hands” (DK 187). On a metaphorical level the black holes in Bering’s field of vision symbolize the collapse of the false “prosthetic memories” the German and Austrian perpetrators and postwar generations invented for themselves. Focusing only on a selective angle of historical reality, postwar German and Austrian societies reconstructed their histories by filling in the complementary angle with pleasant self-images instead of with the haunted landscapes of the campsites and the ghosts of the persecuted and murdered. Even when Bering encounters in Ambras a returning victim he still refuses to engage with Ransmayr’s “complementary angle.” Only in the form of ghostly black holes seared into Bering’s retina does that complementary angle—the repressed criminal past—become visible. Tellingly, when Bering first misidentifies the black holes in his eyes as pot holes in the road and swerves around them, Ambras barks at the erratically driving Bering: “Are you

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seeing ghosts?” (DK 149). Yet, it is not ghosts per se that disturb Bering’s gaze. Rather, the black spots are an indication of a haunting that becomes noticeable when “those singular yet repetitive bearings on the world lose direction, when the over-and-done-with comes alive, when what’s been in your blind spot comes into view.”54 The novel’s opening passages, which presented the reader with the beautiful landscape through the contaminated tourist gaze from the watchtower, introduced the kind of double vision—or “complementary angle”—necessary to recognize the horrendous past in the present. The eye disease with its black holes forms the haunting and ghostly version of this double vision, the “polysensual” bodily reaction to a traumatic past, which Ransmayr then translates into a discursive format via specific linguistic constellations such as metaphors and intertextual references. In so doing, he models what such a meaningful affective experience could look like and also generates a kind of ersatz affect in his readers. To make visible the dark historical events hidden in the blind spot, Morbus Kitahara expands the map of memory and history even deeper into the “landscapes of the mind”55 and into the “un-time” (Unzeit)56 of the victim and survivor Ambras. When the granite quarry of Moor is depleted, the Allied command decides to turn the region into a military training ground and ships the remaining inhabitants of Moor off to Pantano, a place at the Brazilian coast. The Portuguese term Pantano means “marsh, swampy wilderness, wetlands” (DK 324), a name that invokes parallels to Moor, which in German can also designate a swamp or bog. After spending a few weeks at the coast, Ambras, Lily, and Bering visit the Hundeinsel (dog island), a remote former prison island off the coast. Shortly after stepping onto the island, the smoky air from a forest fire and the remnants of the prison’s wall and watchtower trigger a sudden rupture of Ambras’s timespace coordinates: “He can smell the ovens. The corpses. This almost impenetrable thicket here, this must have been the drill field. Along the road through the camp, between the stony watch-towers, inside the barracks—the fire is present everywhere and yet soundless and invisible” (DK 347). Ambras climbs up the remaining prison walls until he is unable to move forward or backward. When Bering hands him a rope and tries to guide him back down, Ambras steps forward into the void, pulling Bering with him: “And now at last Ambras is standing at the fence, at the barbed wire with white porcelain insulators for the high voltage. And yet with that first step he now takes, he feels no shock, no pain. And there is no rain of sparks, either. He simply steps into emptiness” (DK 355). As he falls, Ambras feels the weight of pain and torture finally lifted off him. Bering, on the other hand, feels the sudden pull of the rope with such force that he has no chance to resist it. Bering’s fall mirrors his father’s fall from the quarry steps in Moor during Commander Elliott’s torture reenactment procedures, albeit with a crucial difference: Commander Elliott had focused almost exclusively on the visual similarity between the documentary photos and the reenactment.

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He provided blankets to keep the “extras” warm and allowed them to carry fake rocks up the stairs to spare them the “unbearable weight of reality” (DK 36). By contrast, Bering experiences the full and unbearable weight of reality. Instead of eliciting laughter, his fall ends with his death. The novel’s narrative climax provides the ultimate example for an affective encounter with history. Although Bering has come to dislike Ambras because of the older man’s special relationship with Lily, he has also become irrevocably entangled in Ambras’s torture experience. Bering has, to put it differently, wandered deeply into Ambras’s haunted inner landscapes, where he is about to act out the role of both perpetrator and victim simultaneously. During their stay at the coast, Bering has become attracted to Myra, the Brazilian woman who guided them to the island. Upon their arrival at the coast, his earlier jealousy of Ambras’s relationship with Lily has grown into such intense hatred that Bering decides to kill Lily. But, as it turns out, Lily has already left the island and returned to the coast. The person in the raincoat whom Bering shoots and kills is Myra, his new love interest. The attempt to see only what he wanted to see precipitates Bering’s own undoing. Among the ruins of the prison island, Bering does what he was unable to do at the lake amid the mountains of Moor: he hears Ambras’s calls for help and tries to rescue him from the ledge of the prison ruins where he got stuck. Yet, by stepping up next to Ambras and connecting with him through the rope, Bering also steps into the imaginary time-space configuration Ambras entered once they landed on the island. In other words, Bering joins Ambras in the camp and he dies with him in the camp. The veracity and accuracy of history is not contingent on photographic evidence anymore, it is confirmed by a shared affective, multisensory experience. Bering, who initially did not want to acknowledge the hauntedness of his home and the presence of the ghosts, must eventually share their fate. While Bering acts in the time-space configuration of what he assumes to be the here and now on Dog Island, the narrator and the reader know that Ambras has returned to the “un-time” where past, presence, and future converge.57 With its double reference to time and place, the island’s location near the delta of the Janeiro River provides yet another key to a reading of Morbus Kitahara as the ever shifting fictional and haunted map of Austrian and German history and as prosthetic memory space. The power of the final scene does not rest on a description of the island’s prison ruin as similar to the torture camp at Moor. Rather, after first rearranging the map of the Salzkammergut in such a way that the familiar tourism landscape also includes the sites of persecution and murder, the novel eventually inverts the map yet again. The quarry of Moor and the lake surrounded by the alpine landscape reappear in almost exact reverse shape: instead of on a lake in a mountainous scenery, Ambras’s and Bering’s final encounter occurs on an island—which is nothing other than the rocky outcropping of a vast underwater mountain—surrounded by water. And through Ambras’s imagination the camp reappears as more threatening, oppressive, and real than ever before.

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Ambras’s shared suicide with Bering also serves as a meta-reflection on Morbus Kitahara’s overall role as a fictional text about actual history. By making it clear to the reader that the similarity between the ruins of the prison island and the torture camp exist only in Ambras’s mind, the novel reaffirms how relevant the imaginary and the fictional are for a fuller understanding of historical reality and also for the creation of affect.58 By inverting the map of the Salzkammergut into a map of a deserted island in the ocean, this fictional literary narrative “throw[s] into relief the uncharted regions of the prevailing culture” and “changes the map” to show “what remains cognitively unfathomable” in an affective way.59 Unable and, as suggested by his eye disease, unwilling to engage with Ambras’s experience on a cognitive level, Bering eventually gains access into the uncharted territory of his prevailing culture, namely Moor’s culture of historical amnesia and repression. And rather than grasping it cognitively, memory hits him with full multisensory and, as it turns out, lethal force. Ambras’s final return to the imaginary but all-too-real torture landscape in his mind forms a powerfully affective counterimage to today’s appearance of the former concentration camp at Ebensee. Any tourist visiting the terrain where camp Zement, so the National Socialist code name for the former subcamp of Mauthausen, was located, will have to navigate several kilometers of small rural roads from the town of Ebensee to a hidden corner at the end of the Traunsee. Small signs here and there show the way to the KZ-Gedenkstätte Ebensee, but

Figure 6.1. Portal of the former concentration camp Zement near Ebensee. Photo by author.

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as a visitor one is still surprised by the sudden appearance of an old stone portal framing the narrow road. Missing its wooden gates, this portal is one of the very few traces left of the actual camp. Behind the gate, a neat little hamlet of family residences covers most of the former campgrounds. Nothing indicates that these well-kept residential dwellings were built shortly after World War II, on the same grid of roads and utility infrastructure that was put into the ground for the camp’s construction in 1943/44.60 A small grove of trees separates this residential area from today’s central commemoration site, built around the concentration camp cemetery. Featuring commemorative sculptures and gravestones from many different European nations, the memorial site presents itself as a quiet and serene place for most of the year. The wide swathes of lush green grass covering the areas between the monuments and the cemetery walls reflect the rainy microclimate in this alpine region. They reveal little about the horrific crimes committed here. The closest place for learning more about the historical context is the small Widerstandsmuseum (museum of resistance) in the center of Ebensee, created by local activists in the wake of the Austrian memory debates following the controversies sparked by the election as president of former SA-member Kurt Waldheim in 1986 and by the fiftieth anniversary of the Anschluss in 1988.61 Starting in the mid-1990s, local activists and historians lobbied the Austrian government to turn at least one of the tunnels of the more than seven-kilometers-long underground rocket factory built by concentration camp inmates into a memorial.

Figure 6.2. KZ Gedenkstätte Ebensee. Photo by author.

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Figure 6.3. Entrance into one of the tunnels of the former concentration camp Zement at Ebensee. Photo by author.

After a protracted bureaucratic process, this part of the memorial finally opened in 2001.62 The Ebensee memorial site’s development from cemetery to museum to Gedenkstollen (commemorative tunnel) symbolizes both a desire for more affective sites of commemoration and the limitations of conventional historiographic and curatorial practices in achieving this goal. The museum in Ebensee responds to the “demands for a cognitive ‘learning place’” especially for Austrian students.63 By contrast, the tunnel exhibit tries to offer a commemorative experience centered on (international) visitors’ expectations of Authentizität.64 The notion of authenticity relies mainly on the space of the dark and damp tunnel itself and on the use of documentary photographs that show the horrible conditions for the inmates and forced laborers. Yet, authentic artifacts do not always convey authentic and affective experiences. As a remedy, the exhibit resorts to small artistic projects and sophisticated lighting technology to generate the desired authenticity. Frequently, it is difficult for visitors to distinguish between authentic remnants of the historical underground factory and artifacts that had to be “recreated and foregrounded” (her[aus]gestellt [sic]).65 To be clear, this is not a criticism of using artistic interventions at memorials for the Holocaust. Nor is it an argument against applying the complete historiographic toolkit to investigate National

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Figure 6.4. Art installation in one of the tunnels dug by concentration camp inmates. Photo by author.

Socialist crimes. But what feeds into the distorted argumentation of Holocaust deniers on the one hand, and what prompts criticism of Holocaust tourism on the other, is the unmarked insertion of artistic and fictional elements under the umbrella of “serious” and “fact-based” historiography for the purpose of affect.

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Instead, artistic and fictional attempts to create an affective experience should be included intentionally and not despite but because of their reliance on fiction and imagination.

Conclusion In my discussion of how two works of literary fiction use the discourse of tourism to intervene in an affective way in Austria’s National Socialist history, I highlight how a retelling of history in the context of fiction does not automatically mean a move away from historical accuracy and veracity. Rather than focusing on the scale of the murder, Children of the Dead and Morbus Kitahara generate affect by condensing the innumerous experiences in a few selected characters. In their narratives they elevate the unique Einzelfall (individual case) into the general Beispiel (example), enabling readers to grasp at least tentatively what otherwise remains far beyond cognitive comprehension.66 The limited reception of these novels alone would undermine any claim that one should read historical fiction rather than visit historical exhibits. Instead, this chapter makes a case for expanding the range of communicating history by including the fictional. Literary fiction offers unique access to the haunted areas of our cultures and brings up the wandering ghosts we usually try to avoid. Fictional narratives open up the realms of memory, which is, in the words of the Angolan artist Miguel Petchkovsky, “an essential attribute of the human psyche and is therefore more personal than historical or material knowledge. History alone cannot enrich memory, because it is systematic and sequential.”67 The unbridgeable tension between historiography’s focus on systematic and sequential representation of history on the one hand, and the desire to generate affect on the other, was one of the reasons, if not the main reason, why the Linz09 projects ran into the problems discussed previously. Fictional literary representations of history are not just alternative forms of communicating history. In a persuasive analysis of Anglo-American postmodern historical fiction, Ansgar Nünning underscores that the subgenre of “historiographic metafiction” also engages with core epistemological and ontological problems of historiography. Historiographic metafiction, Nünning argues, effectively undermines the “idea of a history written in the singular as positivistic function and the ideal of objectivity as ‘noble dream.’”68 The polyvocality and complex interweavings of time and space in Children of the Dead, as well as the remapping of core Austrian identity spaces as inverted and haunted landscapes in Morbus Kitahara, directly engage with the limitations of historiography that I discussed in this and the previous chapters. As complex literary texts, both novels defy the category of the popular that Alison Landsberg identifies as crucial discursive context for her discussion of

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prosthetic memories. But both novels reflect on popular discourses of consumerism and, most importantly, tourism and their connections to memory discourses. By drawing on the tourism discourse’s intrinsic capacity for “mind traveling,” Jelinek’s and Ransmayr’s novels present innovative treatments of tourism beyond the usual polemics against tourism as an artificial cover up. In the context of a cultural landscape filled with monuments to Austrian self-images, Children of the Dead and Morbus Kitahara function as powerful “guerilla memorializations” that “rewrite the story . . . right from the belly of the beast.”69

Notes 1. The novel was translated into English by John E. Woods and published under the title The Dog King by Alfred A. Knopf in 1997. All quotations in English are taken from the Knopf translation with page numbers for the English version referring to the eBook edition by Vintage Books. 2. Thomas E. Schmidt, “Dunkelgrüner Granit,” Frankfurter Rundschau, 11 October 1995; quoted in Thomas Neumann, “‘Mythenspur des Nationalsozialismus’: Der Morgenthauplan und die deutsche Literaturkritik,” in Die Erfindung der Welt: Zum Werk von Christoph Ransmayr, ed. Uwe Wittstock (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch, 1997), 190. Michael Winter’s review in the Süddeutsche Zeitung even wondered why “no GDR authors, whether they emigrated or stayed, were able to write a novel that excludes its reader from the world the same way the state had excluded the author” (kein geflohener oder gebliebener DDR-Autor es vermocht hat, einen Roman zu schreiben, der seinen Leser genauso von der Welt ausschließt wie der Staat, in dem er gelebt hat), Süddeutsche Zeitung, 11 October 1995. All translations from the German language into English are mine unless noted otherwise. 3. Ulrich Greiner, “Eisen, Stein und Marmor: Christoph Ransmayrs neuer Roman ‘Morbus Kitahara,’” Die Zeit, 13 October 1995, sec. Literatur. This review and several others were triggered by the novel’s oblique reference to the so-called Morgenthau plan that had proposed to transform post-World War II Germany into an agrarian state. Ransmayr never mentions the name Morgenthau, but the novel includes an address by the fictitious US president Lyndon Porter Stellamour that contains enough verbal clues for the reviewers to draw the connections: “cabbage heads, dunghills . . . and steaming cow-pies in the lanes of your autobahn, where potatoes will grow next spring!” Christoph Ransmayr, The Dog King, trans. John E. Woods, eBook (New York: Vintage Books, 1997), 32. All following quotations will be cited DK in the text. MK refers to the German title. As Thomas Neumann has shown, Ransmayr does not refer to the language of the actual Morgenthau memorandum but to Nazi Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels characterization of the plan. Neumann suggests that these critics’ strong reactions must be read in the context of a broader German and Austrian postwar discourse in which the distorted legacy of Morgenthau’s plan served as a bridge “to stealthily move from the side of the perpetrators to the side of the victims” (um sich von der Täterseite auf jene der Opfer hinüberzumogeln). Neumann, “Mythenspur,” 191. For additional analyses engaging with the Morgenthau reference, see Ian Foster, “Alternative History and Christoph Ransmayr’s ‘Morbus Kitahara,’” Modern Austrian Literature 32, no. 1 (March 1999): 111–25; Alex-

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ander Honold, “Die steinerne Schuld: Gebirge und Geschichte in Christoph Ransmayrs Morbus Kitahara,” Sinn und Form, no. 2 (1999): 252–67. For a detailed analysis of the Morgenthau plan’s role in the postwar era, see Bernd Greiner, Die Morgenthau-Legende: Zur Geschichte eines umstrittenen Plans (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 1995). “By referring incestuously back to the writing process itself, the Morbus Kitahara syndrome suggests that any attempt to constitute meaning outside the network of selfreferentiality can only be valued on the level of a found object.” Jutta Landa, “Fractured Vision in Christoph Ransmayr’s Morbus Kitahara,” German Quarterly 71, no. 2 (Spring 1998): 143. “Es gibt nirgendwo in Morbus Kitahara den Trost eines endgültigen Endes der Geschichte—im Gegenteil: nach der Postmoderne kommt die Prämoderne.” Carl Niekerk, “Vom Kreislauf der Geschichte. Moderne-Postmoderne-Prämoderne: Ransmayrs Morbus Kitahara,” in Die Erfindung der Welt: Zum Werk von Christoph Ransmayr, ed. Uwe Wittstock (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch, 1997), 173. Konrad Paul Liessmann points to the novel’s circular structure and reads Morbus Kitahara as an allegory of history’s non-linear path. “Der Anfang ist das Ende: Morbus Kitahara und die Vergangenheit, die nicht vergehen will,” in Die Erfindung der Welt: Zum Werk von Christoph Ransmayr, ed. Uwe Wittstock (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch, 1997), 149. Stefan Alker interprets the novel as “prototypical story about departure and traveling” (prototypische Erzählung vom Weggehen und Reisen). Stefan Alker, Entronnensein—Zur Poetik des Ortes: Internationale Orte in der österreichischen Gegenwartsliteratur (Vienna: Braumüller, 2005), 65. Christoph Janacs, “Die Verdunkelung des Blicks: Christoph Ransmayr ‘Morbus Kitahara,’” Literatur und Kritik (November 1995): 101. There are some notable exceptions. For Wolfgang Straub, who provides a thorough study of postwar Austrian writers’ engagement with the topic of tourism, the description of Moor’s decline as a tourist destination provides a “a realistic depiction of how after the start of World War II spa tourism rapidly declined and how ‘more and more vacationing soldiers’ replaced spa tourists.” Wolfgang Straub, Willkommen: Literatur und Fremdenverkehr in Österreich (Vienna: Sonderzahl, 2001), 134. Thomas Stahl uses Ransmayr’s phrase “backdrop of my own life” to probe deeper and ponder how the references to guard tower, quarry, and camp barracks transform the “initial fascination” with the tourism landscape into a “threatening alienation.” Thomas Stahl, “Geschichte(n) erzählen: Das Verhältnis von Historizität und Narrativität bei Christoph Ransmayr im Kontext postmoderner Konstellationen,” Ph.D. dissertation, Brno, Czech Republic: Masarykova Universita, 2007, 59. Brita Steinwendtner, “Ein Monolith der Düsternis: Christoph Ransmayr ‘Morbus Kitahara,’” Literatur und Kritik (November 1995): 97. Christoph Ransmayr, “‘Das Thema hat mich bedroht’: Gespräch mit Sigrid Löffler über Morbus Kitahara (Dublin 1995),” in Die Erfindung Der Welt: Zum Werk von Christoph Ransmayr, ed. Uwe Wittstock (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch, 1997), 214–15. Honold, “Steinerne Schuld,” 252. Marie Magdalena Rest, “Das Zeitgeschichte Museum und der Gedenkstollen in Ebensee,” in Zeitgeschichte ausstellen in Österreich: Museen—Gedenkstätten—Ausstellungen, ed. Dirk Rupnow and Heidemarie Uhl (Vienna: Böhlau Verlag, 2011), 337–67. Nikolaus Wachsmann and Jane Caplan, eds., Concentration Camps in Nazi Germany: The New Histories (New York: Routledge, 2009). The novel actually reconnects what the se-

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lective memory processes of the postwar period have separated. The Salzkammergut, and especially the town of Gmunden, formed the backdrop for the triumphant announcement of the building of a concentration camp in Mauthausen. Only two weeks after the Anschluss, the Nazi party-organ Völkischer Beobachter quotes a speech by the Upper Austrian Gauleiter Eigruber that “Upper Austrians will receive yet another, special honor” by hosting the “concentration camp for the traitors of the people from all over Austria.” “Bollwerk Salzkammergut,” Völkischer Beobachter, Vienna Edition, 29 March 1938; quoted in Association for Remembrance and Historical Research in Austrian Concentration Camp Memorials, ed., The Mauthausen Concentration Camp 1938–1945: Catalogue to the Exhibition at the Mauthausen Memorial (Vienna: new academic press, 2013), 39. The Totes Gebirge is the name for a high-alpine plateau that straddles the provinces of Upper Austria and Styria and is known for its lack of water and vegetation. “Totes Gebirge,” in Wikipedia, retrieved 16 August 2017 from https://de.wikipedia.org/w/index .php?title=Totes_Gebirge&oldid=168199755. Honold, “Steinerne Schuld,” 260; Herbert Ohrlinger, “Wolken zwischen den Häuten des Augapfels,” Die Presse, 16 September 1995, sec. Spectrum. Claudia Bell and John Lyall, “The Accelerated Sublime: Thrill-Seeking Adventure Heroes in the Commodified Landscape,” in Tourism: Between Place and Performance, ed. Simon Coleman and Mike Crang (New York: Berghahn Books, 2002), 21–22. John Urry, The Tourist Gaze (London: Sage Publications, 1990), 3. Ransmayr, Dog King, 23. Ibid. Honold, “Steinerne Schuld,” 253. Ibid. Thomas Hellmuth, “Die Erzählungen des Salzkammerguts: Entschlüsselung einer Landschaft,” in Die Erzählung der Landschaft, ed. Dieter A. Binder, Helmut Konrad, and Eduard G. Staudinger (Vienna: Böhlau Verlag, 2011), 50–51. For more on the role of the Salzkammergut in history and culture, see also Thomas Hellmuth, “Der Glanz der Provinz: Visionen einer heilen Welt,” in Visionäre bewegen die Welt: ein Lesebuch durch das Salzkammergut, ed. Thomas Hellmuth et al. (Salzburg: Anton Pustet, 2005), 16–25; Thomas Hellmuth, “Das Salzkammergut,” in Memoriae Austriae II: Bauten, Orte, Regionen, ed. Emil Brix, Ernst Bruckmüller, and Hannes Stekl (Vienna: Verlag für Geschichte und Politik, 2005), 336–69. Hellmuth, “Erzählungen,” 45. A significant role in the Salzkammergut’s appreciation as a tourist destination played Alexander von Humboldt’s alleged appraisal: “I consider the regions of Salzburg, Nepal and Constantinople the most beautiful ones on earth.” For an insightful and critical discussion of this marketing myth, see Robert Hoffmann, “Die Entstehung einer Legende—Alexander von Humboldts angeblicher Ausspruch über Salzburg,” retrieved 20 August 2014 from http://bbaw.opus.kobv.de/volltexte/2006/94/. Lutz Maurer, “Plädoyer für ein Paradies,” in Visionäre bewegen die Welt: Ein Lesebuch durch das Salzkammergut, ed. Thomas Hellmuth et al. (Salzburg: Anton Pustet, 2005), 8. Hellmuth, “Erzählungen,” 57. Hellmuth models his analysis of the Salzkammergut as utopian Austrian national space on Homi K. Bhaba’s concept of “third space.” See Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 36–39. As cultural historian Wolfgang Kos points out: “The system of rules for reading and constructing landscapes transcends national borders. But national affiliations emerge via a

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communal practice and emotional ‘group exercise.’ Only the actual practice turns beautiful landscapes into ‘Austrian landscapes.’” Wolfgang Kos, “‘Landschaft’: Zwischen Verstaatlichung und Privatisierung,” in Memoriae Austriae II: Bauten, Orte, Regionen, ed. Emil Brix, Ernst Bruckmüller, and Hannes Stekl (Vienna: Verlag für Geschichte und Politik, 2005), 202. For the role of the Salzkammergut as Jewish memory space, see Hellmuth, “Glanz,” 24. Avery F. Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), xvi. This outsized fictional monument serves as provocative reminder of the big void in Austria’s postwar memory culture: while thousands of so-called Kriegerdenkmäler (war memorials) commemorating Austria’s fallen soldiers dot the country’s landscape, until the 1990s virtually no memorials existed to remember the murdered Jewish Austrians or the tens of thousands of people persecuted and murdered for their political activities, sexual orientation, or membership in marginalized communities. See Heidemarie Uhl, “Das ‘Erste Opfer’: Der österreichische Opfermythos und seine Transformationen in der Zweiten Republik.,” Österreichische Zeitschrift für Politikwissenschaft 30, no. 1 (2001): 21. The term Eingeborenen used in the German original conveys the ethnographic and colonialist connotations of the tourist gaze and would better be translated as natives than inhabitants. For a detailed account of this history with regard to Mauthausen, see Bertrand Perz, “Die Ausstellungen in den KZ-Gedenkstätten Mauthausen, Gusen und Melk,” in Zeitgeschichte ausstellen in Österreich: Museen—Gedenkstätten—Ausstellungen, ed. Dirk Rupnow and Heidemarie Uhl (Vienna: Böhlau Verlag, 2011), 87–116; Bertrand Perz and Jörg Skriebeleit, “Introduction,” in The Concentration Camp Mauthausen 1938–1945: Catalogue to the Exhibition at Mauthausen Memorial, ed. Association for Remembrance and Historical Research in Austrian Concentration Camp Memorials (Vienna: new academic press, 2013), 12–15. Perz, “Die Ausstellungen,” 92. The direct quotes are from “Beschlüsse des zweiten Bundesdelegiertentages des Bundesverbandes der österreichischen Kzler, Häftlinge und politisch Verfolgten vom 6.5.1950, hg. V. Bundesverband, o.O., o.J.” quoted in Perz, “Die Ausstellungen,” 92–93. For a detailed discussion of the role of photographs as evidence in the context of war crimes, see Helmut Lethen, Der Schatten des Fotografen: Bilder und ihre Wirklichkeit (Berlin: Rowohlt, 2014). See Janacs and my discussion above. Most relevant for my discussion here are Christoph Ransmayr, “Die vergorene Heimat: Ein Stück Österreich,” in Der weite Weg nach Surabaya: Reportagen und kleine Prosa, by Christoph Ransmayr (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 1997), 41–62; Christoph Ransmayr, “Kaprun: oder die Errichtung einer Mauer,” in ibid., 75–90. The latter essay investigates the history of the hydroelectric dam project in the Alps. Long celebrated as symbol of post-World War II reconstruction and Austrian autonomy, the project’s National Socialists origins and especially the use of forced laborers, concentration camp inmates, and POWs in the early construction phase were increasingly scrutinized in the 1980s. Ransmayr’s essay addresses the history but also the lack of postwar interest in the commemoration by detailing the story of the so-called Russendenkmal, a stone obelisque commemorating the murder of Soviet POWs. The inscription of the obelisque served as

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40.

41.

42. 43. 44. 45.

46. 47. 48.

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the model for the fictional inscription of the monument in Morbus Kitahara: “Here lie 87 Soviet citizens / driven into misery by German Fascist conquerors / who lost their lives far from home.” Ransmayr, “Kaprun,” 85. See also Margit Reiter, “Die Tauernkraftwerke Kaprun,” in NS-Zwangsarbeit in der Elektrizitätswirtschaft der “Ostmark,” 1938–1945: Ennstalkraftwerke—Kaprun—Draukraftwerke—Ybbs—Persenbeug—Ernsthofen, ed. Oliver Rathkolb and Florian Freund (Vienna: Böhlau Verlag, 2014), 127–98. Ransmayr,“Gespräch,” 216. Ibid., 216–17. Christoph Ransmayr, “Das Menschenmögliche zur Sprache bringen: Ein Gespräch mit Christoph Ransmayr über die Durchmusterung des Himmels und die äußersten Gegenden der Phantasie,” in Bericht am Feuer: Gespräche, E-Mails und Telefonate zum Werk von Christoph Ransmayr, ed. Insa Wilke (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 2014), 47. Ibid., 38. Already in an earlier interview Ransmayr elaborated on this idea of complementary visual perception: “If the complementary angle is not part of one’s field of vision, one only sees a particular section of reality, an encouraging, cheerful, comforting, or soothing section, but one misses the complementary angle that closes the full gaze at the world. Literature, a narrative, can restore this gaze. Once one starts to tell a story, one can only tell the full story.” Ransmayr, “Gespräch,” 216. Gordon, Ghostly Matters, xvi. Ransmayr’s notion of the complementary image resonates with Wolfgang Iser’s description of how fictional narratives reflect back on reality as well as with Karl Schlögel’s call for literary representations of the ruptures and caesuras of history. Ransmayr, “Gespräch,” 216. Michael Mayerfield Bell, “The Ghosts of Place,” Theory and Society 26 (1997): 816. See “Rio de Janeiro,” in Wikipedia, retrieved 13 January 2018 from https://en.wikipedia .org/w/index.php?title=Rio_de_Janeiro&oldid=820121557. For a detailed discussion of the postwar debates between survivor organizations, Austrian government representatives, and Allied commands about whom to acknowledge as victims and how to address Austria’s collaborative role with National Socialism, see Perz, “Die Ausstellungen.” For a comprehensive history of how postwar Austrian governments tried to forestall compensating Jewish survivors, see Robert Knight, ed., “Ich bin dafür, die Sache in die Länge zu ziehen”: Die Wortprotokolle der österreichischen Bundesregierung von 1945 bis 1952 über die Entschädigung der Juden (Vienna: Böhlau Verlag, 2000). Rolf Steininger, Austria, Germany and the Cold War: From the Anschluss to the State Treaty, 1938–1955 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2008), 13. See Uhl, “Das erste Opfer.” Already in the 1920s local inns announced that they would only accommodate “Christian” vacationers. A majority of innkeepers openly endorsed anti-Semitism and calls for a judenfreie Sommerfrische (a vacation without Jews) were not uncommon. Nonetheless, as Hellmuth writes, the Salzkammergut remained a nostalgic place for Jewish exiles: “In the survivors’ memories . . . the vacation destinations become ‘Heimat’, the bourgeois summer vacation transforms into a symbol for Austria in general.” “Salzkammergut,” 356. Karl Schlögel, Im Raume lesen wir die Zeit: Über Zivilisationsgeschichte und Geopolitik (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 2003), 24.

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50. In this and in other passages, Morbus Kitahara contains references to autobiographical reflections by Holocaust survivor Jean Améry. See especially Jean Améry, “Wieviel Heimat braucht der Mensch?,” in Jenseits von Schuld und Sühne: Bewältigungsversuche eines Überwältigten, by Jean Améry (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1977). 51. Ransmayr, “Gespräch,” 215. 52. Schlögel, Im Raume, 431; 243. 53. Dog King, 149; 186–87; 238–39; 279–80. “Morbus Kitahara” is the outdated name of a condition called “chorioretinitis centralis serosa.” See also Judith Ryan, The Novel after Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 172. 54. Gordon, Ghostly Matters, xvi. 55. Schlögel, Im Raume, 243. 56. Ransmayr, “Gespräch,” 215. 57. Ibid. 58. Joy Sather-Wagstaff, “Affect, Memory, Heritage,” in Heritage, Affect and Emotion: Politics, Practices and Infrastructures, ed. Divya P. Tolia-Kelly, Emma Waterton, and Steve Watson (New York: Routledge, 2016), 17. 59. Wolfgang Iser, “Towards a Literary Anthropology,” in The Future of Literary Theory, ed. Ralph Cohen (New York: Routledge, 1989), 228. 60. Peter Egger, “‘Ortseinsichten.’ Wahrnehmungen und Erinnerungen am Ort des ehemaligen Konzentrationslagers Ebensee,” Diplomarbeit, Vienna 2008, 22; quoted in Rest, “Ebensee,” 341. See also Wolfgang Quatember, “Die Geschichte der KZ-Gedenkstätte Ebensee,” in Zeitgeschichte Museum Ebensee: Republik, Ständestaat, Nationalsozialismus, Widerstand, Verfolgung. Katalog zur Dauerausstellung, ed. Ulrike Felber and Wolfgang Quatember (Ebensee: Verein Zeitgeschichte Museum Ebensee, 2005). The most comprehensive historiographic examination of the former concentration camp in Ebensee can be found in Florian Freund, Arbeitslager Zement (Vienna: Verlag für Gesellschaftskritik, 1989). 61. Rest, “Ebensee,” 345. 62. Ibid., 350. 63. Ibid., 363. 64. Ibid. 65. Ibid. 66. Ransmayr, “Gespräch,” 218–19. 67. Gert Oostindie, ed., Facing Up to the Past: Perspectives on the Commemoration of Slavery from Africa, the Americas and Europe (Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle Publishers, 2001), xxxvi; quoted in Alan Rice, “Museums, Memorials, and Plantation Houses in the Black Atlantic: Slavery and the Development of Dark Tourism,” in The Darker Side of Travel: The Theory and Practice of Dark Tourism, ed. Richard Sharpley and Philip Stone (Bristol: Channel View Publications, 2009), 232. 68. Ansgar Nünning, “Die Rückkehr des sinnstiftenden Subjekts: Selbstreflexive Inszenierungen von historisierten Subjekten und subjektivierten Geschichten in britischen und postkolonialen historischen Romanen der Gegenwart,” in Historisierte Subjekte—Subjektivierte Historie: Zur Verfügbarkeit und Unverfügbarkeit von Geschichte (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2003), 258. 69. Alan Rice and Johanna C. Kardux, “Confronting the Ghostly Legacies of Slavery: The Politics of Black Bodies, Embodied Memories and Memorial Landscapes,” Atlantic Studies 9, no. 3 (2012): 254.

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Bibliography Alker, Stefan. Entronnensein—Zur Poetik des Ortes: Internationale Orte in der österreichischen Gegenwartsliteratur. Vienna: Braumüller, 2005. Améry, Jean. “Wieviel Heimat braucht der Mensch?” In Jenseits von Schuld und Sühne: Bewältigungsversuche eines Überwältigten, by Jean Améry. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1977. Association for Remembrance and Historical Research in Austrian Concentration Camp Memorials, ed. The Mauthausen Concentration Camp 1938–1945: Catalogue to the Exhibition at the Mauthausen Memorial. Vienna: new academic press, 2013. Bell, Claudia, and John Lyall. “The Accelerated Sublime: Thrill-Seeking Adventure Heroes in the Commodified Landscape.” In Tourism: Between Place and Performance, edited by Simon Coleman and Mike Crang, 21–37. New York: Berghahn Books, 2002. Bell, Michael Mayerfield. “The Ghosts of Place.” Theory and Society 26 (1997): 813–36. Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994. Foster, Ian. “Alternative History and Christoph Ransmayr’s ‘Morbus Kitahara.’” Modern Austrian Literature 32, no. 1 (March 1999): 111–25. Freund, Florian. Arbeitslager Zement. Vienna: Verlag für Gesellschaftskritik, 1989. Gordon, Avery F. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. Greiner, Bernd. Die Morgenthau-Legende: Zur Geschichte eines umstrittenen Plans. Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 1995. Greiner, Ulrich. “Eisen, Stein und Marmor: Christoph Ransmayrs neuer Roman ‘Morbus Kitahara.’” Die Zeit, 13 October 1995, sec. Literatur. Hellmuth, Thomas. “Das Salzkammergut.” In Memoriae Austriae II: Bauten, Orte, Regionen, edited by Emil Brix, Ernst Bruckmüller, and Hannes Stekl, 336–69. Vienna: Verlag für Geschichte und Politik, 2005. ———. “Der Glanz der Provinz: Visionen einer heilen Welt.” In Visionäre bewegen die Welt: Ein Lesebuch durch das Salzkammergut, edited by Thomas Hellmuth, Ewald Hiebl, Günther Marchner, and Martin Scheutz, 16–25. Salzburg: Anton Pustet, 2005. ———. “Die Erzählungen des Salzkammerguts: Entschlüsselung einer Landschaft.” In Die Erzählung der Landschaft, edited by Dieter A. Binder, Helmut Konrad, and Eduard G. Staudinger, 34:43–68. Vienna: Böhlau Verlag, 2011. Hellmuth, Thomas, et al., eds. Visionäre bewegen die Welt: Ein Lesebuch durch das Salzkammergut. Salzburg: Anton Pustet, 2005. Hoffmann, Robert. “Die Entstehung einer Legende—Alexander von Humboldts angeblicher Ausspruch über Salzburg.” Retrieved 20 August 2014 from http://bbaw.opus.kobv.de/ volltexte/2006/94/. Honold, Alexander. “Die steinerne Schuld: Gebirge und Geschichte in Christoph Ransmayrs Morbus Kitahara.” Sinn und Form, no. 2 (1999): 252–67. Iser, Wolfgang. “Towards a Literary Anthropology.” In The Future of Literary Theory, edited by Ralph Cohen, 208–28. New York: Routledge, 1989. Janacs, Christoph. “Die Verdunkelung des Blicks: Christoph Ransmayr ‘Morbus Kitahara.’” Literatur und Kritik (November 1995): 99–101. Knight, Robert, ed. “Ich bin dafür, die Sache in die Länge zu ziehen”: Die Wortprotokolle der österreichischen Bundesregierung von 1945 bis 1952 über die Entschädigung der Juden. Vienna: Böhlau Verlag, 2000.

