Austrian literature
Famous contemporary playwrights and novelists include Elfriede Jelinek and Peter Handke, and well-known essayists such as Robert Menasse and Karl-Markus Gauß.
It came mostly from Empress Maria Theresa's 'Chastity Commission', intended to uphold public morals, but it had the effect not only of creating a facade of decency but a stunted intellectual front.
There were Alps with their distinctive traditions, the deep woods, the coastal regions around Trieste (now Italy and Slovenia) and the Croatian islands, which served as the Austro-Hungarian equivalent to the French Côte d'Azur, a center for writers, painters and other artists at value - and that often-meant religious texts - were written down.
Different sources however suggest that there also existed aristocratic historical records (like Heldenlieder), lyric folklore (dance, love songs, spells).
He managed to gather around his court in Vienna humanists such as Conrad Celtes – the founder of Collegium Poetarum or in the later time poet laureat Vadian (Joachim von Watt) who wrote in Latin.
Big figures of the Catholic Church of that time Nicholas of Cusa and Petrus Canisius were connected with the Austrian court and a few of their works were written in German.
The Thirty Years War had multiple effects on European literary trends; some writers based their work on the sufferings of the time, or withdrew into writings of a religious nature.
Playwrights at that time were Franz Grillparzer (1791–1872), Friedrich Halm (1806–1871) - also an accomplished writer of "Novellen" (novellas and short stories) -, Johann Nepomuk Nestroy (1801–1862) and Ferdinand Raimund (1790–1836).
Grillparzer wrote tragedies in the tradition of the "Weimarer Klassik", Nestroy and Raimund were representatives for the "Wiener Volksstück" mainly played at the Viennese theater "Volkstheater Wien".
Stifter not only influenced Peter Rosegger but also German writers like Ganghofer, Heyse, Freytag, Wildenbruch and later authors (the time of "Bürgerlichen Realismus") like Storm, Fontane and through them Thomas Mann and Hesse.
Ferdinand Kürnberger was a novelist much like Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, who became famous with Venus in Furs - the erotic behavior he described, would later be called masochism according to his name.
Robert Musil and Hugo von Hofmannsthal expressed their "German centric" point of view, while others, such as Stefan Zweig, Franz Werfel and Alexander Lernet-Holenia, strictly spoke up for Austria and Austrian tradition and culture.
Later Nobel Prize winner Elias Canetti studied and lived in Vienna and wrote his only novel Auto-da-Fe, before the Anschluss he fled to England.
In analogy to Musil's Kakania (from the anagram for the k. u. k., i.e. imperial and royal monarchy till 1918), Fritz von Herzmanovsky-Orlando created Tarockania for the weird figures of his humorous novels and stories.
This breakup continued afterwards in Vienna and led to a separation of liberal and "German nationalistic" authors; the latter left the Austrian PEN Club and later worshipped Hitler and his annexation of Austria.
In 2007, the Theodor Kramer Society[8] published an anthology of Austrian poetry written in exile, under the title In welcher Sprache träumen Sie?
While some authors were in search for reorientation, such as Ilse Aichinger, Ingeborg Bachmann, Heimito von Doderer, Alexander Lernet-Holenia, Gerhard Fritsch and Hans Lebert, others came back from concentration camps, such as Jean Améry, from former (in times of monarchy) Austrian territories, such as Rose Ausländer and Paul Celan, or from exile, such as Hans Weigel and Friedrich Torberg, while others again did not come back from exile, such as Hermann Broch or Franz Werfel.
Among its founders and first members include Barbara Frischmuth, Peter Handke, Ernst Jandl, Alfred Kolleritsch, Friederike Mayröcker, and Michael Scharang.
Peter Handke tried out new ways of theater communication with his play Offending the Audience in 1966.Ernst Jandl and Friederike Mayröcker wrote a new sort of experimental poetry, Konkrete Poesie, working with the sounds of speech than with semantics.
One of the dramas is called Heldenplatz, an open allusion to Vienna's central imperial place, from which Adolf Hitler had held his first speech after the country's annexation by Nazi German troops in front of hundreds of thousands of cheering Austrians.
The acclaimed novel Morbus Kithara creates a scenario, in which Austria did not get aid from the Marshall Plan after World War II and was condemned to become an exclusively agrarian country.
On this background, the author writes about the time after the war, about ex-soldiers, ex-Nazis and concentration camp survivors, and thus depicts the complexity of post-war Austria.
Also Milo Dor, a born Serb who wrote all of his books in German and became a very important figure in Austria's literary scene, chose the danger of ultra-right wing parties as topic for one of his narrative texts, Wien, Juli 1999.
While the roots may be found with Franz Grillparzer, Hermann Bahr and especially Karl Kraus, one of the most important essayists after World War II is Jean Améry whose oeuvre primarily consists of essays, articles and critiques.
The historian and scholar Friedrich Heer is the author of about fifty thousand pages, most of them essays on Austrian and European topics, on history and philosophy as well as on religion and literature.
In 2004, Elfriede Jelinek (*1946) received the Nobel Prize in Literature for her "musical flow of voices and counter-voices in novels and plays that, with extraordinary linguistic zeal, reveal the absurdity of society's clichés and their subjugating power[11]".
Her works comprise novels such as The Piano Teacher, Lust and Die Kinder der Toten (Children of the Dead), as well as theater plays such as Clara S., Burgtheater and Bambiland.
Literatur und Kritik and Erostepost are published in Salzburg, Manuskripte, Sterz, Schreibkraft and Lichtungen in Graz, Wespennest and Kolik in Vienna, Cognac & Biskotten in Innsbruck, DUM in Lower Austria.
The scholar Klaus Zeyringer states that public subsidies represent the backbone of today's literary production and especially publishing in Austria, and this would be one reason why the frame conditions obviously differ from those in Germany.
These include Marie Anders, Reinhold Aumaier, Zdenka Becker, Adelheid Dahimène, Dimitré Dinev, Martin Dragosits, Klaus Ebner, Günter Eichberger, Olga Flor, Karin Geyer, Thomas Glavinic, Constantin Göttfert, Marianne Gruber, Egyd Gstättner, Wolf Haas, Klaus Händl, Ludwig Laher, Gabriel Loidolt, Wolfgang Kauer, Daniel Kehlmann, Michael Köhlmeier, Melamar, Hanno Millesi, Gabriele Petricek, Judith Nika Pfeifer, Wolfgang Pollanz, Doron Rabinovici, Julya Rabinowich, Sophie Reyer, Kathrin Röggla, Gudrun Seidenauer, Linda Stift, Erwin Uhrmann, Vladimir Vertlib, Philipp Weiss, Christine Werner, Peter Paul Wiplinger.
