3 - Redefining the Jewish Past: Vladimir Vertlib

Summary

VLADIMIR VERTLIB's LITERARY PRODUCTION provides fascinating insights into Russian society under the Soviet regime, diverse aspects of Israel, and the relationship between Jews and Gentiles in Austria and Germany, as well as the segmentation of Jewish communities in postwar Germany and Austria. Vertlib is one of the Austrian-based Jewish-identified writers and artists, a list that includes Anna Mitgutsch, Robert Schindel, Robert Menasse, Ruth Beckermann, and Doron Rabinovici, who started to write in the 1980s. According to Christina Guenther, these writers continue to reflect on what it means to be Jewish in contemporary Austria and to project Jewish identity as multiple and non-hermetic, not constrained within Austrian national or cultural boundaries. Indeed, Vertlib is concerned with the delicate position of Jews living in Austria—a country that has been reluctant to admit its guilt in the Holocaust. Austria's cultural memory regarding the Holocaust differs considerably from Germany's tradition of Vergangenheitsbewältigung: Austria began the process of dealing with the traumatic past very late and hesitantly. Relying on the so-called “Unschuldsmythos” (myth of innocence), the political elite of Austria succeeded in constituting themselves as victims of Nazi Germany, as having been the first country to have been occupied by the Nazi forces. With the Anschluss, or annexation, Austria dissolved as a state, a fact that gave the postwar Austrian Second Republic a pretext to claim it was innocent of Nazi crimes. Only with the “Waldheim-Affäre” in 1986 was public attention drawn to the country's role in the mass destruction of European Jewry. During Kurt Waldheim's 1986 election campaign for the office of Federal President, allegations surfaced that he, as an officer in the German Wehrmacht in the Balkans during World War II, had committed war crimes. In spite of this scandal, Waldheim won the campaign; but, as a result, Austria was isolated by the European community until the end of his presidency in 1992. Only in 1991 did Chancellor Franz Vranitzky, in a declaration before the National Assembly, admit that some Austrian people were guilty in the murder of European Jews, without, however, admitting that Austria as a whole was guilty.