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Kos, Wolfgang. “‘Landschaft’: Zwischen Verstaatlichung und Privatisierung.” In Memoriae Austriae II: Bauten, Orte, Regionen, edited by Emil Brix, Ernst Bruckmüller, and Hannes Stekl, 200–235. Vienna: Verlag für Geschichte und Politik, 2005. Landa, Jutta. “Fractured Vision in Christoph Ransmayr’s Morbus Kitahara.” German Quarterly 71, no. 2 (Spring 1998): 136–44. Lethen, Helmut. Der Schatten des Fotografen: Bilder und ihre Wirklichkeit. Berlin: Rowohlt, 2014. Liessmann, Konrad Paul. “Der Anfang ist das Ende: Morbus Kitahara und die Vergangenheit, die nicht vergehen will.” In Die Erfindung der Welt: Zum Werk von Christoph Ransmayr, edited by Uwe Wittstock, 148–57. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch, 1997. Maurer, Lutz. “Plädoyer für ein Paradies.” In Visionäre bewegen die Welt: Ein Lesebuch durch das Salzkammergut, edited by Thomas Hellmuth, et al., 8–11. Salzburg: Anton Pustet, 2005. Neumann, Thomas. “‘Mythenspur des Nationalsozialismus’: Der Morgenthauplan und die deutsche Literaturkritik.” In Die Erfindung der Welt: Zum Werk von Christoph Ransmayr, edited by Uwe Wittstock, 188–97. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch, 1997. Niekerk, Carl. “Vom Kreislauf der Geschichte. Moderne-Postmoderne-Prämoderne: Ransmayrs Morbus Kitahara.” In Die Erfindung der Welt: Zum Werk von Christoph Ransmayr, edited by Uwe Wittstock, 158–80. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch, 1997. Nünning, Ansgar. “Die Rückkehr des sinnstiftenden Subjekts: Selbstreflexive Inszenierungen von historisierten Subjekten und subjektivierten Geschichten in britischen und postkolonialen historischen Romanen der Gegenwart.” In Historisierte Subjekte—Subjektivierte Historie: Zur Verfügbarkeit und Unverfügbarkeit von Geschichte, 239–61. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2003. Ohrlinger, Herbert. “Wolken zwischen den Häuten des Augapfels.” Die Presse, 16 September 1995, sec. Spectrum. Perz, Bertrand. “Die Ausstellungen in den KZ-Gedenkstätten Mauthausen, Gusen und Melk.” In Zeitgeschichte ausstellen in Österreich: Museen—Gedenkstätten—Ausstellungen, edited by Dirk Rupnow and Heidemarie Uhl, 87–116. Vienna: Böhlau Verlag, 2011. Perz, Bertrand, and Jörg Skriebeleit. “Introduction.” In The Concentration Camp Mauthausen 1938–1945: Catalogue to the Exhibition at Mauthausen Memorial, edited by Association for Remembrance and Historical Research in Austrian Concentration Camp Memorials, 12–15. Vienna: new academic press, 2013. Quatember, Wolfgang. “Die Geschichte der KZ-Gedenkstätte Ebensee.” In Zeitgeschichte Museum Ebensee: Republik, Ständestaat, Nationalsozialismus, Widerstand, Verfolgung. Katalog zur Dauerausstellung, edited by Ulrike Felber and Wolfgang Quatember. Ebensee: Verein Zeitgeschichte Museum Ebensee, 2005. Ransmayr, Christoph. “Das Menschenmögliche zur Sprache bringen: Ein Gespräch mit Christoph Ransmayr über die Durchmusterung des Himmels und die äußersten Gegenden der Phantasie.” In Bericht am Feuer: Gespräche, E-Mails und Telefonate zum Werk von Christoph Ransmayr, edited by Insa Wilke, 13–98. Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 2014. ———. “‘Das Thema hat mich bedroht’: Gespräch mit Sigrid Löffler über Morbus Kitahara (Dublin 1995).” In Die Erfindung der Welt: Zum Werk von Christoph Ransmayr, edited by Uwe Wittstock, 213–19. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch, 1997. ———. “Die vergorene Heimat: Ein Stück Österreich.” In Der weite Weg nach Surabaya: Reportagen und kleine Prosa, by Christoph Ransmayr, 41–62. Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 1997.

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———. The Dog King. Translated by John E. Woods. eBook. New York: Vintage Books, 1997. ———. “Kaprun: oder die Errichtung einer Mauer.” In Der weite Weg nach Surabaya: Reportagen und kleine Prosa, by Christoph Ransmayr, 75–90. Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 1997. ———. Morbus Kitahara. Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 1995. Reiter, Margit. “Die Tauernkraftwerke Kaprun.” In NS-Zwangsarbeit in der Elektrizitätswirtschaft der “Ostmark.” 1938–1945: Ennstalkraftwerke—Kaprun—Draukraftwerke—Ybbs— Persenbeug—Ernsthofen, edited by Oliver Rathkolb and Florian Freund, 127–98. Vienna: Böhlau Verlag, 2014. Rest, Marie Magdalena. “Das Zeitgeschichte Museum und der Gedenkstollen in Ebensee.” In Zeitgeschichte ausstellen in Österreich: Museen—Gedenkstätten—Ausstellungen, edited by Dirk Rupnow and Heidemarie Uhl, 337–67. Vienna: Böhlau Verlag, 2011. Rice, Alan. “Museums, Memorials and Plantation Houses in the Black Atlantic: Slavery and the Development of Dark Tourism.” In The Darker Side of Travel: The Theory and Practice of Dark Tourism, edited by Richard Sharpley and Philip Stone, 224–46. Bristol: Channel View Publications, 2009. Rice, Alan, and Johanna C. Kardux. “Confronting the Ghostly Legacies of Slavery: The Politics of Black Bodies, Embodied Memories and Memorial Landscapes.” Atlantic Studies 9, no. 3 (2012): 245–72. “Rio de Janeiro.” In Wikipedia. Retrieved 13 January 2018 from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/ index.php?title=Rio_de_Janeiro&oldid=820121557. Ryan, Judith. The Novel after Theory. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014. Sather-Wagstaff, Joy. “Affect, Memory, Heritage.” In Heritage, Affect and Emotion: Politics, Practices and Infrastructures, edited by Divya P. Tolia-Kelly, Emma Waterton, and Steve Watson, 12–29. New York: Routledge, 2016. Schlögel, Karl. Im Raume lesen wir die Zeit: Über Zivilisationsgeschichte und Geopolitik. Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 2003. Stahl, Thomas. “Geschichte(n) erzählen: Das Verhältnis von Historizität und Narrativität bei Christoph Ransmayr im Kontext postmoderner Konstellationen.” Ph.D. dissertation. Brno, Czech Republic: Masarykova Universita, 2007. Steininger, Rolf. Austria, Germany and the Cold War: From the Anschluss to the State Treaty, 1938–1955. New York: Berghahn Books, 2008. Steinwendtner, Brita. “Ein Monolith der Düsternis: Christoph Ransmayr ‘Morbus Kitahara.’” Literatur und Kritik (November 1995): 96–99. Straub, Wolfgang. Willkommen: Literatur und Fremdenverkehr in Österreich. Vienna: Sonderzahl, 2001. “Totes Gebirge.” In Wikipedia. Retrieved 16 August 2017 from https://de.wikipedia.org/w/ index.php?title=Totes_Gebirge&oldid=168199755. Uhl, Heidemarie. “Das ‘Erste Opfer’: Der österreichische Opfermythos und seine Transformationen in der Zweiten Republik.” Österreichische Zeitschrift für Politikwissenschaft 30, no. 1 (2001): 19–34. Urry, John. The Tourist Gaze. London: Sage Publications, 1990. Wachsmann, Nikolaus, and Jane Caplan, eds. Concentration Camps in Nazi Germany: The New Histories. New York: Routledge, 2009.

Part III

AUSTRIAN NARRATIVES OF PLACE AND IDENTITY IN THE CONTEXT OF GLOBALIZATION

d I’m not a criminal. I’m a tourist. —Nana Iaschwili in Florian Flicker’s film Suzie Washington (1998) This is so unreal. —Brazilian tourist commenting on Salzburg’s old town (2012)

A

ustrians spent much of the 1990s caught up in a long-overdue debate about the country’s responsibility for the crimes of National Socialism. During the same time period, significant geopolitical developments in the European and international political landscape impacted the country. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989; the collapse of the Soviet Union shortly thereafter; and Austria’s subsequent integration into the European Union in 1995, delineate a process that significantly affected the country’s national identification. After all, it was at Austria’s Eastern border to Hungary where the Iron Curtain was ripped open first.1 With the Cold War order coming to an end, countries such as Austria suddenly faced new challenges. What would the country’s neutral status mean in a world with the United States remaining as the only superpower? How should Austria recalibrate its cultural and political relationships to its big German neighbor, on the one hand, and to the newly liberated Eastern European countries, on the other? How should the country, still wrestling with the legacy of its collaboration with Hitler’s Germany, navigate its role in the memory debates of its formerly

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communist Eastern neighbors, where intellectuals and politicians revived ideas of a German-speaking Mitteleuropa based on Austro-Hungarian foundations?2 In the previous two sections of this book I showed how tourism discourse played a significant role in the political project of reintegrating Austria into the international community of nations. In my analyses of government documents, films, and literary texts, I tried to foreground the discourse of tourism as an arena that provided space both for hegemonic and affirmative performances of Austrian national identity as well as for their critical and alternative counterparts. In this section, I will once again turn to cultural texts that reflect tourism’s complex role in the negotiation of space and identity. This time, I will focus less on what anchored Austrian identity, and more on how the discourse of tourism puts into relief the multifaceted ways in which cultural and social forces of globalization have impacted and continue to impact the country’s identity narratives. In the first chapter of this section, I will closely read Florian Flicker’s 1998 film, Suzie Washington, as a text that tracks how Austria’s EU membership, the EU’s new Schengen border regime, and the migration trends linked to the destabilization of the former Soviet republics and the Balkan wars challenged both Austria’s self-image as a beautiful and hospitable tourist destination and Austrians’ traditional ways of thinking about borders and security.3 In the second chapter, I will trace how The Sound of Music and its changing reception on an international and national scale reflects Austria’s shifting identity discourses. From its rejection as American kitsch in the early decades after the Hollywood film’s release to being embraced as a core Austrian narrative following the 2011 Salzburg Landestheater production, the story of the Trapp family exemplifies the dynamic connection between the discourses of Austrian national identity and tourism.

Notes 1. Nikhil Sathe, “Crossing Borders in Austrian Cinema at the Turn of the Century: Flicker, Allahyari, Albert,” in New Austrian Film, ed. Robert von Dassanowsky and Oliver C. Speck (New York: Berghahn Books, 2011), 228. 2. Milan Kundera, “The Tragedy of Central Europe,” trans. Edmund White, The New York Review of Books, 26 April 1984. 3. An earlier version of the chapter was published as Gundolf Graml, “Trapped Bodies, Roaming Fantasies: Mobilizing the Constructions of Place and Identity in Florian Flicker’s Suzie Washington,” in New Austrian Film, ed. Robert von Dassanowsky and Oliver C. Speck (New York: Berghahn Books, 2011), 251–62.

Bibliography Graml, Gundolf. “Trapped Bodies, Roaming Fantasies: Mobilizing the Constructions of Place and Identity in Florian Flicker’s Suzie Washington.” In New Austrian Film, edited by Robert von Dassanowsky and Oliver C. Speck, 251–62. New York: Berghahn Books, 2011.

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Kundera, Milan. “The Tragedy of Central Europe.” Translated by Edmund White. The New York Review of Books, 26 April 1984. Sathe, Nikhil. “Crossing Borders in Austrian Cinema at the Turn of the Century: Flicker, Allahyari, Albert.” In New Austrian Film, edited by Robert von Dassanowsky and Oliver C. Speck, 227–41. New York: Berghahn Books, 2011.

Chapter 7

TRAPPED BODIES, ROAMING FANTASIES Mobilizing Constructions of Place and Identity in Florian Flicker’s Suzie Washington (1998)

d T

he fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989 and Austria’s impending entry into the EU produced an increasingly xenophobic undertone to Austrian politics.4 As soon as former communist countries in Eastern Europe relaxed their travel restrictions, the Austrian government felt compelled to reiterate “that it was not a country of immigration.”5 Driven by the right-wing Freedom Party (FPÖ) and its chairman Jörg Haider, the coalition government composed of Social Democrats (SPÖ) and Christian Conservatives (ÖVP) passed a series of laws that severely restricted access to Austria for potential immigrants and political refugees.6 In 1998, Florian Flicker’s film Suzie Washington addressed these debates by tracing the bizarre journey of an illegal migrant through Austria’s tourism landscape and throwing into relief the blind spots and hypocrisy of Austria’s national self-image. Fittingly, the film starts at the Viennese airport, an important point of entry into Austria. Nana Iaschwili, a teacher of French from the former Soviet republic of Georgia, transits through the airport on her way to Los Angeles, where she plans to visit her uncle. However, her entire itinerary is based on forged papers, which do not pass the scrutinizing inspection of the ticket agent. Nana is arrested, interrogated, and then scheduled for deportation within forty-eight hours. Her request to remain in Austria, or to be handed over to a neighboring country, is rejected. Determined to avoid a return to Georgia, Nana escapes the transit area and attaches herself to a tour group from the United States bound for the Austrian lake district. Pursued by the police, Nana begins an at times comical, at times dangerous journey through Austria. On her trip she must dodge not

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only the authorities, but also lonesome male tourists and innkeepers looking for a holiday fling, as well as smugglers and criminals preying on illegal migrants. Contemporary critics were clearly torn between applauding the film’s depiction of the protagonist as victim of the tourism industry’s collaboration with state bureaucracy and rooting for Nana as a resourceful and resilient agent of her own journey to freedom. Evidence for the former is David Rooney’s review in Variety, who writes that Nana’s rejection at the airport rips the veil off “the postcard scenery of the Austrian countryside.”7 The latter is highlighted by German film critic Thorsten Krüger, who applauds the film as a “spannendes Road Movie” (a suspenseful road movie).8 This tension between Nana as victim and as a street smart survivor in a strange tourism wonderland is crucial for a discussion of the film in the context of the country’s increasingly xenophobic immigration policy of the early 1990s. As I will show, Nana’s arrest at the airport and her subsequent journey through Austria reveal the racism underlying the apparently objective differentiations between tourists and (im)migrants. Several critics use the term “road movie” to highlight the protagonist’s seemingly unperturbed determination to reach her goal despite a series of obstacles put in her path.9 While the category of the film as road movie is not wholly inappropriate, my analysis will problematize this classification in relation to the context of tourism. After all, Flicker’s film is less concerned with the heroine’s arrival at a particular destination, and more with the mobilizing of narratives of identities and places among West European audiences.

When Tourists Become Migrants Suzie Washington highlights the collaboration between the tourist industry and police on both a local and a global level. More than once, Nana encounters airline representatives, tour guides, and hotel owners who function as double agents. Rather than just facilitating the flow of tourists by pointing travelers to their connecting flights, the Viennese ticket agent also verifies passports, and, in doing so, serves the Austrian state, the supranational policing structure of the European Union, as well as the United States’ immigration authorities. Later in the film, the Austrian guide on the tour bus filled with tourists from the United States and a hotel receptionist also combine a heartfelt welcome with the request for identification. Touristic spaces and places function as selective filters that separate those who belong from those who do not. Within the Western imaginary of the twentieth century, airports have long stood for almost unlimited mobility and freedom. However, since planes have become potential weapons of mass destruction, air travel has also become inaccessible for people who do not meet the Western criteria of “traveler” or “tourist.” In its opening sequence, Suzie Washington highlights

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the gatekeeping function of airports. Nana Iaschwili’s arrival at the airport is filmed with a somewhat blurry, handheld camera that mimics the cinematography of holiday videos produced by tourists. Nana’s later interrogation by the airport police and, especially her subsequent stay in the transit zone, are captured by a much steadier camera, which follows Nana through a series of long shots as she aimlessly wanders among the duty-free shops and souvenir kiosks. Several horizontal long shots from outside the glass walls of the transit area underscore the cage-like atmosphere of Nana’s stay at the airport. Nana’s status as an object of a controlling gaze becomes evident in the bird’s-eye shots from a ceiling-mounted surveillance camera. Cinematography transforms the airport from a space representing the opportunities of freedom and mobility into a holding pen for undesirable foreigners. Not just airports, but the tourism infrastructure in general assists in the policing of immigrants. Whether Nana sits in a bus, takes a boat across a lake, hitchhikes on the Autobahn, or takes a ski lift up into the mountains, these means of transportation repeatedly require Nana to adjust her identity in order to pass as a tourist. From the perspective of the migrant, the touristic infrastructure does not so much represent leisurely escapism as illustrate “how the mechanisms of control extend well beyond the border.”10 In quite a few instances the touristic infrastructure even takes on the function of a border. More than just an indication of the commodification of Austria’s landscapes in the era of globalization,11 the depiction of tourism and transit spaces as hindering the mobility of illegal migrants illustrates the significant change in attitude that Austrians began to exhibit against foreigners, especially when compared to the former’s willingness to support refugees from Eastern bloc countries at crucial points during the era after World War II. The “various degrees of enthusiasm”12 with which Austrians received those fleeing the violent Soviet response to the anti-Stalinist revolutions during the 1950s,1960s, and 1980s in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Poland were to some extent based on the fact that the vast majority of these refugees would move on to settle in other countries.13 If, in these historical cases, the transit zone of Austria had revolving doors on both sides, the Austria of the 1990s features sliding doors that only open for favored groups of foreigners: “Incidentally, the only foreigners entitled to Gemütlichkeit these days, it seems, are those who do not come from Eastern and Southern Europe and Third World countries, and who come—as tourists—to spend money.”14 It is the social and cultural construction of the difference between tourists and (illegal) migrants or asylum seekers that is under scrutiny in Suzie Washington. Whether a person appears to be a tourist or a migrant is contingent not so much on their behavior but more on—often unacknowledged—Western traditions of seeing, identifying, and categorizing this behavior as indicative of a particular race, ethnicity, or gender. As Nira Yuval-Davis writes, an ethnic “collectivity constructs itself and ‘its interest’” through a series of “political processes”15 that often

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rely on ideas of “manhood and womanhood.”16 Flicker’s film demonstrates how the interest of an ethnically “pure” Austria is coded in gendered actions of white male characters that determine whether Nana is perceived as a threatening illegal migrant or an exotic foreign tourist.17 At the film’s beginning, Nana’s Georgian passport and her accented English frame her as an ethnic other in ways that attract the attention of the Austrian police. Yet, shortly thereafter, this apparently objective categorization is shown to be arbitrary and based on racist and gendered “interests” of the dominant Austrian/Western collective: when another illegal migrant from Iran resists deportation and causes an armed showdown with the airport police, Nana uses the confusion and slips out of the transit area. Donned in the blue coat of a cleaning woman, she pushes the cart with cleaning utensils through the airport’s corridors under the nose of the police, proving that the threatening visibility of the foreign “other” can turn into invisibility when this “other” serves the economic interest of the dominant Austrian/Western collective. Suzie Washington’s airport scenes demonstrate that “otherness” becomes visible not because of an actual difference but because how we see is based on internalized racialized distinctions between people. As art historian Martin A. Berger writes, “[i]mages do not persuade us to internalize racial values embedded within them . . . Instead of selling us on racial systems we do not already own, the visual field powerfully confirms previously internalized beliefs.”18 In other words, when the presence of the ethnic or racial “other” does not disturb the ethnic self-image of the dominant collective, the racial(ized) “other” remains invisible. The film scrutinizes Austrians’ dominant ethnic self-image even more once Nana escaped the watchful eyes of the Austrian border police and boards an American tour bus under her new identity as American tourist Suzie Washington. The group’s Austrian guide never questions the Georgian teacher’s newly assumed persona. His perception of Nana’s accent and appearance seems to match what he expects to see in a person hailing from North America’s racial and ethnic “melting pot,” a clichéd perception supported by the rather tanned complexion of Austrian actor Birgit Doll. The guide’s polite and welcoming attitude toward Nana also reflects the role of the United States as a politically and culturally powerful collective and an important tourist market. Being a US citizen temporarily overwrites Nana’s perception as ethnic “other.” Later in the film, Nana’s references to her American identity allow her to fend off requests by the hotel owner for her passport and payment long enough to slip away. Suzie Washington demonstrates how male erotic desire shapes the perception of ethnicity, nationality, and class. When Nana must abandon her journey on the tour bus and finds herself stranded in the bucolic Austrian countryside, German tourist Herbert Korn comes to the rescue. He ferries Nana/Suzie across the lake in his fishing boat and helps her to get a room in the same hotel where he is staying. For the quiet and socially awkward middle-aged loner, the alleged American

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tourist is an attractive and exotic interruption of his rather dull vacation, and he quickly invites her to dinner. He even buys a swimsuit for her, hoping that she will join him for a midnight swim in the lake. Realizing that Nana/Suzie travels without a companion, Herbert sees an opportunity to “spice up” his vacation with a holiday fling. Although not the aggressive type, Herbert embodies a Western male perspective that perceives the body of the female “other” as a potential “destination,” as an “imagined territory” open for male exploration.19 Suzie Washington’s critique of tourism goes beyond a critique of what Rooney calls “the postcard scenery of the Austrian countryside.” Rather, the film shows tourism as a set of discourses that decisively shapes the very objects and people it represents. It shows tourism, in the words of Stuart Hall, as one of the “‘machineries’ and regimes of representation in a culture . . . [which] play a constitutive and not merely a reflexive, after-the-event, role.”20 Nana’s/Suzie’s shift from illegal migrant to tourist exemplifies this process. At first, Nana’s financial resources, and her claim that she is “not a criminal [but a] tourist,” do not convince the female police officer during her interrogation at the Vienna airport. But Nana’s performances as Suzie Washington apparently become believable when they meet the desires and fantasies of the dominant collective, or when her performances match the visual traditions through which Western perceptions identify racial and ethnic differences. In so doing, Suzie Washington reveals the racist underpinnings of Austria’s immigration policies.

The Limits of Performance Nana’s/Suzie’s temporarily successful performance as a tourist, and her flexibility in coping with repeatedly changing circumstances, do indeed invite a reading of Suzie Washington as a road movie, albeit as one with a European bent. While American road movies often show their heroes engaged in criminal activities, European road movies focus more on the “psychological, emotional, and spiritual states” of their protagonists. Where protagonists in American road movies are on their way “outside of society,” European road movies have them move “into national cultures, tracing the meaning of citizenship as a journey.”21 Nana’s/Suzie’s psychological state of mind, her desires, and her worries become apparent in several virtual postcards to her (imagined) uncle in Los Angeles. Nana/Suzie narrates the first postcard as voiceover in English while locked into the Viennese airport’s transit zone: “Dear Uncle! I’m on my way. Not in time, but closer than ever before. I’m sorry to say my flight to Los Angeles will be delayed. But please don’t worry. I’m fine. It’s been years of waiting, so a few more days won’t matter. See you soon. Maybe tomorrow. Love.” Later, after she boards the tour bus, Nana/Suzie explains her delayed arrival in another postcard: “Dear Uncle! Everything changed. I decided to take a little trip to the countryside. There

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was so much excitement over the last few days. I need some time to relax. So, I will travel around a little bit, take a deep breath and—you know.” At first, these postcard narratives seem to indicate that tourism’s emancipatory potential outweighs its entanglement in exploitative economic and oppressive policing structures. Numerous theoretical approaches in fact view tourism as a “set of cultural practices” that harbors the potential for spatial change through performative acts: “In the spaces of tourism and leisure, social and spatial identities collide and elide, creating moments of ‘uncertainty.’ The uncertainties expose the margins of categories, such as tourists and nontourists, and make present the struggles that arise as tourists and nontourists try to either reinforce or break down . . . tenuous social and spatial borders.”22 Along the same lines, David Crouch regards tourism as an example of a “spatial practice” whose aim is “not to return or imagine a past, but to creatively enliven, to repeat only the possibility of a new, unique moment.”23 Nana’s performances as the American tourist Suzie Washington result in several creative and unique moments that help her evade the police and fool tourism officials. By providing her own voice-over captions to images of these landscapes, Nana/Suzie creates an interactive relationship between the places observed and the narrative place of the observer, a practice that sustains at least the semblance of agency: “I decided to take a little trip to the countryside,” she writes, transforming the chance escape from the airport into a voluntary decision, and the inhospitable spatial surroundings into an almost welcoming place. But the postcards also indicate the limits of self-actualization through massmediated narratives. As Nana/Suzie continues to narrate her fictitious postcards, it becomes clear that the American uncle does not exist. Instead, the uncle can be read as reference to the mythical wealthy American relative that permeates much of twentieth century European cultural texts.24 What drives Nana’s/Suzie’s journey is not the uncle, but the cinematic aura of Los Angeles. For the teacher from Georgia, a country traumatized by decades of Stalinist rule and then ravaged by civil war, Los Angeles means Hollywood, the final destination—concretely or metaphorically—of innumerable road movies and filmic fantasies. In other words, while the postcards indicate Nana’s/Suzie’s distance to Hollywood and thus her distance to freedom, they also draw the viewer’s attention to cinema and tourism’s commercialized side. Read from this perspective, Suzie Washington not only questions its own genre format as a road movie but also casts a critical eye on all-too-facile postmodern interpretations of mass media as empowering and emancipating. Both readings of the postcard narratives—as spatial performances and as a narrative construction of her desire for happiness—converge in a climactic scene that shows Nana/Suzie in her hotel room, lying on the bed and emptying the contents of the minibar. As she zaps through the TV channels, she formulates the following postcard to her fictitious uncle:

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Dear Uncle! The weather is fine. And people here are rich and friendly. I found a nice hotel with hot water, drinks for free, and thirty-two TV channels. This is not America, but my first holiday since my honeymoon, I guess, and a good place to hang around. So I will do my best. Los Angeles is far away, and so am I. Please don’t forget me.

In this scene, Nana/Suzie seems to be able to forge a space for herself by performing as a tourist, by imitating a series of “cultural codes” that symbolize “proper forms of conduct” when engaging in a tourist trip: she goes into the hotel room, takes a shower, lies down on her bed, watches TV, and consumes snacks and drinks from the minibar.25 The postcard narrative supplements this performative creation of a new space by providing a storyline that enables Nana/Suzie to “inscribe” herself into the social spaces of tourism. The postcards exemplify Michel de Certeau’s observation that “a story even has distributive power and performative force (it does what it says) when an ensemble of circumstances is brought together. Then it founds spaces.”26 As Nana’s reference to the thirty-two TV channels indicates, her experience of (temporary) agency is closely linked to an imagination shaped by mass-media. Her casual way of using the remote control and her almost child-like joy at the abundance of channels resonate with cultural theorist Arjun Appadurai’s observation that consuming globalized mass media must be understood as working in the sphere of “imagination,” which he defines as “a space of contestation in which individuals and groups seek to annex the global into their own practices of the modern.”27 Although Appadurai warns of reading consumption as a liberatory practice, it is a pleasurable one, and, as he concludes, “where there is pleasure there is agency.”28 It would indeed be tempting to use Appadurai’s rather sweeping generalizations for a reading of Suzie Washington as celebration of an individual’s courageous fight against state and police authorities. The curiosity and confidence with which Nana/Suzie browses the TV channels seem to indicate a form of control over a commodified world by imagining herself on an extended vacation, reminiscent of a honeymoon. Yet, there are also enough scenes that question whether the protagonist’s spatial performances and imagination are sufficient to overcome the deeply ingrained processes of “othering” and exclusion that shape Austrian narratives of national and cultural identity. One such scene is the already mentioned dinner between German tourist Herbert Korn and Nana/Suzie. At some point between the main course and dessert, Nana/Suzie reveals to Herbert that she is not an American tourist but an illegal migrant without a passport. Herbert, whose Palatschinken (sweet pancakes) have just arrived, reacts to the news by looking down at his plate and ripping apart the egg-and-flour omelets with the following words: “This is an Austrian specialty, from Hungary. Palatschinken. The emperor liked them so much, he brought them back from Budapest. He even refined it, tore it into pieces, shredded it, like this. Now it’s called ‘Emperor’s Delight.’ A specialty, too.”29

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Herbert’s description of how a Hungarian dish became an Austrian specialty seems to acknowledge that identities are socially and culturally constructed categories. However, by detailing further the dessert’s Austrianization through an imperial act of refining via destruction, Herbert illustrates what Homi Bhabha calls the “violence involved in establishing the nation’s writ.”30 In other words, not by imaginatively appropriating and redefining spaces, but only by subjecting herself to a violent national and cultural reorientation might Nana/Suzie be able to overcome the cultural and national boundaries that hinder her journey. That performative identity constructions in themselves are not sufficient to overcome hegemonic and dominant strategies of exclusion becomes apparent in the film’s subsequent scenes. The morning after her dinner with Herbert, Nana/ Suzie wakes up only to discover her photo next to a large Gesucht! (Wanted!) headline in Austria’s main tabloid. She manages to hitch a ride with a family to the nearest Autobahn rest area, where she encounters a seemingly friendly trucker who offers to take her to Hamburg. Unbeknownst to her, the trucker is part of a human-trafficking ring exploiting migrants who try to cross the AustrianGerman border. Tricked into spending the night in the trucker’s cabin, Nana is abandoned at a gas station still on Austrian territory, whose owner collaborates with the human traffickers. The smugglers rob Nana of her remaining valuables and then transport her and several other illegal migrants to a ski lift that carries them further up into the mountains between Germany and Austria. While Nana’s/Suzie’s performances as an American tourist in the film’s earlier part reveal the tourism industry’s collaboration with the authorities of the nationstate, the later part offers insights into the exploitative and criminal flip side of tourism enterprises. The transportation infrastructure with its freight trucks, gas stations, and roads in general, and the tourism infrastructure with ski lifts and tour buses in particular, now appear more concerned with the illegal movement of people as with the legal one. Suzie Washington draws attention to tourism’s double-faced nature by combining Nana’s story of escape with one of the most enduring mass-mediated escapes that also has become one of the most popular Austrian tourist phenomena, namely The Sound of Music story. As the human traffickers drive Nana/Suzie and the other illegal border crossers to the ski lift, a brief shot of the van’s door reveals a “Sound of Music Tour” advertisement. Suzie Washington’s director, Florian Flicker, called the 1965 Hollywood production the “grandmother” of his own film and considered the use of this logo in connection with illegal border crossing as a symbol of hope: “In the same region where The Sound of Music was shot thirty years ago, people are today still looking for an escape path into the ‘new world.’”31 It is certainly appropriate to describe the historical event of the Trapp family’s emigration from Nazioccupied Austria as an escape into the New World. But the Hollywood film, and the various Sound of Music tour enterprises that try to capitalize on the film’s pop-

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ularity, are, if anything, escapist narratives rather than escape paths.32 For Nikhil Sathe, the intertextual reference to The Sound of Music amounts to a restaging of the Trapp family’s flight from the authorities, which allows Suzie Washington to reemphasize its criticism of “borders and their repressive control.”33 While this is a plausible reading, it does not address the fact that Suzie Washington’s reference actually is not to The Sound of Music as filmic text but to the tourist enterprises it generated. Thus, in my reading, the misuse of the Sound of Music tour bus for an enterprise that further exploits people in an already desperate situation is not just an invitation to see the parallels between Nana’s/Suzie’s and the Trapps’ attempts to cross borders but also criticizes the simplistic yet powerful “mediascapes” that have formed around The Sound of Music narrative.34 The sequence discredits capitalism’s false realization and manipulation of mass-mediated fantasies and, by extension, reveals Nana’s/Suzie’s goal to reach Los Angeles as a misguided desire: as the van symbolizes, globalized media fantasies and the capitalist structures undergirding them seem more intent on exploiting their consumers than delivering on their promise of liberation. Any suggestion that imagination by itself leads to liberation dissolves in the final sequences of the film. After the ski lift has transported Nana/Suzie to the alpine Austrian-German borderland, she loses her way and, in the impending darkness, seeks refuge in a small mountain hut. The hut’s owner quickly has doubts about Nana’s/Suzie’s explanation of being a lost American tourist. But without further questions, he provides her with a meal and lodging in exchange for her help in the kitchen and in serving the other guests. Affection begins to develop between the two characters, and for a brief moment this hut in the liminal world of the mountains between two nation states transforms into a space of refuge for Nana/Suzie. However, it is an unstable, and eventually untenable, situation based on wishful thinking, as the film shows. When Nana/Suzie cleans up under the dormitory’s bunk beds, she finds a pair of broken sunglasses with pink-colored lenses. Playfully, she holds the glasses before her eyes a couple of times, with the film providing matching point-of-view shots through tinted lenses. During the last point-of-view shot, the Jeep of the border patrol drives into the frame, informing the innkeeper about illegal migrants in the area. Thus, the forces of law and order disrupt the mise-en-scène at the very moment that the protagonist is once again tempted to settle into an imagined situation of home and belonging. Nana’s/Suzie’s playing with the pink-colored sunglasses and the border police’s disturbance of the potential mountain idyll signal to the audience to let go of the desire for a traditional happy ending in which Nana/Suzie might find long-term refuge in the Austrian-German borderlands. The final sequence also cautions viewers to expect comforting or even redemptory identity positions as a result of the metaphoric uses of terms such as “traveler,” “migrant,” or “tourist.” When Nana/Suzie eventually crosses the border into Germany with a passport stolen

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from one of the hut’s other patrons, she attests to the fact that “few of us can live without a passport or an identity card of some sort.”35 The protagonist’s sometimes funny, but more often bizarre, encounters with the Austrian tourist landscape, as well as with tourists, tourism officials, and locals, open up a series of “contact zones.” Mary Louise Pratt develops the notion of the “contact zone” in the context of colonialist travelogues in order to “invoke the spatial and temporal copresence of subjects previously separated by geographic and historical disjunctures.”36 In Suzie Washington, the tourist performances of the female traveler/migrant from the Eurasian border zone amount to a series of “copresences” that question the hegemonic and allegedly natural self-image of Western audiences. The disturbingly comic effects created by Nana’s/Suzie’s experience are only possible because of Western viewers’ acceptance of tourism’s conventional symbolic order. When an airport turns into a prison cell, when a ski lift is used—in the summer no less—by illegal border crossers, it confuses a conventional sense of spatial order and sparks critical awareness. Even though Suzie Washington was released a few years before historian Dipesh Chakrabarty wrote about the need to “provincialize Europe,” the actions of its main protagonist fit quite well into this perspective.37 Chakrabarty stipulated that European intellectual history is “at once both indispensable and inadequate” for an understanding of modernity and argued for its renewal “from and for the margins.”38 Arguably, Suzie Washington anticipates this act of provincializing through cinematic means. As I have shown in my discussion of imagination and spatial performances, Nana Iaschwili is clearly influenced by Western narratives and fantasies of identity and happiness. However, her life experience as woman hailing from a country that suffers from the fallout of a destructive civil war also changes the meaning of these narratives and desires. Nana/Suzie questions the impact of apparently progressive and liberating constellations such as the EU and mobilizes alternative imaginary and performative spaces. In doing so, she produces what Michel Foucault calls “heterotopia,” a set of “different spaces” that contrast, contradict, and sometimes complement the imagined space of a supranational and equalizing European Union, which, in public discourse, has become an iconic emblem for the supposed post-national era.39 Instead of focusing on the margins of the hegemonic space—the fringes of the ever-widening EU—Flicker’s film temporarily marginalizes the “heart of Europe,” to cite the slogan used to describe Austria in the tourism brochure Nana/Suzie receives on the bus. Read in this context, Suzie Washington emerges as a road movie quite different from other road movies addressing the question of European identity during the same decade. Wim Wenders’s Lisbon Story (1994), for instance, features a male German protagonist who appreciates the supranational EU’s at least temporary stabilization of a fractious continent but bemoans the resulting cultural homogenization. On the road from Germany to Lisbon, the protagonist begins to imagine the Southwestern margin of the EU through the lens of “imperialist nostal-

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gia,” transforming it into a place that is culturally, socially, and economically behind the European center, and, consequently, into a desirable if elusive point of refuge for the exhausted white male citizen of the German metropolis.40 As Eva Mazierska and Laura Rascaroli point out, “although nominally . . . Wenders reached the margins of Europe, metaphorically [he] did not travel very far.”41 Suzie Washington, by contrast, emphasizes the frictions of intercultural contact and highlights the existence of legal, political, cultural, ethnic, and gendered boundaries. However, while modeling how to redirect a marginalized perspective onto the “center,” Nana/Suzie must not be misread as a kind of subaltern voice from the colonies critiquing the metropolis. As a teacher of French and as a fluent English speaker, Nana/Suzie is versatile in different languages and cultures, and she is perhaps described best as being suspended between different spaces and different historical narratives. This might also explain the film’s ambiguous last scene, during which Nana/Suzie finally manages to cross the border into Germany with a stolen French passport. Her assumption of yet another nationally defined identity does not, however, constitute a definitive embrace of the national as the only viable way to define identity. Rather, it seems that for the fugitive from war-ravaged Georgia, a stable national identity is still highly desirable. While a Western perspective might see the nation as something “already overcome,” Nana/Suzie might perceive it as “not-yet-achieved.” Perhaps this is what she addresses in the concluding sentence of her last postcard, which doubles as the final shot of the film: “Once upon a time there was, and there was not. A bientôt, Jacqueline Duron.” At first glance, Suzie Washington portrays an individual’s struggle against national and international policing structures. But as I showed in my discussion, Nana’s/Suzie’s versatile performances, limited as they may be, draw attention to yet another angle on the connections between tourism and Austrian national identity. The very marketing strategies used to advertise Austria through the discourse of tourism tap into global(ized) cultural narratives and media discourses that also allow for alternative and critical interpretations. In the face of Nana’s/ Suzie’s difficulty to maintain her freedom in Austria’s tourism landscape, the marketing of Austria as the “Heart of Europe” for the American tourist group and the use of a Sound of Music tour bus for human trafficking certainly become indicators of the tourism discourse’s doublespeak. However, these scenes also already hint at the tourism discourse’s power to not only anchor national identity, as I investigated in the earlier chapters of this book, but to also destabilize it. In the following chapter I will further analyze tourism’s potential for destabilizing and mobilizing Austria’s national identity narrative. The cameo appearance of the Sound of Music tour bus in Suzie Washington already hinted at the ambiguous role this iconic cultural text plays for Austria’s national identity constructions at the turn of the twenty-first century. On the one hand, the bus seems aligned with the forces that promote a hegemonic and xenophobic Austria that removes

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those who do not belong from the territory of the nation-state. On the other hand, this apparent defense of the nation’s borders is revealed to be an illusion. Qua its connection to the international Sound of Music narrative, the bus can and does cross the nation’s borders at will, both in order to transport tourists but also to transport illegal border crossers. In doing so, the tour bus anticipates the complex ways in which Sound of Music tourism in general has both affirmed but also challenged Austria’s national self-image in particular ways.

