Nostalgia After Nazism: History, Home, and Affect in German and Austrian Literature and Film

This book maps nostalgia and its displacements in the works of seminal post-Holocaust German and Austrian authors and filmmakers such as Ingeborg Bachmann, Elfriede Jelinek, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Michael Haneke, Tom Tykwer, and Robert Menasse.

By focusing on nostalgia, the author links the central tropes of post-fascist German-language culture (home, family, history, nation) with affect. Within the former Nazi countries, the author argues, nostalgia encounters a taboo, since the fascist past must never be idealized. Nostalgia after Nazism utilizes globalization theory in order to delineate a cultural particularity within the former Nazi nations. The caesura of the Holocaust has produced an historical and affective break that distinguishes these nations from other European countries. Germany and Austria experienced a regression to a pre-modern state during the period of the Third Reich; hence, their belated re-entrance into modernity following the fall of Nazism has had profound implications for national identity and aesthetics. The compulsive fixation with the Nazi past has resulted, the author proposes, in a hesitant and tenuous engagement with the post-national discourses of globalization.

Through the lens of nostalgia, this book traces confrontations with history and home in post-fascist German and Austrian literature and film. These works often enact a repetition compulsion of the critique of Nazism via a focus on the tainted spaces of family, home, and nation. A nostalgic longing for the damaged home is possible only in an alienated form, and many contemporary German-language authors and filmmakers represent scenes of departure from the entrapping space of home to other countries. Hence, Nostalgia After Nazism also outlines a shift from the aesthetic project of historical critique to instances of transnational nostalgia that combine a critique of recent history with a global concept of home. Through an analysis of the historical affect of nostalgia, this book offers a unique route of access to the conflicted emotions of loss and alienation that characterize contemporary Germany and Austria.

Nostalgia After Nazism engages scholarship in the fields of literary and film studies, philosophy, gender studies, and globalization studies. It takes part in current discussions about cultural particularities and local and national nostalgias by focusing on the anomalous cases of Germany and Austria. It provides novel readings of works by canonized and important new German and Austrian authors and directors, juxtaposing these readings with interpretations of comparable Anglo-American texts.

This book will be of interest to students and scholars in German and Austrian Studies, European Studies, comparative literary and cultural studies, cinema studies, Holocaust studies, and gender studies, as well as to those working on modernity/postmodernity, globalization, and contemporary notions of temporality and affect.