2 - Reconstructing a Home: Nostalgia in Anna Mitgutsch's Haus der Kindheit

Summary

One is always at home in one's past.

—Vladimir Nabokov, Speak Memory

HAUS DER KINDHEIT WAS THE SIXTH NOVEL published by the Austrian writer Anna Mitgutsch. Mitgutsch who was born in 1948 in the Austrian city of Linz, is an academic and writer who divides her time between Linz and Boston in the United States. Her novels are largely concerned with issues of memory, identity, belonging, and Austria's Nazi past. Her work from the early 1990s onward is frequently concerned with journeys in search of roots, whether these are from the New World to Old Europe, or from Europe to the Middle East. The return to origins, which the protagonists anticipate in Mitgutsch's novels, are inevitably thwarted. In the novel Abschied von Jerusalem (Farewell to Jerusalem, 1995), the protagonist's search for roots in Jerusalem ends in tragedy, while in the novel In fremden Städten (In Foreign Cities, 1992), Mitgutsch presents the American-born Lillian leaving her Austrian family for the East Coast, yet failing to achieve the homecoming she anticipated.

Mitgutsch's novel Haus der Kindheit is no different in this respect. The first of Mitgutsch's novels to center on a male protagonist, Haus der Kindheit offers a powerful exploration of place, home, and belonging through the protagonist's quest to regain the house in the Austrian town of H. that his Jewish family left in 1928 when they moved to the United States, when Max was aged five. Max's aunt, uncle, and grandfather remained in the house, but the house was subsequently expropriated by the Nazis, and all three family members perished in the Holocaust. Despite growing up in New York, Max Berman is infected with his mother's melancholy for the Old World and for the home they left behind, and following her death, sets about reclaiming the “Haus seiner Kindheit” (HdK, 227; house of his childhood, HoC, 209). By the time that Max is ultimately successful in his quest he is nearly seventy, yet the projected return to origins rapidly turns to disillusionment through his experience of contemporary Austria.