Notes 1. Nikhil Sathe, “Crossing Borders in Austrian Cinema at the Turn of the Century: Flicker, Allahyari, Albert,” in New Austrian Film, ed. Robert von Dassanowsky and Oliver C. Speck (New York: Berghahn Books, 2011), 228. 2. Milan Kundera, “The Tragedy of Central Europe,” trans. Edmund White, The New York Review of Books, 26 April 1984. 3. An earlier version of the chapter was published as Gundolf Graml, “Trapped Bodies, Roaming Fantasies: Mobilizing the Constructions of Place and Identity in Florian Flicker’s Suzie Washington,” in New Austrian Film, ed. Robert von Dassanowsky and Oliver C. Speck (New York: Berghahn Books, 2011), 251–62. 4. Martin Reisigl and Ruth Wodak, Discourse and Discrimination: Rhetorics of Racism and Antisemitism (London: Routledge, 2001), 147. 5. Ibid., 149. 6. The FPÖ started discussing a referendum called Österreich zuerst (Austria First) in December 1992 and launched it in January 1993. In December 1992, the Austrian parliament passed the Ausländergesetz (Alien Act) detailing the conditions under which foreigners could receive an entry visa. Before that, in June 1992, parliament passed the Asylum Act that aimed to prevented the “‘suspected abuse’ of the provisions for political asylum.” Ibid., 147. 7. David Rooney, “Suzie Washington,” Variety, 5 October 1998, http://variety.com/1998/ film/reviews/suzie-washington-1117913463/. 8. Thorsten Krüger, “Suzie Washington (Ö 1998),” Artechock, retrieved 23 October 2017 from https://www.artechock.de/film/text/kritik/s/suwash.htm. All translations into English are mine unless otherwise noted. 9. See the subtitle of the following review: Nicole Hess, “Suzie Washington: Ein Heimatfilm als Roadmovie,” Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 29 January 1998. 10. Nikhil Sathe, “Crossing Borders in Austrian Cinema,” 231. 11. Ali Zheng, “Contested Identities and Public Spaces in Recent Austrian Film,” Modern Austrian Literature 34, no. 1/2 (2001): 60. 12. Reisigl and Wodak, Discourse, 149. 13. In 1956, approximately 160,000 Hungarians fled to Austria after the violent suppression of the anti-Stalinist uprising. In 1968, 100,000 Czechs arrived after Soviet tanks crushed the Prague Spring, and about 50,000 Poles came to Austria after the implementation of martial law in 1982. Ibid., 148–49. 14. Ibid., 147–48.

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15. Nira Yuval-Davis, Gender and Nation (London: Sage, 1997), 44. 16. Ibid., 23. 17. While the notion of an “ethnic Austrian-ness” might sound strange at first, Reisigl and Wodak demonstrate convincingly that the language of the FPÖ’s “Austria First” petition implies a definition of Austrian-ness based on biological and quasi-ethnic traits that can only be inherited by birth and not by other means. Reisigl and Wodak, Discourse, 155. 18. Martin A. Berger, Sight Unseen: Whiteness and American Visual Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 1. 19. Chris Rojek and John Urry, “Transformations of Travel and Theory,” in Touring Cultures: Transformations of Travel and Theory, ed. Chris Rojek and John Urry (New York: Routledge, 2000), 17. 20. Stuart Hall, “New Ethnicities,” in Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, ed. David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen (New York: Routledge, 1996), 443. 21. David Laderman, Driving Visions: Exploring the Road Movie (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002), 248. 22. Stephen P. Hanna and Vincent J. Del Casino, “Introduction: Tourism Spaces, Mapped Representations, and the Practices of Identity,” in Mapping Tourism, ed. Stephen P. Hanna and Vincent J. Del Casino (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), xxi. 23. David Crouch, “Introduction: Encounters in Leisure/Tourism,” in Leisure/Tourism Geographies: Practices and Geographical Knowledge, ed. David Crouch (New York: Routledge, 1999), 4. 24. The rich uncle from the United States was a staple in literature and film after World War I and II. For an overview of even earlier references see Rolf Parr, “Der ‘Onkel aus Amerika’: Import von Amerikawissen oder Re-Import alter Stereotype?,” in Amerika und die deutschsprachige Literatur nach 1848: Migration—Kultureller Austausch—Frühe Globalisierung (Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2009), 21–38. 25. Tim Edensor, National Identity, Popular Culture and Everyday Life (Oxford: Berg, 2002), 95. 26. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 123. 27. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalizations (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 4. 28. Ibid., 7. 29. “Das ist eine österreichische Spezialität, aus Ungarn. Palatschinken. Ist gut. Dem Kaiser haben sie so gut geschmeckt, dass er sie aus Budapest mitgebracht hat. Er hat es sogar verfeinert, zerstückelt, zerfetzt, so . . . Das ist jetzt ein Kaiserschmarrn. Auch eine Spezialität.” 30. Homi K. Bhabha, ed., Nation and Narration (New York: Routledge, 1990), 310. 31. Florian Flicker, Suzie Washington: Drehbuch und Notizen zum Film (Weitra: Bibliothek der Provinz, 1999), 102. 32. See Jacqueline Vansant, “Robert Wise’s The Sound of Music and the ‘Denazification’ of Austria in American Cinema,” in From World War to Waldheim: Culture and Politics in Austria and the United States, ed. David F. Good and Ruth Wodak (New York: Berghahn Books, 1999), 165–86. The history of the Trapp family and the impact of The Sound of Music on Salzburg’s and Austria’s tourism landscape will be the focus of the next chapter. 33. As Nikhil Sathe has pointed out, from the encounter with the German tourist at the lake to Nana’s/Suzie’s developing relationship with a local innkeeper during her final overnight

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34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

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stay in an alpine hut, Suzie Washington revisits crucial aspects of the Heimatfilm genre “in order to undermine both the narrative configurations associated with them and also their illusory gestures toward integration and acceptance.” Sathe, “Crossing Borders,” 232. Appadurai, Modernity, 33. Caren Kaplan, Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourses of Displacement (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), 9. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York: Routledge, 1992), 262. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 3. Ibid., 16. Michel Foucault, “Different Spaces,” in Michel Foucault: Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, vol. 2, Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984, ed. James D. Faubion (New York: The New Press, 1998), 178. Renato Rosaldo, Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993), 68. Eva Mazierska and Laura Rascaroli, Crossing Europe: Postmodern Travel and the European Road Movie (New York: Wallflower Press, 2006), 209.

Bibliography Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalizations. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. Berger, Martin A. Sight Unseen: Whiteness and American Visual Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. Bhabha, Homi K., ed. Nation and Narration. New York: Routledge, 1990. Certeau, Michel de. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000. Crouch, David. “Introduction: Encounters in Leisure/Tourism.” In Leisure/Tourism Geographies: Practices and Geographical Knowledge, edited by David Crouch, 1–16. New York: Routledge, 1999. Edensor, Tim. National Identity, Popular Culture and Everyday Life. Oxford: Berg, 2002. Flicker, Florian. Suzie Washington: Drehbuch und Notizen zum Film. Weitra: Bibliothek der Provinz, 1999. Foucault, Michel. “Different Spaces.” In Michel Foucault: Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, vol. 2: Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984, edited by James D. Faubion, 175–85. New York: The New Press, 1998. Hall, Stuart. “New Ethnicities.” In Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, edited by David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen, 441–49. New York: Routledge, 1996. Hanna, Stephen P., and Vincent J. Del Casino. “Introduction: Tourism Spaces, Mapped Representations, and the Practices of Identity.” In Mapping Tourism, edited by Stephen P. Hanna and Vincent J. Del Casino, ix–xxvii. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. Hess, Nicole. “Suzie Washington: Ein Heimatfilm als Roadmovie.” Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 29 January 1998.

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Kaplan, Caren. Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourses of Displacement. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996. Krüger, Thorsten. “Suzie Washington (Ö 1998).” Artechock. Retrieved 23 October 2017 from https://www.artechock.de/film/text/kritik/s/suwash.htm. Laderman, David. Driving Visions: Exploring the Road Movie. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002. Mazierska, Eva, and Laura Rascaroli. Crossing Europe: Postmodern Travel and the European Road Movie. New York: Wallflower Press, 2006. Parr, Rolf. “Der ‘Onkel aus Amerika’: Import von Amerikawissen oder Re-Import alter Stereotype?” In Amerika und die deutschsprachige Literatur nach 1848: Migration—Kultureller Austausch—Frühe Globalisierung, 21–38. Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2009. Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. New York: Routledge, 1992. Reisigl, Martin, and Ruth Wodak. Discourse and Discrimination: Rhetorics of Racism and Antisemitism. London: Routledge, 2001. Rojek, Chris, and John Urry. “Transformations of Travel and Theory.” In Touring Cultures: Transformations of Travel and Theory, edited by Chris Rojek and John Urry, 1–22. New York: Routledge, 2000. Rooney, David. “Suzie Washington.” Variety, 5 October 1998. http://variety.com/1998/film/ reviews/suzie-washington-1117913463/. Rosaldo, Renato. Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis. Boston: Beacon Press, 1993. Sathe, Nikhil. “Crossing Borders in Austrian Cinema at the Turn of the Century: Flicker, Allahyari, Albert.” In New Austrian Film, edited by Robert von Dassanowsky and Oliver C. Speck, 227–41. New York: Berghahn Books, 2011. Vansant, Jacqueline. “Robert Wise’s The Sound of Music and the ‘Denazification’ of Austria in American Cinema.” In From World War to Waldheim: Culture and Politics in Austria and the United States, edited by David F. Good and Ruth Wodak, 165–86. New York: Berghahn Books, 1999. Lisbon Story. Directed by Wim Wenders. Germany: Madragoa Filmes, 1995. Yuval-Davis, Nira. Gender and Nation. London: Sage, 1997. Zheng, Ali. “Contested Identities and Public Spaces in Recent Austrian Film.” Modern Austrian Literature 34, no. 1/2 (2001): 54–67.

Chapter 8

THE COPY AND THE ORIGINAL The Sound of Music (1965) and Austrian National Identity

d I

n the summer of 2011, several new tourist markers in Salzburg’s old town district attracted the attention of locals and visitors: at the edge of the Residenzplatz, between the Romanic cathedral and the statue of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, visitors encountered a mock-up bus stop advertising an exhibit about The Sound of Music and the Trapp family in the adjacent Salzburg Museum. Similarly, visitors exiting from the museum in Mozart’s former living quarters on the other side of the Salzach River looked at large banners announcing the first Salzburg-based performance of the German-language version of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s musical The Sound of Music in the Salzburg Landestheater. To encounter references to The Sound of Music in Salzburg’s public spaces would not have been surprising per se. After all, the film’s popularity had drawn visitors to Salzburg since its release in 1965. While early tourists relied on the insider knowledge of local taxi drivers, Sound of Music tourism has since transformed into a booming business served by numerous local and regional tour companies. Approximately fifty thousand visitors per year participate in guided Sound of Music bus tours. For about three to four hundred thousand annual foreign visitors, The Sound of Music forms the main reason for a stopover in Salzburg.1 What made the new tourist markers stand out was their placement adjacent to sites and locations traditionally connected to Salzburg’s role of defining Austria’s high-cultural identity. Finding references to The Sound of Music next to the cathedral and Mozart’s living quarters provided the first indication that The Sound of Music had morphed from symbolizing American kitsch to shaping the narrative about Salzburg’s and Austria’s global relevance.

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Figure 8.1. Signs outside the Salzburg Panorama Museum indicate locations relevant for the Trapp family’s history and for The Sound of Music. Photo by author.

Salzburg’s tourism promoters had always gladly accepted the additional cash influx provided by the film’s fans, but had shored up the city’s reputation as the epitome of classical music and baroque architecture. In the late 1990s, the situation gradually changed. In the restaurants of the old town, karaoke performances of Do-Re-Mi began to compete with the string sounds of baroque chamber music. Wolfgang (Amadeus Mozart) had to move over and share space and fame with Maria (Trapp). These noticeable transformations of Salzburg’s soundscape and urban topography raise significant questions: Who decides which tourist image or narrative is more relevant for Austria’s national identity? How do tourist performances at the various sites contribute to or undermine the perception of an authentic Austrian nation? To address these questions, this chapter examines the transatlantic travel of the narratives that led to the eventual Hollywood blockbuster; analyzes the practices of tourists and tour guides; and discusses museum exhibits and musical performances related to The Sound of Music. Contrary to the often-heard claim that Sound of Music tourism lacks any links to a “real” Austrian identity, I consider this particular manifestation of the tourism discourse a paradigmatic example of how Austria has fashioned its national and cultural identity in an inter- and trans-

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national framework for several decades now. Especially in the context of supranational political structures such as the European Union, and of the globalized flows of culture and money that define an allegedly post-national world, Sound of Music tourism constitutes an epistemological framework that highlights how supposedly “inauthentic” practices anchor “authentic” experiences of belonging and identity.2 The concerns expressed by political representatives, journalists, and public intellectuals about the The Sound of Music’s alleged sidelining of Mozart is a reminder that national identity is usually not generated only by the “traditional authority of those national objects of knowledge—Tradition, People, the Reason of State, High Culture, for instance—whose pedagogical value often relies on their representation as holistic concepts,” but that it is also contingent on (everyday) performances that question said pedagogical standards.3 Precisely because many Austrians have long treated Sound of Music tourism as a series of representations for foreign tourists that have relatively little impact on Austrian “reality,” Sound of Music emerges as a promising realm for studying national identity processes. As Stuart Hall writes, how “things are represented and the ‘machineries’ of representation in a culture do play a constitutive, and not merely a reflexive, afterthe-event role.”4 As a form of tourism that is now both derided and supported by many Austrians, Sound of Music tourism offers itself as ideal discursive terrain for studying the nation “as it is written . . . in the temporality of culture,” to borrow Homi K. Bhabha’s words.5 The Sound of Music serves as a particular example of how cultural representations are caught in a tension between internal and external interpretations of what constitutes the core values of a community. Michael Herzfeld uses the term “cultural intimacy” to describe “the recognition of those aspects of a cultural identity that are considered a source of external embarrassment but that nevertheless provide insiders with their assurance of a common sociality, the familiarity with the bases of power.”6 It is not uncommon among Austrians to denounce The Sound of Music as fake, while also underscoring that Austrian national identity is indeed unique and defined by the very elements celebrated in the film: a beautiful landscape, a slow-paced lifestyle, and a particular sense of historical and cultural grandeur. “Cultural intimacy” reveals itself especially in those instances where negative aspects raised by Sound of Music tourists— questions about Austria’s National Socialist history, for instance—are not rejected, but, rather, declared to be beyond an outsider’s understanding. Such processes of denial and affirmation allow me to trace the construction of an “authentic” national identity via the interaction between insiders and outsiders. Similar to my discussions of authentic notions of Austrian-ness in earlier chapters, the term authenticity here should not be read as an absolute category but as denoting a temporary experiential phenomenon that is dependent on a particular intersection of related discourses.

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By studying the discursive constructions of national identity in relation to a globalized tourist phenomenon my goal is not to privilege the nation-state as a bastion against the forces of globalization. Nor do I consider tourism synonymous with a transnational or global way of life. Following the direction of earlier chapters, I think of tourism as an organizing principle for the fantasies and desires of people from very different backgrounds and locations. Sound of Music tourism manifests itself in a range of settings, from children’s performances in the United States to sing-along-shows in the UK, from The Sound of Music fan clubs in India to guided tours and, eventually, German-language performances in Salzburg. As an inter- and transnational phenomenon, Sound of Music tourism provides insights into the ways in which individuals and groups create experiences of belonging and stability by connecting local desires with global fantasies. Instead of viewing tourist practices as representative of a priori existing ideas of the nation, I am interested in how these practices become the basis of “imagined communities,”7 how they create and connect with “invented traditions,”8 and how they undergird performative constructions of identity. Tourism officials and journalists have frequently evaluated Sound of Music tourism’s relevance for Austria and Salzburg by calculating the number of visitors and overnight stays it generates. Yet, as important as the economic elements of tourism are, they do little to reveal tourism’s importance for the performative construction of places, which in turn shapes processes of identity formation. As David Crouch writes, “[c]rude consumption figures do not reveal very much of spatial practice.”9 To understand the latter, the focus needs to be on how the discourse of tourism organizes the contradictory desires and emotional structures of belonging through which people anchor their identities in a constantly shifting world. The notion of imagination is central to analyzing the intersection of the performativity of place and tourism’s organization of desire. “[I]magination,” as Arjun Appadurai writes, functions as “an organized field of social practices, a form of work (in the sense of both labor and culturally organized practice), and a form of negotiation between sites of agency (individuals) and globally defined fields of possibility.”10 Simon Coleman and Mike Crang’s plea that “[w]e should . . . see places from the perspective of a performance that takes them up and transforms them, redeploys them and connects them through metonymic relationships” resonates with Appadurai’s observation and provides an apt perspective on Sound of Music tourism.11 Instead of treating Sound of Music tourism as an event that happens within an already defined place—for instance in the Austrian nation-state—I consider it a set of practices that enables ever new manifestations of Austrian-ness by “mobilizing and reconfiguring spaces and places, bringing them into new constellations and therefore transforming them.”12 Sound of Music tours are neither definitive performances of authorized identity narratives, nor are they sectarian practices by those initiated in the cult of The Sound of Music. Instead, as

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the following pages show, Sound of Music tourism is best described as an evolving “contact zone” in which complex and contradictory stories of identity are narrated, reiterated, and performed by a diverse group of agents.13 However, before we get into the complexities of The Sound of Music tourism in the Salzburg of today, a look back at the historical origins of the Trapp family story is in order— so, we shall “start at the very beginning.”

(Inter)National Metamorphoses of a Cultural Text When locals and tourists interact in the context of Sound of Music tourism, they do so in a complex web of narratives and images that thematize travel (in the form of migration) and have traveled extensively themselves. The first full account of the Trapp family’s story dates back to 1949, when Maria Augusta Trapp published her memoir in English under the title The Story of the Trapp Family Singers. Trapp tells the by-now famous account of how she left the convent to become governess of, and later stepmother to, the seven children of Georg Baron von Trapp. She also details the family’s loss of aristocratic wealth, their first forays into singing, and their eventual success as a family choir in the United States, after Austria’s annexation by Nazi Germany had precipitated their emigration.14 American reviewers recommended the book for its inspiring “success story” and its “charmingly natural union of spirituality and practicality.”15 Although the singing Trapp family had acquired national fame in Austria before their emigration, it was their success overseas that inspired German-Austrian director Wolfgang Liebeneiner to produce two feature-length films, Die Trapp Familie (1956), and Die Trapp Familie in Amerika (1958).16 Both films were well received in the postwar German-speaking world. Although they failed to attract large audiences in the US market, Liebeneiner’s version of the Trapp family story did spark yet another round of traveling cultural texts: the first of Liebeneiner’s films inspired Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein’s highly successful 1959 Broadway musical, The Sound of Music. This musical, in turn, became the template for Robert Wise’s 1965 Hollywood film The Sound of Music, starring Julie Andrews as Maria and Christopher Plummer as Baron von Trapp and ordaining Austria’s landscape with a quasi-mythical aura for generations of international moviegoers. The film won five Oscars and its box office returns quickly surpassed previous record holders such as Gone with the Wind, The Ten Commandments, and Ben Hur.17 While The Sound of Music was a huge success in practically all international markets, it failed to attract significant audiences in the German-speaking world in general and in Austria specifically, where the film ran for only a few days.18 Clumsy attempts to make the film more palatable to German audiences aroused US suspicion: when the German manager of Twentieth Century Fox decided

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to let a screening of the film in Munich end with the couple’s wedding, thereby omitting the invasion of the Nazi troops, some US journalists suspected that “the anti-Nazi aspects of the film have militated against its German acceptance.”19 There is, however, little evidence for any sustained campaigning against The Sound of Music other than an unverified claim that the German National- und Soldatenzeitung accused Hollywood of “hate against Germany” (Hass gegen Deutschland ) and “Antigermanismus.”20 The fact that Liebeneiner’s sequel could be described as a road movie through some of the United States’ most iconic landscapes begs the question why it garnered such little attention. Similarly, with Wise’s The Sound of Music narrative largely affirming the Austrian victim thesis and celebrating Austria’s natural and cultural beauty, the relative disinterest of German-speaking audiences is puzzling. It seems that one possible way to explain the differing receptions of the films is to read the respective audience reaction in the context of “[p]ractices of displacement.” That is, rather than addressing a conflict directly in the familiar context, communities displace and often transfer conflicts into a different cultural, geographical, social arena. Seemingly unrelated to the main discussion about a group’s cultural identity, these other discursive arenas become “constitutive of cultural meanings.”21 The 1950s Trapp Familie films by Liebeneiner and Wise’s The Sound of Music played such constitutive roles for German and US audiences, respectively. And because the German/Austrian and the US versions of the Trapp family functioned as coded narratives of complex cultural conflicts in their respective “native” socio-cultural environment, audiences outside of these environments lacked the keys to decipher the narratives. To paraphrase Homi K. Bhabha, instead of simply mirroring back already existing national identity narratives, each cinematic version contributed to a writing of the national narrative at crucial moments in time. Analyzing how this process worked in earlier decades is a first and important step toward understanding the complex role Sound of Music tourism plays for Austrian national identity narratives at the turn of the twenty-first century. In Liebeneiner’s version of the Trapp story, the family’s forced departure from their homeland and the encounter with hardship and tragedy in a foreign country match the conventional expectations for a Heimatfilm.22 But what audiences likely responded to so positively was not Liebeneiner’s skillful deployment of staple elements of the Heimatfilm genre. Rather, it was the ways in which Liebeneiner innovated the genre by turning the family’s temporary exile in the United States into a permanent and even satisfying one. As a result, the film engages with a period of rapid modernization and acceleration in postwar German-speaking Europe. The “opposition between Heimat to its ‘other,’” which the genre usually demands for the “purpose of reinforcing the value of the former term,” is resolved by making the “other” place—the United States—the new Heimat.23 Such a representation was not so much a call for mass emigration to the United

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States, as an attempt to comfort German-speaking audiences at a time of turmoil. In the context of the Cold War, Liebeneiner’s depiction of the United States underscored its almost mythical role as safeguarding Europe from Communism. In 1956, the year of Die Trapp Familie’s release, Warsaw Pact troops crushed the uprising against the Hungarian Communist regime and sent tens of thousands of refugees across Austria’s Eastern borders. Even though the United States did not intervene, their glorified status as guarantor of Europe’s freedom formed an important backdrop for Austria’s aid to Hungarian refugees in this conflict, a daring stance given that Austria itself had only recently regained full sovereignty in the State Treaty of 1955.24 On another level, by symbolically depicting the United States as a new Heimat the Liebeneiner films greatly facilitated Germans and Austrians’ acceptance of their rapidly ‘Americanizing’ postwar societies. In the mid and late 1950s, Germans and Austrians found in Liebeneiner’s films a comforting alignment of German cultural tropes with US-style consumer culture that emerged as a result of Western Europe’s Marshall Plan-funded economic takeoff. Ruth Starkman reads Die Trapp Familie and Die Trapp Familie in Amerika as vehicles for the exhibition of postwar prosperity, arguing that the depiction of the family’s upscale lifestyle “appears for the most part an opportunity for post-war consumers to identify with the wealthy” and fuse Americanization with German and Austrian national identity.25 Interestingly, the display of a similar upscale lifestyle in the Hollywood production of 1965 would have quite the opposite effect. Hollywood’s rendering of the Trapp family’s way of life in its Salzburg villa appeared too out of touch with what might have been possible for the Austrian and German middle and upper-middle classes, making Robert Wise’s The Sound of Music an all-too-blunt reminder of the new consumer society’s “foreign” origins.26 As this initial discussion of the Liebeneiner films shows, the reception of the various cinematic versions of The Sound of Music cannot simply be explained as a result of national audiences’ predilection for a specific “national” cinematic genre. Germans and Austrians did not simply prefer Liebeneiner’s version because it came in the format of the beloved Heimatfilm. Rather, their positive reaction was to a large extent based on the way these films renegotiated postwar German and Austrian identities vis-à-vis the US cultural juggernaut. And, importantly, in this renegotiation national identifiers become mobilized as well, since “neither of the two terms—German and American—can retain its apparent stability in this encounter.”27 A similar mobilization of categories can be observed when it comes to the reception of The Sound of Music, especially in the context of Austria and Austrian national identity narratives. For Robert von Dassanowsky, much of the Austrian reticence toward The Sound of Music can be explained by the film’s overall positive representation of Austria’s authoritarian period from 1934 to 1938. Dassanowsky questions the widespread reading of the film as depicting how an inno-

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cent pre-Anschluss Austria is conquered by an evil National Socialist Germany. After all, the National Socialist characters in the film are actually Austrian and form an inconvenient reminder of the Nazis as a homegrown political element. Postwar Austrian audiences also might have been turned off by the problematic conflation of “good” anti-Nazi attitudes with pro-authoritarian tendencies in some characters. For instance, Baron von Trapp’s staunch defense of his Austrian homeland against the German Nazis implicitly rehabilitates the Austrian interwar, anti-democratic Ständestaat government. The romance between Baron von Trapp, a World War I military hero and loyalist of pre-Anschluss Austria, and Maria, an escaped Catholic nun, amounts to “an allegory for the Austrian Ständestaat [and] casts an approving light on the era’s general atmosphere.”28 By avoiding The Sound of Music, postwar Austrian audiences might have ducked a more nuanced discussion of the anti-democratic but pro-Austrian legacy of the Ständestaat and the role of its supporters, quite a few of whom paid for their work against the Anschluss with political persecution, prison, or deportation to concentration camps. Some of the survivors then “help[ed] build a postwar Austria”29 and came to personify the continuities between pre- and post-1945 Austria, for better or worse.30 On the other side of the Atlantic, The Sound of Music’s version of the Trapp family’s story serves as a veritable cultural map for tracing the political reorientation and socio-economic reconfiguration of the United States in the 1950s and 1960s. Raymond Knapp, for instance, sees the film’s spurious treatment of Austrian history as evidence that “it is American history that is at stake, not Austrian.”31 In Knapp’s view, Austria plays a role only insofar as the US national narrative needs to rescue at least one part of European history and culture from total condemnation in order to salvage its self-image as a European society at a time when the country grows into its role as global superpower: The Sound of Music . . . recreates an essentialized, specifically national slice of central Europe as a remnant of our spiritual past with a similar connection to nature, a slice of Europe ostensibly unimplicated in the perverse strand of nationalist fervor that so nearly destroyed Europe. . . . Salzburg thus comes to stand for what Americans might continue to see as the essentially good heart of Europe.32

Released during the social and cultural upheavals sparked by the Vietnam War, The Sound of Music presents an ahistorical and “denazified” Austria as a comforting projection of its national self-image. As Jacqueline Vansant points out, The Sound of Music’s retroactive glorification of the American “Golden Age” of the 1950s for a 1960s American audience makes it possible to view the Hollywood production as an American Heimatfilm.33 These analyses significantly improve our understanding of how the mobilized narratives of the Trapp family produced an international “mediascape” for negotiating the meaning of Austrian-ness in relation to American-ness.34 But to what

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extent does a focus on interwar Austria, on the one hand, and on the United States of the 1950s, on the other hand, explain the ongoing popularity of The Sound of Music in the twenty-first century and especially among young travelers? William Donahue cautions against assuming US undergraduate students, for instance, have the necessary historical knowledge and awareness to read the Hollywood film through the ideological lenses described above. That would “require a certain prior fund of background information, which we simply cannot assume they possess.”35 Arguably, the same applies to Austrian students’ levels of knowledge about specific periods of US postwar history. The Sound of Music’s global popularity with audiences in Australia, Indonesia, and India further undermines any claim that the film’s historical references are the main reason for its continuing attractiveness. For some scholars, the film’s affective portrayal of comforting psychological and social conditions, especially of familial happiness, best explains The Sound of Music’s ongoing global pull. Drawing on Raymond Williams’s concept of “structures of feeling,” which provides insights into how “an experience which is really very wide suddenly finds a semantic figure which articulates it,”36 Martin Gorsky analyzes The Sound of Music’s impact mainly through affect. For Gorsky, the “extraordinary reception of the film lies in those scenes, which bring emotional weight to the themes of child-rearing, discipline, and play, and the relationship between psychological health and the good society.”37 The film’s representation of how Maria transforms the Trapp family’s structure from patriarchal militarism into a traditionally feminized model of nurturing parenting amounts to an allegorical rejection of anti-democratic government systems in favor of collaborative social organization.38 Despite the patriarchal undercurrents of the child-rearing discourses referenced by the film,39 The Sound of Music has become a touchstone for emancipatory and feminist discourses. Gorsky concedes that Julie Andrews’ character Maria eventually is shown as accepting the role of wife and mother, but in order to get there she has to make a series of autonomous decisions and find “love on her own terms.”40 In a testament to the film’s “polysemic” quality, this last point generates viewer identification among heterosexual and queer audiences alike.41 As Stacey Wolf points out, The Sound of Music’s emphasis on a woman’s supposedly normal and normative place in the house(hold) is “shaky, gapridden, and ultimately unconvincing.”42 Wolf views the film as a “lesbian musical fantasy” that has by now functioned as significant text-of-reference for the coming-out processes of several generations of lesbian women.43 As these various examples show, the transatlantic and global travels of the Trapp family’s story have morphed into a convoluted amalgamation of discourses that significantly complicates the question what Sound of Music tourism might mean for contemporary Austrian identity processes. It is fair to assume that most foreign tourists have at least some general awareness that the tours they attend

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and the sites they visit are connected to Austria’s World War II history. But, as multiple research projects have shown, tourists’ predominant reasons for (re)visiting the film sites are, first, reconnecting with family, and, second, recreating the emotions experienced when watching the film for the first time.44 To what extent these two motivators shape tourist practices, Austrian tour companies’ itineraries, tour guides’ stories, as well as exhibits about and performances of the musical in Salzburg, will be the focus of the following sections.

