IN THE DECADES FOLLOWING the Second World War widespread Austrian support for Austro-fascism and National Socialism as well as Austrian participation in the Nazi military and the actual degree to which Austrians had taken part in the Holocaust gradually came to light. It also became obvious that authoritarian attitudes, intolerance, racism, and chauvinism — the syndrome referred to in the 1970s as “everyday fascism” and described by Ingeborg Bachmann in Der Fall Franza (The Franza Case, published posthumously in 1981) and thematized by Elfriede Jelinek in Die Ausgesperrten (The Excluded, 1980) — had outlasted the Nazi system. The survival of old attitudes had been obvious since anti-Semitic demonstrations in 1947 in Austrian cities and the founding in 1948 of the Verband für Rückstellungsbetroffene protecting those who had benefited from the deportations that began soon after the Nazi takeover by acquiring under-priced property owned by Jews. In the 1970s and 1980s writers and critics explored lingering proto-fascist and anti-Semitic attitudes among the contemporaries of the Nazi era and realized that these patterns were perpetuated in the following generations in the absence of a legitimate public forum to express them. Latent anti-Semitism also persisted, though Vienna's small postwar Jewish community, consisting primarily of Displaced Persons, was considered only temporary, even by its members. In 1986, in the heat of the Waldheim election campaign, anti-Semitism in conjunction with anti-US sentiments regained a semblance of legitimacy. It was fostered by the invectives directed against the World Jewish Congress by the Austrian media, particularly the Kronen-Zeitung and the Kurier. Articles in these and other papers alleged or suggested that American Jews were engaging in an anti-Austrian conspiracy to topple the conservative presidential candidate and meddle in internal Austrian affairs.

Even at the end of the twentieth century the trauma of the 1930s and 1940s was impossible to overcome, as the conservative People's Party (ÖVP) formed a coalition government with a successful extreme rightwing movement, the Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ). Along with the victory of populism, concerned critics continued the process of unraveling the events of the Nazi era. During that time of heightened uncertainty and polemics Austrian intellectuals were still — or once again — struggling to reach conclusive assessments of the cataclysmic social and political changes of the years between 1938 and 1945.

The representation of Jewish identity after the Shoah in German and Austrian texts is a complex and often problematic issue, showing up the highly contentious nature of German-Jewish memory contests. On the one hand post-Shoah Jewish identity continues to be negotiated within firmly established traditions; on the other hand any such negotiation involves an engagement with the Austrian and German cultural contexts. The destruction of the Jewish communities and cultural networks in Europe caused an unprecedented breakdown in continuity and a divide across which the search for an authentic Jewish tradition seems impossible. Jewish intellectuals and poets left behind a rich textual legacy in a variety of European languages. Innumerable literary and autobiographical works by authors such as Arthur Schnitzler, Else Lasker-Schüler, Gertrud Kolmar, Jakob Wassermann, and Joseph Roth convey an impression of Jewish life before the Shoah. These works explore the identity struggles of Jews between assimilation and self-assertion, between those who sought citizenship within Christian societies and those who wished to preserve their difference, opting instead to coexist alongside the dominant population, albeit within an ambiguously defined cultural context.

Throughout the following article the works of one of the most prominent post-Shoah writers, Ilse Aichinger, will be examined and revisited to assess different phases in the re-emergence of a literary Jewish culture after 1945. Aichinger's career began with the publication of her novel Die größere Hoffnung (1948, The Greater Hope, published in English as Herod's Children, 1963), a text whose radical position of alienation from the dominant culture has often been overlooked, and continues in the twenty-first century.

The statements about animals in Elias Canetti's works reveal the scope and direction of the author's thought as few other topics do. In her anthology Elias Canetti über Tiere (2002), Brigitte Kronauer writes that Canetti's relationship to animals is indicative of the much-debated fascination with and concern about power that permeated all phases of his career as a writer and critic. Rather than considering Canetti the “ruthless tyrant who paradoxically criticizes the exertion of power” as some critics have characterized him, Kronauer emphasizes his desire for equality among all living beings:

Scattered throughout Canetti's work, observations about animals and the relationship between humans and animals seem strangely at odds with the human-centeredness of the dominant philosophies and ideological programs of his era such as Marxism, fascism, existentialism, and humanism. In fact, there is a development in Canetti's thoughts on animals that leads from his earlier, mostly abstract configuration of the concepts “man and animal” as myth or metaphor to a more literal understanding of animals and to a real concern for their well-being in a world increasingly dominated and devastated by humans. “Die Laute der Wale. Im Grunde empfinde ich Scham, diese friedlichen Laute von Geschöpfen zu hören, die sich gegen uns nicht zur Wehr setzen können,” he wrote in 1992 (Tiere, 98). Such statements transcend the anthropocentric patterns of the post-Enlightenment and place Canetti into the context of post-humanist, postmodern movements concerned with ecological issues and animal rights. For example, in a statement made in 1985, Canetti expressed his refusal to take part in the domestication of nonhuman animals, which would result in making them subservient to him: “Kein Tier hat ihn erkannt. Er war keinem Tier geheuer. Er weigerte sich, ein Tier zum Diener zu nehmen” (Aufz. 1942–85, 530).

