Exhibition Horror Patriae
Chamber of Improbable Patriots
Every region and country has poets, writers, or artists it worships as national icons—disregarding the contradictions at their core. But Austria has, at every moment of its history, known a cohort of writers and artists whose attitude toward their homeland was radically critical, up to becoming almost an aversion to it. These figures, from Karl Kraus (1874–1936) to Elfriede Jelinek (born 1946), belong to the most famous representantives of Austrian culture internationally.
Locally, Peter Rosegger (1843–1918) is celebrated as the Styrian writer per se. Born to poverty and illiteracy in a remote mountain village, he was a self-made man who taught himself how to read and write. The Right celebrated him as a poet of the Heimat (homeland), while the Left admired his pithy social critique. In 1913, Rosegger was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature. In the end, the award went to Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941), who became the first non-European to ever receive this honor. The decision against Rosegger might have been influenced by the lobbying of Slovenian and Czech intellectuals. They criticized him for supporting Germanization policies in the Slavic-speaking parts of the Habsburg Empire, where local languages were to be prohibited and compulsory German schooling introduced.
In contrast to Rosegger, Thomas Bernhard (1931–1989) seemed to be the opposite of a patriot. Few writers have been so critical of Austria’s provincialism, its postimperial ambitions, and its notion of Heimat. Yet, as it turned out, Bernhard resided in strange spaces evoking the life of a conservative Austrian country squire. Was his anger really a form of patriotism?