Tracking Maria: (Self )Ethnographic Forays into Sound of Music Tours in Salzburg Organized Sound of Music tours have been a mainstay of Salzburg tourism for over five decades. Salzburg Panorama Tours, by many measures the dominant company among Salzburg’s travel agencies, promotes “The Original Sound of Music Tour” as the premium event among its packages.45 Salzburg Sightseeing Tours offers “The Most Unique Sound of Music Tour” and the “Follow Maria’s Footsteps Tour.”46 A third company calls its tour simply “The Sound of Music Tour.”47 In a 2008 survey of Sound of Music tour participants, approximately 10 percent of respondents listed seeing The Sound of Music film locations as main reason for their visit to Salzburg. Of all respondents, 41 percent listed the film locations first when asked to rank a series of attractions they were planning to visit while in Salzburg. For more than 42 percent of the respondents, The Sound of Music was the “most influential information source,” with guidebooks (18 percent) and travel agencies (17 percent) trailing by significant margins.48 As an almost prototypical manifestation of film tourism, these Sound of Music tours have attracted millions of visitors over the decades. By definition, film tourism attracts visitors who are often not interested in a place’s or culture’s “reality” as the locals see it but in the “features as seen in the film which allows them to connect to the film, its storyline and characters.”49 In this context, Salzburg and its surroundings can be compared to virtual destinations such as “Brontë Country,” Harry Potter’s Britain, or to the Lord of the Rings landscapes in New Zealand.50 Similar to theme-park tourism, film tourism has initially been viewed as the epitome of consumer-oriented mass tourism. However, more recent critical tourism research has highlighted how tourists participating in these tours are not simply passive consumers but also creators of an “existential authenticity.”51 What elements of Salzburg’s place image does this “existential authenticity” include? How does it relate to Austrian history and national identity? What do tourists and tour guides actually do on these tours? These questions prompted me to conduct repeated participant-observation research in the years from 2003 to 2015. I attended guided tours, observed the actions of tourists and guides, and interviewed tourists, tour guides, and tour operators. Additionally, I vis-

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ited Sound of Music-themed sites, museum exhibits, and attended performances of the German-language version of the musical at the Salzburg Landestheater. My training as a historian and cultural studies scholar in German and Austrian studies influences to a large extent the theoretical and methodological perspectives I employ. Additionally, the term “(self )ethnographic” in the subheading for this section reflects my shifting role on the continuum between local and tourist. On one level, I approach Sound of Music tourism from that professional “distance” that James Clifford has described as the (not always unproblematic) cornerstone of traditional field work.52 On another level, the places, landscapes, and narratives I am analyzing also constitute a version of home for this Austrian native and temporary inhabitant of Salzburg in the 1990s. Part of the challenge of observing, describing, and analyzing cultural patterns in a familiar setting is the temptation to look for comforting signs of stasis and immobility and reinscribe home as the opposite of an ethnographic practice of “going out in search of difference.”53 Given that my analysis centers on how a set of traveling cultural narratives has sparked complex tourist practices, which in turn interact with shifting discourses of national identity, the danger of focusing too much on immobilized notions of home seems minimal. Nonetheless, just as my discussions of the performative constructions of spaces and places in previous chapters have drawn on the insights of feminist theorists, my analysis of Sound of Music tourism, too, will intentionally mobilize home as a dynamic and often uncomfortable site in its own terms.54 As Amanda Coffey writes, an acknowledgement of the positionality of the researcher and writer and, in this case, of his personal involvement in the construction of what is called “the field” is crucial.55 Thus, in addition to exploring the attitudes and practices of foreign and domestic tourists, I will critically evaluate my personal reactions to and interactions with The Sound of Music phenomenon. *** As an example of film tourism, Sound of Music tourism is prime terrain for negotiating the tension between fiction and reality. For many Austrians, the Sound of Music tours have nothing to do with Austria’s and Salzburg’s reality. Foreign tourists, on the other hand, see in the tours’ virtuality the ultimate affirmation of the reality they expected to see on their visit. When a Brazilian visitor, upon looking down on the city of Salzburg from a spot featured in the Hollywood film, exclaims “This is so unreal!,” her use of the term “unreal” expresses the opposite of what Austrians mean by it and illustrates the construction of what Wang calls “existential authenticity.”56 The experience of “existential authenticity” in the context of film tourism is aided by the following three conditions: the travel must lead to an “authentic place;” the itinerary must allow for “embodied presence in that place;” the trip has to provide a “socially authentic experience” in the sense that fellow travelers and tour guides act in ways consistent with the destination’s

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value as evinced by the respective filmic text.57 The first two criteria also address the notion of place, which proves to be a crucial bridge for my later discussion of Sound of Music tourism’s link to Austrian national identity. I will therefore start with the last condition, “socially authentic experience,” and leave the other two for later. In numerous conversations about the film, tourists from the United States, the United Kingdom, India, and New Zealand, among others, turn the tours into a “socially authentic experience” by pointing out the film’s role as a childhood and family rite of passage. Although tourists do not directly address the above-mentioned discourses of parenting and motherhood, they talk about how watching the film in the company of family and friends has been instrumental in forging and thereafter renewing intimate and long-lasting social bonds. The nostalgic reenactment of these crucial biographical moments is often connected with several sing-along moments on the bus or in front of iconic film locations. Tour guides encourage this kind of reminiscing and mockingly scold the rare passenger who admits that she has never seen the film. As I experienced multiple times, any awkwardness about singing along (and out loud) quickly evaporates as part of the social fellowship generated by the common interest in The Sound of Music. Confessional conversations between tourists during the two- to threehour tours frequently enhance the construction of “social authenticity.” During one tour in the summer of 2013, the male partner of an American couple in their early thirties had participated in the sing-alongs on the bus with such enthusiasm that his strained vocal cords finally refused to function any longer. In a raspy voice he shared with the tourists sitting next to him how this tour brought back memories of him starring as Rolf in several high school performances of The Sound of Music. Pointing apologetically to his partner, he explained: “It was I who dragged her along on that bus ride. She really was not that much interested in The Sound of Music, but I finally wanted to see the real places of the musical and the film.” To have the male partner participate in this confessional and nostalgic conversation is not entirely representative of the gendered reactions I observed. Frequently, it was young women and their mothers who shared pleasant memories on the tour, sometimes turning the tourist outing itself into a moment of transition from childhood into early adulthood. In these conversations, the film’s main character, Maria, is touted as role model for overcoming obstacles, even though her path from novice nun to hired housekeeper to loyal wife embodies a complex agglomeration of gendered roles. On the one hand, Maria’s role foregrounds core values such as family, decency, and love with a bourgeois and patriarchal slant. On the other hand, Maria’s depiction of a misfit for the convent and her standing up to the Baron’s militaristic parenting style invite interpretations of her role as emancipatory and liberating that not even the bourgeois fantasy of heterosexual marriage at the film’s end can subvert entirely.

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In some instances, both readings overlap, transforming the Sound of Music bus tours into highly charged sites of negotiating complex identity and power positions. For a businesswoman from Sri Lanka, who attended a Sound of Music tour with her extended family, the discourses around empowerment and a certain ethics of kindness allegedly messaged by the film prompted her to share her daughter’s experience of racism at a Salzburg restaurant earlier in the day. Rather than connect the waitress’ racist comment about her daughter with the general xenophobic climate in Austria at that time, the Sri Lankan tourist’s outrage focused on how this incident diminished the daughter’s rite of passage on the Sound of Music tour: “It is such a wonderful film. My kids love it, they wanted to experience it in reality, but now they are sad that someone yelled at them. Their experience has been destroyed.” This episode illustrates the extent to which the Sound of Music tours also serve as site for negotiating power relations. Linda McDowell points out that “[p]laces are made through power relations which construct the rules which define boundaries. These boundaries are both social and spatial—they define who belongs to a place and who may be excluded, as well as the location or site of the experience.”58 While the daughter’s experience of racism is not mitigated by the fact that her mother can share the story with the tourist group, the conversation on the bus exemplifies how the Sound of Music tours complicate the notion of neatly delineated boundaries and spaces of belonging. Excluded from one spatial configuration of Austrian-ness by the racist waitress, the Sri Lankan woman and her family find community among (mostly foreign) tourists on a tour bus operated by an Austrian company, visiting a series of “typical” Austrian sites, and, in doing so, creating yet another version of an Austrian national space. These performative constructions co-exist and produce the very tensions within which the ever shifting and contradictory narratives of national identity unfold in relation to other identity discourses. The multivalent Sound of Music narratives do not just affect foreign tourists but also domestic actors in the discourse of tourism. Conversations with two female Sound of Music tour operators provide insights into how the tours’ emancipatory messages impact their identity constructions. E.T., who owns a small transportation company that also offers customized Sound of Music tours,59 is proud of the company that she has built over the course of more than twenty years. Yet, she strikes a tone of resignation about the male-dominated business world of tourism in general and of Sound of Music in particular. E. T. sees herself as less aggressive than men in this business environment, and therefore also as less successful. E. T. prides herself on an alternative, “softer” approach to the tourism business. Instead of trying to get the most out of tourists, and to compete mercilessly with other companies, E. T. claims that her guides turn the customer into a participant by polling them about their interests before the start of the tour. Consequently, some of the Sound of Music tours also turn into excursions on

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alpine botany, relegating the actual Sound of Music narrative to the background. Wondering aloud whether she really is a businesswoman, she concludes: “Maybe not. [pause] Certainly not” (Vielleicht nicht. [pause] Sicher nicht). Another tour operator, B. L., a Scottish immigrant married to a Salzburg local, organizes Sound of Music tours by bicycle as an alternative to the conventional Sound of Music bus tours. Like E. T., B. L. describes how she had to overcome significant bureaucratic obstacles in order to register her company. Even after that she had to endure public verbal attacks by senior tour guides who see her business as infringing on their turfs.60 Much of what the two female tour operators describe resonates with a feminist critique of how a patriarchal society regulates access to place and community. Both women use the discourse of tourism to gain access to the business community of Salzburg and to criticize the larger patriarchal framework of Austrian society within the constraints of their personal and professional circumstances. The Sound of Music film’s emancipatory subtext provides a noticeable template for some of their discursive and non-discursive actions, especially for the bicycle tour operator B. L. Quite intentionally, as she concedes, she appears for one of our interviews wearing an Austrian Dirndl, the regional traditional costume often featured in Sound of Music brochures and available for rent on some of the bus tours.61 Somewhat jokingly, B. L. mentions her three young children and compares herself to the character Maria in The Sound of Music, whom she describes as a person who also had to find her own way in a world dominated by discourses of church, state, and social authorities. The performances of the two female tour organizers complicate the more traditional femininity foregrounded by the deployment of the Maria character in the context of the larger bus tours.62 An emphasis on less aggressive marketing practices and alternative modes of transportation—bicycles—points toward a more progressive and socially responsible construction of place, while their intentional self-positioning as female entrepreneurs indicates a feminist stance that draws on the more assertive aspects of the Maria character. However, as Caren Kaplan points out, it would be too facile to consider the fact of a “woman” being able to access a “place” as progressive in and of itself. A critical geography of the personal requires a concept of identity as contingent on multiple and dynamic categories.63 Quoting James Clifford’s definition of location, Kaplan suggests thinking of the connection between identity and place as dynamic, as “a series of locations and encounters, [as] travel within diverse, but limited spaces.”64 While the tour operators E. T. and B. L. function as examples for a performative construction of identity, insofar as they model access to a space usually governed by patriarchal discourses, they also become gatekeepers of Salzburg when the conversation shifts to national identity. For instance, when tour operator E. T. addresses what she thinks about tourists’ questions regarding Austria’s responsibility for the Holocaust,65 she clearly switches from an accommodating to a defensive stance: “I usually tell the Americans: ‘Look who’s talking! You’ve dropped nuclear

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bombs; you’ve been to Vietnam, that’s a kind of Holocaust [sic] too. Do you pay reparations? We’ve paid our dues!’ Then they usually shut up.”66 As this quote indicates, E. T.’s position within tourism’s matrix of power oscillates significantly. Marginalized for being a female business owner with limited access to the place defined as Austria, she simultaneously controls access by evaluating and categorizing tour participants into belongers and non-belongers. E. T. reconstructs and validates discursive boundaries around a particular version of Austrian national identity via a comparison with the history of the United States. E. T.’s vehement refutation of tourists’ implicit insinuation that Austrians could have resisted National Socialism, or, at least followed the Trapp family’s model of emigration, reflects the affirmation of a national identity narrative through a discourse of “cultural intimacy,” which is “above all a familiarity with perceived social flaws.”67 Although she knows that Austrians’ collective and individual roles during the National Socialist period were anything but positive, E. T. nonetheless defends “her” country by turning this negative aspect into a communal bond. This process of embracing and renegotiating negative historical truths as intimate elements of a cultural and national identity became especially prevalent in Austria during the early years of the new millennium. Parliamentary elections in 1999 produced a right-leaning government coalition in early 2000 between the Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP) and the right-wing Freedom Party (FPÖ). The latter’s chairman, Jörg Haider, had gained international notoriety for his open admiration of Adolf Hitler’s policies, his anti-Semitic utterances, and his racist views on migration.68 The fourteen other member states of the European Union responded with a series of sanctions intended to isolate Austria on the international stage. From the center-right and culturally conservative, domestic Austrian perspective, this appeared to be a hypocritical reaction and a misreading of the actual domestic political situation.69 The sense of being misunderstood intensified when international media turned tourism in general, and Sound of Music tourism in particular, into the discursive battleground about Austrian history, memory, and, national identity. A political cartoon published by the British newspaper The Independent in early 2000 shows Jörg Haider in folkloric dress, playing guitar and singing: “Goose steps on pavements / And whiskers on Hitler / Shiny bright jackboots / And warm Wienerschnitzel / Brownshirts en masse / All singing The Ring / These are a few of my favorite things.”70 For international audiences, the cartoon offered a version of the critique of tourism as artificial surface that camouflages a problematic reality. By transforming Maria into Jörg Haider and a somewhat silly song about childhood rituals into a sinister allusion to (Neo)Nazi violence, the cartoon uses the idyllic Sound of Music version of Austria that originated in the 1960s as highly condensed, discursive terrain for drawing attention to the political developments at the turn of the twenty-first century.

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Figure 8.2. Right-wing politician Jörg Haider performs a tune adapted from The Sound of Music. Cartoon by Peter Schrank. Reprinted with permission.

From an Austrian perspective, the cartoon can be viewed as evidence for an alleged misapprehension of the Austrian situation by people who lack the “cultural intimacy” that delineates the boundary between belonging and non-belonging— in other words, by foreigners. The author of “The Sounds of Humbug,” a chapter in the first German-language volume on the impact of The Sound of Music culture, discusses the cartoon as example for US intellectuals’ alleged infatuation with a simplified Sound of Music image of Austria that prevents them from understanding the country’s complex historical and political developments.71 Specifically, the author compares US criticism of the right-wing turn in Austrian politics with lawsuits brought before US courts against Austrian museums over the restitution of “Aryanized” works of art and against Austrian companies over delayed compensation for forced laborers in the National Socialist regime. Even a cursory look at how US historians and political scientists debated the EU sanctions against Austria reveals the Austrian author’s claims about US intellectuals as uninformed.72 Using this spurious evidence to reframe the lawsuits over stolen artwork and compensation for forced laborers as driven by foreigners’ ignorance about Austria’s complex history is not only a problematic parallel, but also illustrates the author’s inability or unwillingness to consider The Sound of Music as a narrative that mobilizes history and identity. Instead, the author engages in the very act for which he blames “foreign” critics: rather than reading The Sound of

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Music as discursive terrain through which one can explore contradictory identity narratives, he argues that there is a “true” and complicated reality that one can only understand by removing the layer of tourism. As these examples show, Sound of Music tourism’s status as a globalized and highly mobile intercultural narrative does not translate automatically into progressive identity positions. On the contrary, in connection with the process of identity formation through “cultural intimacy,” the Sound of Music narrative can also become a carrier for xenophobic and racist views. Tour bus operator E. T., for instance, maintains that her competitors in the tourism business steer the “undesirable” (unerwünschten) tourists from India, Indonesia, and other Asian countries to her tours. Although she claims not to mind—“as long as they pay, they are welcome” (so lange sie bezahlen, sind sie willkommen)—she immediately delves into stereotyping “the Indian’s” problematic attitude and “his” deficient understanding of Western cultural narratives. Similarly, Scottish immigrant and Sound of Music bicycle-tour operator B. L. admits her preference for an Austrian identity narrative that considers the core of the nation to be white and Western. She is worried that Austria will encounter a situation not unlike the one she left behind in her former home country, the UK: It was the same thing in England. Now England has become very cosmopolitan, there are so many cultures. But it doesn’t really work, the crime rate is too high. There are certain cultures that just can’t live together. The crime rate in Austria is so low, and they are against foreigners—maybe there is a connection? When you read it in the [Austrian] newspapers that the crime rate went up—mostly its Serbians and other people who commit these crimes.

As her innovative and popular bike tours demonstrate, L. clearly appreciates the performative character of Sound of Music tourism. But rather than see it as indication of a more fluid and accessible notion of national identity, she uses The Sound of Music narrative to re-imagine Austria as her new homeland in the form of a reactionary social utopia, free of “undesirables,” and, therefore, supposedly free of social problems. The personal geographies of these two interviewees illustrate that national identity is closely connected to place, but that the meaning of place cannot be determined through a singular perspective or experience. Both women feel enabled to claim a sense of belonging to the place of Austria by way of casting themselves as insiders in opposition to alleged outsiders. Their perspectives demonstrate that the allegedly global nature of The Sound of Music does not per se subvert an exclusionary understanding of national boundaries. The examples I have discussed here illustrate the complex ways in which Sound of Music tours facilitate “socially authentic” experiences. But they also already point to the other two elements that undergird “existential authenticity”: a desire

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for “authentic places” and for an “embodied experience.”73 Tourists would like to see the “real” places where the film was made, while local Austrians try to show the real Austria that lies behind the screen. Both of these aims intersect at the “embodied” experiences that the tour operators design for their guests and which the tourists themselves either amplify or transform through their performative actions. In the following section I will take a closer look at the ways in which notions of authenticity, reality, and place interact to produce various meanings of Austrian-ness.

Austrian-ness: A “Reality” Produced by Desire and Crisis Even as the film-related tourism business took off during the 1990s, local Austrians continued to exhibit a mixture of bemusement and dismissiveness toward it. Sound of Music tourism was, for many, a manifestation of foreign kitsch, made by the United States’ popular culture industry and intended for US tourists. Austrian journalists repeatedly show themselves bewildered by the fact that “[t]he majority of tourists [to Salzburg] do not come because of Mozart, but because of . . . the clichés shown in [a] film,” which, it seems, “has nothing to do with reality.”74 When I tried to get tickets for the Sound of Music Dinner Show, the ticket agent awkwardly tried to talk me out of watching the show. It made no sense to him that an Austrian would want to attend a performance aimed at US visitors. When I proceeded to buy the tickets, he pleaded with me not to read too much into the performance, since “The Sound of Music does not have anything to do with the real Austria” (hat nicht viel zu tun mit dem wirklichen Österreich). In their preface to the first and, until now, only comprehensive scholarly analysis of The Sound of Music from an Austrian perspective, the editors voiced concerns about the topic’s relevance for Austrian academics: “Initially many ridiculed the idea to make The Sound of Music a topic for ethnographers. Perhaps it’s a topic for cinephiles, for marketing researchers, for tourism agents, for tabloids—but for us?”75 The personal pronoun uns (us) in this quote ostensibly refers to the author collective of ethnographers. However, insofar as it addresses the alleged separation between high culture and kitsch, it also reveals the implicit assumption that Austrian Kulturwissenschaften should not stoop to the level of tabloid topics. This comment inadvertently confirms Bhabha’s observation that national identity narratives prefer to reference “national objects of knowledge” rather than the fleeting “temporality of culture.”76 Of course, what matters is who referees these two categories. The anthology’s individual chapter titles, such as “How Julie Andrews pushed aside Mozart” (Wie Julie Andrews Mozart verdrängte), underline this perspective.77 Evidence for the longevity of such a high- versus low-culture split can also be found in the 2015 headline of a national Austrian newspaper’s online edition: “First the Trapps, then Mozart” (Erst die Trapps, dann Mozart).78

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Such comments notwithstanding, locals participate just like tourists in the construction of an “authentic” Austrian-ness through The Sound of Music. Their envisioned results might differ, but both groups exhibit a desire to see and experience “authentic places” and create “embodied presence[s].”79 For tourists, the Sound of Music tours are first and foremost an opportunity to see the places featured in the film. Slight deviations notwithstanding, the Sound of Music bus tours all follow a similar route. After starting out in the heart of the city, near Mirabell Palace, the tours cross the Salzach River toward the Southern end of the Old Town district. On their route, the buses pass underneath the rocky outcroppings of the Mönchsberg, where Nonnberg Abbey is located, the monastery where Maria spent time as novice. After about a ten-minute ride, the tours arrive at Leopoldskron Palace, whose garden side was used as the backside of the Trapp villa in The Sound of Music. The tours usually allow for a fifteen-minute photo opportunity there and visitors have a chance to walk along the shores of the small pond, featured in the film’s famous boat scene. The tour groups then continue to Hellbrunn Palace to visit the gazebo, the small glass pavilion in which Liesl secretly meets Rolf and dances to “Sixteen Going on Seventeen.” Following another photo stop there, the buses subsequently leave the city of Salzburg for an approximately hour-long drive into the Western parts of the Salzkammergut, the Austrian lake district, with stops along the Wolfgangsee, where some of the opening aerial shots of The Sound of Music were filmed, and the Mondsee, where tourists visit the eponymous town that is home to the church used in the film’s wedding scene. Tour participants have an opportunity to buy lunch and souvenirs before the buses return to the city of Salzburg.80 For tourists, the desired “embodied experience” is the result of switching between the buses as cinemas on wheels and the physical landscape. On the bus, the sing-along moments to clips from the Hollywood movie support and amplify a re-enactment of that quasi-mythical first experience of watching the film. Tour participants simultaneously watch the clips while also acting in their own version of the film. The diegetic sound of the sing-along acts merges with the panoramic perspective from the bus, producing a multimedia experience that exceeds conventional cinema. When the buses move through hairpin curves and frequently alternate between acceleration and deceleration, the high definition images of the landscape outside the bus integrate with the kinetic impressions on the body. The result is an IMAX-like experience that tour guides repeatedly draw attention to.81 For instance, when the lumbering coaches climb the pass leading into the valley of the Wolfgangsee, the guides alert participants to mentally cue the aerial shots from the movie’s opening scenes: “Imagine sitting in that helicopter as it swoops over the mountain range with the lake spreading out underneath.” Quite sophisticated timing by drivers and guides often lets the actual lake come into view at precisely the moment when tourists try to follow this mental exercise, resulting in a dramatically enhanced reality effect. If the schedule permits, some buses stop

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Figure 8.3. Sound of Music tourists at a stop above the Wolfgangsee, taking in a view that imitates the aerial shots at the beginning of The Sound of Music. Photo by author.

at a bend right above the lake so that participants can take pictures of the scenery. The step through the bus door becomes a step through the screen into the landscape, transforming the latter from cinematic image into reality. By describing these processes of authentication on the tourists’ side I do not mean to suggest that the tour participants confuse fiction and reality. As sophisticated media consumers tourists know about, and even expect, creative interferences between cinematic representations and physical reality. Indeed, part of the thrill of visiting the shooting locations is the ability to compare and evaluate the differences and similarities between a place’s representation on film and its appearance during an actual visit, something that can be observed well at the gazebo.82 The small glass pavilion situated in a hidden corner of Hellbrunn Palace has only been used for a few exterior shots in the film. The actual dancing and singing scenes in which Liesl and Rolf perform “Sixteen Going on Seventeen” were shot in Hollywood. A plaque on Hellbrunn garden’s wall right behind the gazebo points out the pavilion’s status as a replica. But that does not undermine the production of an “embodied authenticity.”83 For tourists, the gazebo is still a major highlight of their visit and they film themselves singing and dancing in front of what some might consider an empty sign. The fact that tourists still flock there, seems, at first, to prove that tourists do exactly what critics of tourism have

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bemoaned for decades, namely chase after commodified and empty signs that make them miss the real thing. Yet, as Chris Rojek points out, signs are part of the social discourse and can therefore become part of the reality effect as tourists “readily treat these social formations as part of the sight-seeing experience.”84 An admixture of tourist marketing images, advertising, and movie images forms “[a] reserve of sights in the mind of the tourist [and] precedes the physical exploration of the sight.” This “reserve” produces an “index of representations,” a kind of database from which “images, symbols and associations are drawn . . . to create new values for the sight.”85 The process of “dragging,” for instance, allows for a visit to the gazebo to acquire the aura of authenticity, not despite but because of the object’s status as replica. What matters, and what creates the notion of reality, is tourists’ sophisticated awareness of the various layers of global media discourses and their skilled use of inserting themselves into a performative reenactment. Sound of Music tourists enact the process of “indexing and dragging” also via digital media. Where Rojek described more or less a one-way process, leading from media-shaped imaginary indexes to the tourist’s creation of a place image, the smartphone and a growing array of social media platforms have produced an infinite feedback loop from Hollywood film to private experience and back into cyberspace, where it then inspires the performative behavior of yet more tourists.86 Rather than only dragging images authorized by a powerful media institution into one’s private life, the new digital environment enables tourists to also drag and index images of their private selves into a global virtual database of images, categorized under the label “authentic.”87 A video produced by a Dutch family also shows how this complex process of dragging once again taps into and underscores The Sound of Music’s above-described relevance as template for childrearing and familial bliss.88 The authenticity performed in these videos does not hide the mass-tourist context in which they were produced. On the contrary, the video makers usually embrace the ironic posture of the mass tourist.89 One can bemoan the inaccuracies and confusions about history and geography in videos like these, but what Rojek observed before the explosion of web-based social media communities rings even truer today: [P]rocesses of indexing and dragging are now chronic in media culture so that distorted and fabricated readings of sights are now corollaries of normal tourist experience. The fictional is undoubtedly inherent in the presentation and cultural meaning of sights. However, it does not follow from this that reality can no longer be revealed or that all forms of fiction are of equivalent value.90

It is the play between fiction and reality that also makes the Austrian tour operators participate in these processes of dragging and indexing. The bus tours, as I described above, show film clips before they let tourists step outside and experience a three-dimensional version of the two-dimensional film images. The Sound of Music bike tours need to rely more on participants’ personal recollection of the

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film. Given that tourists might not remember the very scenes needed to draw connections between the film and the specific architectural environment of Salzburg’s old town, the tour operators came up with an effective remedy: each rental bike comes equipped with a laminated booklet that features the relevant still images from the film. A numbering system corresponds with the stops along the bike tour. At the various stops tour guides can call out the respective numbers, thereby enabling tourists to recall particular scenes and give them advice on how to best deploy a cinematically informed “tourist gaze” at a particular location. While both locals and tourists participate in the act of creating reality effects through processes of “indexing and dragging,” their motivations differ. Tourists, as shown above, create their Sound of Music Austria mainly through a discourse of desire; Austrians operate more within a discourse of crisis. From an Austrian perspective, Sound of Music tourists seem so immersed in the filmic narrative that they might easily miss an experience of the “real” Austria. In light of an Australian tour participant’s comparison of Salzburg’s old town to Knottyville, Australia’s equivalent of Disneyland, one can almost feel sympathy for a local journalist’s desperate question, “What does the visitor really want?” (Was will der Besucher wirklich?)91 The media narratives of The Sound of Music merge with the described multimedia processes to form a “mediascape”92 that absorbs, reworks,

Figure 8.4. Aligning physical and virtual places by “indexing and dragging” on Fräulein Maria’s Bicycle Tour. Photo by author.

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Figure 8.5. Participants of Fräulein Maria’s Bicycle Tour at a stop near Leopoldskron. The laminated booklet with film stills can be seen mounted on the bike’s steering handle in the foreground. Photo by author.

and then redistributes on a global level images and narratives about Austrian culture and history, which can no longer be controlled by conventional and mainstream visions of Austrian national identity. Rather than indexing stable place images, place names such as Austria and Salzburg have come to symbolize the mobilization of identity categories. Attempts to “correct” such mobilizations via references to “real” history result in confusion and only heighten a sense of crisis, as the following transcription of a tour guide’s comment on one of the Sound of Music bus tours highlights: So it’s 1938, Hitler wanted the Baron to join the Navy again, but he refused and had to leave. But he did not go to Switzerland. By crossing Mount Untersberg, the Trapp family would have landed in Berchtesgaden, close to Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest. On your right, you see the fortress [Hohensalzburg] again. It’s about 500 years old. The first settlers in Salzburg are recorded in 4000 BCE, salt mining was a lucrative business. Fifty BCE, the Romans came here. St. Rupert founded St. Peter’s [monastery], and four years later also the Nonnberg Abbey, which is the wedding church of the Trapp family in reality and in the film. However, the wedding scene was actually filmed in Mondsee. Salzburg was an independent country and had all the power until Napoleon came along in 1800. After some turbulent years, Salzburg became a part of Austria in 1860.

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Reportedly, Robert Wise brushed aside all criticism of The Sound of Music’s redrawing of Austria’s borders with the statement that “in Hollywood we make our own geography.”93 As the tour guide’s narrative suggests, The Sound of Music also sparked the remaking of history: the tour guide’s attempts to “fix” the film’s depiction of Austria become entangled in contradictory references to actual and cinematic spaces as well as to the Salzburg region’s complex historical space-time coordinates. Instead of providing a foundation for any kind of objective “reality,” the guide’s explanations illustrate that places do not exist in and of themselves. Rather, as cultural geographer Doreen Massey argues, places are the product of “intersecting social relations,” some of which are “contained within the place; others will stretch beyond it, tying any particular locality into wider relations and processes in which other places are implicated too.”94 Massey’s conceptualization of places further illustrates the place-making that Sound of Music tourists are engaged in, driven by their desire for recreating their affective responses to the film in a physical environment, which they in turn shape through the processes of “indexing and dragging.” Massey’s observation further elucidates the sense of crisis that came to reframe the longstanding grounding of Austrian national identity narratives in particular place images in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Throughout the postwar period, Austria’s national identity drew on an imagined and supposedly “unique” blend of historical and political importance, reaffirmed by references to high-cultural achievements and institutions, as well as its landscape.95 Things changed in the 1980s, when brewing controversies around Austria’s long-ignored collaboration with National Socialism burst into the open, amplified by the sudden restructuring of the geopolitical landscape in the aftermath of the Soviet Union’s collapse and the ensuing acceleration of economic and cultural globalization. Austria’s integration into the European Union in 1995 “plunged the self-absorbed Austrians into a deep crisis. Suddenly there was a need to accept new realities and decision-making processes, which led increasingly to frictions as Austria’s special political and economic role from Cold War times was markedly reduced, or disappeared entirely.”96 Quite abruptly, national identity could not be reaffirmed anymore by simply drawing on what Bhabha described as “national objects of knowledge—Tradition, People, the Reason of State, High Culture,”97 and, in the case of Austria, landscape. Those categories had become part of the seemingly unlimited processes of discursive recombination through which meaning is produced in a globalized media environment. Sound of Music tourism provides crucial insights into the ways in which a global(ized) mobilization of people, images, and cultural narratives has come to challenge traditional national identities. At the same time, Sound of Music tourism also exemplifies the resilience and adaptability of national identity discourses, for better or worse. For, as much as the tourists’ reconstruction of Austrian spaces and places based on discourses of desire produced a crisis moment for traditional

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Austrian-ness, this crisis also provided a pivotal moment for readjusting the performative construction of the nation in such a way that the global “mediascape” transformed from a perceived force of destabilization into a source of restabilization and even authentication. To consider Sound of Music tourism as a re-authenticating discourse for Austrian national identity does not contradict earlier references to tourists and locals who considered the film unreal or inauthentic. On the contrary, this perception of Sound of Music tourism as representing “hyperreality”—as “Europe’s answer to Disneyland” (Europas Antwort auf Disneyland)98—also opened a space for reinforcing Austrian national identity in the twenty-first century.99 While a more mainstream use of hyperreality understands the term as synonymous with inauthenticity, Jean Baudrillard actually deploys it to analyze the upended relationship between reality and its visual depiction. In premodern times, he argues, images have largely been understood as “reflection of a profound reality.”100 Such a linear perception between reality and image has largely evaporated in the media landscapes of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. We now perceive and categorize our reality mostly through the prism of already existing images, as an echo of something we have already seen before. For Baudrillard this has significant repercussions on the institutions of government and state power, which rely on their acceptance as “real.” But how can state power be executed if the governed have reason to suspect that “law and order themselves might be nothing but simulation?”101 In response to such suspicions institutionalized power tries to “reinject the real and the referential everywhere, to persuade us of the reality of the social, of the gravity of the economy and the finalities of production [through] . . . the discourse of crisis, but also, why not? that of desire.”102 Although Baudrillard’s thoughts on hyperreality initially focused on its role in manipulating people into acquiescing to neo-liberal politics, his perspective is pertinent for the analysis of tourist phenomena such as Sound of Music tourism. After all, as my discussion so far has shown, a mixture of crisis and desire propels Sound of Music tourists’ attempts to construct their own affective (and protective) reality in rapidly changing times. Tourists reassemble memories of earlier film screenings, communal experiences on the buses, and encounters with physical reality into a powerful, multilayered, and temporary “existential authenticity” modeled on a visual narrative. A similar mixture of crisis and desire informs Austrians’ approach to The Sound of Music. On the one hand, Sound of Music tourism is symptomatic of the fear that foreign tourists, long seen as external validators of Austria’s national self-image, are now distracted by a discourse seemingly unrelated to the “real” Austria; on the other hand, the same tourist practices and structures also provide an opportunity to “re-inject” and re-configure Austria’s “real” national narrative as a kind of hyperreality modeled on the simulated film images. In doing so, tourists once again serve as (sometimes unwitting) external guarantors of the national. Ultimately, tour operators and regional tourism

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marketing officials recognize that the practices of “dragging and indexing” also double as practices of authenticating a re-affirmed Austrian national identity and encourage them wherever possible. Such practices of re-authentication become apparent in the struggle for the label “original” by the various Sound of Music tour operators. One tour company advertises its services by foregrounding its predecessor company’s role in the movie: “Julie Andrews, who played Maria von Trapp, took our bus to drive to the von Trapp mansion!”103 Another company has managed to secure the rights to the phrase “Original Sound of Music Tour” and on its advertising materials juxtaposes photos of the Hollywood actors starring in the 1965 film with actual Trapp family members to establish its credentials (see Figure 8.6 and 8.7 for the dueling claims to originality). On a previous version of its website, the facsimile of a handwritten letter by Maria Trapp attested in English that “The ‘Original Sound of Music Tour’ arranged by Panorama Tours is something nobody should miss. . . . I never do.”104 Addressing the potential tourist/readers directly, the letter states that “you” will not only visit the “places used in the Sound of Music,” but that “you are also taken through the most beautiful part of the land of Salzburg, the ‘Salzkammergut’ with its lakes and mountains, villages with . . . old churches and houses profusely decorated with flowers on their balconies.”105 By enacting the overlapping roles of guide and local authority, Maria Trapp vouches not only for the tours’ authenticity but also re-creates as “real” the Austrian spaces and places visited on the tours. The letter thus reaffirms the role of landscape for Austrian national identity that formed such a crucial link throughout the postwar period and is an example for turning an allegedly “unreal” cinematic discourse into the foundation for reauthenticating Austrian-ness. The authentication of Austria’s landscape plays a crucial role in other Sound of Music events as well. During the 2003 version of the Sound of Music Dinner Show, attendees were first treated to an eight-minute long video about the story of the Trapp family. The video ended with a panoramic shot of the characteristic mountain scenery framing the city of Salzburg, a rather direct reference to the Hollywood movie. This shot then “dissolved” into a naïve mural of a similar landscape, which became visible as soon as the lights in the dining hall were turned back on. As the disappearing pull-up screen gradually gave way to the mural, the latter symbolically reduced Hollywood’s celluloid panorama shots to a more traditional artisan reproduction of a similar landscape. At the same time, this process of reduction doubled as process of enhancement, given that the act of replacing an ephemeral film image with a tangible and auratic mural can also be read as allowing the visitors to leave behind the film and get one step closer to the “real” Austrian landscape. The transition from film to mural evokes the moments when tourists step outside the bus at various stops during the tours. Exiting the bus provides a chance to breathe Austria’s clean mountain air and experience the

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Figure 8.6. Is this the “original” tour bus . . . ? Photo by author.

Figure 8.7. . . . Or is it this one? Photo by author.

