This chapter answers the question ’does central Europe exist?’ by first drawing a literary-historical line between Franz Kafka and Milan Kundera, focusing particularly on the critical tensions in Kundera’s construction of a vanished culture and on the West’s mythologizing of central Europe. It then turns to two Prague-set novels, Bruce Chatwin’s Utz, which explores the condition of stubborn aesthetic individualism under communism, and Tom McCarthy’s Men in Space, set in the months following the splitting-up of Czechoslovakia in 1992. Beyond the Czech lands, the Austrian Ingeborg Bachmann’s Malina, a significant work of avant-garde feminism, offers a doomed fantasy of post-war Austro-Hungarian relationships. Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead, set in the Polish–Silesian borderlands, is a revenge thriller whose narrator is inspired by the radicalism of William Blake. These case studies signal the ways central Europe has been confabulated by British writers; they also show how an evolving canon of fiction-in-translation is appropriately pluralizing and updating the West’s idea of the ‘middle’.

A Necessary Novel

ILIJA TROJANOW’S DER WELTENSAMMLER (The collector of worlds, 2006),a novel in three long chapters about the Victorian explorer Richard F. Burton, was welcomed in the review sections of the highbrow German-language press. In fact, its author, already well known for his travel writing and journalism, soon came to be feted as a new literary star. Ilija Trojanow has good looks and well-developed communication skills and is ready to take sides in public debates. A further selling point is his fascinating and unique personal backstory, which is often summarized on book covers and in newspaper profiles. Born in Bulgaria in 1965, his family fled the communist regime when he was seven years old, finally settling in Nairobi, Kenya, where he attended first an English-speaking school, then the Deutsche Schule, where he learnt German for the first time and took his Abitur (graduation diploma). After studying in Munich, he lived in Bombay and Cape Town before settling recently in Vienna. Contemporary cosmopolitan Germany is tempted to see an ideal image of itself reflected in such a writer. Austrians are reminded of a time when the peripheries of the Habsburg Empire produced many of their most celebrated poets and thinkers. Trojanow’s Der Weltensammler was a novel that all the German-speaking countries perhaps needed to read in 2006. It was received both as an original Abenteuerroman (adventure novel, the term that appears most frequently in reviews) and as a contribution to discussions about race and identity in the wake of the American “war on terror” and particularly of the ongoing German debates about immigration and the value of culturally heterogeneous societies.

What was missed in the broadly positive assessments of the novel and its unlikely hero for a German-language novel is that it enacts the opposite of contemporary liberal thinking on interculturality. Trojanow’s Burton is not the role model for interaction between East and West that he appears at first sight to be. In fact, by the end he has more or less failed. In this chapter, I wish to focus on a specific and as yet unexplored theme in the novel; namely, the body as a source of metaphor and identity. A discussion of the body will highlight a feature that has not been fully recognized in critical discussion of the novel hitherto.

Since its publication in the early summer of 1995 Faserland (Frayed-Land) has divided critical opinion. Increasingly hailed as a masterpiece in some quarters, it is still condemned as aesthetically worthless in others. One reason for this is the contested status of German ‘pop’ literature itself, with which Faserland and its author are associated as no other recent single work or individual writer is. Other reasons lie deeper and can be located in the novel itself. Both its form, an unreflective picaresque confession, and its content, a series of degenerate parties attended by the pampered jeunesse dorée, are said to be either strikingly new or hopelessly banal. For some, the novel, which ends with the narrator communing with the spirits of Goethe and Thomas Mann, is embedded in German literary tradition (though, as we shall see, that tradition has a specifically Swiss inflection). For others, it is a cheap imitation of an already boorish American genre. Novels by Bret Easton Ellis – in particular Less than Zero (1985), which is set among bored wealthy teenagers in Los Angeles – are repeatedly cited as Kracht’s models. Yet any reader who comes to Kracht from Ellis will be struck by his moralism, which is distinctly lacking in the Californian original. Kracht is either a right-wing irredentist and a scourge of the sensibilities of ageing ’68ers or a despairing humanist in search of lost values. He either penetrates the dull Zeitgeist of egotistical consumerism, mourning its spiritual emptiness, or he skims joyfully on its surface, celebrating superficiality through his characters’ encyclopaedic recall of brand names and designer labels, and deeply held opinions on trivia. In the critical literature, which in its bulk already far exceeds the novel’s 150 pages, there is little consensus. Here, however, conflicting interpretations are mutually enriching. In this chapter, I set out what I see as the principal positions in the arguments over Faserland and contend that one sign of its enduring significance lies in the lack of critical agreement. I then conclude with some comments about its political stance.

