Dilemmas of Austrian Identity – Alfred Goubran’s Idiotikon: Der Gelernte Österreicher
Dilemmas of Austrian Identity – Alfred Goubran’s Idiotikon: Der Gelernte Österreicher

Summary/Abstract: It is an intriguing title, Der gelernte Österreicher (Braumüller, 2013), with its allusive irony, as in a gelernter Tischler (trained carpenter) or (like the current Mayor of Vienna) a gelernter Biologe (trained biologist). Gelernte implies a professional training, first as an apprentice, then as a fully fledged practitioner. Artisanship. Craft. Skills that can be acquired by following a technical induction. But a gelernter Österrreicher? As to Idiotikon, a word which like gelernte immediately sends ambiguous signals to the reader, we are told it originally meant a “dictionary of the linguistic idiosyncrasies of a country or region”1 – but that is now archaic. Goubran traces the etymology of “idiot” from Greece (a private person – not pejorative) through Rome (pejorative to describe the incompetent), finally arriving at Lenin’s “useful idiots” who were both the victims and the perpetrators of ideological manipulation. His bitter essay is a characterisation of the mainstream intellectual, managerial, bureaucratic and political Austrian as “useful idiot”, a type he claims has all too often exchanged his independence of mind for identity-free careerism. It is a malevolent generalisation worthy of the writer Thomas Bernhard, but Goubran’s strictures on the Austrian ethos have a serious intent, which cannot always be said of the literary hyperbole and finely tuned rants of Bernhard.

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