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three-dimensional version of the cinematic landscape. In an attempt to capitalize (quite literally) on the visitors’ experiences, tour operators and local entrepreneurs maintain Sound of Music souvenir shops at Mondsee and St. Gilgen, where tourists can acquire a commodified and tangible object of their “authentic” experience. In the souvenir kiosks, the invention and representation of culture transforms into a circular authentication of the nation.106 Visitors buy, consume, and, in doing so, realize versions of Austrian national identity, a practice Austrians in turn use as measure for the popularity of their national image. One of the most interesting examples of re-authentication can be found in the form of the gazebo, the small glass pavilion used in several crucial scenes in The Sound of Music. After years of neglect and an odyssey through various Salzburg public storage facilities, this stage prop eventually wound up in the gardens of Hellbrunn Palace in the Southern suburbs of Salzburg. In proper museographical manner, the small glass pavilion is labeled: a plaque on the palace garden’s wall right behind the gazebo explains in English and German that this object featured prominently in the film The Sound of Music as the garden house where Liesl sings “Sixteen Going on Seventeen.” Functioning like the description next to a piece of art, the plaque seems to turn the gazebo into an extension of the narrative of Austrian-ness told at Hellbrunn Palace. The palace’s early baroque architecture with its unique trick fountains and hydro-mechanical theater mark exemplary objects of the traditional high-cultural discourse of Austrian identity.107 By some accounts, the gazebo ended up in Hellbrunn Park because no other public department or institution was interested in having it.108 This narrative suggests that the gazebo as an artifact in itself was not attractive enough and required framing by a more legitimate example of Austrian-ness. Yet, is it actually the palace that “allows” the gazebo to be displayed within its garden walls, or is it this small wood-and-glass structure that becomes an anchoring point for an Austrian national narrative in crisis? On the one hand, the gazebo presents a tangible opportunity to connect older time-place configurations of Austria’s national narrative with newer and more popular ones. After all, hundreds of Sound of Music tourists stop in front of the gazebo every day to revive and relive important and intimate memories: families pose for pictures; children and adults overcome their inhibitions and break into song; some even try a couple of dancing steps. As several visitors commented to me, their euphoric sentiments resulted from a sense of experiencing utmost authenticity at a place they recognize as profoundly fake. At a time of apparent disorientation, the gazebo becomes the metonymic link between traditional Austrian-ness and the tourists’ performative construction of their respective “existential authenticities.” The connection with the “most famous piece of backdrop in the world” (die berühmteste Filmkulisse der Welt)109—a hyperbolic classification of the gazebo by an Austrian writer that in itself speaks volumes about Austrians’ desire to be recognized internationally—allegedly modernizes, popularizes, and,

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indeed, globalizes Austria’s national image. Through the commemorative plaque on Hellbrunn Palace’s garden wall, the gazebo—an object frequently derided as kitsch—also facilitates the “re-embedding” of Austrian national identity.110 On the other hand, this metonymic connection cannot fully determine the meaning of the pavilion from an Austrian perspective. Rather, by invoking and verbalizing not only family memories but also the memories of war, emigration, and the Holocaust—the (often invisible) undercurrents of the Sound of Music story—tourists also re-inject the problematic discourses into the re-authentication process. In other words, Austrian attempts to define and appropriate the performative enactments of space and history within Sound of Music tourism already incorporate the challenges to the desired, hegemonic Austrian national image. The gazebo, thus, symbolizes the translation process from the peripheral to the central that Homi K. Bhabha identifies as crucial for processes of national identity formation. The gazebo is part of the “scraps, patches, and rags of daily [tourist] life” that “must be repeatedly turned into the signs of a national culture.” The little glass house embodies the “split between the continuist, accumulative temporality of the pedagogical, and the repetitious, recursive strategy of the performative. It is through this process of splitting that the conceptual ambivalence of modern society becomes the site of writing the nation.”111

Figure 8.8. Tourists take pictures in front of the Sound of Music gazebo in Hellbrunn Park. An imitation of the second degree turns into an authenticating device. Photo by author.

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The gazebo’s very location itself illustrates the “conceptual ambivalence” that makes it a suitable site for investigating the discourse of national identity. In a twenty-first century context, the gazebo is likely seen as embodiment of the performative—the globalized Sound of Music narrative—and Hellbrunn Palace as the “pedagogical,” a historical example of baroque architecture that underscores traditional Austrian national identity. Yet, as Eric Hobsbawm states, traditions are invented, and what is considered part of the official “pedagogical” version of Austrian-ness at the turn of the twentieth century might well have been looked at askance as a “performative” and intrusive element in the process of identity formation at an earlier moment.112 The gazebo draws attention to this dynamic qua its multiple layers of simulation. The little glass structure in Hellbrunn Park has only been used for several exterior shots for the 1965 Hollywood production, while the by now legendary dancing scene between Rolf and Liesl was filmed in the California studios of Twentieth Century Fox.113 If the gazebo’s appearance in The Sound of Music film as cinematic stage and backdrop constitutes the first degree of filmic simulation, the downsized copy in Hellbrunn counts as simulation to the second degree, as a copy of the simulation. On one level, this only underscores to what extent the “reinjection” (Baudrillard) of the “real” into the discourse of Austrian national identity is prompted by a “fake” narrative, which in turn heightens the sense of “ambivalence” that permeates this particular act of “writing the nation.”114 On another level, though, the performative element of the gazebo, especially the repetitive gesture embedded in the multiple layers of simulation, opens a window into the inventions of traditional narratives of Austrian-ness in the first place. As a combination of stage and backdrop in a corner of Hellbrunn garden, the gazebo serves as miniature example of the by now two-centuries old myth of Salzburg as “world stage and natural scenery” (Weltbühne und Naturkulisse), which, in turn, transformed into a central and long-lasting element of Austrian national identity discourse in the late nineteenth century.115 Even today’s notion of Austrian-ness draws on an image of Salzburg as a place where historical urban architecture harmoniously blends with its natural surroundings to form a unique venue for the celebration of theater and music— the Salzburg Festival. This narrative emerged at the turn of the twentieth century as admixture of two older myths, namely Salzburg as “beautiful city” (schöne Stadt) and Salzburg as “city of Mozart” (Mozartstadt).116 Both of these myths rely on and incorporate Hellbrunn Palace and other historically and architecturally relevant sites as elements of a performative staging of Austrian-ness through the intersection of landscape and culture and in response to political, economic, and social crises. The exhibition of the gazebo at Hellbrunn Park is the perhaps most visible indication that Sound of Music tourism is not an “other” to traditional Austrian identity narratives, but only their most recent incarnation. Two more recent manifestations of Sound of Music tourism that I will investigate in the next section connect with these Salzburg myths quite directly.

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The German-language version of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s musical, which premiered at the Salzburg Landestheater in 2011 and has since become a part of the theater’s repertoire, illustrates The Sound of Music’s reappropriation for the “pedagogical” narrative of Austrian-ness within the tradition of music and the performing arts. Similarly, a 2011 Sound of Music exhibit in the Salzburg Museum reflected on Sound of Music tourism’s role as continuing the tradition of the “traveling” panorama, a connection that counters in crucial ways mainstream interpretations of The Sound of Music as an allegedly foreign representation of Austrian-ness.

From Broadway to Makartplatz: The Trapp Story Returns to the Salzburg Stage For many years, improvised performances by slightly embarrassed but joyful foreign tourists in or near the gazebo in Hellbrunn were the only way to catch a glimpse of scenes from The Sound of Music on “stage.” It would take until 2011 for the full musical to finally be performed in an actual Salzburg theater, the Salzburg Landestheater.117 Already in the 1990s, Lutz Hochstraate, then director of the Landestheater, acknowledged that it was high time for a Salzburg performance of the musical. Part of his vision was the concern that any such production would be historically and artistically appropriate. Hochstraate emphasized that a Salzburg production would need to preserve the musical’s irony without slipping into pathos; address Salzburg’s and Austria’s collaboration with National Socialism “without moralistic finger-wagging” (ohne darauf mit dem erhobenen Zeigefinger herumzureiten); and create a stage decoration “with taste” (mit Geschmack) that stayed away from the “snobistic chic of the salon-Tracht” (snobistischen Chic der Salon-Tracht).118 Ten years and two theater directors later, the musical finally premiered in Salzburg. Contrary to mediocre reviews of earlier German-language productions in Vienna, the Salzburg production was received very favorably by the press.119 Reviewers celebrated the 2011 Salzburg premiere as the overdue homecoming of a long-lost Austrian narrative: “Salzburg embraced ‘its’ musical like a prodigal son whom not just this city, but all of Austria and all German-speaking regions have ignored and dismissed as kitsch for more than half a century. . . . But all fears of contact have been overcome, the world is whole again and the Trapp family has finally returned home.”120 The actual Trapp family still calls Vermont and not Salzburg their home, but this pathos-laden review reveals the extent to which The Sound of Music has moved from being dismissed as American kitsch to serving as central discursive space for re-negotiating Austria’s image on a globalized stage. For at least one reviewer the show manages to represent Austria’s National Socialist history “without moralistic finger-wagging”:121 “[T]he production avoids

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contrived images of this history—but it also does not avoid this history: while the ‘Alleluja’ and ‘Gaudeamus Domino’ of the nuns fade into the background, street-scrubbing Jewish Austrians appear in the foreground.”122 In a 2012 radio show with the main actors, the interviewer described these historical references as “smart” ( gescheit) and considered them one of the main reasons why the musical is more “authentic” than the film.123 Yet, the same interview also underscores that the actual cause for the 2011 Salzburg production’s popularity with Austrian audiences might well be its successful appeal to a regional and national sense of identity through the use of the Salzburg Tracht. In the interview, lead actors Wietske van Tongeren (Maria Rainer) and Uwe Kröger (Kapitän Georg von Trapp) acknowledge how their work on the musical fostered their appreciation of the historical meaning and the beauty of the regional Austrian attire. The interviewer builds on this observation and favorably compares the costumes of the Salzburg production with the costumes in the 1965 Hollywood production: “If one watches the film, it is awful what the characters are wearing. You are wearing very beautiful original Trachten, and as an Austrian one watches this and says: yes, that fits.”124 By differentiating between the costumes of the Hollywood film and the Originaltrachten of the Salzburg production, the interviewer recasts the latter as an affective (and effective) re-authentication of Austrian-ness via the “Austrification” of a popular American cultural text. The term costume connotates disguise, while the word Originaltrachten implies that the actors simply wore something “originally” Austrian. The phrase implies that the Originaltrachten of the production indicate a return to a quasi-mythical period of national origin, a time where true Austrian identity could be represented without distortion. Austrian dialect words in the German lyrics enhance this impression.125 In the program brochure, a picture of the Maria character on a hill invites the audience to join this reaffirmed Austrian community via its caption: “We are all Austrians after all!” (Wir sind doch alle Österreicher!)126 And although the German-language production’s English subtitles indicate that foreign Sound of Music tourists remain part of the target audience, the performances in Salzburg continue to attract large numbers of Austrian visitors. Many of them attend in Dirndl and Trachtenanzug. As I learned in informal conversations during the intermission, some visitors in Tracht feel their identities as Austrians recognized by the fact that the main characters of a globally famous musical finally appear in “authentic” attire and validate the musical plot’s “true” cultural context.127 The Salzburg production’s play with Austrian costumes could be read as a new phase in the development of Austrian national identity that acknowledges the nation’s dark history while also celebrating its cultural history. The postmodern use of Dirndl and Trachtenanzug in connection with a globally and locally credible cultural text plays a crucial role in this recalibration of Austrian-ness. In her investigation of the role of uniforms and costumes in identity formation, Gabriele

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Mentges observes how the Tracht in a postmodern context “is no longer understood and practiced only as societal dictate but as temporary commitment.”128 From this perspective, the Salzburg production’s costumes could then exemplify a twenty-first century performative (and perhaps ironic) use of the Tracht as cultural and aesthetic legacy of a specific cultural and historical context, rather than as ideological and political statement. However, this supposedly apolitical characteristic of the Tracht and its use for representing twenty-first century Austrian-ness necessitates a critical discussion of how the 2011 The Sound of Music production shaped Austrian national identity performances by tapping into historical and contemporary manifestations of the discourse of tourism. As characters that are above any suspicion when it comes to their role during National Socialism, the Trapp family’s stage appearance in Tracht neutralizes the political baggage of the Trachten look, turning it both into a projection screen and an anchoring point for twenty-first century Austrian-ness. Exemplary for this effect is how the Salzburg production portrays the family’s final appearance at the Salzburg Festival right after Austria’s annexation. As the Trapp family members, all clad in Tracht, perform their farewell song, “Auf Wiedersehen, Goodbye!,” actors dressed in SA uniforms slip into the theater house and guard all exit doors. During the Baron’s subsequent “Edelweiß” performance, gradually brightening footlights in the house ominously illuminate the SA guards from below and generate a sense of imprisonment. As the interviewer in the above-quoted radio show describes it, this is an oppressive moment that drives home the family’s experience of expulsion and loss.129 Yet, this is also a moment where Austrian audience members and Austrian characters on stage engage in a rather contorted process of performing an Austrian-ness that undermines the Holocaust references at the show’s beginning. Since the musical’s plot already invites the audience to empathize with the Trapp family as victims of National Socialism, the use of the Tracht as defining element of Austrian identity by actors and audience members alike redoubles this identificatory process. As a result, National Socialism once again is portrayed as an outside force—literally sneaking into the house in the dark of night—while all Austrians are victims. This is a subtle yet significant change to Robert Wise’s Hollywood production, which also presents Austria as victim of an external threat but shows the main Nazi characters as homegrown. Not only does the 2011 version of the musical belatedly legitimize the family’s emigration as a form of resistance against the 1938 Anschluss, it turns the Tracht into a symbol of anti-National Socialist resistance and thereby distorts the complex roles the costume played in the nationalistic and ethnic tensions all the way from the end of the Habsburg Empire to the National Socialist regime. As a physical manifestation of an “invented tradition,” the local costume acquired a crucial role in reconciling regional, imperial, and national identity narratives during the second half of the nineteenth century and it did so in the context of

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tourism and leisure practices.130 Their often opposing political goals notwithstanding, aristocratic, upper-middle class, and urban circles shared with lower-middle class, peasant, and rural communities their preference for the Tracht as an expression of national identity even though their interpretations of said identity differed greatly. When Austria’s Viennese and Jewish political and cultural elite adorned variations of the regional Tracht during their summer vacations in the Salzkammergut, their “going native” was based on a notion of “Heimat consciousness” (Heimatbewußtsein) and on a certain playful mixture of “fashion, nostalgia, masquerade, and local atmosphere” (Mode, Nostalgie, Verkleidung und Lokalkolorit).131 By contrast, local and regional communities of peasants, lowlevel civil servants, and small business owners perceived rural costumes as the last bastion against the eroding forces of modernity and concentrated their efforts on protecting and, increasingly, promoting the Tracht as single-most important symbol of a supposedly authentic national community.132 Before symbols can be “exploited and shaped” for particular ideological purposes, they need to “be discovered.”133 And indeed, the more the population of Austria’s provinces felt threatened by an allegedly foreign modernization, the more engaged and intentional these communities became in inventing, defining and controlling the “authentic” Tracht against its perceived devaluation by vacationing city dwellers.134 Regional and local associations, Trachtenvereine, took on a prominent role in the process of finding the authentic (echten) regional costumes and differentiating them from the Trachtenmode worn by urban tourists. In their meetings and journals, these associations also provided advice by experts “who went out of their way to fulfill their duty of educating the lay population about the noble topic of Tracht.”135 Salzburg ethnographer Ulrike Kammerhofer-Aggermann aptly describes how the Trachtenvereine provided space for those social groups who were most affected by and least equipped to cope with the socio-economic shifts of the late nineteenth century. The children of farmers in the Salzburg mountains, small business owners, and innkeepers were disproportionally represented among those who perceived themselves as losers in this process of modernization and looked for support in the nostalgic atmosphere of the Trachten associations.136 Simultaneously, these associations became accelerators for the aggressive nationalistic and anti-Semitic discourse that shaped the last decades of imperial Austria and spilled over into the First Austrian Republic. In Salzburg in particular, the perceived threat of a destructive foreign modernization became equated with the allegedly contaminating presence of Jewish businesses and tourists. The Trachtenvereine became powerful front organizations for the strong, illegal National Socialist movement in Salzburg and relentlessly promoted Austria’s Anschluss to Nazi Germany.137 Leading up to the 1938 Anschluss, the “authentic” Tracht eventually became an “identifier of the Aryan race” (arische[s] Rassenmerkmal), demarcating German-Austrian identity against Austria’s racially and ethnically “inferior” population, especially against Jewish Austrians.138

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In relation to tourism, the Salzburg Festival is a special case in point for studying the role of the Tracht as a virtual and literal battleground for national identity discourses. The Festival’s two main founders, Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Max Reinhardt, envisioned it as stage for the reinvention of a post-World War I Austrian national identity by fusing the cultural legacy of Austrian baroque with the legacy of German enlightenment.139 Tacitly implied in these lofty goals was the desire (and financial necessity) to attract a great number of wealthy domestic and, especially, foreign tourists.140 These tourists enjoyed donning what they considered the local costume. Numerous memoirs by writers and actors of the era describe how their arrival in Salzburg also meant a change into Dirndl or Trachtenanzug.141 Austrian author and Salzburg resident Stefan Zweig chronicled how the Tracht dominated Salzburg’s streets during the Festival season: “Salzburg blossomed out. In summer one encountered on its streets everybody from America and Europe who sought the highest manifestations of art, in Salzburg costumes; white linen shorts and jackets for the men, the gay Dirndls for the women. Diminutive Salzburg suddenly set the world’s fashions!”142 Zweig’s description alludes to the tension between Tracht and Mode (fashion). Influenced by the creative and sometimes eclectic ways in which Festival visitors would integrate Tracht into their appearance, fashion designers created a distinct Salzburg Trachtenmode that quickly became an acclaimed element of the international fashion world in the mid-1930s.143 But while the visiting prominence indulged in a concours d’élégance, as the 1936 luxury auto show with Trachten exhibit in Castle Kleßheim was called, local and regional Trachtenvereine became increasingly alienated by the transformation of the Tracht into a fashion brand. Arguments about the authenticity and national relevance of Tracht were closely linked with the Salzburg Festival’s contradictory positions vis-à-vis the increasingly fraught relations between the Austro-Fascist Ständestaat and Nazi Germany. As a celebration of Austrian identity independent of Germany and anti-Anschluss, the Festival seemed to fit well with the governments of the Christian-Socialist Chancellors Dollfuss and Schuschnigg, which since 1934 tried to keep National Socialist Germany at bay by banning the National Socialist Party in Austria and, instead, developing a homegrown authoritarian regime. But via its strong connection to the enlightenment legacy of German culture, the Festival also appealed to a pan-German ideology and therefore to the pro-Anschluss camp in Austria.144 To make matters even more complicated, the Tracht straddled these varying political and ideological affiliations. While the political and cultural elites of the authoritarian Austrian Ständestaat wore the Tracht to signal their anti-Anschluss patriotism, illegal Nazis in Salzburg and other alpine provinces combined various Trachten elements with white knee-high socks in support of the pro-Anschluss movement.145 Consequently, foreign visitors and Jewish Austrians who put on the Tracht because they thought they were engaging in a playful version of going native or who

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simply wanted to demonstrate their understanding of Austrian-ness found themselves stepping into an ideological minefield. Class and race tensions overlapped and reinforced each other in the criticism of the alleged misappropriation of the Tracht by foreigners and by the “wrong”—meaning: Jewish—Austrians and Germans. Some Trachtenvereine rejected the internationally acclaimed Salzburg adaptation of the local Tracht for making a mockery of local customs and lifestyles.146 But the self-proclaimed defenders of the “purity” of local traditions increasingly resorted to unveiled racist language. Building on the long-practiced anti-Semitism that had overshadowed the summer vacations of Vienna’s Jewish cultural and industrial elite since before World War I, the publications of the Trachtenvereine became outlets of an aggressive anti-Semitism that identified the Tracht as the ultimate bastion of a “pure” Austrian identity.147 When a few months after the Anschluss in 1938, the Salzburg police commissioner announced that Jews are prohibited from the “public display of alpine (authentic or inauthentic) local costumes” (öffentliche Tragen von alpenländischen [echten oder unechten] Trachten), the Gebirgs-Trachten-Zeitung had its moment: “Beyond any doubt, the decree will be welcomed by all circles, who had to endure for a long time that, for instance, the Dirndl—one may only recall Bad Ischl a few years ago!—had appeared to have become a Jewish national costume.”148 “People in costume equals power” (Volk in Tracht ist Macht!)—what the Gebirgs-Trachten-Zeitung proclaimed in 1922 had become violent reality in 1938. At that particular moment in time, the Salzburg Festival visitors’ ironic engagement with local costumes, and the fashion industry’s playful adaptation of the Tracht lost out against the forces that equated “authentic” Tracht with “real” (and racially “pure”) German Austrian-ness. These shifting meanings and deployments of the Tracht in relation to Austrian national identity must be kept in mind when analyzing the role of the Tracht in The Sound of Music production of the Salzburg Landestheater. Arguably, the Salzburg production contains and conflates aspects of both the playful reenactment of the Tracht in a postmodern context and the verification (or even restoration) of a “true” Austrian-ness. The playfulness with which foreign tourists and younger Austrians might don the Tracht during Sound of Music tours and the musical’s performances is only one side of the picture, however. The other side is represented by the radio interviewer’s positive connotation of Originaltracht with “original” Austrian-ness, an aspect repeatedly exploited by right-wing groups and xenophobic ideologues in popular cultural venues and in the political arena. For instance, Austrian singer Andreas Gabalier exemplifies the conflation of a postmodern, eclectic use of the Tracht with reactionary political views. A declared supporter of the right-wing Freedom Party (FPÖ), Gabalier repeatedly made headlines with xenophobic and misogynistic statements that he portrays as a commitment to traditional values.149 The historical perspective I sketched out here disrupts facile readings of The Sound of Music’s positive reception as evidence that a “foreign” popular cultural

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narrative from the United States has finally been “fact-checked” and, therefore, welcomed back into the fold of “true” Austrian culture. On the contrary, if The Sound of Music production at the Landestheater provides evidence for anything, then for Bhabha’s observation that the site where the nation is written is always an ambivalent one. At first, the performance of an “Austrianized” version of The Sound of Music at the venerable Salzburg Landestheater might well look like a manifestation of how the “repetitive, recursive strategy of the performative” morphs into the “continuist, accumulative temporality of the pedagogical.”150 However, a closer critical and historically contextualized reading reveals the “pedagogical” (and allegedly more “authentic”) version of national identity itself to be the result of a “recursive” and “performative” strategy. The Landestheater is closely tied to late nineteenth-century visions of Salzburg as a “city of music,” which then evolved into the idea of the Salzburg Festival. The Festival, in turn, is the synthesis of two other “mythical” narratives that positioned Salzburg as illustrative of Austrian national identity in general: the myth of the Mozartstadt and the myth of the “beautiful city.”151 The Sound of Music production at the Landestheater is, thus, not so much the integration of an “other” cultural narrative into a domestic version of national identity, but, rather, the continuation of a performative process of Austrian national identity for which Salzburg has provided the theatrical frame.

Salzburg’s Traveling Image: From Sattler’s Panorama to The Sound of Music As a miniature stage The Sound of Music gazebo does not only illustrate the theatrical element that reconnects a twenty-first century popular tourist discourse with earlier forms of cultural and national identity constructions in the realm of tourism. Its placement in the Hellbrunn Palace gardens just outside the city also makes it an important reference point for a closer analysis of the role that replications and simulations of landscape sceneries play in the mutually reinforcing discourses of tourism and national identity. While my earlier discussion of the practices of “indexing and dragging” in Sound of Music film tourism focused mainly on the twentieth and twenty-first century, the gazebo’s coincidental placement at the seam of nature and urban space establishes a link to a much longer tradition of Austrian national identity construction via the circulation of culturally constructed images of nature. To what extent Salzburg’s image relies on the combination of nature and culture becomes apparent in Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s 1919 call for the creation of the Salzburg Festival based on a fusion of nature and cultural genius loci: The lands of Salzburg lie in the heart of Europe’s heart. Salzburg lies halfway between Switzerland and the Slavic lands, halfway between northern Germany and Lombardic

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Italy; it lies in the middle of South and North, between mountain and lowland, between the heroic and the idyllic; Salzburg as architecture is between the urban and the rural, the antique and the modern, the baroque aristocratic and the pastoral, eternal peasant culture. Mozart expresses all of this.152

While the Festival’s mission was ostensibly focused on reviving Salzburg’s musical culture in the image of Mozart, Michael P. Steinberg’s analysis of the Salzburg Festival’s ideological context has demonstrated to what extent Hofmannsthal’s Festival idea is grounded in the conservative interpretation of a “neobaroque cultural discourse,” itself a reinterpretation of “German enlightenment and early romantic thinkers between 1780 and 1800.”153 Hofmannsthal’s effusive ode to Salzburg as geographical midpoint, intersection of cultures, and harmonious pivot between nature and culture substantiates to what degree a romanticist legacy undergirds the myth of Salzburg as a “beautiful city” and “city of music.” The earliest written traces for the image of Salzburg as schöne Stadt can be found in topographical descriptions of Salzburg that were embedded in otherwise encyclopedic lists of relevant sites and attractions compiled by late-enlightenment writers at the end of the 1700s. Lorenz Hübner, one of Salzburg’s leading enlightenment thinkers, described the location of the Mönchsberg mountain in the midst of the city as “one of the most wonderful promenades” (eine der herrlichsten Promenaden). Already then Hübner pointed out the role of landscape as a tourist attraction: “A similar mountain near a big European city would be worth millions” (Ein ähnlicher Berg in der Nähe einer großen europäischen Stadt wäre Millionen werth [sic]). Unfortunately, like Hübner, the locals view this unique site “somewhat distanced” (etwas gleichgültig), even though they enjoy “when foreigners enthusiastically comment on the mountain” (wenn Fremde ihn über allen Ausdruck entzückend [ fänden]).154 One of these foreigners was Alexander von Humboldt, who spent the winter of 1797/98 in Salzburg as an early scientific tourist to prepare for his South American exploration. Later promoters of Salzburg falsely attributed to Humboldt the praise of the city and the region as “one of the most beautiful regions on the globe.”155 Following on the coattails of enlightenment explorers were early romantic writers who felt drawn to the city’s surrounding alpine landscape.156 Similar to the “discovery” of the Rhineland, the Salzkammergut and the alpine region around Salzburg became representative of an aesthetically sublime nature ensemble.157 Writer Joseph August Schultes, for instance, describes the region as “the assembly of all natural attractions, which the richest phantasy can only dream of on the entire continent.”158 The romantic writers’ prioritization of the surrounding nature over the city of Salzburg might have been prompted by the city’s socio-economic decline in the wake of Salzburg’s transformation from autonomous archdiocese to Habsburg province.159 Disappointed by the decaying city, the visiting writers looked to the natural environment for inspiration.

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What repelled the writers of the romantic era proved to be a point of attraction for the romantic visual artists following in their footsteps. In the short time span of two decades, from roughly 1810 to 1830, Salzburg’s backwardness transformed into the embodiment of the romantic spirit. German and Austrian painters who had been on their way to Italy got stuck in Salzburg, lured by the city’s alleged combination of German and Italian atmosphere.160 Salzburg became synonymous for the Gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art) in which landscape and history, nature and culture morph into an inseparable unity.161 The painters’ portrayals of fairytale-like urban places framed by mountain peaks contributed significantly to the Salzburg myth. And, as Robert Hoffmann points out, these portrayals were instrumental in turning Salzburg’s socio-economic disadvantages into assets for the growing middle-class tourism sector. The romantic paintings of Salzburg avoided the dire socio-economic reality, which had concerned the writers of the enlightenment era. Instead, the painters anticipated the “tourist gaze” that began to attract visitors in ever greater numbers and which Friedrich Graf Spaur so aptly described in his Spaziergänge in Salzburg (Salzburg walks): “French, British, Russian, and German visitors felt enchanted by these paradisiacal, well maintained regions, which always sported rejuvenated plantings and invited the visitors to stay for months.”162 In the 1830s, just around the time Salzburg’s image as a perfect balance between nature and urban space had been solidified, the invention of its image as city of music started and so did the commodification of culture for tourist purposes. Vincent and Mary Novello, an English couple, are credited with the role of having been the first “Mozart tourists.” Their visit in 1829 marks the beginning of a growing interest in Mozart, whose city of birth had until then paid little to no interest in maintaining and promoting its connection to the famous composer. Responding to the growing interest by outside visitors, the city authorities as well as private citizens gradually began to repair and exhibit places such as Mozart’s birth house and the family’s apartment.163 In the mid-1830s, the proposal for a monument to the city’s greatest son gained speed, and in September of 1842, the process culminated in “the first ‘historical cultural national monument’ on Austrian soil.”164 The 1842 monument stands at the beginning of Mozart’s long and often turbulent role as a promotional figure for Salzburg tourism and for Austrian national identity. When Salzburgers and German-speaking Austrians used the term national at that time, they referred to the vision of a greater German nation, based on the idea of German culture to which the Austrian Empire’s German-speaking bourgeoisie saw itself belonging. Unsurprisingly, this worried the absolutist Habsburg authorities, who viewed with suspicion the assembly of thousands of guests from Europe’s German-speaking territories at the 1842 celebration.165 What the Salzburg bourgeoisie celebrated as important milestone in its march toward political participation, the Austrian imperial authorities tried to recast as

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an expression of Austrian patriotism against foreign modern influences.166 Eventually the Habsburg authorities’ permissive attitude toward the Salzburg bourgeoisie’s celebration of Mozart as a Germanic genius paid off. In the wake of the small-German solution after 1848, and certainly after the proclamation of the Second German Empire in 1871, it had become increasingly difficult to promote Salzburg as a German city. During this historical shift, the Mozart monument facilitated Salzburg’s reorientation from “most beautiful German city” to an iconic representation of Austrian identity for an international audience.167 The construction and celebration of the monument also demonstrates that the commodification of the city’s high-cultural image for tourist purposes has a long history and even preceded any more serious engagement with Mozart’s musical oeuvre.168 Notwithstanding the 1842 celebration of Mozart as a musical genius, his works were only rarely performed in Salzburg until the second half of the nineteenth century. But that did not prevent the emergence of an impressive tourism industry: Salzburg’s shops offered “Mozart busts, Mozart baking forms, Mozart pipes, Mozart statuettes, etc.” (Mozartbüsten, Mozartsmodeln, Mozartspfeifen, Mozartstatuetten etc.), while the city’s guest houses advertised “Mozart rooms, Mozart bread, Mozart wines” (Mozartszimmer, Mozartsbrot, Mozartsweine).169 Mozart’s musical compositions would have to wait until the late 1800s before they were performed as part of a series of festivals that anticipated the later Salzburg Festival.170 When locals today bemoan Sound of Music tourism as representative of a problematic—read: popular cultural and American—development in mass tourism, they engage in an arbitrary misreading of the historical genealogy of present-day tourist phenomena. Compared to The Sound of Music, Mozart’s image today might seem more “historical” and, therefore, more in tune with the high-cultural aspects of Austrian national identity. However, his twenty-first century role as a marketing brand for Austria and Salzburg and as “trademark or trade-name of consumer goods that are supposed to be associated internationally with his birthplace” has as little to do with the actual composer as the above-mentioned tourism frenzy in the 1840s.171 In their complaints about tourists’ alleged lack of interest in culture, local commentators overlook that Sound of Music tourism only resumes what Mozart tourism started: Sound of Music tourism draws on the same combinations of landscape and culture, nature and urban space, which already framed the integration of Mozart into the myth of the beautiful city. Rather than seeing The Sound of Music as a disruption of this development, it can also be read as its continuation through new technological means. As cultural critic Kurt Luger writes, “[t]he Salzburg Festivals drew world attention to Mozart and the classical musical heritage. But it was only through the mass media that Salzburg finally made its name—the city as a world stage, the country as natural scenery.”172 Luger’s sequencing of events implies that the mass-mediated dissemination of Salzburg’s image started in the twentieth century, especially with the 1965 Hol-

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lywood film. But the foundations for the distribution of mass-mediated visual images of Salzburg as a “beautiful city,” as the “city of Mozart,” were laid long before the advent of electronic media. When Salzburg’s bourgeoisie gathered in 1842 to celebrate the unveiling of the Mozart monument, they also used the occasion to publicly celebrate, one last time, Johann Michael Sattler’s “Salzburg Panorama,” a 125-square-meter panoramic painting that had to be mounted on the inside of a cylindrical structure to be viewed.173 By virtually positioning the viewer into the tower of Castle Hohensalzburg, the painting provides a 360degree view of Salzburg and its surrounding landscape in unprecedented detail and perspective. Only three years earlier, in 1839, Sattler and his panoramic painting had returned from a ten-year tour through Europe’s capitals. The tour allowed Sattler to recuperate some of the immense cost of producing the monumental painting. But he made sure to remind his fellow Salzburg citizens that he had invested in more than just a painting, for he was aware that his artistic work would contribute to the popularity of Salzburg as a tourist destination: “Now, highly esteemed! The image of your father city and your environment has returned to its Heimat undamaged and successfully—the image of the city and the landscape [which many travelers] describe as the most beautiful point on earth; a true paradise in which you are lucky to wander pleasantly and of which millions are jealous.”174 Sattler’s comments, and the Salzburg citizen’s acknowledgement of Sattler’s work, somewhat qualify Luger’s unequivocal statement that “[c]oming at the beginning of the audio-visual age, The Sound of Music was to prove the cheapest and most efficient image-campaign of all time for both Austria and Salzburg.”175 Sattler’s traveling panoramic painting clearly anticipated these developments. As bridge technology between realistic painting, on the one hand, and photography and—soon—cinema, on the other, panorama paintings anticipated many of the reactions that movie audiences would exhibit a few decades later. Similar to the early moving pictures, panoramas usually were considered fairground (and therefore tourist) attractions rather than high-cultural art forms. Frequently exhibited in either permanent or temporary rotundas, panorama paintings attracted lower middle- and working-class audiences, thereby contributing to the emerging visibility of the new phenomenon of the mass audience. Viewers’ fascination with panoramas was not so much based on what they showed but how they showed it. The use of a wide-angle perspective and the interplay between proximate and distant vistas provided viewers with a new perception of their environment and “awakened sensory modes of perception that had been idle until then” (weckte Sensorien, die bis dahin brach gelegen waren).176 Sophisticated presentation techniques such as covering up the upper and lower margins of the painting and indirect lighting created a multi-sensory and vertiginous experience. Once the multi-sensory stimulation had worked its magic, motifs had to be swapped out quickly to keep audiences interested.177

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If panoramas were attractive for their ability to show locals their own places from a new perspective, they were even more fascinating for their ability to facilitate virtual traveling. Panoramas—often also called dioramas or cycloramas by contemporary writers and commentators—anticipated the parallels between traveling and the movies that would characterize early cinema. Similar to moving pictures, panoramas were “capable of teleporting [their] audience[s] to another location, and dissolving the boundary between local existence and global vision.”178 The wide-angle vision could manifest itself as “bourgeois selfaffirmation” (bürgerliche Selbstbestätigung) in an era of European colonization and conquest. And, at a time when the first organized tourism trips began to traverse the European continent, the panoramas’ global vision also served either as a kind of ersatz travel or as virtual exploration of future travel destinations.179 Indeed, Sattler’s 1839 comment in which he informed his fellow citizens that the image of Salzburg as the city’s traveling visual representation and reputation has returned unharmed coincides with a series of other events that marked the beginning of Western mass tourism: In 1841, Thomas Cook organized what is now regarded as the first packaged “tour”; the first railway hotel was opened in York just before the 1840s railway mania; the first national railway timetable, Bradshaws, appeared in 1839; Cunard started the first ever Ocean steamship service; and Wells Fargo, the forerunner of American Express, began stagecoach services across the American West.180

These practices evolved in tandem with the “‘tourist gaze,’ that peculiar combining together of the means of collective travel, the desire for travel and the techniques of photographic reproduction,” of which the panorama was an important antecedent.181 Put into this historical context, Sound of Music tourism seems less like a new stage in the connection between Austrian national identity narratives and the discourse of tourism, and more like the latest repetition of long-established practices of identity construction, reenacted in the tension between the “pedagogical” and the “performative,” in themselves terms that designate dynamic rather than stable categories. In many ways, The Sound of Music film’s visual representation of the city is a repetitive enactment of the perspectives captured by the romantic painters who created Salzburg’s reputation as “world stage and natural scenery” (Weltbühne und Naturkulisse ) in the first place. What the painters created as singular still images, the Hollywood production spliced together into one large stream of moving images. It was initially the gazebo’s placement and use by tourists that prompted this excursion into Salzburg’s historical role as a cultural stage for performative constructions of the Austrian nation. However, the juxtaposed reading of historical examples of traveling images with The Sound of Music film is also based on a 2011 exhibit that combined those elements in interesting ways. Just as the 1842 unveiling of the Mozart monument was celebrated by exhibiting Sattler’s panorama