Günter Grass’s memoir of his first thirty years, Peeling the Onion (2006), which he published a year short of his eightieth birthday, refocused attention on the autobiographical themes of his first three books, The Tin Drum (1959), Cat and Mouse (1961), and Dog Years (1963), which cover much of the same period and made him famous. Grass suddenly becomes a very autobiographical author when these are put together with his next set of prose fiction, which runs From the Diary of a Snail (1972) through to The Flounder (1977) and The Rat (1986), in which the authorial first person, or ‘author function’ to cite Rebecca Braun’s useful new term (see her chapter in this volume), orchestrates the polyphonic narratives. And in Local Anaesthetic (1969), The Call of the Toad (1992), and Too Far Afield (1995), the central characters are roughly Grass’s age at the time of publication (early forties in 1969, around seventy in the 1990s) and have a number of biographical features in common with him – both Starusch and Fonty have guilty wartime secrets, for instance. Yet it is not until the mid-1990s that autobiographical modes predominate in his literary writing, which follows a trend evident in his public statements from the beginning of the previous decade. The collection of one hundred stories which make up My Century (1999), for example, alternate between memoir and fiction in ways which may be seen as emblematic for his entire oeuvre.

IT WAS FAR FROM UNUSUAL in the interwar period for satirical or leftwing German authors to adopt a nom de plume. Indeed there is a long tradition of German literary Jewish writers changing their name to hide their family origins from prejudiced readers. Neither of the other two Jewish women writers from “the 1890s generation,” Claire Goll and Gertrud Kolmar, whom Dagmar Lorenz groups with Veza, published under their real names. The greatest satirist of the Weimar period, Kurt Tucholsky, invented a number of writing personae, alternately calling himself Peter Panther, Theobald Tiger, Ignaz Wrobel, and Kaspar Hauser, after the nineteenth-century foundling (that is also the theme of one of Veza's lost texts).

In a letter to Rudolf Hartung after the war, Veza recalls that Dr. König from the Arbeiter-Zeitung explained to her that “with the latent anti-Semitism one cannot publish so many stories and novels written by a Jewess, and yours are unfortunately among the best.” In such a climate, a change of name was a practical necessity. Pseudonyms could be even more useful to Jewish or oppositional authors after 1933. In order for his book to stand a chance of dissemination in Nazi Germany, Walter Benjamin rechristened himself Detlef Holz (which means wood) to publish an anthology of ostensibly nationalistic letters (German People) written by prominent Germans between 1783–1883, which he published in Switzerland.

ELIAS AND VEZA CANETTI began to write at the same time; he started with his only novel, while she wrote short stories for the workers' newspaper in Vienna. After graduating in chemistry in the summer of 1929, he initially began to work on an even more ambitious eight-volume project he had called (after Balzac) the Comédie Humaine of Madmen. In the end he wrote only one volume, initially called Kant catches Fire, which he completed between 1930 and 1931. It is about an eccentric academic whose mind is so warped by reading and his sequestered intellectual life that he marries his ignorant housekeeper and consequently brings about his personal, professional, and financial downfall. Veza enthused, the year before she died, that

For a novel of such overweening proportions to be its author's first piece of literary writing is all but unprecedented. That Canetti wrote no more fiction makes its status more unusual still.

