Austrian Identity and the Sexualized Racial Other: Lilian Faschinger’s Wiener Passion and Peter Henisch’s Schwarzer Peter GARY SCHMIDT U NIVERSITY OF W EST G EORGIA Some twenty years ago Reinhold Grimm asked whether there is a «German Blackness» of its own, four years after Sander Gilman had suggested the possibility of a German blackness without blacks. Yet today, while it will still take much political and cultural labor to erode significantly the image of Germany as a white nation, the Federal Republic can no longer be spoken of as a nation without blacks or where people of color are invisible in literature, film, and other electronic media. 1 Austria has proven more resistant than Germany to the «de-whitening» of its self-image. After the Waldheim Affair and the opening of the East Block a wave of xenophobia brought increasing support to Jörg Haider’s right-wing populist Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs (FPÖ), culminating in its participation in a national coalition government from 2000 to 2002. In a political and cultural environment in which populist xenophobia is able to thrive, albeit not unchallenged, blackness, more than ever, remains a paradigmatic space in which everything believed to be antithetical to Austrian identity is subsumed. 2 Although hegemonic constructions of blackness in Austria do not exist in the absence of blacks, fear of blacks is produced discursively to a degree disproportionate to their small numbers. In such an environment, blackness often figures synecdochically for a broader category of foreigners that does not include all people without Austrian passports but only specific groups stigmatized as inimical to Austrianness and so-called Austrian values. Hence, an analysis of the function of blackness in Austrian literature must take account of the complex nexus of significations through which Austrian identity is produced against an abject other and how the literary system of signification negotiates this nexus. In Austria, blackness continues to be constructed by whites, not only by xenophobic politicians for malevolent political purposes but also by leftthinking authors who continue the critical tradition of the older anti-Heimat generation (Fetz 179-81). While writers such as Lilian Faschinger and Peter Henisch have created black characters who challenge the nation’s self-image as exclusively White and European, these characters may in fact be seen as constructions of blackness that work from within the same discourses that al- 186 Gary Schmidt so inform racist xenophobia and hence can be examined within this tradition. While many scholars understandably celebrate Faschinger’s and Henisch’s denaturalization of Austria’s self-understanding, viewing their texts as significant contributions to the discussion of multiculturalism, 3 a thorough literary analysis of their novels leads to a closer examination of the figurative language they use to represent blackness and the manner in which the paradigmatic category of the Black is renegotiated within existing discourses of race and nation. The present analysis applies insights of queer theory to examine ways in which hegemonic discourse constructs monolithic identities using signs of race, gender, and sexuality. This approach allows one to evaluate how the literary texts in question renegotiate these inscriptions. As Randall Halle emphasizes in his recent study Queer Social Philosophy, «queering» should be understood as having a double meaning: while queer theory has often emphasized the subversive potential of deconstructively revealing the inconsistencies, exclusions, gaps and irreconcilabilities of identity constructions and thus demonstrated the impossibility of reducing desire to procreative heterosexuality, a complementary approach examines the «queering» enacted by hegemonic discourses that create the abject outside of identity, i.e., the process by which nonprocreative desires are rendered deviant (Halle 10). Henisch’s and Faschinger’s novels can be read as «queering» race insofar as blackness appears as a subversive potential disrupting ethnically pure genealogies and denaturalizing commonly accepted alignments of race, culture and national identity. Yet blackness also acts as a central signifier of abjection for a whole range of «non-Austrian» identities. In Wiener Passion (1999) and Schwarzer Peter (2000), blackness appears literally as hybridity: the female protagonist of the frame narrative of Wiener Passion is an American woman whose white Austrian mother taught her to sing Schubert’s «Die Forelle» and whose black American father, a jazz musician, imparted to her his own musical heritage in the spiritual «Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.» The title character of Schwarzer Peter is a Besatzungskind, born from the union of a white Austrian mother and a black American soldier, who speaks Wienerisch but is instinctively attracted to the black keys of the piano and the jazz he hears on the radio. It is not insigificant that Faschinger maps difference onto axes of both race and gender: Magnolia’s same-sex parent is of a different race (Magnolia is black, her mother is white), whereas her different-sex parent is outwardly of the same race (they both have black skin). In this fashion, difference (i.e., what is constructed textually as racial and sexual difference) predominates in Magnolia’s parental attachments. It becomes impossible to read her rediscovery of an «Austrian» identity in her maternal lineage as an attainment of self-identity. Not only will she always be marked Austrian Identity and the Sexualized Racial Other 187 as different in Austria due to her dark skin color, her desire for Austria, unlike that of the culturally atavistic Viennese residents, whose pleasure lies in the ceaseless repetition of ossified cultural forms, can be read as desire for that which is different from herself. Figured this way, homogeneity of desire and identity appears as the binary opposite of their heterogeneity, leaving little room for a dialectical play between