UNCANNY MAUTHAUSEN. NOVELS BY LIDIA HAIDER Cover Image

UNHEIMLICHES MAUTHAUSEN. ZU LYDIA HAIDERS ROMANEN
UNCANNY MAUTHAUSEN. NOVELS BY LIDIA HAIDER

Author(s): Joanna Jabłkowska
Subject(s): Comparative Linguistics, Austrian Literature
Published by: Uniwersytet Adama Mickiewicza
Keywords: “Anti-Heimatliteratur”; reckoning with the national socialist past; Mauthausen-Gusen; the Uncanny; non-places;

Summary/Abstract: Lydia Haider, is a young Austrian writer, whose work is in line with two tendencies characteristic for Austrian Literature. Haider describes Austrian province from a position of critical distance, focusing on the critique of language and attempts to thematize the lack of reckoning with national socialist past in specific Austrian contexts. The article analyses two novels by Haider: congregationand rotten. The novels foreground the discussion on the denial of the Nazi crimes on the lands surrounding Mauthausen Concentration Camp. The main question posed in the article is whether Haider could be called a inheritor of the critical “Heimatliteratur”. It is also important to investigate whether the young author offers new aesthetic solutions, adequate for contemporary perspective from which we can view the unsettled Nazi past.

  • Issue Year: 2019
  • Issue No: 40
  • Page Range: 37-51
  • Page Count: 16
  • Language: German