Elias Canetti was a witness to the most cataclysmic events of the twentieth century; he was their analyst and their chronicler. A Sephardic Jew, born on the fringes of Europe in Roustchouk, Bulgaria, in 1905, he identified himself through European classical literature and the German language without forgetting his cultural roots. In his magnum opus Masse und Macht (1960), one of his prime examples of the survivor is the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus (37–ca. 100 A.D.), who became a Roman citizen and assistant to the Roman commander Titus. In Die Stimmen von Marrakesch (1967) Canetti's visit in the Jewish quarter is the highlight of his narrative. Finally, Canetti's analysis about Franz Kafka's troubling relationship with his fiancée Felice Bauer is no less a chapter of Central European Jewish cultural history than it is the account of a prominent writer torn by his duties, desires, and sense of integrity.

As was the case with Flavius Josephus and Franz Kafka, in Canetti's life, past and present, tradition and innovation, occidental and oriental influences represented equally strong forces. Faced by war and genocide perpetrated by those who spoke the language of his choice and were members of the culture he had come to love, Canetti did not disavow the German language and culture. Even while in exile in England he remained aloof, a cosmopolitan, and a critic of those who supported violence, regardless under which circumstances. “In Kriegen geht es ums Töten,” he writes. “‘Die Reihen der Feinde wurden gelichtet.’ Es geht um ein Töten in Haufen. Möglichst viele Feinde werden niedergeschlagen; aus der gefährlichen Masse von lebenden Gegnern soll ein Haufen von Toten werden” (MM, 77). Identifying with more than one society, Canetti remained impartial to causes, programs, and ideologies. He took sides only against death itself, the misguided who killed on behalf of demagogues, and others who killed for the sheer pleasure of it.

Canetti was the oldest of three sons and the member of a minority among European minorities. He grew up a polyglot and a student of world cultures, including nations and groups that received little or no attention except perhaps from anthropologists and ethnographers — the Lele of Kasai, the Jivaros, the Pueblo Indians, the Shi'ites in Karbala, and the Xosas (MM, 151–58, 173–81, and 226–35).

At first glance, the difference between the role of women in the public sphere in 1900, at the fin de siècle, and in 2000, at the millennium, appears tremendous. In terms of fashion, educational opportunities, employment, legal and civil rights, participation in the dominant culture and gender role expectations, the long-skirted, corseted suffragettes seem light years apart from women who take their active and passive voting rights for granted, see nothing unusual in single motherhood and abortion, and dress whichever way they choose, in skirts, pants, shorts, suits, and gowns. Yet writings of contemporary avant-garde, Marie-Thérè se Kerschbaumer (b. 1936), Elfriede Jelinek (b. 1946), and Marlene Streeruwitz (b. 1950) as well as somewhat more conservative women authors, Anna Mitgutsch (b. 1948) and Barbara Frischmuth (b. 1941), reveal that serious issues remain unresolved. Male-female relationships continue to be unequal in the home, in politics, and on the job market. Women are still barred from top positions and denied equal access in the social arena. Even more problematic is the fact that the prevailing mentality in the dominant culture, internalized by women at a young age, continues to relegate girls and women to a secondary role and thus prevents them from living up to their potential. The outside pressures on women to be submissive and women's internalization of the socially accepted roles reinforce one another.

Kafka configures gender roles in both familiar and unexpected ways. His characters, despite certain conformities with the stereotypes of his age, are in flux, calling to mind Otto Weininger's scale of masculinity and femininity. Gender boundaries in Kafka's writings of all periods are indistinct as are boundaries between species. For Kafka one is not born male or female, to paraphrase Simone de Beauvoir, one becomes one or the other or sometimes a mixture of the two.

As a recent critic has pointed out, his approach to gender was tied up closely with Jewish thinking on the subject. A close look at earlier and later works will reveal also that he did not revise his concepts of gender relations over time, contrary to Klaus Theweleit's assertion that by 1922 Kafka had achieved an understanding of women based on individuality, but rather that he 'de-essentialised' gender all along. Kafka derived gender models from a variety of sources all of which he approached in a critical, detached way. The diversity of the available models allowed him to recognize the relativity of each and, as Theweleit notes, to escape the exclusively heterosexual model which admits ‘only victors and victims . . . (not men and women)’.