the two. In this context, homoeroticism appears as the very opposite of hybridity; it tropes as a desire for sameness that permeates contemporary Austrian life, entrenched in power and invested in the repetition of the same that requires the exclusion of the other. Henisch, in contrast, creates a parent-child race/ gender mapping that situates difference entirely on the side of the mother and an elusive sameness on the side of the father. Whereas over the course of the narrative the darkskinned Peter becomes increasingly estranged from his white Austrian mother, he spends years on a fruitless quest in search of his black father. The logic of the text suggests an interpretation of this character’s quest for an absent father, which can be construed as a desire for sameness and self-identity denied to him in an Austria where blacks are still spoken of as Moors, as containing a homoerotic component; hence the recurrence of homosexual episodes between Peter and other (white) Austrians is invested with a certain internal consistency. The figuration of the homoerotic in a discussion of difference and sameness in these literary treatments is of no minor significance: it not only touches on a central discussion of queer theory 4 but also participates in an intertextual negotiation with canonical works of German-language literature in which sexuality and national identity are discussed in close proximity. 5 Finally, the psychoanalytic tropes and narratives deployed in such literary texts invoke theoretical and political responses to fascism in which queer sexuality appears only in neuroses that are causally linked to irrational fear of the racial other. 6 Faschinger and Henisch instrumentalize race metaphorically and metonymically within the semiotic economy of a psychoanalytic critique of Austrian xenophobia, such that blackness tends to represent all those elements that have been repressed or abjected from Austrian identity, including, for example, the multicultural demographic legacy of the Habsburg Vielvölkerstaat, which belies all claims that a pure German ethnicity can function as the defining characteristic of Austrian identity. 7 Hybridity - defined here as a cultural environment in which specific practices, products, and values cannot be traced unproblemtically to a clearly delimited national culture but in which national and ethnic traditions interact, overlap, and alter one another in a nonhierarchical fashion - appears not only as a desideratum, but also as a repressed reality of contemporary Austria. While blackness, as a literary 188 Gary Schmidt metaphor, is equivalent to the conscious celebration and living of hybridity for Faschinger and Henisch, whiteness is its denial. Blackness makes visible the hybridity inherent in all Austrians; it is the affirmation of change and life, while whiteness is solipsism, purism, and death. 8 Faschinger’s and Henisch’s preferencing of hybridity also suggests a reversal of the historical path of antisemitism that led to the realization of genocidical racism in Nazi Germany. In antisemitic discourse, Jews and Blacks often occupied the same paradigmatic space, that of the «mongrel,» the homeless, the nationless or of the foreign body that could not be integrated into the Volk; indeed, Jews were sometimes referred to as «White Negroes» (Gilman 1985: 30-31), an idea alluded to in Wiener Passion (46). 9 Of course, the appearance of blacks in literature as manifestations of hybridity is nothing new. In the nineteenth century the mulatto appeared as particularly problematic, a character who often represents the irreconcilability of the European and non-European temperament or character, most famously, for example in Kleist’s Die Verlobung in St. Domingo. As Susanne Zantop pointed out, an analysis of color in Die Verlobung must be framed within the discourse of miscegenation that continued to inform much anxiety about race relations well into the twentieth century because of its challenge to categories and boundaries. Literary tropes of miscegenation inhabited a whole series of German literary negotiations, extending well beyond the overt thematization of European-African relations. As Yaya Elsaghe has provocatively demonstrated in his studies of the textual construction of German identity in the works of Thomas Mann, the literary representations of a time period when the internal and external borders of the German nation were being redefined contain ample evidence of the interchangeability of blacks and Jews in a semiotic system in which races and ethnicities become defined according to their cultural and geographic affinity to the Reich. 10 In the texts of Thomas Mann, hybridity becomes a problematic characteristic that, although feeding aesthetic productivity, also makes the artist into a marginalized figure dangerous to the health of the new German nation-state. Elsaghe suggests that such a paradoxical relationship requires in compensation Mann’s endless textual production of Germany and Germanness against a racial and sexual other. In this context, elements foreign to German culture introduced into the artist’s background through the mother (significantly, often via German immigration to the New World and the subsequent return of later generations, as in Mann’s own family history) sometimes suggests Jewishness, sometimes blackness and certainly always queerness, in the sense of failure to live up to the heterocoital imperative (Halle 15-21). 11 In Mann’s novels it is the return of the Auslandsdeutsche Austrian Identity and the Sexualized Racial Other 189 whose blood has become mingled with that of non-Europeans that presents a Dionysian challenge to the ordered life of the newly established German nation and threatens a disruption in the continuity, even the continued existence, of the Volk. 12 In this fashion, racial mixing and queer desire become mutually imbricated in tropes of degeneration and infertility, a fact also recognized by authors who were critical of purist notions of ethnicity and race. Wolfgang Koeppen, for example, a very close reader of Thomas Mann, 13 embraced Dionysian sensuality precisely in its capacity to subvert exclusive and monolithic conceptions of Germanness that led to fascism. 