Veza was not always so sanguine on the subject, not least because she bore the brunt of the mental collapse Canetti almost endured as he narrated Peter Kien's disintegration. She responded by publishing prose fiction, short stories, and novellas, in the Arbeiter-Zeitung from June 1932, which she continued to do until November 1933, three months before the paper was closed.

Veza on Canetti

IT WAS CANETTI'S MOST PERSISTENT CRITIC who first suggested in a review of Yellow Street that “Knut Tell, Poet” was a satirical portrait of the author's future husband. Being reminded of his first wife's gentle satire reportedly upset him. What the reviewer could not know was that Tell appears two more times in Veza's writings, in a short story entitled “Lost Property” (“Der Fund”) which first appeared in the Arbeiter-Zeitung in April 1933, and in The Tiger, which makes him her single most enduring character. What is striking in the context of the Canettis' literary marriage is that by the time of her second play Veza's attitude towards him changes dramatically. He is transformed from a well-meaning and mildly ridiculous figure to the upholder of artistic integrity in the face of commercial philistinism and worse.

Veza's literary characters often corresponded closely with people she knew. Canetti's benefactor, the Straßburg journalist Jean Hoepffner, features in one unpublished story as “Herr Hoe,” which was their nickname for him. In her letters to Georg, Veza tells him that he appears as “the young doctor” in The Ogre (August 1946; BG:221) and that she has written a number of other plays or stories about people in her life. “The Tiger,” for instance, “tells the story of your cousin Mathilde” (16 December 1933; BG:14) and her accounts of the real-life Mr. and Mrs. Milburn and the fictional couple in “Toogoods or the Light” are as good as identical.

I FIRST CAME ACROSS Elias Canetti's autobiography fifteen years ago when working on a paper about German writers whose lives were turned upside down by the events of the last century. I still find The Tongue set Free and the two volumes that followed to be the most exciting of his big books. His account of a childhood among Spanish-speaking Jews in pre-1914 Bulgaria, of his family's moves, first to Manchester in defiance of his paternal grandfather, to Vienna after the sudden death of his young father, from there to the haven of Switzerland, and then to Frankfurt during the great inflation add powerful historical details to this essentially lyrical book. Canetti's early life is his legend and it belongs to a world that has been obliterated by the wars and exterminations of the twentieth century. He practiced telling it long before he wrote it down. But the real focus of this strangely secretive confession is his battle with a very powerful woman — his mother — who, despite her love of literature, set her heart on thwarting his ambition to become a writer, that is a Dichter, who would take his own place in the European tradition that she had taught him to love. After her literary romance with his father ended with Jacques Canetti's unexpected death, she made their eldest son into her precociously bookish confidante and he decided to become a writer just to please her.

FAR MORE THAN Friedl Benedikt or Iris Murdoch, let alone Kathleen Raine, Veza reacted not only to her husband's personality but also to his writing and ideas. In turn she exerted a more profound influence on him than any of his literary girlfriends or pupil/mistresses. While he put her into his fiction and drama before he made her a major character in his autobiography, her ideas (on the psychology and ethics of sight, ogres, the hunt, physical disability, the life of animals, cinema, even sexual equality) fed into his work. Their relationship went through phases of partnership, conflict, reconciliation, and renewed partnership. In Vienna they responded to the same set of cultural and political circumstances and worked in parallel and as equals on their independent projects. Their writings also constitute part of a remarkable private dialogue.

Canetti's creative partnerships with other writers or artists took numerous forms. If Murdoch and Benedikt were literary girlfriends, then Veza was his literary mother. In her letters to Georg, she calls both Elias and the younger Georg Canetti her “sons”; and she mothers both of them in terms of their physical well-being and their professional ambitions. A good mother traditionally puts the interests of her children before her own, and Veza appears to have been a very good mother in this respect. In both her prewar letters to Georg and her more numerous postwar ones, she devotes at least twenty times more attention to Canetti's literary aspirations than to her own, which often appear as afterthoughts when she mentions them at all.