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painting as a visual work of art that drew attention to Salzburg’s and Austria’s evolving narratives of national identity through the discourse of traveling and tourism, the Salzburg Museum in 2011 celebrated its then recently-renovated Sattler Panorama by framing the exhibition of the panorama with the exhibit The Trapp Family—Reality and Sound of Music (Die Trapp Familie—Realität und ‘Sound of Music’). Spreading over two floors of the museum, the exhibit presented numerous objects and documents related to the lives of the various members of the Trapp family. Parts of the exhibit also covered the outer wall of the cylindric enclosure that houses the Sattler Panorama. No explanatory sign pointed out the irony that this exhibit of the “real” Trapp family history utilizes, quite literally, the backside of one of the earliest examples of a mass-mediated, traveling brand image for Salzburg and Austria. But then, no sign was needed, as the parallels between the panorama and The Sound of Music were practically self-evident. Separated by more than a century in terms of their creation, the two artifacts nonetheless are connected via their function as immensely popular, traveling visual postcards of Salzburg and Austria. They constitute evidence for the importance of tourism as discursive terrain for the performative construction of Austrian national identity, while highlighting to what extent this process mobilized and reconfigured the relationship between high culture and popular culture. *** Similar to the earlier sections of this book, this section traced the interrelation between the discourse of tourism and Austrian discourses of national identity. However, more so than in previous chapters, the concept of national identity itself and its historical genealogy as it pertains to Austria were the focus of these two chapters. In the context of greater European unification, of economic globalization, and of accelerated media spheres that seem to make political borders less relevant, the constructedness of national identity moved to the foreground. References to Austria’s history, high culture, and landscape have lost their earlier function as self-evident examples of a stable Austrian identity. Not that these traditional elements of Austrian identity went away completely, but the need to reaffirm and reconstruct them pulled the connections between national identity and the discursive arena of tourism into the limelight. The iterative manifestations of the Sound of Music narrative further illustrate how the connection between tourism and Austrian identity narratives has adapted to twenty-first century conditions. What the analysis shows is that, even though the decades before and after the turn of the millennium hardly qualify anymore as the postwar period, the legacy of Austria’s collaboration with National Socialism continues to shape Austria’s national identity narrative. But the discussion of the various Sound of Music-themed aspects of tourism also shows that it has become even less possible to depict tourism as a surface phenomenon or cover-up than it already was in earlier decades. On the contrary, The Sound of

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Music has become a major discursive terrain for debating and making visible this historical legacy with and for younger generations of Austrians. At the same time, Sound of Music tourism also sheds new light on the tension between notions of “authenticity” and “copy.” Throughout the twentieth century, mass tourism and the visual media have evolved in tandem, sometimes pulling and sometimes pushing each other to new forms of interaction. Sound of Music tourism offers a case study for these various layers of mediation and their potential for individual and collective identity narration. Even though the concept of “authenticity” has not lost its affective power both for tourists and hosts, the way it is understood clearly changed. The many ways in which Austrian “agents” and entities tap into the globalized narrative of The Sound of Music to construct an identity appealing to foreign tourists and Austrians alike underscores Clifford Geertz’ dictum that it is indeed the “copying that originates.”182

Notes 1. Raffaela Lindorfer, “Sound of Music: ‘Erst die Trapps, dann Mozart,’” Online Newspaper, Kurier.At, (1 March 2015), https://kurier.at/chronik/oesterreich/sound-of-music-erstdie-trapps-dann-mozart/116.798.902. Exact numbers are hard to come by, since tourists usually visit more than one attraction in Salzburg. For an overview of postwar tourism in the province and city of Salzburg, see Ernst Hanisch, “Tourismus und sozialer Wandel,” in Salzburg: Zwischen Globalisierung und Goldhaube, ed. Ernst Hanisch and Robert Kriechbaumer (Vienna: Böhlau Verlag, 1995), 193–94. For a more specific discussion of US tourism in Salzburg, see Thomas Huber, “Wie Julie Andrews Mozart verdrängte: Hintergründe und Auswirkungen des US-Tourismus in Salzburg,” in The Sound of Music zwischen Mythos und Marketing, ed. Ulrike Kammerhofer-Aggermann and Alexander Keul (Salzburg: Salzburger Landesinstitut für Volkskunde, 2000), 415. All translations into English are mine unless otherwise noted. 2. This chapter builds on two earlier publications of my research on The Sound of Music: Gundolf Graml, “(Re)Mapping the Nation: Sound of Music Tourism and National Identity in Austria, ca 2000 CE,” Tourist Studies 4, no. 2 (1 August 2004): 137–59; Gundolf Graml, “‘The Hills Are Alive . . .’: Sound of Music Tourism and the Performative Construction of Places,” Women in German Yearbook: Feminist Studies in German Literature & Culture 21, no. 1 (2005): 192–214. 3. Homi K. Bhabha, “Introduction: Narrating the Nation,” in Nation and Narration, ed. Homi K. Bhabha (New York: Routledge, 1990), 2–3. 4. Stuart Hall, “New Ethnicities,” in Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, ed. David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen (New York: Routledge, 1996), 443. 5. Bhabha, “Introduction,” 2. 6. Michael Herzfeld, Cultural Intimacy: Social Poetics in the Nation-State (New York: Routledge, 1997), 3. 7. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Revised Edition (New York: Verso, 2016). 8. Eric Hobsbawm, “Introduction: Inventing Traditions,” in The Invention of Tradition, ed. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (London: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 1–14.

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9. David Crouch, “Introduction: Encounters in Leisure/Tourism,” in Leisure/Tourism Geographies: Practices and Geographical Knowledge, ed. David Crouch (New York: Routledge, 1999), 4. 10. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalizations (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 31. 11. Simon Coleman and Mike Crang, “Introduction: Grounded Tourists, Travelling Theory,” in Tourism: Between Place and Performance, ed. Simon Coleman and Mike Crang (New York: Berghahn Books, 2002), 10. 12. Ibid. 13. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, Second Edition (New York: Routledge, 2008), 8. 14. Maria A. Trapp, The Story of the Trapp Family Singers (Philadelphia, PA: Lippincott, 1949). 15. Katherine Brégy, “Rev. of ‘The Story of the Trapp Family Singers,’” The Catholic World, October 1949. For additional reviews, see Helen E. Bush, “The Story of the Trapp Family, by Maria Augusta Trapp,” Library Journal, n.d.; Carter Harman, “Singers All. Rev. of The Story of the Trapp Family Singers, by Maria Augusta Trapp,” The New York Times, 20 November 1949; “Rev. of ‘The Story of the Trapp Family Singers,’” The Bookmark, December 1949. 16. Liebeneiner’s biography itself illustrates the motif of traveling, albeit mostly in political and ideological terms. During the Third Reich, he became director of the film department in the National Socialist Reichsfilmkammer. In this role he worked closely on the 1941 film Ich klage an (I Accuse), which advocated the killing of terminally ill people and is usually referred to as Euthanasiefilm. Liebeneiner was nonetheless able to continue his work as director right after 1945. See John E. Davidson, “Working for the Man, Whoever That May Be: The Vocation of Wolfgang Liebeneiner,” in Cultural History through a National Socialist Lens: Essays on the Cinema of the Third Reich., ed. Robert C. Reimer (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2000), 240–67; Christian Strasser, “The Sound of Music—Ein unbekannter Welterfolg,” in The Sound of Music zwischen Mythos und Marketing, ed. Ulrike Kammerhofer-Aggermann and Alexander Keul (Salzburg: Salzburger Landesinstitut für Volkskunde, 2000), 268–69. 17. For a definitive account of the film’s making and impact, see Julia Hirsch, “The Sound of Music”: The Making of America’s Favorite Movie (Chicago: Contemporary Books, 1993). 18. Strasser, “The Sound of Music,” 283. 19. “‘Anti-Nazi’ Sound Hit All over but Not in Germany,” Variety, 16 April 1967. 20. Strasser, “The Sound of Music,” 283. 21. James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 3; emphasis in original. 22. Strasser, “The Sound of Music,” 272. 23. Johannes von Moltke, “Trapped in America: The Americanization of the Trapp-Familie, or ‘Papas Kino’ Revisited,” German Studies Review 19, no. 3 (1996): 465. 24. Oliver Rathkolb, The Paradoxical Republic: Austria 1945–2005, English language edition (New York: Berghahn Books, 2014), 174. 25. Ruth A. Starkman, “American Imperialism or Local Protectionism? The Sound of Music (1965) Fails in Germany and Austria,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 20, no. 1 (2000): 70. 26. Ibid., 67. 27. Moltke, “Trapped in America,” 461.

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28. Robert von Dassanowsky, “An Unclaimed Country: The Austrian Image in American Film and the Sociopolitics of The Sound of Music,” Bright Lights Film Journal 41, no. 3 (August 2003): n.p. https://brightlightsfilm.com/an-unclaimed-country-the-austrian-im age-in-american-film-and-the-sociopolitics-of-the-sound-of-music/#.XcsevFczagA 29. Ibid. 30. Former Austrian chancellor Kurt Schuschnigg was imprisoned in the concentration camps of Sachsenhausen and Dachau. Leopold Figl, Austria’s first regular post-World War II chancellor, was arrested right after the Anschluss and spent several years in the concentration camps of Dachau and Mauthausen. See Rathkolb, Paradoxical Republic, 98; Rolf Steininger, Austria, Germany and the Cold War: From the Anschluss to the State Treaty, 1938–1955 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2008), 14. 31. Raymond Knapp, “History, ‘The Sound of Music’, and Us,” American Music 22, no. 1 (April 2004): 136. 32. Ibid., 138. 33. Jacqueline Vansant, “Robert Wise’s The Sound of Music and the ‘Denazification’ of Austria in American Cinema,” in From World War to Waldheim: Culture and Politics in Austria and the United States, ed. David F. Good and Ruth Wodak (New York: Berghahn Books, 1999), 175. Director Robert Wise was well aware of this socio-political and cultural context: “Nineteen sixty-five was a volatile year in the United States and throughout the world. Newspapers carried headlines of the war in Vietnam, a cultural revolution was beginning to spread throughout the country, and people needed old-fashioned ideas to hold on to.” Robert Wise, “Foreword,” in “The Sound of Music”: The Making of America’s Favorite Movie, by Julia Hirsch (Chicago: Contemporary Books, 1993), x. 34. Appadurai, Modernity, 33. 35. William Collins Donahue, “‘Bless My Homeland Forever’: Teaching Austria and the Holocaust,” Die Unterrichtspraxis / Teaching German 29, no. 2 (1996): 189. 36. Raymond Williams, Raymond Williams: Politics and Letters. Interviews with New Left Review, eBook Edition (New York, NY: Verso, 2015), 399. 37. Martin Gorsky, “‘Raindrops on Roses’: The Sound of Music and the Political Psyche of the Sixties,” The Sixties 6, no. 2 (2013): 199. 38. Ibid., 213. 39. Key figures in these discourses were Donald Winnicott and John Bowlby of Britain’s Psycho-Analytic Society, to which Julie Andrews allegedly was connected through her own experiments with psychoanalytic therapy. See Ibid., 212. 40. Ibid., 216. 41. Ibid. 42. Stacy Ellen Wolf, A Problem Like Maria: Gender and Sexuality in the American Musical (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002), 227. 43. Ibid., 233. For more on the queer readings of musicals in general see Stacy Wolf, “The Queer Pleasures of Mary Martin and Broadway: The Sound of Music as a Lesbian Musical,” Modern Drama 39, no. 1 (1996): 51–63. 44. Alexander G. Keul, “The Sound of Virtue: Über die paradoxe Mutter und den transatlantischen Blick,” in The Sound of Music zwischen Mythos und Marketing, ed. Ulrike Kammerhofer-Aggermann and Alexander G. Keul, (Salzburg: Salzburger Landesinstitut für Volkskunde, 2000), 327. 45. “Sound of Music—Salzburg Highlights—Salzburg—Panorama Tours,” retrieved 25 September 2014 from http://www.panoramatours.com/en/salzburg/salzburg-highlights/sou nd-of-music/.

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46. “Salzburg Sightseeing Tours,” retrieved 24 September 2014 from http://www.salz burg-sightseeingtours.at/sound-of-music.php?lang=2. 47. “Sound of Music Tour—Bob’s Special Tours,” retrieved 11 November 2017 from http:// www.bobstours.com/som.php. During the ten years I have researched Sound of Music tourism, various Sound of Music-themed enterprises have emerged and disappeared again, others have gone through organizational restructuring and name changes. Fräulein Maria’s Bicycle Tours, originally founded in 1999, is one of the more consistently operating smaller enterprises. So is the Sound of Music Dinner Show, now called the Sound of Salzburg Dinner Show. 48. Holly Hyunjung Im and Kaye Chon, “An Exploratory Study of Movie-Induced Tourism: A Case of the Movie The Sound of Music and Its Locations in Salzburg, Austria,” Journal of Travel and Tourism Marketing 24, no. 2–3 (2008): 233. The tourism boom in connection with The Sound of Music started right after the film’s premiere in the United States in 1965. That year, more than 70,000 US visitors registered in Salzburg, an almost 20 percent increase from the prior year. Magistrat Salzburg/Amt für Statistik 71; quoted in Huber, “Wie Julie Andrews,” 413. 49. Bronwyn Jewell and Susan McKinnon, “The Commercial and Dream Landscape Cultures of Films,” in New Cultural Landscapes, ed. Maggie Roe and Ken Taylor (New York: Routledge, 2014), 111. 50. For a comprehensive overview of the literature on film tourism, see Sue Beeton, FilmInduced Tourism (Clevedon, UK: Channel View Publications, 2005); Anne Buchmann, Kevin Moore, and David Fisher, “Experiencing Film Tourism: Authenticity & Fellowship,” Annals of Tourism Research 37, no. 1 (January 2010): 229–48; David Crouch and Nina Lübbren, eds., Visual Culture and Tourism (New York: Berg, 2003); Im and Chon, “An Exploratory Study of Movie-Induced Tourism”; Bronwyn Jewell and Susan McKinnon, “The Commercial and Dream Landscape Cultures of Films”; Bronwyn Jewell and Susan McKinnon, “Movie Tourism—A New Form of Cultural Landscape?,” Journal of Travel and Tourism Marketing 24, no. 2–3 (2008): 153–62; Noelle O’Connor, Sheila Flanagan, and David Gilbert, “The Integration of Film-Induced Tourism and Destination Branding in Yorkshire, UK,” International Journal of Tourism Research 10, no. 5 (1 September 2008): 423–37. 51. Ning Wang, “Rethinking Authenticity in Tourism Experience,” Annals of Tourism Research 26, no. 2 (1 April 1999): 350. 52. Clifford, Routes, 84. 53. Ibid., 85. Clifford identifies such traditional viewpoints also in attempts to “repatriate” fieldwork into domestic contexts in the form of cultural critique. For a more detailed discussion of the “repatriation of anthropology,” see George E. Marcus and Michael M. J. Fischer, Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 111. 54. For sustained discussions of the role of home in cultural, sociological, and spatial contexts, see Caren Kaplan, Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourses of Displacement (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996); Doreen B. Massey, Space, Place, and Gender (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994); Linda McDowell, Gender, Identity and Place: Understanding Feminist Geographies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999). 55. Amanda Coffey, The Ethnographic Self: Fieldwork and the Representation of Identity (London: SAGE, 1999), 1. 56. Wang, “Rethinking Authenticity in Tourism Experience,” 350. While I regard Wang’s

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larger and highly nuanced theorizations of authenticity as not always productive, the notion of “existential authenticity” provides a helpful conceptual shorthand for thinking through a range of legitimate tourist experiences that are not or only vaguely related to any kind of objective reality. Buchmann et al. “Experiencing Film Tourism,” 240. McDowell, Gender, Identity and Place, 4. Per the request of my conversation partners, I am protecting their privacy by using only initials. The tensions between licensed general tour guides and boutique operators offering Sound of Music tours have a long history. The designation Österreichischer Fremdenführer (Austrian Tour Guide) is only given to guides who have gone through a certification process that includes taking university-level courses. Specified tours, such as the Sound of Music tours, are usually exempted from this requirement under the provision that they refrain from general explanations of architecture and history. A discussion of the role of the Dirndl and other forms of local costume in the context of Austrian national identity and in relation to the Salzburg Festival and Sound of Music tourism will follow later in this section. The tour companies’ use of still images of Maria amidst alpine meadows draws on the stereotypical conflation of femininity with innocence. In the context of Austrian national identity, this style of advertising perpetuates a nineteenth- and twentieth-century practice of portraying Austria as a feminized space. As I discussed in previous chapters, this perspective shaped a segment of historiography after World War II, when historians argued that the passive feminized territory of Austria has always suffered violation from outside invaders and, therefore, could not be considered an aggressor. Similar historical images helped the country’s realignment with the West during the Cold War. See Siegfried Mattl, “Geschlecht und Volkscharakter: Austria Engendered,” Österreichische Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaften 7, no. 4 (1996): 511. See especially Kaplan’s chapter “Feminist Politics of Location.” Questions of Travel, 143–87. James Clifford, “Notes on Theory and Travel,” Inscriptions 5 (1989): 177–88, 179; emphasis in original. Tourists’ frequent questions about this particular period of Austrian history do not contradict my earlier discussion of how tourist interest in the Sound of Music tours cannot solely be explained by a desire to learn more about Austrian history. While tourists might not think about history when planning their vacation and the Sound of Music tour, their encounter with certain places and monuments as well as the tour guides’ narratives usually prompt such questions once the Sound of Music tours are underway. “Ich sag’ ihnen [den Amerikanern] dann immer: ‘Schau mal wer da spricht! Ihr habt Atombomben abgeworfen; ihr wart in Vietnam, das ist auch eine Art Holocaust [sic]. Zahlt ihr Wiedergutmachung? Wir haben unsere Schuld bezahlt!’ Normalerweise sind sie dann ruhig.” Herzfeld, Cultural Intimacy, 9. Walter Manoschek, “FPÖ, ÖVP, and Austria’s Nazi Past,” in The Haider Phenomenon in Austria, ed. Ruth Wodak and Anton Pelinka (London: Transaction Publishers, 2009), 3–4. For a detailed discussion of the FPÖ’s and Jörg Haider’s role in the debates about Austria’s National Socialist past see the essays in Ruth Wodak and Anton Pelinka, eds., The Haider Phenomenon in Austria (London: Transaction Publishers, 2009).

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69. For a discussion of the sanctions from a historical and political perspective, see Tony Judt, “Tale from the Vienna Woods,” The New York Review of Books, 23 March 2000, http:// www.nybooks.com/articles/2000/03/23/tale-from-the-vienna-woods/. 70. “The Ring” is a reference to Richard Wagner’s cycle of four operas, The Ring of the Nibelung. 71. Christian Strasser, “The Sounds of Humbug,” in The Sound of Music zwischen Mythos und Marketing, ed. Ulrike Kammerhofer-Aggermann and Alexander G. Keul (Salzburg: Salzburger Landesinstitut für Volkskunde, 2000), 456. 72. Judt, “Tale from the Vienna Woods.” 73. Im and Chon, “An Exploratory Study of Movie-Induced Tourism.” 74. Robert Haimerl, “Eine ideale Landschaft,” Salzburger Nachrichten, 24 September 2002. 75. “Bei vielen hat das Thema in der Anfangsphase ein spöttisches Lächeln hervorgerufen: The Sound of Music ein Thema der Kulturwissenschaften? Ein Thema vielleicht für begeisterte Cineasten, für Marktforscher, für die Tourismusbranche, für die Yellow Press—aber für uns?” Ulrike Kammerhofer-Aggermann, “Vorwort,” in The Sound of Music zwischen Mythos und Marketing (Salzburg: Salzburger Landesinstitut für Volkskunde, 2000), 7. 76. Bhabha, “Introduction,” 2–3. 77. Huber, “Wie Julie Andrews.” 78. Lindorfer, “Sound of Music.” 79. Buchmann et al., “Experiencing Film Tourism,” 240. 80. For an overview how the tour itineraries evolved over time, see Stefan Herzl, “‘Where Is the Gazebo . . .?’: Die Entstehung der Sound of Music-Tour,” in The Sound of Music zwischen Mythos und Marketing, ed. Ulrike Kammerhofer-Aggermann and Alexander Keul (Salzburg: Salzburger Landesinstitut für Volkskunde, 2000), 307–16. 81. For more on the connection between sublime landscape experiences and the multisensory experience of modern tourism, see Claudia Bell and John Lyall, “The Accelerated Sublime: Thrill-Seeking Adventure Heroes in the Commodified Landscape,” in Tourism: Between Place and Performance, ed. Simon Coleman and Mike Crang (New York: Berghahn Books, 2002), 21–37. 82. Chris Rojek, “Indexing, Dragging and the Social Construction of Tourist Sights,” in Touring Cultures: Transformations of Travel and Theory, ed. Chris Rojek and John Urry (New York: Routledge, 2000), 55. 83. Buchmann et al., “Experiencing Film Tourism,” 240. 84. Rojek, “Indexing, Dragging and the Social Construction of Tourist Sights,” 62. For an indepth analysis of how places are actually created by signs, see the cult around Wall Drug in South Dakota, analyzed in Eve Meltzer, “Performing Place: A Hyperbolic Drugstore in Wall, South Dakota,” in Tourism: Between Place and Performance, ed. Simon Coleman and Mike Crang (New York: Berghahn Books, 2002), 160–75. For a discussion of tourist practices and their relation to consumerism and kitsch, see Marita Sturken, Tourists of History: Memory, Kitsch, and Consumerism from Oklahoma City to Ground Zero (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007). 85. Rojek, “Indexing, Dragging and the Social Construction of Tourist Sights,” 54. 86. For a typical example, see The Sound of Music Tour 2015, 2015, https://youtu.be/Atjun WbxwoY. 87. Writing before the current prevalence of smartphones and social media platforms, Bell and Lyall argue that soon one might not even have to photograph oneself on location to generate that effect, because one’s picture can be photoshopped into any desired background and disseminated around the globe immediately. I do not want to dismiss the

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awe-inspiring speed and global reach of current social media platforms, but it also seems that these are Internet-based variations of practices dating back to the invention of photography, and perhaps even portrait painting, which allowed people to have themselves represented in different postures, environments, and contexts. Claudia Bell and John Lyall, “‘I Was Here:’ Pixilated Evidence,” in The Media & The Tourist Imagination: Converging Cultures, ed. David Crouch, Rhona Jackson, and Felix Thompson (New York: Routledge, 2005), 139. Robert Hoetink, “The Sound of Music” Remake on Film-Locations in Salzburg, n.d., retrieved 11 November 2019 from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k68cUNZG0nw. Rojek, “Indexing, Dragging and the Social Construction of Tourist Sights,” 62. Ibid., 57. Haimerl, “Eine ideale Landschaft.” Appadurai, Modernity, 33. Hirsch, The Sound of Music, 75. Massey, Space, 120. Rathkolb, Paradoxical Republic, 5. Ibid. Bhabha, “Introduction,” 2. This phrase is taken from one of several German–English signs from the public exhibition Salzburgization: Hinter den Kulissen, which addressed the role of tourism through an exhibit in one of Salzburg’s most frequent locations, the footbridge Makartsteg across the Salzach River. Thomas Stini and Margot Deerenberg, Salzburgization: Hinter den Kulissen, Open Air Art Installation, 3 July 2013. Umberto Eco and Jean Baudrillard are the two critics most closely linked with the term hyperreality as a descriptor of the US culture industry and theme-park tourism. See especially Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994); Umberto Eco, Travels in Hyperreality (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1986). Baudrillard, Simulacra, 6. Ibid., 20; italics in original. Ibid., 22. “Salzburg Sightseeing Tours.” Graml, “The Hills,” 198. Ibid., 199. Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 62. “The Trick Fountains,” Schloss Hellbrunn, retrieved 27 November 2017 from https:// www.hellbrunn.at/en/the-trick-fountains/. Strasser, “The Sound of Music,” 287; Herzl, “‘Where Is,’” 311. Salzburger Nachrichten, 26 July 1991, 15; quoted in Strasser, “The Sound of Music,” 287. Sam Binkley, “Kitsch as a Repetitive System: A Problem for the Theory of Taste Hierarchy,” Journal of Material Culture 5, no. 2 (2000): 135–36. Bhabha, Homi K. “DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation,” in Nation and Narration, ed. Homi K. Bhabha (New York: Routledge, 1990), 297. Hobsbawm, “Introduction.” Strasser, “The Sound of Music,” 279.

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114. Bhabha, “DissemiNation,” 297, emphasis in original. 115. Hanns Haas, Robert Hoffmann, and Kurt Luger, eds., Weltbühne und Naturkulisse: Zwei Jahrhunderte Salzburg-Tourismus (Salzburg: Anton Pustet, 1994). 116. Robert Hoffmann, Mythos Salzburg (Salzburg: Anton Pustet, 2002), 11; 46. 117. The first Salzburg performance of the musical followed the Rodgers/Hammerstein version, translated into German by Heiko Wohlgemuth and Kevin Schröder. Earlier German language performances premiered in Hildesheim, Germany, in 1982, and at the Volksoper in Vienna, Austria, in 2005. For more information, see the entry “The Sound of Music,” in Wikipedia, 23 March 2019, https://de.wikipedia.org/w/index .php?title=The_Sound_of_Music&oldid=186862047. 118. Lutz Hochstraate, “‘A Few of My Favorite Things:’ Über eine mögliche Aufführung von The Sound of Music in Salzburg,” in The Sound of Music zwischen Mythos und Marketing, ed. Ulrike Kammerhofer-Aggermann and Alexander G. Keul (Salzburg: Salzburger Landesinstitut für Volkskunde, 2000), 264. 119. In the decade between Hochstraate’s musings and the realization of the Salzburg production, the musical saw its first Austrian performance at the Viennese Volksoper. The reviews were “mixed at best,” as the theater critic of The New York Times described in a review of the performance and the reaction of the Viennese press: “The critic of Die Presse, one of Austria’s serious national daily papers, called it a ‘boring two and a half hours.’ Another paper, Kurier, complained that one of the show’s signature numbers, ‘Edelweiss,’ was ‘an insult to Austrian musical creation.’” Richard Bernstein, “Vienna Journal: The Hills Are Alive with the Sound of Remembrance,” New York Times, 24 March 2005, late ed. edition, sec. A. 120. “Salzburg hat ‘sein’ Musical ins Herz geschlossen wie einen verlorenen Sohn. Den hat nicht nur diese Stadt, sondern ganz Österreich und der deutschsprachige Raum ein halbes Jahrhundert ignoriert und als Kitsch abgetan. . . . Aber jetzt sind die Berührungsängste überwunden, die Welt ist wieder in Ordnung und die Familie Trapp ist endlich zu Hause.” “The Sound of Music—Im Edelweiß-Rausch,” News.At, retrieved 26 September 2014, http://www.news.at/a/the-sound-music-im-edelweiss-rausch-310241. 121. Hochstraate, “A Few,” 264. The opening scene of the Salzburg production evokes the Reibpartien (scrubbing crews), as the forced street-cleaning by Jewish Austrians after the annexation in 1938 was labeled. The program brochure offers a brief explanation of the historical background as well as a photographic reproduction of Alfred Hrdlicka’s 1985 sculpture, Der straßenwaschende Jude (The street-washing Jew). “The Sound of Music. Programmheft” (Salzburger Landestheater, n.d.). 122. “ohne verkrampft zeitgeschichtliche Bilder zu strapazieren—aber auch, ohne darauf zu verzichten: Das ‘Alleluja’ und ‘Gaudeamus Domino’ der Nonnen entschwindet in den Hintergrund, während vorne Juden die Straße schrubben müssen.” Reinhard Kriechbaum, “The Sound of Music in Salzburg: Edelweiß—Sei der Heimat ein Segen,” Oberösterreichische Nachrichten, 25 October 2011, sec. Kultur, http://www.nachrichten.at/nachrichten/kultur/ The-Sound-of-Music-in-Salzburg-Edelweiss-sei-der-Heimat-ein-Segen;art16,745481. 123. HitSquad Interview. The Sound of Music in Salzburg mit Wietske van Tongeren und Uwe Kröger, 2012, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KU-k1uCqygc&feature=youtu be_gdata_player. 124. “Wenn man sich den Film anschaut, ist es ja furchtbar, was die da anhaben. Ihr habt ja sehr schöne Originaltrachten an, und das schaut man sich als Österreicher an und sagt: ja, das passt.” Ibid.

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125. In the Salzburg production, the line “Me, a name I call myself ” in the Do Re Mi song is translated as “Mi, heißt mich in Österreich” (Mi, means myself in Austrian). Arguably a small detail, the insertion of this dialect word is significant for establishing a connection between Austrian audiences and a musical that has been considered foreign for such a long time. 126. “Programmheft.” The visual appeal of the Trachten is also used for the program brochure, whose cover consists of a full-page picture of the Trapp family characters in Tracht on a green meadow with the iconic silhouette of the Untersberg mountain in the background. Ibid. 127. Personal conversations with audience members who identified themselves as Salzburgers and Austrians during an intermission of a performance of The Sound of Music at the Salzburg Landestheater on 10 January 2015. 128. “wird nicht länger als Diktat, sondern als zeitliche begrenzte Selbstverpflichtung verstanden und praktiziert.” Gabriele Mentges, “Uniform—Kostüm—Maskerade: Einführende Überlegungen,” in Uniformierungen in Bewegung: Vestimentäre Praktiken zwischen Vereinheitlichung, Kostümierung und Maskerade, ed. Gabriele Mentges, Dagmar NeulandKitzerow, and Birgit Richard (Berlin: Waxmann, 2007), 18. See also Christina Köck, “Konstruierte Heimat: Grenzziehung durch Tracht am Beispiel von Martin Dušeks Dokumentarfilm mein Kroj,” Revue d’Allemagne et des Pays de Langue Allemande 47, no. 2 (July 2015): 482. 129. HitSquad Interview. 130. Hobsbawm, “Introduction,” 1. 131. Ulrike Kammerhofer-Aggermann, “Von der Trachtenmode zur heiligen vererbten Vätertracht,” in Ein ewiges Dennoch: 125 Jahre Juden in Salzburg, ed. Marko M. Feingold (Vienna: Böhlau, 1993), 188. 132. Köck, “Konstruierte Heimat: Grenzziehung durch Tracht am Beispiel von Martin Dušeks Dokumentarfilm mein Kroj,” 478. 133. Eric Hobsbawm, “Mass-Producing Traditions: Europe, 1870–1914,” in The Invention of Tradition, ed. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (London: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 307. 134. Ulrike Kammerhofer-Aggermann, “Salzburger Tracht zwischen Entdeckung und Erfindung,” in Trachten nicht für Jedermann?: Heimatideologie und Festspieltourismus dargestellt am Kleidungsverhalten in Salzburg zwischen 1920 und 1938, ed. Ulrike KammerhoferAggermann, Alma Scope, and Walburga Haas (Salzburg: Salzburger Landesinstitut für Volkskunde, 1993), 9–24. 135. “denen keine Mühe zu schwer ward, die Pflicht der idealen Aufklärung in der edlen Trachtensache zu erfüllen und dem Alltagsmenschen zugänglich zu machen.” GebirgsTrachten-Zeitung, 2.2 (1913): 11; quoted in Kammerhofer-Aggermann, “Trachtenmode,” 177. 136. Ibid., 182. 137. Ibid., 178; 182–83. 138. Ibid., 187. 139. Michael P. Steinberg, The Meaning of the Salzburg Festival: Austria as Theater and Ideology, 1890–1938 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), xiv. 140. Robert Hoffmann, “Mozart and the Image of Salzburg,” in Satchmo Meets Amadeus, ed. Reinhold Wagnleitner (Innsbruck: Studienverlag, 2006), 114. 141. Rudolf Kommer, personal assistant of festival director Max Reinhardt, sometimes ar-

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ranged the wardrobe changes for the VIPs before they even arrived in Salzburg: “Consequently, Lillian Gish, Lady Diana Manners, Rosamund Pinchot and many others walked through Salzburg as ‘Dirndeln’ [sic] only hours after their arrival” (So gingen Lillian Gish, Lady Diana Manners, Rosamund Pinchot und zahllose andere schon wenige Stunden nach ihrer Ankunft als ‘Dirndeln’ durch die Stadt). Gusti Adler, “. . . aber vergessen Sie nicht die chinesischen Nachtigallen: Erinnerungen an Max Reinhardt, Salzburg: n.p., 1980, 195; quoted in Ulrike Kammerhofer-Aggermann, “Kulturmetropole Salzburg: Der Festspieltourismus der Zwischenkriegszeit,” in Weltbühne und Naturkulisse: Zwei Jahrhunderte Salzburg-Tourismus, ed. Hanns Haas, Robert Hoffmann, and Kurt Luger (Salzburg: Anton Pustet, 1994), 117. Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday: An Autobiography (New York: The Viking Press, 1943), 347. See Kammerhofer-Aggermann, “Kulturmetropole,” 117; 119n40. For detailed discussions of the various ways in which the Festspiele and the Trachtenmode became linked, see Alma Scope, “Das Henndorfer Dirndl: Zur Entstehung eines Mythos,” in Trachten nicht für Jedermann?: Heimatideologie und Festspieltourismus dargestellt am Kleidungsverhalten in Salzburg zwischen 1920 und 1938, ed. Ulrike Kammerhofer-Aggermann, Alma Scope, and Walburga Haas, (Salzburg: Salzburger Landesinstitut für Volkskunde, 1993), 83–132; Alma Scope, “Das Sporthaus Lanz und seine Bedeutung,” in Trachten nicht für Jedermann?: Heimatideologie und Festspieltourismus dargestellt am Kleidungsverhalten in Salzburg zwischen 1920 und 1938, ed. Ulrike Kammerhofer-Aggermann, Alma Scope, and Walburga Haas (Salzburg: Salzburger Landesinstitut für Volkskunde, 1993), 211–40; Alma Scope, “Bühnen der ‘Volkstümlichkeit:’ Die Bedeutung Salzburgs und der Festspiele für die Trachtenmode,” in Trachten nicht für Jedermann?: Heimatideologie und Festspieltourismus dargestellt am Kleidungsverhalten in Salzburg zwischen 1920 und 1938, ed. Ulrike Kammerhofer-Aggermann, Alma Scope, and Walburga Haas (Salzburg: Salzburger Landesinstitut für Volkskunde, 1993), 241–60. Steinberg, Meaning, 117. Kammerhofer-Aggermann, “Trachtenmode,” 187. Ibid., 186. See Ulrike Kammerhofer-Aggermann, “Dirndl, Lederhose und Sommerfrischenidylle,” in Der Geschmack der Vergänglichkeit: Jüdische Sommerfrische in Salzburg, ed. Robert Kriechbaumer (Vienna: Böhlau, 2002), 318–34. Insightful discussions of anti-Semitism in the context of pre-World War II tourism can be found in Thomas Hellmuth, “Das Salzkammergut,” in Memoriae Austriae II: Bauten, Orte, Regionen, ed. Emil Brix, Ernst Bruckmüller, and Hannes Stekl (Vienna: Verlag für Geschichte und Politik, 2005), 336–69; Hanns Haas, “Der Traum vom Dazugehören—Juden auf Sommerfrische,” in Der Geschmack der Vergänglichkeit: Jüdische Sommerfrische in Salzburg, ed. Robert Kriechbaumer (Vienna: Böhlau, 2002), 41–58; Günther Fellner, “Judenfreundlichkeit, Judenfeindlichkeit: Spielarten in einem Fremdenverkehrsland,” in Der Geschmack der Vergänglichkeit: Jüdische Sommerfrische in Salzburg, ed. Robert Kriechbaumer (Vienna: Böhlau, 2002), 59–126. “Die Verfügung wird zweifellos von allen Kreisen begrüßt werden, die es seit langem hinnehmen hatten müssen, daß z.B. das Dirndl—man erinnere sich nur an Bad Ischl früherer Jahre!—geradezu als ein jüdisches Nationalkostüm erschien.” Kuno Brandauer, “Juden und Trachten,” Gebirgs-Trachten-Zeitung 20.7 (1938): 7, quoted in KammerhoferAggermann, “Trachtenmode,” 189.