14 For Koeppen, miscegenation became the prerequisite for biological and cultural fertility, a reversal of nineteenth-century fear that interracial sexuality would result in sterility. Homosexuality necessarily occupies a problematic position in any literary portrayal invested in fertility and the continued existence of the nation, whether defined racially as Volk or reconstructed to include multiple racial and cultural players. Koeppen’s use of homosexual pederasty to invoke sterility and passivity is negatively charged in the helpless and irrelevant intellectual Edwin in Tauben im Gras but positively coded in the composer Siegfried Pfaffrath in Tod in Rom, whose homosexuality is the very prerequisite for his radical rejection of his parent’s fascist values, the absolute negation of procreative repetition necessary for the birth of something truly new rather than an eternal return of the past. Since homoeroticism also plays a role in Wiener Passion and Schwarzer Peter, it is productive to examine its functioning as trope within the greater negotiation of racial hybridity and its meaning for Austrian identity. Significantly, both these novels, like the aforementioned writings of Thomas Mann and Wolfgang Koeppen, fantasize black-white relations in the framework of a return to the Old World in which «Black» and «Jewish» become interchangeable signifiers. In the frame narrative of Wiener Passion, half-Austrian, half African-American Magnolia travels to Vienna to receive voice training in preparation for playing the role of Anna Freud in a Broadway Musical about the father of psychoanalysis. In Schwarzer Peter, the title character returns to Austria after living many years in New Orleans, where he had hoped in vain to discover his paternal roots. Through the figure of the returning black Austrian, who condenses a broader history of multiculturalism that was truncated and repressed when, after the demise of the Hapsburg Empire, ethnic Germanness came to be seen as a prerequisite for Austrian identity, these narratives fantasize the renewal of Austrian culture as a U-turn out of the dead-end street that not only led to the Anschluss and the Holocaust but lives on in the party platform of the FPÖ. Faschinger and Henisch belong to a significant group of contemporary Austrian writers who have turned to the production of postmodern historical 190 Gary Schmidt fiction, with the apparent intent of subverting commonly held views on Austrian history, including the image of fin-de-siècle Vienna as a glamorous cosmopolitan center 15 and the foundational myth of the second republic, which presented Austria largely as a victim of Nazi Germany. In particular, these authors have been concerned with exploring the position of outsiders whose histories have not been told, including immigrants, workers, and women, as well as ethnic and sexual minorities. Such literary portrayals mirror recent historical scholarship, which emphasizes the contrast between the image Austria presents of its history and the reality of ethnic and class struggle that has been repressed from national memory. 16 Of course, Austria-criticism is not a recent appearance in literature. Yet, as several scholars have observed, the new post-Bernhardian generation of writers is distinguished from the earlier «anti-Heimat» literature in its use of humor, its willingness to entertain, and its deployment of narrative to resolve conflicts through unexpected and even implausible resolutions. For example, both Wiener Passion and Faschinger’s earlier novel Magdalena Sünderin end not with an Auslöschung, but with a kind of provisional and highly tenuous synthesis (Fetz 187). Faschinger, in particular, consciously uses humor and irony to suggest the hypocrisy of Austrian ethnocentrism. Magnolia’s archconservative Tante Pia expresses her doubts about Magnolia’s ability to participate as an equal in the everyday life of an Austrian as she defines it, for example by lighting the antique stove whose noxious fumes, ironically, killed Pia’s own daughter, or in the preparation of «Kuttelflecksuppe,» a Bohemian recipe she feels she cannot fully entrust to Magnolia, whose racial heritage excludes her from full admission to citizenship in Pia’s eyes. Since «Kutteln» - chitterlings or chitlins - are widely perceived in the United States to be soul food, Faschinger seems to suggest an area of culinary overlap that would certainly not be to the liking of the racist Tante Pia and would demonstrate the absurdity of her insistence on cultural purity (65). In its own playful approach to identity and foregrounding of role play and performance, the novel suggests its own reading as a postmodern text that foregoes giving psychological depth to its characters. Yet a truly postmodern approach to Austrian identity, which would serve to defamiliarize identity constructions by simultaneously reinscribing and subverting them, 17 would also need to reflect on its own unconscious, its own blind spot, in which sexual development appears central to the development of self and a key to the repressions/ frustrations that lurk behind a refusal of those who are perceived as ethnically or racially different. Wiener Passion, while demonstrating the power exerted over women and female sexuality by maledominated medico-juridical discourse in the late nineteenth century in a way Austrian Identity and the Sexualized Racial Other 191 that has been interpreted as Foucauldian (Kecht), at the same time attempts to account for persistent xenophobia and ethnocentrism in present-day Austria through a familiar Oedipal narrative of stagnated psychosexual development. Indeed, via the frame narrative, the novel suggests an analogy between repression of heterosexual desire (desire for the other being understood as necessarily heterosexual) and the deliberate forgetting of Austria’s multicultural heritage. The Binnengeschichte of Wiener Passion narrates the life of Rosa Havelka, whose diaries are found by Magnolia tucked safely away in an old chest in her octogenarian aunt’s spare room. Rosa, who wrote down her story waiting for her execution for the murder of her abusive husband, is a Czech woman who, like so many others, came to the late nineteenth-century Austrian imperial capital in search of work as a maid in an upper middle-class German-speaking household. Rosa Havelka is stigmatized with almost all the marks of abjection through which late nineteenth-century Viennese society created the Other that formed the contours of its own imagined identity: she is the illegitimate child of a maid who was treated as the sexual property of her male employer. Later on, she too is seduced by the head of the household in which she labors, when his wife is pregnant and apparently unwilling to satisfy his sexual appetite. 