Mitgutsch and Austrian Memory Contests

The question of memory has already surfaced explicitly at points during my discussions of Vanderbeke, Grünzweig, and Strubel. Memory has of necessity pervaded and fueled this study. As Andreas Huyssen notes, “All representation … is based on memory,” and all remembering involves representation. The past is not simply there in memory, it needs to be articulated actually to become memory. History thus involves a dynamic reworking of the past in the present, where these terms are not fixed or static; Huyssen refers to the “tenuous fissure” between the two. In the context of post-Holocaust Germany and Austria, the past and its representation are potent and painful sites of debate, as suggested in the introduction. In this chapter, I want to consider the questions of nomadism and postmemory to examine the work of the Austrian writer Anna Mitgutsch.

Anna Mitgutsch was born in 1948 in Linz, Austria, and studied German and English at the University of Salzburg. She gained her doctorate in 1974 with a dissertation about English poetry. Between 1975 and 1978, she worked as a teaching assistant at the American Studies Institute at Innsbruck University. She has also taught at Hull University and the University of East Anglia in Britain, and in Seoul, South Korea. From 1979 to 1985 she lived in the United States, teaching at a number of different universities.