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149. While his songs are geared to a younger audience, his frequent appearance in Tracht has also made him a popular figure among older Austrian audiences. He even has his own Trachtenkollektion: https://www.trachten-onlineshop.at/andreas-gabalier.html. In March 2019, a Freedom Party (FPÖ) member of the regional parliament of Styria rejected the accusation by a member of the Styrian Social Democratic Party (SPÖ) who argued that an FPÖ marketing image showing women in Dirndl with a deep neckline was sexist. Referring to the SPÖ critic’s Croatian family background, the FPÖ representative declared “I won’t have a Yugoslav steal my Dirndl” (Das Dirndl lass ich mir auch von einer Jugoslawin nicht schlecht reden). The criticized SPÖ representative responded on Twitter with a photo of herself in a Dirndl and the statement: “Well, Helga, I won’t have it stolen from me by the FPÖE_Steiermark (Well [sic], Helga, ich lasse es mir von der FPÖE_Steiermark nicht wegnehmen). “Unser Dirndl lass ich mir auch von einer Jugoslawin nicht schlecht machen,” profil.at, 15 March 2019, https://www.profil.at/oesterreich/ dirndl-helga-kuegerl-10684513. 150. Bhabha, “DissemiNation,” 297. 151. Hoffmann, Mythos, 57. 152. “Das Salzburger Land ist das Herz vom Herzen Europas. Es liegt halbwegs zwischen der Schweiz und den slawischen Ländern, halbwegs zwischen dem nördlichen Deutschland und dem lombardischen Italien; es liegt in der Mitte zwischen Süd und Nord, zwischen Berg und Ebene, zwischen dem Heroischen und dem Idyllischen; Salzburg liegt als Bauwerk zwischen dem Städtischen und dem Ländlichen, dem Uralten und dem Neuzeitlichen, dem barocken Fürstlichen und dem lieblich, ewig Bäuerlichen. Mozart ist der Ausdruck von alledem.” Hugo von Hofmannsthal, “Festspiele in Salzburg,” in Gesammelte Werke in Einzelausgaben: Prosa IV, ed. Herbert Steiner (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 1955), 92. 153. Steinberg, Meaning, 19, 84. 154. Lorenz Hübner, Reise durch das Erzstift Salzburg zum Unterricht und Vergnügen, Nebst Studenzeiger und Strassenkarte (Salzburg, 1796), 46, quoted in Hoffmann, Mythos, 14. 155. See my earlier discussion of this quote and also Robert Hoffmann, “Die Entstehung einer Legende—Alexander von Humboldts angeblicher Ausspruch über Salzburg,” retrieved 20 August 2014 from http://bbaw.opus.kobv.de/volltexte/2006/94/. 156. Robert Hoffmann, “Die Romantiker ‘entdecken’ Salzburg,” in Weltbühne und Naturkulisse: Zwei Jahrhunderte Salzburg-Tourismus, ed. Hanns Haas, Robert Hoffmann, and Kurt Luger (Salzburg: Anton Pustet, 1994), 16–21. 157. Hoffmann, Mythos, 13. 158. “Vereinigungspunkt aller Naturschönheiten, die die üppigste Phantasie sich auf dem Continente wünschen kann.” Joseph August Schultes, Reise durch Salzburg und Berchtesgaden (Salzburg: J.V. Degen, 1804), 226; quoted in Hoffmann, Mythos, 17. 159. In 1803, Napoleon’s occupation of most of the German-speaking parts of the Holy Roman Empire terminated the rule of the last Catholic archbishop, Hieronymous Graf von Colloredo. In the course of the Napoleonic wars, Salzburg moved back and forth between Habsburg and Bavarian rule, until it was finally annexed by the Habsburg Empire in 1816. The “Salzburger Land,” as the region was then called, was under the rule of the Upper Austrian capital of Linz, until Salzburg’s status as capital of the Duchy of Salzburg was restored in 1850. 160. Hoffmann, Mythos, 39. 161. Ibid., 13–19.

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162. “Franzosen, Britten, Russen, Deutsche fanden sich [von der Umgebung] entzückt und weilten Monate, und täglich mit neuem Entzücken, in diesen paradiesischen, stets mit verjüngtem Grün belebten, gut kultivierten Gefilden.” Friedrich Franz Joseph Spaur (Graf ), Spaziergänge in den Umgebungen von Salzburg (Salzburg: Franz Xaver Oberer, 1834), 2.; quoted in Hoffmann, Mythos, 23. 163. Hoffmann, “Mozart,” 112. 164. Gernot Gruber, Mozart und die Nachwelt (Salzburg: Piper, 1987), 165–66.; quoted in Hoffmann, “Mozart,” 112. 165. Hoffmann, “Mozart,” 112. 166. Hoffmann, Mythos, 51–52. 167. Ibid., 35. 168. For a discussion of the debates around Mozart’s roles as a “German” or “Austrian” icon before, during, and after National Socialism, see Oliver Rathkolb, “Continuity and Discontinuity in Mozart’s Exploitation by Nazi-German and Post-War Austrian Cultural Policies: 1938–1945, 1945–1955,” in Satchmo Meets Amadeus, ed. Reinhold Wagnleitner (Innsbruck: Studienverlag, 2006), 71–87. 169. Ludwig Mielichhofer, Das Mozart-Denkmal zu Salzburg und dessen Enthüllungs-Feier im September 1842 (Salzburg: Mayr’sche Buchhandlung, 1843), 18, 31.; quoted in Hoffmann, Mythos, 51. 170. Hoffmann, “Mozart,” 113. 171. Kurt Luger, “Fun-Factory Salzburg: Sound of Music, Salzburg Festival, and Tourism,” in Satchmo Meets Armstrong, ed. Reinhold Wagnleitner (Innsbruck: Studienverlag, 2006), 121. 172. Ibid., 126. 173. Gerhard Plasser, “Das Salzburg-Panorama auf Europa Reise,” in Das Salzburg-Panorama von Johann Michael Sattler, ed. Erich Marx and Peter Laub (Salzburg: Salzburger Museum Carolino Augusteum, 2005), 1:58. 174. “Nun, Hochverehrte! Ist das Bild Ihrer Vaterstadt und Ihrer Umgebung in seine Heimat unversehrt und glorreich zurückgekehrt—das Bild der Stadt und der Landschaft [welche von vielen Reisenden] als der schönste Punkt der Erde geschildert wird; ein wahres Paradies, in welchem gemütlich zu wandern Sie so glücklich sind und darum von Millionen beneidet warden.” Amts- und Intelligenz-Blatt zur kaiserl. Königl. Privil. Salzburger Zeitung, 1839, 947, 72 v. 9.9; quoted in Hoffmann, Mythos, 27. 175. Luger, “Fun-Factory,” 126. 176. Nikolaus Schaffer, “An den Ursprüngen der Schaulust,” in Das Salzburg-Panorama von Johann Michael Sattler, ed. Erich Marx and Peter Laub (Salzburg: Salzburger Museum Carolino Augusteum, 2005), 8–9. 177. Ibid., 9. 178. Erkki Huhtamo, Illusions in Motion : A Media Archaeology of the Moving Panorama and Related Spectacles (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013), 5. 179. Schaffer, “Schaulust,” 9. 180. John Urry and Jonas Larsen, The Tourist Gaze 3.0 (London: SAGE Publications, 2011), 14. 181. Ibid. 182. Clifford Geertz, “Making Experiences, Authoring Selves,” in The Anthropology of Experience, ed. Victor W. Turner and Edward M. Bruner (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986), 380.

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Donahue, William Collins. “‘Bless My Homeland Forever’: Teaching Austria and the Holocaust.” Die Unterrichtspraxis / Teaching German 29, no. 2 (1996): 188–200. Eco, Umberto. Travels in Hyperreality. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1986. Fellner, Günther. “Judenfreundlichkeit, Judenfeindlichkeit: Spielarten in einem Fremdenverkehrsland.” In Der Geschmack der Vergänglichkeit: Jüdische Sommerfrische in Salzburg, edited by Robert Kriechbaumer, 59–126. Vienna: Böhlau, 2002. Geertz, Clifford. “Making Experiences, Authoring Selves.” In The Anthropology of Experience, edited by Victor W. Turner and Edward M. Bruner, 373–80. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986. Gorsky, Martin. “‘Raindrops on Roses’: The Sound of Music and the Political Psyche of the Sixties.” The Sixties 6, no. 2 (2013): 199–224. Graml, Gundolf. “‘The Hills Are Alive . . .’: Sound of Music Tourism and the Performative Construction of Places.” Women in German Yearbook: Feminist Studies in German Literature & Culture 21, no. 1 (2005): 192–214. ———. “(Re)Mapping the Nation: Sound of Music Tourism and National Identity in Austria, ca 2000 CE.” Tourist Studies 4, no. 2 (August 1, 2004): 137–59. Haas, Hanns. “Der Traum vom Dazugehören—Juden auf Sommerfrische.” In Der Geschmack der Vergänglichkeit: Jüdische Sommerfrische in Salzburg, edited by Robert Kriechbaumer, 41–58. Vienna: Böhlau, 2002. Haas, Hanns, Robert Hoffmann, and Kurt Luger, eds. Weltbühne und Naturkulisse: Zwei Jahrhunderte Salzburg-Tourismus. Salzburg: Anton Pustet, 1994. Haimerl, Robert. “Eine ideale Landschaft.” Salzburger Nachrichten, 24 September 2002. Hall, Stuart. “New Ethnicities.” In Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, edited by David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen, 441–49. New York: Routledge, 1996. Hanisch, Ernst. “Tourismus und sozialer Wandel.” In Salzburg: Zwischen Globalisierung und Goldhaube, edited by Ernst Hanisch and Robert Kriechbaumer, 168–209. Vienna: Böhlau Verlag, 1995. Harman, Carter. “Singers All. Rev. of The Story of the Trapp Family Singers, by Maria Augusta Trapp.” The New York Times, 20 November 1949. Hellmuth, Thomas. “Das Salzkammergut.” In Memoriae Austriae II: Bauten, Orte, Regionen, edited by Emil Brix, Ernst Bruckmüller, and Hannes Stekl, 336–69. Vienna: Verlag für Geschichte und Politik, 2005. Herzfeld, Michael. Cultural Intimacy: Social Poetics in the Nation-State. New York: Routledge, 1997. Herzl, Stefan. “‘Where Is the Gazebo. . .?’: Die Entstehung der ‘Sound of Music-Tour.’” In The Sound of Music zwischen Mythos und Marketing, edited by Ulrike Kammerhofer-Aggermann and Alexander Keul, 307–16. Salzburg: Salzburger Landesinstitut für Volkskunde, 2000. Hirsch, Julia. “The Sound of Music”: The Making of America’s Favorite Movie. Chicago: Contemporary Books, 1993. HitSquad Interview. The Sound of Music in Salzburg mit Wietske van Tongeren und Uwe Kröger, 2012. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KU-k1uCqygc&feature=youtube_gdata_player. Hobsbawm, Eric. “Introduction: Inventing Traditions.” In The Invention of Tradition, edited by Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, 1–14. London: Cambridge University Press, 1983. ———. “Mass-Producing Traditions: Europe, 1870–1914.” In The Invention of Tradition, edited by Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, 263–308. London: Cambridge University Press, 1983.

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Hochstraate, Lutz. “‘A Few of My Favorite Things:’ Über eine mögliche Aufführung von ‘The Sound of Music’ in Salzburg.” In The Sound of Music zwischen Mythos und Marketing, edited by Ulrike Kammerhofer-Aggermann and Alexander G. Keul, 263–65. Salzburg: Salzburger Landesinstitut für Volkskunde, 2000. Hoetink, Robert. “The Sound of Music” Remake on Film-Locations in Salzburg, n.d. Retrieved 11 November 2019 from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k68cUNZG0nw. Hoffmann, Robert. “Die Entstehung einer Legende—Alexander von Humboldts angeblicher Ausspruch über Salzburg.” Retrieved 20 August 2014 from http://bbaw.opus.kobv.de/ volltexte/2006/94/. ———. “Die Romantiker ‘entdecken’ Salzburg.” In Weltbühne und Naturkulisse: Zwei Jahrhunderte Salzburg-Tourismus, edited by Hanns Haas, Robert Hoffmann, and Kurt Luger, 16–21. Salzburg: Anton Pustet, 1994. ———. “Mozart and the Image of Salzburg.” In Satchmo Meets Amadeus, edited by Reinhold Wagnleitner, 111–18. Innsbruck: Studienverlag, 2006. ———. Mythos Salzburg. Salzburg: Anton Pustet, 2002. Hofmannsthal, Hugo von. “Festspiele in Salzburg.” In Gesammelte Werke in Einzelausgaben: Prosa IV, edited by Herbert Steiner, 88–94. Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 1955. Huber, Thomas. “Wie Julie Andrews Mozart verdrängte: Hintergründe und Auswirkungen des US-Tourismus in Salzburg.” In The Sound of Music zwischen Mythos und Marketing, edited by Ulrike Kammerhofer-Aggermann and Alexander Keul, 401–24. Salzburg: Salzburger Landesinstitut für Volkskunde, 2000. Huhtamo, Erkki. Illusions in Motion : A Media Archaeology of the Moving Panorama and Related Spectacles. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013. Im, Holly Hyunjung, and Kaye Chon. “An Exploratory Study of Movie-Induced Tourism: A Case of the Movie The Sound of Music and Its Locations in Salzburg, Austria.” Journal of Travel and Tourism Marketing 24, no. 2–3 (2008): 229–38. Jewell, Bronwyn, and Susan McKinnon. “The Commercial and Dream Landscape Cultures of Films.” In New Cultural Landscapes, edited by Maggie Roe and Ken Taylor, 99–116. New York: Routledge, 2014. ———. “Movie Tourism—A New Form of Cultural Landscape?” Journal of Travel and Tourism Marketing 24, no. 2–3 (2008): 153–62. Judt, Tony. “Tale from the Vienna Woods.” The New York Review of Books, 23 March 2000. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2000/03/23/tale-from-the-vienna-woods/. Kammerhofer-Aggermann, Ulrike. “Dirndl, Lederhose und Sommerfrischenidylle.” In Der Geschmack der Vergänglichkeit: Jüdische Sommerfrische in Salzburg, edited by Robert Kriechbaumer, 318–34. Vienna: Böhlau, 2002. ———. “Kulturmetropole Salzburg: Der Festspieltourismus der Zwischenkriegszeit.” In Weltbühne und Naturkulisse: Zwei Jahrhunderte Salzburg-Tourismus, edited by Hanns Haas, Robert Hoffmann, and Kurt Luger, 113–19. Salzburg: Anton Pustet, 1994. ———. “Salzburger Tracht zwischen Entdeckung und Erfindung.” In Trachten nicht für Jedermann?: Heimatideologie und Festspieltourismus dargestellt am Kleidungsverhalten in Salzburg zwischen 1920 und 1938, edited by Ulrike Kammerhofer-Aggermann, Alma Scope, and Walburga Haas, 9–24. Salzburg: Salzburger Landesinstitut für Volkskunde, 1993. ———. “Von der Trachtenmode zur heiligen vererbten Vätertracht.” In Ein ewiges Dennoch: 125 Jahre Juden in Salzburg, edited by Marko M. Feingold, 177–90. Vienna: Böhlau, 1993.

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———. “Vorwort.” In The Sound of Music zwischen Mythos und Marketing, 7–15. Salzburg: Salzburger Landesinstitut für Volkskunde, 2000. Kaplan, Caren. Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourses of Displacement. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996. Keul, Alexander G. “The Sound of Virtue: Über die paradoxe Mutter und den transatlantischen Blick.” In The Sound of Music zwischen Mythos und Marketing, edited by Ulrike Kammerhofer-Aggermann and Alexander G. Keul, 317–27. Salzburg: Salzburger Landesinstitut für Volkskunde, 2000. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara. Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Knapp, Raymond. “History, The Sound of Music, and Us.” American Music 22, no. 1 (April 2004): 133–44. Köck, Christina. “Konstruierte Heimat: Grenzziehung durch Tracht am Beispiel von Martin Dušeks Dokumentarfilm mein Kroj.” Revue d’Allemagne et des Pays de Langue Allemande 47, no. 2 (July 2015): 473–88. Kriechbaum, Reinhard. “The Sound of Music in Salzburg: Edelweiß—Sei der Heimat ein Segen.” Oberösterreichische Nachrichten, 25 October 2011, sec. Kultur. http://www.nach richten.at/nachrichten/kultur/The-Sound-of-Music-in-Salzburg-Edelweiss-sei-der-Heimatein-Segen;art16,745481. Lindorfer, Raffaela. “Sound of Music: ‘Erst die Trapps, dann Mozart.’” Online Newspaper. Kurier.At, 1 March 2015. https://kurier.at/chronik/oesterreich/sound-of-music-erst-dietrapps-dann-mozart/116.798.902. Luger, Kurt. “Fun-Factory Salzburg: Sound of Music, Salzburg Festival, and Tourism.” In Satchmo Meets Armstrong, edited by Reinhold Wagnleitner, 119–28. Innsbruck: Studienverlag, 2006. Manoschek, Walter. “FPÖ, ÖVP, and Austria’s Nazi Past.” In The Haider Phenomenon in Austria, edited by Ruth Wodak and Anton Pelinka, 3–15. London: Transaction Publishers, 2009. Marcus, George E., and Michael M. J. Fischer. Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Massey, Doreen B. Space, Place, and Gender. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994. Mattl, Siegfried. “Geschlecht und Volkscharakter: Austria Engendered.” Österreichische Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaften 7, no. 4 (1996): 499–515. McDowell, Linda. Gender, Identity and Place: Understanding Feminist Geographies. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. Meltzer, Eve. “Performing Place: A Hyperbolic Drugstore in Wall, South Dakota.” In Tourism: Between Place and Performance, edited by Simon Coleman and Mike Crang, 160–75. New York: Berghahn Books, 2002. Mentges, Gabriele. “Uniform—Kostüm—Maskerade: Einführende Überlegungen.” In Uniformierungen in Bewegung: Vestimentäre Praktiken zwischen Vereinheitlichung, Kostümierung und Maskerade, edited by Gabriele Mentges, Dagmar Neuland-Kitzerow, and Birgit Richard, 13–28. Berlin: Waxmann, 2007. Moltke, Johannes von. “Trapped in America: The Americanization of the Trapp-Familie, or ‘Papas Kino’ Revisited.” German Studies Review 19, no. 3 (1996): 455–78. O’Connor, Noelle, Sheila Flanagan, and David Gilbert. “The Integration of Film-Induced Tourism and Destination Branding in Yorkshire, UK.” International Journal of Tourism Research 10, no. 5 (1 September 2008): 423–37.

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Plasser, Gerhard. “Das Salzburg-Panorama auf Europa Reise.” In Das Salzburg-Panorama von Johann Michael Sattler, edited by Erich Marx and Peter Laub, 1:37–62. Salzburg: Salzburger Museum Carolino Augusteum, 2005. Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. Second Edition. New York: Routledge, 2008. Rathkolb, Oliver. “Continuity and Discontinuity in Mozart’s Exploitation by Nazi-German and Post-War Austrian Cultural Policies: 1938–1945, 1945–1955.” In Satchmo Meets Amadeus, edited by Reinhold Wagnleitner, 71–87. Innsbruck: Studienverlag, 2006. ———. The Paradoxical Republic: Austria 1945–2005. English language edition. New York: Berghahn Books, 2014. “Rev. of ‘The Story of the Trapp Family Singers.’” The Bookmark, December 1949. Rojek, Chris. “Indexing, Dragging and the Social Construction of Tourist Sights.” In Touring Cultures: Transformations of Travel and Theory, edited by Chris Rojek and John Urry. New York: Routledge, 2000. “Salzburg Sightseeing Tours.” Retrieved 24 September 2014 from http://www.salzburg-sightseeingtours.at/sound-of-music.php?lang=2. Schaffer, Nikolaus. “An den Ursprüngen der Schaulust.” In Das Salzburg-Panorama von Johann Michael Sattler, edited by Erich Marx and Peter Laub, 1:7–35. Salzburg: Salzburger Museum Carolino Augusteum, 2005. Scope, Alma. “Bühnen der ‘Volkstümlichkeit:’ Die Bedeutung Salzburgs und der Festspiele für die Trachtenmode.” In Trachten nicht für Jedermann?: Heimatideologie und Festspieltourismus dargestellt am Kleidungsverhalten in Salzburg zwischen 1920 und 1938, edited by Ulrike Kammerhofer-Aggermann, Alma Scope, and Walburga Haas, 241–60. Salzburg: Salzburger Landesinstitut für Volkskunde, 1993. ———. “Das Henndorfer Dirndl: Zur Entstehung eines Mythos.” In Trachten nicht für Jedermann?: Heimatideologie und Festspieltourismus dargestellt am Kleidungsverhalten in Salzburg zwischen 1920 und 1938, edited by Ulrike Kammerhofer-Aggermann, Alma Scope, and Walburga Haas, 83–132. Salzburg: Salzburger Landesinstitut für Volkskunde, 1993. ———. “Das Sporthaus Lanz und seine Bedeutung.” In Trachten nicht für Jedermann?: Heimatideologie und Festspieltourismus dargestellt am Kleidungsverhalten in Salzburg zwischen 1920 und 1938, edited by Ulrike Kammerhofer-Aggermann, Alma Scope, and Walburga Haas, 211–40. Salzburg: Salzburger Landesinstitut für Volkskunde, 1993. “Sound of Music—Salzburg Highlights—Salzburg—Panorama Tours.” Retrieved 25 September 2014 from http://www.panoramatours.com/en/salzburg/salzburg-highlights/sound-ofmusic/. “Sound of Music Tour—Bob’s Special Tours.” Retrieved 11 November 2017 from http://www .bobstours.com/som.php. Starkman, Ruth A. “American Imperialism or Local Protectionism? The Sound of Music (1965) Fails in Germany and Austria.” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 20, no. 1 (2000): 63–78. Steinberg, Michael P. The Meaning of the Salzburg Festival: Austria as Theater and Ideology, 1890–1938. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000. Steininger, Rolf. Austria, Germany and the Cold War: From the Anschluss to the State Treaty, 1938–1955. New York: Berghahn Books, 2008. Stini, Thomas, and Margot Deerenberg. Salzburgization: Hinter den Kulissen. Open Air Art Installation, 3 July 2013.

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Strasser, Christian. “The Sound of Music—Ein unbekannter Welterfolg.” In The Sound of Music zwischen Mythos und Marketing, edited by Ulrike Kammerhofer-Aggermann and Alexander Keul, 267–95. Salzburg: Salzburger Landesinstitut für Volkskunde, 2000. ———. “The Sounds of Humbug.” In The Sound of Music zwischen Mythos und Marketing, edited by Ulrike Kammerhofer-Aggermann and Alexander G. Keul, 455–56. Salzburg: Salzburger Landesinstitut für Volkskunde, 2000. Sturken, Marita. Tourists of History: Memory, Kitsch, and Consumerism from Oklahoma City to Ground Zero. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007. “The Sound of Music.” In Wikipedia, 23 March 2019. https://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php ?title=The_Sound_of_Music&oldid=186862047. “The Sound of Music—Im Edelweiß-Rausch.” News.At. Retrieved 26 September 2014 from http://www.news.at/a/the-sound-music-im-edelweiss-rausch-310241. “The Sound of Music. Programmheft.” Salzburger Landestheater, n.d. The Sound of Music Tour 2015, 2015. https://youtu.be/AtjunWbxwoY. “The Trick Fountains.” Schloss Hellbrunn. Retrieved 27 November 2017 from https://www .hellbrunn.at/en/the-trick-fountains/. Trapp, Maria A. The Story of the Trapp Family Singers. Philadelphia, PA: Lippincott, 1949. “Unser Dirndl lass ich mir auch von einer Jugoslawin nicht schlecht machen.” profil.at, March 15, 2019. https://www.profil.at/oesterreich/dirndl-helga-kuegerl-10684513. Urry, John, and Jonas Larsen. The Tourist Gaze 3.0. London: SAGE Publications, 2011. Vansant, Jacqueline. “Robert Wise’s The Sound of Music and the ‘Denazification’ of Austria in American Cinema.” In From World War to Waldheim: Culture and Politics in Austria and the United States, edited by David F. Good and Ruth Wodak, 165–86. New York: Berghahn Books, 1999. Wang, Ning. “Rethinking Authenticity in Tourism Experience.” Annals of Tourism Research 26, no. 2 (1 April 1999): 349–70. Williams, Raymond. Raymond Williams: Politics and Letters. Interviews with New Left Review. eBook Edition. New York, NY: Verso, 2015. Wise, Robert. “Foreword.” In “The Sound of Music”: The Making of America’s Favorite Movie, by Julia Hirsch, ix–x. Chicago: Contemporary Books, 1993. Wodak, Ruth, and Anton Pelinka, eds. The Haider Phenomenon in Austria. London: Transaction Publishers, 2009. Wolf, Stacy. “The Queer Pleasures of Mary Martin and Broadway: The Sound of Music as a Lesbian Musical.” Modern Drama 39, no. 1 (1996): 51–63. Wolf, Stacy Ellen. A Problem Like Maria: Gender and Sexuality in the American Musical. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002. Zweig, Stefan. The World of Yesterday: An Autobiography. New York: The Viking Press, 1943.

CONCLUSION When Austria Moves to China

d T

hroughout this book I investigated the connection between Austrian national identity and the discourse of tourism in a wide range of manifestations. In my analysis of government documents and school essays, of literary texts and films, and of guided tours and museum exhibits, tourism has taken shape as discursive terrain for developing, disseminating, but also for critiquing particular images of a reconstructed Austrian nation both in its ideological and geographical form. Quite intentionally, I traced the discourse of tourism in ways that complicated the reductive and redundant descriptions of tourism as a glossy, airbrushed surface beneath which Austria’s sinister, “true” reality is hidden. The resulting tapestry of perspectives on the link between tourism and Austrian national identity highlights tourism’s ongoing and powerful role as a catalyst in the evolving performativity of the Austrian nation. It also underscores the tourism discourse’s significance as a matrix for studying historical and contemporary identity processes. Austria as place, Austria’s place in the world, and the often heavily contested notion of “authentic” Austrian-ness formed the predominant undercurrents of the various chapters. In this concluding chapter, these three aspects of my larger argument come together in the rather curious episode of the Chinese replicating the Austrian town of Hallstatt for a housing development project in China. Rather than simply summarize the insights from the various chapters, I weave them into the analysis of this particular tourism phenomenon to counterbalance the historical perspective applied in the preceding chapters with a speculative look forward as to how the connection between global tourism and Austrian national identity might develop in the twenty-first century. When it comes to foreign tourists, the debate in Austria has always focused mostly on what these tourists do or do not bring to Austria, usually measured in the form of financial revenue in relation to the country’s GDP. Upper Austrians reacted therefore with surprise and, in several cases, anger, when they learned that

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a particular group of tourists was actually trying to take something from Austria: in the spring of 2011, Austrian and German newspapers began reporting on a Chinese mining company’s endeavors to build a life-size copy of the Austrian town of Hallstatt in a residential community in Southern China.1 A group of Chinese tourists had repeatedly spent days and weeks in Hallstatt, where they surveyed every building in order to replicate the entire town.2 Austrian citizens in Hallstatt and beyond voiced concerns about what some considered an egregious example of plagiarizing an iconic place image of Austrian-ness. After all, the town of about nine hundred inhabitants deep in the mountains of the Upper Austrian Salzkammergut achieved UNESCO World Heritage status in 1997 for its unique blend of landscape and culture. The UNESCO website specifically states that the “cultural landscape has retained a degree of authenticity in nature and society that is outstanding in the alpine region.” Ironically, in its statement UNESCO explained the town’s fame and relevance by referencing the “large number of visiting artists whose many canvases and representations are additional fitting testimony to its value.”3 While UNESCO and the locals of Hallstatt seem to not mind the earlier forms of two-dimensional copying that accompanied and propelled the town’s rise to its iconic status as a core alpine and Austrian location, they were much less enthusiastic about the three-dimensional copying planned by a remote Chinese corporation. Hallstatt locals compared the unauthorized duplication to a burglary, and the Austrian UNESCO branch even considered taking legal steps. But eventually there was no stopping the opening of Hallstatt See, as the Chinese copy is named, in the Chinese province of Guangdong in 2012.4 Hallstatt’s mayor, it turned out, had not been completely unaware of the project, and the local and regional tourist marketing institutions considered the copying a “gift from heaven.”5 Since the opening of the Chinese Hallstatt See settlement, the sense of betrayal among Hallstatt’s citizens has given way to a more blasé attitude, which treats the fact of having been copied as inevitable part of being world-famous. As one citizen put it, it is “an honor” to have been copied.6 As the sample reactions above indicate, for some Austrians the copying of Hallstatt is yet another step toward a flattening of cultural differences and a hollowing out of “real” culture. The fact that the copying is done by a Chinese company, aided and abetted by Chinese tourists and their ubiquitous cameras, not only feeds the xenophobic cliché of the camera-toting Asian tourist but invites the perception that the reproduction of Hallstatt in Guangdong forms an extreme example of the product piracy China is frequently accused of in the consumer electronics sector: “Cars, watches, electronics, all that you can get from China, deceptively authentic—but only a copy. ‘Made in China,’ of course. Now a complete town was replicated—an Austrian town, protected as world heritage by UNESCO.”7 But the practice of copying is not unique to China. As the language of the UNESCO website indicates, particular forms of copying have been essential for

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Hallstatt’s rise to prominence. The same artistic visual and literary practices that have shaped Salzburg’s ascent to an iconic “beautiful city” (see chapter 8), have also contributed to Hallstatt’s standing as “typical” alpine settlement. Throughout the twentieth century, visual representations of Hallstatt on stamps, postcards, and posters have been traded as cultural commodities. With its residential houses nestled into the hillside on the shore of a deep alpine lake and framed by high mountain peaks, the Austrian Hallstatt’s “photogenic qualities . . . suggest it was destined to be, and has been, reproduced, re-imaged, and re-imagined.”8 In fact, any visitor to Hallstatt’s local museum will find paintings, photographs, and three-dimensional models of the village from various time periods. Susan Ingram and Markus Reisenleitner conclude that it is less the copying per se that unsettled Hallstatt’s and Austria’s inhabitants but the “materiality of the Chinese village that is the crux of the matter of its ‘fakeness.’”9 The difference between earlier copies of Hallstatt and the Chinese replication seems to be that the former never challenged Hallstatt’s status as original, while the creation of Hallstatt 2 in the form of Hallstatt See changed “the ontological status of the original, from Hallstatt to Hallstatt 1.”10 Such a reading renders the Chinese housing settlement Hallstatt See in Guangdong an extreme form of Chris Rojek’s practice of “dragging and indexing,” which I discussed in chapter 8. The main difference is that tourists do not simply reinscribe themselves into the tourist landscape and narratives, but they copy the latter and transfer them back to the place they consider “home.” Austrian artist Norbert Artner added yet another twist to this in a 2014 art installation. Artner photographed the Chinese Hallstatt

Figure 9.1. Hallstatt in its iconic representation. Photo by Nick Csakany. Public domain.

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Figure 9.2. A photo of the copied Hallstatt church in the Chinese Hallstatt See mounted on a barn of the Austrian Hallstatt. Artwork and photograph by Norbert Artner. Reprinted with permission.

See and then put up billboard-size reproductions of these photos in the Austrian Hallstatt, dragging the copy back into the space of the original and questioning routine assumptions about the hierarchy between original and copy. The Chinese Hallstatt See’s challenge to the Austrian Hallstatt’s “ontological status” as original has important ramifications for the link between discourses of tourism and the constructions of Austrian national identity analyzed in chapter 1 of this book. The allegedly unique and irreproducible Austrian topography was considered the postwar nation’s most important cultural, economic, and, indeed, political asset. References to supposedly ahistorical, but nonetheless Austrian, landscape became central for reintroducing to the world an Austria that was separate and independent from Germany and, so the initial argument, not implicated in the criminal acts of National Socialism. Tourism, and here especially the tourist gaze, turned into an important external validation factor for postwar Austria, as Chancellor Renner’s 1945 proclamation shows, in which he announced that “Vienna and Salzburg as sites of art, our Alps as tourist destinations of the first order, will joyfully greet the foreigners.”11 The imagined gaze of foreign tourists functioned as the point of orientation against which postwar Austria triangulated its reconstruction, a process varyingly portrayed as creation, rediscovery, and clean-up action. Supposedly it was for

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the purpose of generating an inventory of interesting sites for foreign tourists that the Ministry for Education requested Austrian teachers in 1954 to remap their regional and local environments. And it was also with an eye toward foreign tourists that students of various ages renarrated their own positionality as one of agency, based on their imagined status as insiders who shared local knowledge with outsiders. The imagined disciplining gaze of an imaginary tourist, finally, prompted concerns about postwar Austria’s reputation with regard to the condition of its infrastructure but also, at least in a few situations, with regard to the country’s woefully inadequate reckoning with its National Socialist past. It is in contrast to this fundamental conviction that Austrian-ness is defined via the close interaction with (or almost embodiment of ) a unique cultural and natural landscape that the Chinese tourists’ copying came to be seen as an outrageous challenge to a core element of Austrian national identity. This is especially pertinent in the case of Hallstatt, which gave its name to an entire period of human history, the Hallstatt culture, and whose salt mountains are closely linked with the Salzkammergut’s erstwhile economic role in the Habsburg Empire as well as its later ascent to a proto-typical romantic landscape under the early “tourist gaze.”12 Additionally, Hallstatt’s “move” to China heightens the sense that Austrian sovereignty over “its” territory has weakened, the effects of which can be observed in mainstream media coverage on an almost daily basis. For instance, as I am writing this conclusion, Austrian newspapers report on the growing share of Austrian ski areas owned by Chinese and Russian investors. Aside from a general skepticism about the eroding effects of global capitalist practices, the coverage repeatedly points to these foreign investors’ presumed lack of cultural connection to the Austrian landscape and covertly references many of the xenophobic tropes that I discussed in the previous chapters.13 Such concerns about foreign ownership of Austrian tourism infrastructure increasingly combine with frustration about the phenomenon of overtourism. As a community of seven hundred locals that receives more than one million visitors per year, Hallstatt is symptomatic for the Faustian bargain made by many communities across the world.14 The outrage about too many foreign visitors appears hypocritical considering that the overall political and economic framework in Austria prioritizes and subsidizes precisely this kind of economic development. The discursive format of the complaints—why are they all visiting us; we experience too many of them—only underscores tourism’s relevance as an arbiter of Austrian-ness in ways that link back to my discussion of Elfriede Jelinek’s Children of the Dead as fictionalized, affective history space. Jelinek uses the discourse of tourism to criticize Austrians’ repression of their co-responsibility for the Holocaust by depicting the murdered Jewish Austrians as undead tourists who reclaim their rooms in the “Hotel Austria” where the self-proclaimed “real” Austrians are reluctant to give up what they consider their space. Obviously, the tourists

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from China, Japan, South Korea, Australia, Russia, and many other countries are very different from the undead Holocaust victims that begin to overrun the hotel in Jelinek’s novel. However, the contemporary locals’ noticeable unwillingness to recognize the influx of visitors in Hallstatt as a direct result of their activities resonates, on a structural level, with Jelinek’s fictionalized portrayal of how tourism facilitates the return of the repressed Holocaust history: by stubbornly clinging to the essentializing connection between nature and identity without recognizing its significance for the “othering,” persecution, and murder of Jewish Austrians in the Holocaust. The novel’s Austrian population brings about its own demise in a fashion not dissimilar to today’s Austrian tourist destinations, which subscribe to the idea of economic growth via tourism despite rapidly deteriorating natural resources. The fear that the Chinese acts of copying undermine Hallstatt, and by extension, Austria’s status as original also loops back to the debates about the tension between Austria’s self-image as a nation defined by classical culture and Sound of Music tourists’ interest in allegedly trivialized representations thereof. Chapter 8 demonstrates that what looks like a simple binary opposition illustrates in fact the highly complex and also contradictory strands of the performative construction of Austrian national identity as it evolved from the nineteenth into the twenty-first century. While Austrians in general, and Salzburg’s citizens in particular, initially dismissed the Hollywood version of the Trapp family story as (American) kitsch, the unceasing and growing interest in the film locations made it impossible to ignore the phenomenon. Especially the increasing sophistication with which tourists toyed with and shaped the boundaries between “reality” and “copy” prompted a gradual shift from trying to deconstruct The Sound of Music’s artificiality toward embracing the popular narrative. The numerous instances in which Sound of Music tour operators try to make tourists “feel” the difference between the visual representations of the Austrian landscape in the Hollywood film and the actual Austrian places, landscape, and topography prove to be ultimate reference points for Austrian-ness. As my discussion of the German-language musical performance in the Salzburg Landestheater and of the Sound of Music exhibit shows, while the efforts to re-appropriate the Sound of Music do sometimes lack nuance, they do overall match older, historical examples of performative identity constructions that relied on the commercialization of Mozart’s music and of innovative visual art such as Sattler’s panorama paintings. The ubiquity of digital technology has made acts of “indexing and dragging” between notions of the “real” and the “copy” an all-pervasive element of tourist behavior.15 Yet, as chapter 8 demonstrates, this process existed before the twentieth century, and rather than outright rejecting it as trivial, studying its historical genealogy does provide insights into fundamental practices of identity construction that might become even more pertinent as societies reorganize themselves through the adoption of algorithms and artificial intelligence.