18 As a Czech, Rosa represents a group that formed the largest minority in turn-of-the-century Vienna. Such domestic servants were often forbidden from using their native language in the home of their employers. Indeed, upon obtaining the Heimatrecht in Vienna, Czechs, as well as other so-called immigrants from the Kronländer of the dual monarchy, were required to sign an oath upholding the German character of the city (John 28), a policy associated with the popular but notoriously antisemitic mayor Karl Lueger, whose rhetoric served as a model for Hitler and whose statue continues to stand to this day on the Lueger Platz at the end of the Wollzeile, one of Vienna’s most frequented shopping streets. Faschinger makes such connections between past and present explicit in her portrayal of the contemporary Viennese. When Magnolia and her aunt pass by the Karl-Lueger-Gedächtnisskirche in Vienna’s Zentralfriedhof, Tante Pia praises Lueger as an extraordinary mayor, «der den Grundstein dazu gelegt, seine Vollendung aber nicht mehr hätte erleben dürfen» (67). While she is literally refering to the church, this is also clearly an ironic reference to the Holocaust, which Lueger, who died in 1910, did not live to witness. That Pia’s attitude toward the Holocaust is characterized by repression and denial is seen in her regret that there are Jewish graves in the Zentralfriedhof, which in contrast to the Christian graves are neglected. «Eine Schande für national und katholisch empfindende Österreicher deutscher Muttersprache,» she quotes 192 Gary Schmidt her late husband as having said (67), a statement that reveals not only the multiple exclusions necessary to arrive at her highly restrictive notion of Austrianness but also the projection of guilt onto the victims of these exclusions. 19 Through the presence in the frame narrative of such explicit allusions to historical agents of the time period narrated in the Binnengeschichte, Tante Pia, as well as Magnolia’s voice teacher, Josef Horvath, a much younger man who nevertheless shares many of the attitudes of the older woman, appear as the contemporary agents who continue to carry out Lueger’s xenophobic charge on the personal level of an identity dependent on abjectification of the ostensibly non-Austrian. In this fashion the frame narrative structure serves not only as the vehicle for Magnolia to recover a lost aspect of her identity (her Czech-Austrian heritage), via identification with the abject victims of fin-de-siecle Viennese culture (as Kecht rightly notes), but also as a means to identify the continuing operation of the psychological structures of abjectification that are dependent on repression and stalled development in the absurd characters of Josef Horvath and Tante Pia. The frame structure thus functions to foreground the way in which contemporary Viennese society continues to prop up an anachronistic, ethnocentric and morally hypocritical self-image that denies its multicultural demographics, both historically and in the present, and remains fixated on a notion of culture centered on Germanness and Geist. Such a critique of German culture as «spiritual» offers a queer potential in its revelation of the suppressed multicultural body evident in the neurotic symptoms of Josef Horvath. Yet, Faschinger’s critique of spirit and recuperation of the body is based on a figuration of cultural sterility as failure to procreate, a trope that Lee Edelman has analyzed extensively for its heteronormative implications. Not for nothing […] does the historical construction of the homosexual as distinctive social type overlap with the appearance of such literary creations as Tiny Tim, David Balfour, and Peter Pan, who enact, in an imperative most evident today in the uncannily intimate connection between Harry Potter and Lord Voldemort, a Symbolic resistance to the unmarried men (Scrooge, Uncle Ebenezer, Captain Hook) who embody, as Voldemort’s name makes clear, a wish, a will, or a drive toward death that entails the destruction of the Child. That Child, immured in an innocence seen as continuously under seige, condenses a fantasy of vulnerability to the queerness of queer sexualities precisely insofar as that Child enshrines, in its form as sublimation, the very value for which queerness regularly finds itself condemned: an insistence on sameness that intends to restore an Imaginary past. (Edelman 21) An obsession with the past, a rejection of difference and compulsion to repeat the same, are characteristic of Josef and Tante Pia, who become ciphers for Austrian Identity and the Sexualized Racial Other 193 the moribund character of contemporary Austrian society. Tante Pia remains childless after the death of her daughter; Josef, who until his heterosexualization through Magnolia is both childless and infirm, resides quite literally in the death house of composer Franz Schubert, having replaced the seven members of a Turkish family who were seen by one of the Schubert Museum’s employees as inappropriate inhabitants of the house of a composer of «eine zutiefst deutsche Musik» (22). Josef’s sterility also appears as a hypochondriac’s susceptibility to illness and