The Literary Politics of Mitteleuropa: Reconfiguring Spatial Memory in Austrian and Yugoslav Literature After 1945

The German term Mitteleuropa, or Central Europe, was never just a geographical concept: it connoted extending German influence to the east. In the 1980s, a number of eastern European dissident writers, including Konrd, Milosz, and Kundera, defiantly revived the concept to counter what they saw as a Cold War memory vacuum and to emphasize their alignment with the multiethnic and multilingual legacy of the Habsburg Empire, giving rise to a protracted public debate. Their move, however, had been anticipated in postwar literary works by Ingeborg Bachmann, Peter Handke, and Christoph Ransmayr in Austria and Danilo Kis, Aleksandar Tisma, and Dubravka Ugresic in Yugoslavia, who questioned notions of geographic identity and national allegiance by imagining Mitteleuropa as a cultural space between nostalgia and totalitarianism. Yvonne Zivkovic draws on theories of space and memory to show how this alternate memory discourse emerged and that it reveals deep ties between the Second Austrian Republic and the Federal Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia. The writers discussed address the major themes of the 1980s debate - traumatic memory, geographic displacement, and transnationalism - but also share a literary aesthetics that privileges the intersections of prose fiction and the essay, the literary fragment, and intertextuality. Zivkovic's book shows the persistence of Mitteleuropa as a literary network and as a cultural collective defined by political debate and civic values, countering public tendencies of memory manipulation.