IN THE VIENNESE Arbeiter-Zeitung of 29 June 1932, seven months and a day before Adolf Hitler was appointed Reichskanzler of Germany, the thirty-five-year-old occasional English teacher and freelance translator, Venetiana Taubner-Calderon, published her first short story. It was on the tragic fate of a young working-class woman, but she entitled it “The Victor” after her protagonist's more powerful male employer. This was the same title as a recently released blockbuster from the UFA film studios starring German cinema's leading matinée idol, who soon became Nazi Germany's greatest box office draw and male poster-boy, Hans Albers. Judging from a line in Comedy of Vanity, the title also alludes to her fiancé's interest in the subject and exercise of power. As Canetti elaborates in Crowds and Power, anyone who survives the death of another individual, as Siegfried Salzman survives that of Anna Seidler, experiences a sense of victory over him (III:267–329). When Anna's body is carried back to the factory by a young worker who found her in the snow, Salzman takes satisfaction from her death because it confirms his own more powerful position. There may be a further dimension. In Canetti's Comedy of Vanity, it is Heinrich Föhn (his self-portrait) who joshes to Leda Frisch that she considers him a “victor.” What's more, according to Heinrich, Leda likes him in this role. Yet Veza's Anna kills herself as a consequence of Salzman's refusal to confirm her secretarial skills, which she acquires independently, through private study, and which denies her the chance of finding work with another firm.

IN THE SECOND PHASE of Veza's career — after the closure of the Arbeiter-Zeitung in February 1934 and until the Anschluss in March 1938 — she wrote two plays, The Ogre and The Tiger, and a number of short stories and novellas, which all distinguish themselves sharply from the material that appeared in the workers' press between 1932 and 1934. Canetti in contrast wrote nothing that he could present for publication. The intensified censorship meant that Veza had to change her style and subject matter if she wanted to get published in Austria, let alone Nazi Germany. Unlike Canetti, she continued to write for readers — at least there are many signs that indicate that after a period of readjustment to the new, repressive political reality, this is what she wanted to do. Success now came much harder, as there were fewer opportunities, which she seems quickly to have realized. She can hardly have dramatized the story of the Igers' marriage with the expectation that it would be published, let alone performed on stage, under either Dollfuß or Schuschnigg. Her indictment of the patriarch, the linchpin of the neo-Catholic order, for his bullying behavior, is too strong for that, regardless of whether Iger is intended to represent Dollfuß, as Angelika Schedel has proposed. Dagmar Lorenz writes that “geared towards a class-conscious proletariat, Der Oger, with its easy-to-follow conflicts, its overt revolutionary message, and its conventional dramatic techniques, is clearly didactic.”

AFTER SO MANY YEARS OF obscurity Veza Canetti could not have anticipated that more than a quarter of a century after her death her story would become a feminist cause célèbre. Yet there is no other way to describe her impact in Germany when her writings began to appear in the 1990s. On the publication of The Tortoises in 1999, Anna Mitgutsch, a distinguished Austrian writer and critic, author of a contemporary feminist classic on abusive family relationships, wrote a scathing attack on her husband. She accused him of direct responsibility for Veza's neglect both before and after her death, of writing condescendingly about her in the foreword to Yellow Street, and of comparing her realistic stories unfavorably with his own celebrated modernist novel of cultural and mental disintegration, Auto-da-Fé. While the great man created, his wife merely “reported,” she alleged Canetti had written. Even if we put aside the other grounds for her polemic, it remains a peculiar way to greet a novel which contains one of the most powerful literary accounts of the Kristallnacht since Günter Grass's The Tin Drum.

Mitgutsch was not the first reviewer to think that Veza's “case” was more interesting than anything she had actually written. The opinion was first expressed in the pages of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in response to Yellow Street.