a need to be mothered that have resulted in a conscious choice for cultured (and cultural) infirmity. For the sickly fatherless child, art - or more specifically the German art of music, and hence a notion of Austrian identity founded on Germanness - appears as a consolation offered by his mother that traumatically reduces the adult Josef to a Wiederholungszwang: «Als ausgebildete Pianistin versuchte sie meinen Heilungsprozess unter Anwendung der Kunst zu beschleunigen» (15-16). Follwing the motto, «was Schönberg und Berg nicht glückt, das wird auch Codein und Penicillin nicht gelingen» (16), Josef’s mother foregoes use of antibiotics to cure her son’s infections, trusting instead in the power of masterpieces of Viennese musical modernism, first and foremost Gustav Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder, a song cycle based on a series of poems that aestheticizes child death and hence displaces the figure of childhood innocence and hope from the future to an irrecoverable past. That Frau Horvath’s reverence for the curative powers of culture are closely associated with class identity are evident in her disdain for her neighbor, daughter of a construction worker in Vienna’s working-class neighborhood Ottakring who never advanced beyond the eighth grade and hence can know nothing of the «Kunst der Heilung durch seelische Beeinflussung mit Hilfe der Musik» (17). Schubert’s song cycle «Die Winterreise» represents for Josef the pinnacle of German music. Already as a sickly child he identified with «der Leiermann,» the outcast organ grinder who in anticipation of a bitter death in a barren landscape devotes himself completely and utterly to his art. Josef’s admiration of Schubert represents an absolute rejection of life for the consolation of an art that is sufficient unto itself, a mode of being enabling not only the repression of sexuality but also the renunciation of one’s individual desire to higher ideals. This is precisely the ideal of self-sacrifice brought to its fullest expression in National Socialism, a connection hinted at when Josef remembers how his mother constantly reminded him of the «übermenschliches Opfer» required of the artist (24-25), a superhuman rather than inhuman sacrifice. Josef is ultimately cured of his sickness unto death and «rescued» from a homosexual attraction to his former prefect in the Vienna Boys’ Choir when he and Magnolia, against all odds, fall in love and produce a child, a living icon 194 Gary Schmidt of a cultural hybridity that rejects Austrian solipsism, reembraces a repressed ethnic diversity, and restores a future temporality to the child as metaphor. It can hardly be attributed to chance that all of the composers favored by Josef’s mother lived and worked in Vienna or that almost all of them come from mixed ethnic backgrounds at the periphery of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and from a working-class milieu, the very origins that Frau Horvath regards as incompatible with culture. This demonstrates not only how the construction of an Austrian national identity based on cultural Germanness operates via repression but also how even Germanness itself, when constructed via culture, functions as only a part taken from the whole; working-class people and their material concerns are abjected from this identity. Considering the association of German culture with a purely spiritual realm, we might turn to a remark made by Franz Fanon in Black Skins, White Masks to consider why it is necessary that a black woman cure Josef of an identity based on disavowal of biological needs. Fanon writes, «To suffer from a phobia of Negroes is to be afraid of the biological. For the Negro is only biological» (165). This is not to say that Faschinger reduces Magnolia to her biological functions but that, by returning the material body to Austria in a black woman who becomes an active agent in its cultural production, she encodes the multiple exclusions and disavowals performed by the construction of an Austrian identity based on a spiritualized construct of German culture. Schubert is a particularly important figure for the disavowal of corporeality in this construct. Indeed, it is while visiting the composer’s grave at Vienna’s Zentralfriedhof that Josef first encounters Magnolia, suggesting not only a return of the repressed body but also of the diversity of Austrian cultural heritage denied both by Josef and Tante Pia in their insistence on German culture as the foundation of Austrianness, this diversity itself being associated with the body as antithesis of spirit, which is culturally pure, i.e., German. Faschinger’s selection of Schubert may be a further example of her ironic subversion of the stereotypes used to reinforce racial boundaries. Significant aspects of the composer’s biography are not mentioned by Josef in his first-person narrative, for example his early death, possibly from the effects of tertiary syphilis (McKay 331), nor the recurrent rumors surrounding the composer’s omnivorous sexuality (McKay 157), although these facts may be known to many of her Germanspeaking readers. A disavowal of this aspect of Schubert’s life at the official level is suggested, however, by the Schubert museum employee’s claims that the dampness of the apartment led to the composer’s early death (74). Regardless of how he died, Schubert’s biography makes him an excellent candidate for consideration as an example of degeneration, a concept central to racial and eugenic thought in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that allowed Austrian Identity and the Sexualized Racial Other 195 a projection of mental and physical illness onto categories of outsiders that often stood in for one another metaphorically: Jews, blacks, criminals, and prostitutes. 