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Is the copying of Hallstatt an indication that the practices of tourism in the context of twenty-first century globalization have finally succeeded in erasing all distinctions between “real” places and their “copies”? Or, to put it differently, are Austrians only reaping what they sowed—after decades of advertising “their” landscape to a global tourism clientele, has one group finally taken them up on their offer in unexpected ways? Instead of using the episode of Hallstatt’s replication in China as prompt for reminiscing about the decline of traditional notions of culture and identity, I want to focus on what this episode reveals about current intercultural and international “translations” of identity practices in the context of tourism. Western languages often translate the practice of shanzhai as “piracy, copying, counterfeiting, or faking,” terms with “pejorative connotations for a Western tradition that values originality, individuality, autonomy, sovereignty.”16 Yet, shanzhai, which also informs the modern phenomenon of architectural copying, has a long and complex tradition in which the “ability to render a good copy . . . [is] a marker of technological and cultural superiority, and the co-existence of an original and its virtually indistinguishable double does not trigger the ontological crisis that is characteristic of the West.”17 “Duplitecture,” as Bianca Bosker calls the phenomenon of Chinese imitations of historical Western cityscapes, must be analyzed in this historical context.18 Architectural imitations have been around in Eastern and Western cultures for centuries, as anyone can attest to who has visited “Chinese” pavilions or tea houses in one of many European palace gardens. In the United States, industrial barons of the nineteenth century fashioned their mansions in the image of Greek or Roman temples, while others preferred imitations of “Dutch city dwellings, Spanish monasteries, Italian piazzas, and English Goth designs.”19 Another form of architectural imitation can be visited in the Little Italys, Greektowns, and Chinatowns that dot the maps of US cities and have in many places become coveted symbols of an enriching ethnic diversity. But these instances of architectural copying, just like the colonialist-era, Western-style city districts in Asian metropolitan areas, differ from the current Chinese “duplitecture” phenomenon. The former were mainly populated by immigrant communities, whereas the latter are meant to become settlements for indigenous populations.20 China’s current practice also differs from the importation of Soviet-style architecture during the Mao-era. Instead of imitating the modern achievements of foreign, Western architectural trends, China’s twenty-first century construction boom in Westernstyle housing “duplicate[s] European sites that enshrine the past” in the form of popular tourist places or famous heritage sites.21 For Bosker, China’s “simulacrascapes” are indications of the country’s new international self-image, they provide a guide for “reading” China’s view of the “other.”22 In a detailed analysis of several Western-style settlements, Bosker shows that Chinese developers do not simply copy European architecture but intention-

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ally merge Chinese traditions of habitation—feng shui—with Western concepts of space and size. The result is something new entirely, consisting of buildings that “appear mismatched in their height, size, and layout,” with a single settlement sometimes assembling “monuments and buildings that in the original are located in different towns.”23 What might look like a lack of engineering skills or of cultural insights into Western traditions does in fact shine a light on what the rapidly growing Chinese middle class considers most “iconic, attractive, and desirable” in the European culture.24 While the façades and streetscapes of these settlements make visible the performative reconstruction of a new Chinese identity by way of reflecting the “tourist gaze” of their Chinese developers on popular European places, the houses and apartments themselves reinscribe that identity on the tenants’ everyday bodily practices. Even though floor plans and interior decorations bear clear signs of their adaptation to Chinese cultural traditions, the “planned community immerses its residents not only in an alien architectural form, but also in an alien style of life with alien quotidian rituals.”25 Model units of “Long Island Villas” in another Chinese Western-style settlement “function as . . . three dimensional ‘conduct books’ that shape the experience prospective home buyers can hope to have by living in the themed towns.”26 Bosker forgoes any further elaboration of what such performative enactments of “alien” rituals could mean, but Austrian director Ella Raidel’s 2014 documentary about the Chinese Hallstatt subdivision, titled Double Happiness, offers some preliminary answers. One of the Chinese architects involved in the project points out that Hallstatt attracted the planners’ interest not only because of its UNESCO imprimatur, but also because of its historically grown architectural layout that has utilized limited real estate in highly efficient ways to provide the basic functions for a residential community. As the architect underscores, copying the architecture of the Austrian Hallstatt also means experimenting with historically grown Western models of habitation as blueprints for housing China’s rapidly growing population.27 Another interview with an administrator of the Guangdong region brings up the affective element of the architectural “simulacrascape.” Hallstatt See is close to Shenzhen, a former fishing town on the coast whose population grew from just under forty thousand inhabitants in 1979 to more than ten million in 2010.28 In the interview, the Chinese administrator reflects on the detrimental impact this rapid growth had on the local communities’ social fabric and on intergenerational family connections. Over the course of her responses, it is today’s Shenzhen that comes across as alien and as an alienating place, while Hallstatt See transforms into a place whose spatial dimensions invoke comforting memories of familial community. In an interesting twist, the locals seem to adapt the developers’ goals to “re-create not only the superficial appearance of Western historical cities, but also their ‘feel’—the atmospheric and experiential local color”29 in a different way; instead of feeling like “Austrians,” the Austrian-style architecture enables

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them to performatively re-enact, and feel, the China of an earlier age. After undergoing a series of complex translation and transformation processes, Hallstatt See, an extension of the particular combination of place and Heimat that plays such a crucial role in Austria’s national identity narrative, might very well also compensate for a particular Chinese version of Heimatlosigkeit. Such a preliminary analysis of Chinese “duplitecture” and of the Hallstatt See development does not do justice to the multilayered and complex meaning that is packed into this phenomenon. It does, however, highlight that there is an opportunity to use the discourse of tourism as an analytical lens for studying the mobilization of national and cultural identity discourses at specific moments in time. For what the Chinese interlocutors reveal about the role of these housing developments in maintaining or performatively recreating a sense of Heimat in the midst of geographical, cultural, and social dislocation does resonate with the analysis of tourism as means for adjusting to a new Austrian national narrative after World War II that I analyze in chapters 2 and 3. My discussion of Councilor Geiger (chapter 2) and The Forester of the Silver Wood (chapter 3) emphasizes that these films are relevant for an analysis within the context of the tourism discourse not so much because they depict tourist themes at a time when more serious topics should have been discussed. Rather, these films are relevant for the ways in which they tap the tourism discourse to mobilize notions of supposedly stable identity frameworks to help communities overcome the traumata of disruption and uprootedness. Despite all cultural and political differences that separate the Austrian films from the documentary voices of the Chinese citizens, one can discern an underlying link in the ways in which apparently trivial, kitschy phenomena facilitate the adjustment to life under new circumstances. As an example of Chinese “duplitecture,” Hallstatt See also has implications for the ways in which the citizens of Austria’s Hallstatt—of Hallstatt 130—perform their identities. After the initial outrage dissipated, and after it became clear that, if anything, the Chinese copy might actually increase the number of tourists that annually visit the alpine town’s narrow alleyways, most of Hallstatt’s inhabitants adopted a more sanguine attitude. For some of the most vocal critics, the experience of being copied even led to a questioning of hitherto accepted truths. The same Hallstatt hotel director who felt her space violated when her Chinese guests surreptitiously surveyed the town and its buildings now acknowledges that the copying incidence has sparked an interaction with China and Chinese culture that prompted her to reconsider the fundamentals of her Austrian and European identity narratives: “One develops a different perspective on Europe and Austria when looking at all of this from China. Consequently, one begins to question some of the way things are done here.”31 As a direct consequence of her reflections, the hotel director decided to commission a Chinese carpentry company to produce the new furniture for her hotel and the result increased her appreciation of the Chinese concept of copying: “This idea that the Chinese only produce

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cheap products is completely false. The problem is that the Europeans only buy cheap products.”32 In quite unintentional ways, the Hallstatt episode seems to have sparked a kind of rival to the xenophobic narrative that divided travelers into wealthy, Western tourists and poor, illegal migrants and used the discourse of tourism as justification for discriminatory and racist practices. Chapter 7 analyzes the film Suzie Washington with an emphasis on tourism’s complicity in practices of exclusion and exploitation. The chapter also discusses the fallacy of mistaking tourism and travel as always signaling freedom and agency. As the close reading of Suzie Washington’s references to Hollywood and The Sound of Music indicates, especially the imaginary landscapes generated by modern media must be scrutinized for their connection to very real, biased, and exploitative political and economic structures. The Hallstatt hotel director’s self-reflective questioning of Austrian attitudes—serendipitous as it may be—does nonetheless indicate that the complex interactions between Austrian and Chinese “agents” in the context of the copying episode have prompted a critical look at concepts of ownership, cultural agency, and economic and political power. One may well hope that examples such as these lead to a blunting of colonialist and Eurocentric perspectives in tourism. One could even go further and consider these instances as yet another form of reconstructing affective cultural realms. Chapters 5 and 6 discuss Jelinek’s novel The Children of the Dead and Christoph Ransmayr’s novel Morbus Kitahara (The Dog King) as examples of how literary fiction can complement the historiographic investigation of Austria’s dark past via the creation of affective history and memory spaces. As I show, it is precisely literary fiction’s ability to rip itself from the moorings of conventional representations of history and to reveal what Ransmayr called the “complementary angle” on reality that brings into relief history’s “ghosts” (Gordon), which in turn point to the complexity of life that is difficult to represent via the normativizing discourses of politics and academia. At first glance, the two novels discussed in chapter 5 and 6 have little in common with the Hallstatt copying, aside from relating to the same geographical and cultural region, the Salzkammergut. Yet, there is a connection between the literary creation of affective realms of history and the copying of Hallstatt: the latter, too, is a break with conventions of representation and narration, a break that generates not only encounters between cultures that consider each other foreign but also encounters between Austrians and their cultural blind spots. Ironically, the same sense of local authenticity that the Chinese developers wanted to recreate in Hallstatt See, and which the Chinese locals keep adapting as compensatory strategy in rather unforeseen ways, also seems to help the citizens of the Austrian Hallstatt make peace with the replication of their town. A 2014–15 poll of Hallstatt’s citizens found that a significant majority of those surveyed did not think that the Chinese copy undermines the Austrian Hallstatt’s “value” long

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term.33 Instead, the respondents seem to agree with the attitude of Hallstatt’s mayor: “[The Chinese Hallstatt is] not another Hallstatt to me. Hallstatt grew over hundreds of years, thousands of years. Seven thousand years ago the Celts and Illyrians lived here. There’s so much history here that you cannot copy it.”34 In the end, Hallstatt 1 and Hallstatt 2 exemplify that tourism continues to remain a highly relevant discursive terrain where national identity narratives become questioned, deconstructed, reaffirmed, and, most importantly, become performatively reconstructed on an ongoing basis. This is not a trivial matter at a time when nationalism celebrates an ominous comeback in all corners of the globe. As political discourses grow increasingly nationalistic again, performative elements of tourism, disseminated far and wide through the internet, might provide a forum for continuing intercultural and global encounters.

Notes 1. For representative media coverage see “Diskussionen über chinesische Hallstatt-Kopie,” DerStandard.At, retrieved 26 December 2017 from https://derstandard.at/1304554470 172/Diskussionen-ueber-chinesische-Hallstatt-Kopie; “Chinesische Hallstatt-Kopie sorgt für Aufsehen,” DerStandard.At, retrieved 26 December 2017 from https://derstandard .at/1304554472637/Kirche-aeussert-Bedenken-Chinesische-Hallstatt-Kopie-sorgt-fuerAufsehen; “Chinesen bauen Hallstatt nach,” retrieved 13 December 2017 from http:// www.nachrichten.at/oberoesterreich/Chinesen-bauen-Hallstatt-nach;art4,649688. 2. Double Happiness, directed by Ella Raidel (Austria: Sixpackfilm, 2014), http://doublehap piness.at/. 3. UNESCO World Heritage Centre, “Hallstatt-Dachstein / Salzkammergut Cultural Landscape,” UNESCO World Heritage Centre, retrieved 26 December 2017 from http://whc .unesco.org/en/list/806/. 4. “Diskussionen”; “Hallstatt Made in China,” retrieved 26 December 2017 from https:// kurier.at/reise/hallstatt-made-in-china/789.239. 5. “Diskussionen.” 6. “Chinesische Hallstatt-Kopie.” 7. “Autos, Uhren, Elektronik, all das gibt es in China, täuschend echt—aber doch nur eine Kopie. ‘Made in China’ eben. Nun wurde gar ein kompletter Ort nachgebaut—noch dazu ein österreichischer, von der UNESCO als Weltkulturerbe geschützt.” See “Hallstatt Made in China.” For additional commentary, see also “China Big in Counterfeit Goods,” ABC News, 7 January 2006, http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/story?id=130381&page=1. All translations into English are mine unless otherwise noted. 8. Susan Ingram and Markus Reisenleitner, “Faking Translation in Hallstatt: A Visit to ‘Hallstatt Revisited I,’” TranscUlturAl: A Journal of Translation and Cultural Studies 6, no. 1 (2014): 50. 9. Ibid. 10. Ibid., 51. Ingram’s and Reisenleitner’s reading is based on artist Norbert Artner’s project Hallstatt Revisited I, which consisted of ten billboard-size color photos of the Chinese Hallstatt copy and its surroundings that the artist exhibited in the Austrian Hallstatt from

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12.

13.

14. 15.

16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

32. 33.

34.

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July through October 2014. Norbert Artner, Hallstatt Revisited I, Photography, October 2014, http://www.norbertartner.at/projects/hallstatt-revisited/. Wiener Zeitung, 23 September 1945, n.p.; quoted in Alois Brusatti, 100 Jahre österreichischer Fremdenverkehr: Historische Entwicklung 1884–1984. (Republik Österreich, Bundesministerium für Handel, Gewerbe u. Industrie, 1984), 143. For an overview, see entry “Hallstatt Culture,” in Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Hallstatt_culture. For a more detailed introduction into the relevant archeological literature, see John T. Koch, Celtic Culture: A Historical Encyclopedia. vol. 1 (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2005). Jakob Pallinger, Thomas Neuhold, and David Krutzler, “Marode heimische Skigebiete suchen ihr Heil bei Investoren aus dem Ausland,” Der Standard, 28 December 2017, derStandard.at edition, https://derstandard.at/2000071089134/Wenn-Chinesen-die-oes terreichischen-Skipisten-kaufen. “Overtourism: Hallstatt will Touristenstrom mit limitierten Bus-Slots Herr werden,” www .kleinezeitung.at, 29 January 2019, https://www.kleinezeitung.at/wirtschaft/5570539/. Chris Rojek, “Indexing, Dragging and the Social Construction of Tourist Sights,” in Touring Cultures: Transformations of Travel and Theory, ed. Chris Rojek and John Urry (New York: Routledge, 2000). Ingram and Reisenleitner, “Faking Translation,” 50. Bianca Bosker, Original Copies: Architectural Mimicry in Contemporary China (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2013), 25. Ibid., 1–2. For an overview of the various Western European places that have been replicated—from England to Holland to France—see Ibid., 37–66. Ibid., 6. Ibid. Ibid., 11. Ibid., 51. Ibid., 47. Ibid., 49. Ibid., 39. Ibid., 58. Double Happiness. “Shenzhen,” in Wikipedia, 25 July 2019, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title= Shenzhen&oldid=907846070. Bosker, Original Copies, 2. Ingram and Reisenleitner, “Faking Translation.” “Man bekommt einen ganz anderen Blick auf Europea und auf Österreich, wenn man das alles von China aus betrachtet. Dann fängt man auch an, einiges was hier passiert in Frage zu stellen, und nicht umgekehrt.” Double Happiness. “Diese Idee, dass die Chinesen nur Ramsch produzieren, das stimmt überhaupt nicht. Die Europäer kaufen da drüben nur Ramsch.” Ibid. Marguerita Wittek, “Hallstatt Made in China—An Austrian Village Cloned” (Master’s Thesis, 2015), Leiden: Univeristy of Leiden, 21, https://openaccess.leidenuniv.nl/han dle/1887/36014. Didi Kirsten Tatlow, “A Real Copy of Austria in China,” The New York Times, 25 July 2012, sec. Europe, https://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/26/world/europe/26iht-letter26 .html.

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Bibliography Artner, Norbert. Hallstatt Revisited I. Photography, October 2014. http://www.norbertartner .at/projects/hallstatt-revisited/. Bosker, Bianca. Original Copies: Architectural Mimicry in Contemporary China. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2013. Brusatti, Alois. 100 Jahre österreichischer Fremdenverkehr: Historische Entwicklung 1884–1984. Republik Österreich, Bundesministerium für Handel, Gewerbe u. Industrie, 1984. “China Big in Counterfeit Goods.” ABC News, 7 January 2006. http://abcnews.go.com/ WNT/story?id=130381&page=1. “Chinesen bauen Hallstatt nach.” Retrieved 13 December 2017 from http://www.nachrich ten.at/oberoesterreich/Chinesen-bauen-Hallstatt-nach;art4,649688. “Chinesische Hallstatt-Kopie sorgt für Aufsehen.” DerStandard.At. Retrieved 26 December 2017 from https://derstandard.at/1304554472637/Kirche-aeussert-Bedenken-ChinesischeHallstatt-Kopie-sorgt-fuer-Aufsehen. “Diskussionen über chinesische Hallstatt-Kopie.” DerStandard.At. Retrieved 26 December 2017 from https://derstandard.at/1304554470172/Diskussionen-ueber-chinesische-Hall statt-Kopie. “Hallstatt Culture” in Wikipedia, updated 23 September 2019, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Hallstatt_culture. “Hallstatt Made in China.” Retrieved 26 December 2017 from https://kurier.at/reise/hall statt-made-in-china/789.239. Ingram, Susan, and Markus Reisenleitner. “Faking Translation in Hallstatt: A Visit to ‘Hallstatt Revisited I.’” TranscUlturAl: A Journal of Translation and Cultural Studies 6, no. 1 (2014): 43–52. Koch, John T. Celtic Culture: A Historical Encyclopedia. vol. 1. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2005. “Overtourism: Hallstatt will Touristenstrom mit limitierten Bus-Slots Herr werden.” www .kleinezeitung.at, 29 January 2019. https://www.kleinezeitung.at/wirtschaft/5570539/. Pallinger, Jakob, Thomas Neuhold, and David Krutzler. “Marode heimische Skigebiete suchen ihr Heil bei Investoren aus dem Ausland.” Der Standard, 28 December 2017. https:// derstandard.at/2000071089134/Wenn-Chinesen-die-oesterreichischen-Skipisten-kaufen. Double Happiness. Directed by Ella Raidel. Austria: Sixpackfilm, 2014. http://doublehappi ness.at/. Rojek, Chris. “Indexing, Dragging and the Social Construction of Tourist Sights.” In Touring Cultures: Transformations of Travel and Theory, edited by Chris Rojek and John Urry. New York: Routledge, 2000. “Shenzhen.” In Wikipedia, 25 July 2019. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Shen zhen&oldid=907846070. Tatlow, Didi Kirsten. “A Real Copy of Austria in China.” The New York Times, 25 July 2012, sec. Europe. https://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/26/world/europe/26iht-letter26.html. UNESCO World Heritage Centre. “Hallstatt-Dachstein / Salzkammergut Cultural Landscape.” UNESCO World Heritage Centre. Retrieved 26 December 2017 from http://whc .unesco.org/en/list/806/. Wittek, Marguerita. “Hallstatt Made in China—An Austrian Village Cloned,” Master’s thesis. Leiden: Univeristy of Leiden, 2015. https://openaccess.leidenuniv.nl/handle/1887/36014.

INDEX

d 1. April 2000, 25–26, 39, 61 affect and historical representation, 12, 107, 109, 111–113, 116–21, 152, 155–62, 164–69, 171–73, 267 and knowledge production, 110 and literary fiction, 131, 133–40, 142– 43, 146n9 in national identity discourses, 32, 57, 223 and space, 270, 272 in The Sound of Music, 210, 225–26 Allied occupation, 11, 27, 31, 44, 88, 97, 106, 152, 162. See also occupation zones annexation, 21, 24, 58, 64, 70, 206. See also Anschluss Anschluss anti-Semitism before the Anschluss, 164 Chancellor Renner on the Anschluss, 57 in Children of the Dead, 143 in Councilor Geiger, 64, 73, 83n82 fiftieth anniversary, 170 performative enactment of Austria, 7 and Salzburg Festival, 236 in The Sound of Music, 209 in The Sound of Music Salzburg Landestheater performance, 234–35 See also annexation Aryanization in Children of the Dead, 138 Ausländer-Hotelaktionen, 27 Austria as first victim thesis, 24, 207 Austrian Federal Press Service, 22

Baedeker, 23 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 49n70 Benjamin, Walter, 116 Berlin Berlin Wall, 183 ghosts of memory, 114 Bernhard, Thomas, 1 Bohemia role of tourism, 20 The Book of Austria, 17, 22–27, 32–34 Brazil in Morbus Kitahara, 152–53, 162, 167, 168 Butler, Judith, 6–7 Carinthia, 28, 31, 41–43, 88 The Children of the Dead (novel). See Die Kinder der Toten China reproduction of Hallstatt, 263–64, 267– 70, 271 cinema cinematic spaces, 225, 227, 229, 231 and connection to tourism in Austria, 55–56, 59, 61, 89, 192, 196, 223, 242 continuity between war and postwar cinema, 60 and embodied experience, 220–21 and marketing of Austria, 62 as symbolic practice related to tourism, 3, 243 Cold War, 29, 183, 225 in Die Trapp Familie, 208 complementary angle, 166–67, 178, 272

Index

concentration camp, 37, 38, 209 and ghosts, 118 Ebensee (Zement), 169–72 (see also KZGedenkstätte Ebensee) and Linz09 exhibit, 105, 109, 113, 117, 118, 152 in Morbus Kitahara, 155–56, 160, 176n13 Mauthausen, 105, 108–09, 117, 152, 154–56, 160–61, 169 Czechoslovakia, 7, 20, 75 Das blaue Licht (The Blue Light), 59, 84 Der heilige Berg (The Holy Mountain), 59 Der Hofrat Geiger (Privy Councilor Geiger), 12, 55, 64 Der verlorene Sohn (The Prodigal Son), 59 desire and construction of authenticity, 219–20, 223, 226 erotic desire, 190 in Heimatfilm, 62 mediated desire, 195 as motivation for tourism, 59, 243 and nostalgia, 140 and The Sound of Music guided tours, 230 for wholeness, 91 Die Kinder der Toten (The Children of the Dead), 12, 98, 107, 121, 130–46 Die Mörder sind unter uns (Murderers among Us), 65 disciplining as element in governing, 30 (see also Foucault, Michel) and gaze, 4, 267 (see also Foucault, Michel) of time and bodies, 3, 34, 37, 42 discourse. See under tourism displaced persons, 38–39, 50 Dos Passos, John, 21 duplitecture, 269, 271 Ebensee concentration camp, 117, 152, 160, 161, 169–171 in Linz09 program, 108 in Morbus Kitahara, 154–55 See also concentration camp

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Emperor Franz Josef, 35, 55 Enzensberger, Hans Magnus, 3–4 European Capital of Culture, 12, 97 Linz as ECOC, 106–08, 119, 122 European Recovery Program, 87. See also Marshall Plan Eva erbt das Paradies (Eva Inherits Paradise), 55 Fanck, Arnold, 59 fiction and Holocaust memory, 135, 137–39, 160–62, 267–68, 272 literary fiction and ghosts, 119 (see also ghosts) literary fiction and reality, 120, 134, 212, 221, 222 (see also literary anthropology) literary fiction and representation of history, 12, 107, 145, 155, 161, 169, 173 First Austrian Republic, 7–8, 20, 73, 77 Foucault, Michel disciplining gaze, 4 governmentality, 30 heterotopia, 196 surveillance, 34 France, 21, 27, 29, 152 Frankfurt School, 56 Franzensbad, 20 Fremdenverkehr, 20–22, 30, 140 Germany “1000-Mark Sperre,” 21 and Austrian history, 7, 10, 24, 29, 31, 183, 238 and Austrian tourism, 21, 87, 88, 90 and Heimatfilm, 62–65 Nazi Germany, 43, 59–60, 183, 206, 209, 235 reunification, 153 and tourism history, 28, 40, 61–62 ghost(s), 12, 103, 107, 111, 114, 116, 118, 119, 121, 130–31, 134, 136, 137, 140–45, 158, 162–68, 173, 272 Glaube an mich (Believe in me), 55–56, 60, 77 Grand Tour, 58

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Great Britain, 152 Gusen, 105, 108–09, 117 Habsburg Empire, 7, 8, 20, 31, 57, 234, 240–41, 267 Hallstatt, 13, 264–73 Hallstatt See (China), 265, 266 Hamsterfahrten, 67 Hartheim, 108 Haslinger, Josef, 2 haunting, 107, 114, 116, 121, 141–145, 161, 164–65, 167 Heimat and femininization of Austrian places, 94 as mediating concept in national identity, 37, 56–57, 62–63, 207–08 and modernity, 62–63 National Socialist appropriation of, 59 and tourism, 19, 32–33, 40–41, 55, 69, 87–95, 139, 242 Heimatfilm(e), 12, 55–56, 58, 61–64, 87, 89–90, 94–97, 207–09 Hermann Göring Werke, 109, 133 Hitler, Adolf, 21, 57, 108, 112, 216 Holocaust, 12, 63, 103, 106, 108–09, 112, 114, 116–18, 121, 135, 268 in Children of the Dead, 131, 136, 139, 142, 144–45 commemoration in Ebensee, 171–72 in Morbus Kitahara, 157, 161, 163 in The Sound of Music context, 215–16, 230, 234 imagination, 58–60, 68, 77, 173 and agency, 193, 195–96, 205 imagined community, 32 In jenen Tagen (Seven Journeys), 65 In Our Midst: Deconstruction of a Building, 111, 113–15, 120 In Situ: Zeitgeschichte findet Stadt, 111, 113–15, 137 Innerhofer, Franz, 1 Iron Curtain, 29, 183, 187 Italy, 3, 20, 4, 55, 239–40, 269 Janacs, Christoph, 154 Jelinek, Elfriede, 1, 2, 12, 130–46, 268, 272

Karlsbad, 20 Klüger, Ruth, 118 Komplementärbild, 161 Kulturhaupstadt des Führer, 111–12, 114– 15, 120 KZ-Gedenkstätte Ebensee, 169. See also concentration camp La Habanera, 59–60 landscape(s), 1, 9, 10–12, 22, 26, 37, 40, 42, 55, 58, 60–62, 66, 91–92, 94, 107, 115, 183, 189, 192, 196–97, 204, 206–07, 211–12, 220, 225, 227, 229, 231, 238–242, 244, 264–69, 272 contaminated landscape(s), 117, 118 haunted landscape(s), 130–34, 139–40, 143–45, 154–58, 164–69, 173–74 Langer-Hansel, Harald, 49 Liebeneiner, Wolfgang, 26, 206–08 Linz, 12, 97, 105–115, 117–20, 133. See also Linz09 Linz09, 105–121. See also Linz literary anthropology, 119 Lower Austria, 23, 42 Marboe, Ernst, 22, 25 Marienbad, 20 Marshall Plan, 208. See also European Recover Program Mauthausen Todesstiege, 156 See also concentration camp Mayr-Melnhof, Franz, 89 memory, 2, 12, 39, 67, 107, 110, 116–18, 121, 131, 132, 136, 140, 142, 144, 146, 156–58, 160–61, 167–70, 173, 183, 216, 272 “prosthetic memory,” 12, 107, 110, 112, 131, 142, 144, 166, 174 Menasse, Robert, 57 Meran, 20 Ministry for Social Administration, 37 Ministry for Trade and Reconstruction, 29, 32 Mitterer, Felix, 1 modernity, 4, 25, 63, 74, 109, 115, 157, 196, 235

Index

mountain films, 59, 61 national identity, xi, 2, 6–12, 19–20, 28, 31, 32, 40, 43–44, 58, 63–64, 66, 69, 87, 143, 157–58, 184, 197, 202–06, 208, 214–16, 224–27, 229–31, 234, 236–38, 240, 244, 263, 271 nostalgia, 97, 139–40, 164–65, 235 occupation zones, 21–22, 64. See also Allied occupation Österreichische Fremdenverkehrswerbung, 2 Ostmark, 8, 57 performance, 5 everyday performances of national identity, 32, 184, 204 of gender, 6–7 of language, 135 of space, 193, 196 tourism as performance, 20 performativity, 5–7, 33, 263 place and affect, 112, 156 and authenticity, 91, 108, 219–20 construction of places, 63, 205 as femininized, 94 and ghosts, 114, 143, 162 as manifestation of social interactions, 68–69, 75, 225 place-panic, 23, 25 and power relations, 214–15 as result of performativity, 5–7, 205 and time configurations, 229 Renner, Karl, 8, 19 chancellor, 20–21, 56–57, 266 president, 44 Riefenstahl, Leni, 59 Rijeka, 20 Rotation, 65 rubble film, 65, 67 Salzburg, xi, 1, 19, 38, 183, 202, 205, 225 as “beautiful city,” 231, 240 as “city of Mozart,” 231, 241, 242

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Hellbrunn Palace, 41, 220–21, 229–32, 238 and Humboldt, 239 Landestheater production of The Sound of Music, 232–34 Salzburg Festival, 231, 234, 236–39, 241 Sattler Panorama, 238, 242–43 The Sound of Music tourism, 211, 219–20, 223–24, 227 and Tracht, 235, 237 US occupation, 39 Salzkammergut, 12, 61, 152, 155, 157–58, 161, 164–65, 168–69, 220, 227, 235, 239, 264, 267, 272 Sattler, Johann Michael, 242–44, 268 Second Austrian Republic, 8, 24, 56, 64, 88 Sierck, Detlef, 59 Sissi, 55–56, 92 Sissi: Die junge Kaiserin (Sissi: The Young Empress), 55 Sissi: Schicksalsjahre einer Kaiserin (Sissi: The Fateful Years of an Empress), 55 Sommerfrische, 20, 95 The Sound of Music, 1, 11, 195, 197, 201–210 (self )ethnographic explorations, 211–19 and Tracht, 237–38 as cultural map for US history, 209 as product of desire and crisis, 219–27 as reiteration of older tourist practices, 243 bus tours, 201, 211 Gazebo, 220–22, 229–32, 238, 243 German-language performance in Salzburg, 232–34 in contrast to Mozart image, 241 Soviet Union, 21, 29, 152–53, 158, 183, 225 space as static, 66 cinematic space, 225 coded as feminine, 24–25 commemorative space (Gedenkraum), 137 disciplining, cleansing of, 34 discursive space of tourism, 2, 5–6, 11, 232 experience of space, 112

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Index

and ghosts, 116 as haunted, 132 as haunting, 145 and Heimatfilm, 63 history space, 133–34, 143, 154, 166, 267 liminal space, 93 literary remapping of historical spaces, 117, 165–68 mobilizing spaces, 205 narrative space, 161, 193 national space, 42, 214 prosthetic space, 144 space-time continuum, 142 space-time/time-space configurations of Austrian-ness, 67–70 third space, 157, 176n26 time-space coordinates, 23 touristic spaces, 188, 192 Western concepts of, 270 See also performance; performativity Speer, Albert, 111 Spital am Pyhrn, 38 Spitz an der Donau, 65, 67–68 Ständestaat, 7, 33, 57, 66, 73, 96, 209, 236 Stelle für den Wiederaufbau der Fremdenverkehrsindustrie, 27. See also Wiederaufbaustelle Steyerl, Hito, 111–13, 115, 120 Streeruwitz, Marlene, 2 Styria, 35–36, 130, 141, 155 sublime, 155–58, 239 Switzerland, 28, 224, 238 Thaler, Peter, 9–10, 31–32 Thurnher, Armin, 2 tourism cleanliness, 35, 37, 42–43 dark tourism, 109, 118 discourse, 2–5, 7–11, 22–23, 30–32, 35, 37–40, 42–44, 67, 70, 74, 76, 96–97, 131, 133, 139–140, 143, 152, 157, 164, 173–74, 184, 196–97, 210, 226, 231, 238, 244, 263, 271–72 as example of governmentality, 30, 44, 108

habitus, 11, 32, 137 history, 20–22, 28–29, 58, 64, 66, 240– 41, 264 rhetoric, 2, 13, 38, 40 tourist gaze, 5, 11, 25–27, 33, 43, 58–59, 94, 96, 223, 243, 266–67, 270 Trenker, Luis, 59 Trieste, 20 Tyrol, 20, 21, 42, 130 UNESCO World Heritage, 264, 270, 273 United Kingdom, 20, 27, 29, 213 United States, xi, 1, 27, 29, 134, 144, 152, 159, 183, 187, 188, 190, 205–10, 213, 216, 219, 238, 269 Unter uns. Dekonstruktion eines Gebäudes, 111. See also In Our Midst: Deconstruction of a Building Upper Austria, 12, 28, 37, 40, 97, 107, 111, 113, 118, 154–55, 255, 263, 264 vampires, 12, 140, 141 Venus von Willendorf, 23–24 Vienna, 19, 21, 26–27, 37–38, 60, 66–68, 75–76, 88–89, 96, 103, 132, 164–65, 191, 232, 237, 266 VÖEST, 105 Waldheim, Kurt, 170 Wehrmacht, 93, 138, 164 whiteness, 39 Wiederaufbaustelle, 27, 30–31, 34, 37, 88. See also Stelle für den Wiederaufbau der Fremdenverkehrsindustrie Wiedergutmachung, 72–73, 75–76 World War I, 20, 209, 236–37, 271 World War II, 3, 11, 17, 20–22, 24, 28, 30, 32, 44, 55, 57, 59–60, 64, 70, 74, 76, 153, 160, 162, 164, 170, 189, 211 Yugoslavia, 20 zombies, 130–31, 140–41, 148 Zwei in einem Auto (Two in One Car), 55