Welcome to flaming June! This is, of course, a happy salute to the hot, sunny weather we are having (at least ‘up North’) and not a curse on the annual exam season, now well under way. It may (or may not) only be the weather, that southerners envy us for. Many users of this portal will be working their way through (or should I say up?) a mountain of scripts, and were it not for my own particular mountain range, I, should be headed for London to listen in to this week’s two-day celebration of postgraduate work in Austrian Studies being co-ordinated by the Ingeborg Bachmann Centre for Austrian Literature. Excellent research is being done by postgraduates from all over the UK and Ireland, and this annual event always offers an impressive range of interesting topics.
If one looks simply at the last six to eight months, the Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies and its Ingeborg Bachmann Centre have hosted, to name but a very few examples, a conference on Hofmannsthal; lectures by esteemed Austrianists Jacques le Rider, Ida Sagarra, and Gar Yates; readings by Lilian Faschinger and Sissi Tax; and a conference co-organised by Bangor’s Anthony Bushell on ‘Aspects of Provincial Austria’. This brings us neatly to the subject of provincial UK and Ireland, with Bangor recently having welcomed (30 April) the Austrian Ambassador to the UK, Gabriele Matzner-Holzer, to lecture on ‘Europe from the Centre: Looking back, around and ahead’. Thankfully, there are, of course, a great many papers on Austrian topics (literary, filmic, linguistic, historical) at the subject association conferences,[1] as well as at the ever-growing number of thematic conferences on our islands, and, alas, since the mountain of marking seems to be behaving as if governed by some kind of academic, tectonic plates and is being pushed ever upwards, there is not time to enumerate them here. I wonder, too, if it would serve any purpose. On reflection, however, perhaps, it would – it is highly useful for researchers to know what recent research has been aired and where, so as to be able to build on it and not have to wait always for that work to be published. It seems to me that the great advantage of having conference programmes on the internetis that we can both receive and send research enquiries to the broader, academic community, not just in the UK and Ireland, but in America, Austria or in the frequently-related and clearly highly cognate country of Australia. (As we know, this is a confusion that has existed for decades, probably centuries, and not simply a result of poor, search-engine harvesting.)
In my own, provincial neck of the woods, matters Austrian are never too far off the horizon. In 2007 Phil Payne welcomed the Internationale Robert-Musil Gesellschaft to Lancaster, and in 2009 Graham Bartram will host the Internationaler Arbeitskreis Hermann Broch. Lancaster’s Ruth Wodak is the organiser of a symposium later this very month on ‘Sites and Modes of Commemoration’ at the Bruno Kreisky Forum for International Dialogue in Vienna [2] Occasional UK and Irish participants at the usually U.S.-based annual conference of MALCA (Modern Austrian Literature and Culture Association) [3] will be pleased to know that 2010 will see the conference take place in Vienna.
The 2008 meeting was on the subject of ‘Cultures of Performance in Modern Austria’, but the news story of twenty-four years of incest, abuse and incarceration from the small upper Austrian town of Amstetten had not got through to the lecture theatres of the University of Washington, Seattle by the time the conference finished on Sunday 26 April at midday (Pacific time). This is perhaps no bad thing, since it would, no doubt, have rather hijacked delegates’ probing discussions on everything from Schnitzler to Schwab, and from conducting music to political protests. One thing seems clear to me: the secondary media phenomenon was much more predictable than this horrendous crime itself. The newspapers and the internet are full of Austrians defending their country and compatriots against international opprobrium and suggestions that the crimes of Joseph Fritzl and Wolfgang Priklopil in the 2006 Natascha Kampusch abduction case are in some way typically ‘Austrian crimes’. That said, both President Fischer and Chancellor Gusenbauer’s utterances on the subject have done little to deflect attention or defuse the situation. Die Welt reports that international media are dubbing Austria the ‘Land der Verliese' [4],a description that certainly resonates with Elfriede Jelinek for whom the subterranean scandal provides another source for her metaphorical, literary geology of Austrian historical amnesia and her grotesque satires of patriarchal violence. Jelinek’s Amstetten response of 1 May is entitled ‘Im Verlassenen’. [5]We may think that Jelinek has been quick off the mark, but as Ritchie Robertson observes, ‘Fritzl existed in literature before he existed in life’. Robertson’s article is illustrated with many examples from Austrian and other literatures. [6]

 

So if the newspapers cannot currently afford an Austrianist some light relief from marking, what else is out there this June? Major football stadia around Austria and Switzerland are gearing up for this year’s UEFA Euro 2008 spectacle of sporting prowess. The run-up to this year’s competition has, however, seen the bizarre phenomenon of a group of Austrian football fans setting up a petition urging the national team to withdraw from the championships and spare Austria the inevitable embarrassment their ‘performance’ will bring. The group calls on likeminded fans to sign up for an ‘österreichfreie Euro 2008, dem Fussball zuliebe’. [7]It’s enough to make you think you’re losing your mind. To quote Edi Finger, the celebrated Austrian reporter, ‘I wer narrisch!’ Indeed on the 16 June, in an act resembling midsummer madness, Austria even plays Germany. The perennial nostalgia for Austria’s 3:2 defeat of Germany in the World Cup of 1978, neatly captured in Edi Finger’s celebratory outburst, has already generated a recent trademarked boom of Cordoba memorabilia and a one-man performance entitled ‘Das Wunder von Cordoba’ at this year’s Wiener Festwochen. But I’m no fan of football and will personally not be going crazy whatever the result.

 

Oh well, the weekend is in sight. Surely, I won’t have to hike over the marking mountain all weekend? Saturday night at least must afford some distraction! My daughter wants to go to a ‘do’ at the sailing club we belong to. That should be harmless enough, I think, and check the programme for details: it’s a ‘Singalonga Sound of Music’ event! Suddenly the mountain of scripts looks challenging and rewarding, attractive even, so I wish readers well with their research and, if relevant, with their marking too. I’m off to do much, much more of the latter for the next few weeks of flaming June. Tja, wen der Berg ruft!...