20 The frame plot of Wiener Passion is, however, driven not only by play but through reinscription of a culturally recognizable narrative of maternal domination and stunted masculine development, in which Faschinger mobilizes familiar images of homosexuality as narcissism, which, as Tim Dean argues in Homosexuality and Psychoanalysis, confounds «self-love and love of the same» (123) and hence is often read as fear of the other and intolerance of difference. Love of the same appears to undergird the cultural sterility satirized in Wiener Passion, for example in the Viennese women who spend their time meticulously copying revered works of medieval art, including the Cathedral of Chartres and the tapestries at the Musée de Cluny in Paris, but also in Josef Horvath’s conscious emulation of Schubert’s biography in his membership in the Vienna Boys Choir, which from Magnolia’s perspective is nothing more than the purveyor of sentimental kitsch appealing to the nostalgia of «Auslandsösterreicher» (79). 21 Such cultural repetition, carried out by the disempowered (Josef is almost starving due to his lack of money), appears as a kind of national cultural Wiederholungszwang, a means by which the dispossessed seek to gain control over the German cultural identity that has been imposed upon them by performing an «ewige Wiederkehr des Gleichen» akin to the «fort/ da» game described by Freud in Jenseits des Lustprinzips (207). Cultural and biological sterility become metaphorically linked in the topos of homosexuality in the Vienna Boys Choir; Josef’s friend the prefect is as great an obstacle to his psychosexual development as his mother. Again, Josef’s personal arrested development is linked to a national narrative in which Vienna appears as the great mother, for whom the child holds a powerful yet repressed ambivalence. This arrested development expresses itself through a typical psychoanalytic narrative of homosexuality: the prefect is a substitute father figure for the fatherless Josef who discovered and encouraged Josef to play female roles (133), impressed him with his external appearance (133), and ultimately shared an intimate afternoon with him in the Palmenhaus in the gardens of Schönbrunn Palace (an artifically tropical environment also used as a motif for unnatural sexuality in Koeppen’s Das Treibhaus) that the prefect would like to repeat (136-37). The narrative seems to take Freud’s elaboration of the conflict between sexual drives and death drives in Jenseits des Lustprinzips quite literally; the death drive, which seeks a return to a previous state, keeps Josef not only traumatically bound to his mother in dreams and visions, but also is the foundation of his nostalgia for life in the boys choir and his relationship to the prefect. The text constructs the prefect’s homosexual- 196 Gary Schmidt ity as a logical consistency: a man who has irreversibly dedicated himself to preserving such a sterile and hopelessly kitschy organization cannot possibly be open to heterogeneous desire, i.e., heterosexuality. Magnolia, however, can offer Josef a new stimulus to push his development ahead, a counterweight to the backward pull of the prefect. 22 She does this by offering Josef not something which is entirely new but rather a degree of difference that also offers enough sameness to be recognizable to Josef and to satisfy his longing for return to past states without succumbing to them. I wish to make clear that my intent is to offer not a psychoanalytic reading of Wiener Passion in the traditional sense, but a critique of the way psychoanalytic tropes are deployed. Faschinger’s use of such tropes is no mere coincidence, for Magnolia even takes on the role of analyst who helps Josef to overcome his old neuroses in a talking cure and through transference. 23 Josef confesses to Magnolia the passion that, as an adolescent, he felt for the prefect, passion so strong that he considered committing suicide by throwing himself from the Riesenrad in the Prater, a passion «über welche ich nie zuvor mit einem Menschen gesprochen habe, da sie, so muß gesagt werden, weit über den Rahmen der üblichen Beziehung zwischen Sangeskollegen hinausgegangen war» (188). As spontaneous analyst, Magnolia fails to thematize the social prohibition that has led Josef to maintain silence about his passion for the prefect for so long and relegates the significance of the relationship to a past about which Josef is entirely too concerned. That Josef’s desire for the prefect should be viewed as an obsessive neurosis capable of cure is further seen in the way Magnolia indeed manages to successfully break it - by returning with Josef to the gardens of Schönbrunn, not for a visit to the Palmenhaus, but for vigorous exercise. In his discussion of transference in Jenseits des Lustprinzips, Freud emphasizes that old neuroses are never eradicated from the unconscious, simply replaced with less dangerous ones (Jenseits 204). Transference is crucial for the analysand and cannot occur without the analyst’s bearing a certain resemblance to the original object that caused the neurosis. In Magnolia’s case this appears in her resemblance to the Austrian Empress Elisabeth (Sissi), which Josef at first finds highly disconcerting due to Magnolia’s obviously «non- Austrian» racial heritage. Sissi also plays a role for Josef through his mother, in whom he believed to see a resemblance to the empress. 24 Josef is able to open up to Magnolia’s difference only through his ability also to find sameness in her. 25 Applying Josef’s personal development to Austrian identity, one might say that Faschinger sets limits to Austria’s ability to open up to racial and ethnic diversity, a replacement of adolescent neurotic xenophobia with a more gentle, integrative cultural chauvinism being possible that in turn also Austrian Identity and the Sexualized Racial Other 197 involves a rediscovery of repressed cultural heritage, for example in Josef’s «discovery» of the Song of Solomon. This psychically grounded circumscription of change, the queering of national identity being restricted to what is proximate based on psychic requirements, undermines an emphasis on performativity found elsewhere in the novel. It should be noted that Faschinger goes to great length not to essentialize race or gender difference. This is seen, for example, not only in the role reversal of the typical doctor/ patient relationship and the male/ female binarisms of strength/ weakness, sickness/ health, reason/ unreason, spirit/ body that are thematized in the Binnengeschichte (Josef, for all his profession of German Geist remains hopelessly imprisoned by his body until Magnolia initiates him into a sensual pleasure that releases him from his obsessive repetition of childhood illnesses), but also in subversion of racist stereotypes, particularly of black female sexuality, which in the time of the Binnengeschichte was represented not only as primitive lust but also signified the feared outcomes of unrestrained sexual activity: degeneration, sterility, and disease (Gilman 1985). Reprimanded by her aunt for being excessively thin, Magnolia’s body appears as the antithesis of the protruding buttocks of Sarah Bartman, the so-called Hottentot Venus, whose body was read in the nineteenth century as a marker for primitive sexuality associated not only with black females but also prostitutes (Gilman 1985: 88-91). Significantly, Magnolia is herself propositioned by a carriage driver as if she were a prostitute (Faschinger 386-87), and the lurking killer murdering foreign women invokes a Jack-the-Ripper motif that further underscores the continued presence of nineteenth-century images of black female sexuality in contemporary Vienna. 26 The fact that Magnolia wears only black also suggests a performative aspect of her identity, for it shifts attention from her skin to her clothing. Her conscious role playing is also emphasized in her increasing interest in Anna Freud, which shifts from her preparations to play the Broadway role to her interest in Anna Freud’s psychoanalytical project and her assumption of the role of Josef’s analyst. The logic of performativity is further illustrated by a discussion about racial casting between Magnolia and her producer. Although Magnolia sees an inconsistency in a black woman’s playing the role of «white-skinned» Anna Freud, she later invokes Peter Brook’s unconventional casting to demonstrate her suitability to play Shakespearian roles traditionally assigned to whites. Her producer, on the other hand, seizes on her mentioning of Brook as proof of a black woman’s suitability to play a Jew but at the same time suggests that Magnolia should take the role of Anna Freud out of economic considerations, doubting that she will have very many better offers due to her dark skin color (45-46). The inconsistencies of these argu- 198 Gary Schmidt ments demonstrate the strategic invocation of race and the ultimate absurdity of imposing monolithic correspondences between race and theatrical role, ultimately suggesting the possibility of performances in which a presumed relationship between race and character identity plays no role. By explicitly using stereotypes to build her own characters, Faschinger assumes a postmodern stance, providing hints that the characters are not to be read as having great psychological depth or complexity. By foregrounding clichée, Wiener Passion rejects a hermeneutic of the mulatto, such as that undertaken by Kleist in Die Verlobung in Santo Domingo (Zantop); it resists giving meaning to skin color and insists instead on performativity of roles. Yet Faschinger’s use of clichée is inconsistent. While Magnolia is given little psychological depth as a character, the same cannot be said for Josef, even if a queer critique of such depth reveals its reliance on clicheed representations. The pseudo-depth invested in Josef is significant when one considers that the text itself suggests he be read as a cipher for Austrian solipsism. If Wiener Passion can in part be read as resistance to the pathologizing of the female body and female sexuality in fin-de-siècle psycho-medical discourse, the novel reinscribes pathologizing narratives of male sexual development originating in the very same discourses. Such a move reveals the tip of an iceberg floating in the German/ Austrian Left’s unconscious regarding the relationship between homosexuality and fascism. 27 Faschinger creates a narrative whose plot outcome must be ascension to heterosexuality, the only alternative to financial ruin and death. While a white Austrian author’s attempt to write from the perspective of a black man might be considered offensive, a kind of ethnic drag - defined by Katrin Sieg as «the performance of race as masquerade» (2) - that can only lead to essentialism, Henisch’s Schwarzer Peter provides cues that the cultural category of blackness is the object of examination, not racial characteristics per se. The title of the novel is a reference to a card game of the same name, its American cultural equivalent being perhaps «Old Maid.» The Schwarzer Peter card is the odd card whose holder loses the game. By selecting this title for his novel and for his protagonist, Henisch foregrounds his objective of examining Austrian society’s historical production of the racial other and how Austria’s self-image as a white European nation continues to function today in xenophobic political discourse. Yet he also suggests to his readers his own identification with the character, since he referred to himself as «der schwarze Peter» already in Die kleine Figur meines Vaters. 28 Further, since both Die kleine Figur and Steins Paranoia are partly autobiographical texts that can be categorized with those of other authors who have recently discovered their Austrian Identity and the Sexualized Racial Other 199 Jewish heritage and have undertaken the task of «inventing their own Jewish identity» (Lorenz 144), Schwarzer Peter, like Wiener Passion, marks an attempt to juxtapose historical and contemporary antisemitism with antiblack racism. In contrast to Faschinger, however, Henisch positions queer sexuality - sexuality exceeding and resisting the norms of procreative heterosexuality - in the same paradigmatic space as queer race. If Wiener Passion allowed at least the provisional integration of Magnolia’s hybrid identity into contemporary Austria through a reinscription of the heterocoital imperative, Peter’s racial and sexual incompatibility with Austria’s identity regime results ultimately in his permanent exile from his country of birth. Since the life span of the protagonist is roughly equivalent to that of the Second Austrian Republic, a country in which his identity as an Austrian is repeatedly called into question, in which as a child and teenager he is often called «Murl» or «Negerl» and an allegedly friendly neighbor tells him to wipe the black shoe polish off his face, Schwarzer Peter, like Wiener Passion, clearly suggests that its personal and family story be read also as a national narrative. Scholars have clearly felt compelled to defend Henisch against possible charges of essentialism, 29 but in making such apologies one should be careful about reproducing notions of authenticity, as well as about drawing a border around Henisch’s novel that would make it immune from a critique of how race functions in the narrative. Dvorak, for example, argues that it was not Henisch’s attempt to create an «‹authentic› black character, in particular not within the framework of American readers’ expectations» (194). One wonders what a literary project attempting to create «an authentic black man» would have looked like, but the assumption seems to be that if a lack of realist intent can be demonstrated, then not only is the text immune from critique but also nothing can be gleaned from it about the cultural production of racial difference or how such productions can be subverted. Rather than erasing the role of race in the novel by subsuming it into a general thematization of «Anderssein» that is presumed to be what the novel is «really» about, I would like to examine specifically the way in which Schwarzer Peter critiques monolithic identity constructions in a way that combines sexuality and race. Schwarzer Peter differs significantly from Wiener Passion in aligning homoerotic desire with a queer liberating potential that allows an intimacy between black and white. Homosexuality is first introduced into the narrative in Peter’s childhood attraction to his classmate Puschnig, who ironically was nicknamed «Der Weisse» (46) because of his extremely pale pigmentation and blond hair color. Like Peter’s father, Puschnig’s father, a Russian soldier, is also absent, which gives the two boys a kind of symmetry and offers a logic for their attraction that is also marked by gender: 200 Gary Schmidt Während ich die Bläschen und Kratzer an meinen Beinen kaum mehr beachtete, kaum mehr bemerkte, versuchte er, mit seiner weißen, empfindlichen Haut auch die geringfügigsten Reizungen und Verletzungen zu vermeiden. / Nun wäre mir diese Zaghaftigkeit bei jedem anderen wahrscheinlich auf die Nerven gegangen. Bei ihm aber machte sie einen Teil seines Charmes aus. Ich mochte ihn, ja. Ich mochte ihn wirklich gern. Ein bißchen kam er mir allerdings vor wie ein Mädchen. (45) The association of Pushnig’s whiteness with femininity through physical fragility and Peter’s blackness with masculinity and strength not only reproduces the biological/ spiritual binarism satirized by Faschinger but also appears to allow the relationship to be read as heterosexual. Yet Peter clearly distinguishes this homosexual experience from his previous activity with girls, giving it a queer interpretation as «difference in sameness» (46). Nun zeigte sich, daß sich jenes Spiel auch in anderer Besetzung spielen ließ. Ich fand es nicht weniger spannend als mit den Mädchen. Es war etwas anders, gewiß, eine Variation. Während dort der Unterschied das Aufregende gewesen war, war es hier die Gleichheit. Wobei diese Gleichheit sich wiederum unterschied. Und gerade diese Verschiedenheit im Gleichen hatte etwas sehr Reizvolles. So war das zumindest zwischen Puschnig und mir. An den Stellen, die normalerweise bedeckt blieben, schien seine Haut noch weißer zu sein als sonst. Was soll ich sagen? Das Spiel wurde uns nicht langweilig. Wenn wir einander so gegenüberstanden, spürten wir immer wieder aufs neue unser Blut pochen. Es war aufregend. War es so aufregend, weil es verboten war? Eigentlich hatte ja niemand ein derartiges Verbot ausgesprochen. (46-47) The boys do not tire of their sexual game; although it leads nowhere and is constantly repeated with equal pleasure, it is neither compulsive nor crippling to their development. It appears neither as substitute for the real thing nor perversion and presents at least an attempt to integrate an erotics of race and gender, although this can be interpreted in different ways. In one sense, a racial heterogeneity is superimposed onto a gender homogeneity; the difference in sameness is repeated in other homoerotic episodes in Schwarzer Peter insofar as Peter’s homosexual liaisons occur only with white men. By mentioning the absence of an explicit prohibition on juvenile homosexual activity, Henisch does not suggest that such activity was accepted in postwar Austria, for he situates the boys’ «affair» prior to their first confession, in preparation for which they first became familiarized with the concept of sin and its «blackening» effect on the soul: «Eine schwarze Seele war eine sündige Seele. War dann - in logischer Konsequenz - ein schwarzer Körper auch ein sündiger Körper? » (49). 30 The two boys’ interpellation into the law of the Church is one in which sexual sin is inextricably linked with a racial hierarchy and hence a moment which irrevocably separates the two, destroying their Austrian Identity and the Sexualized Racial Other 201 friendship. Upon seeing Puschnig exit the confessional, Peter seems no longer to find a difference in sameness but merely an effeminizing difference in Puschnig’s whiteness: «Endlich kam er [Puschnig] zurück, die Augen unter den langen, weißblonden Wimpern niedergeschlagen. An mir vorbei ging er bis zum Mittelgang, wo er einen geradezu unverschämt feminin wirkenden Knicks machte und ein Kreuz schlug» (51). In contrast to what he suspects Puschnig has admitted to the chaplain, Peter makes no mention of «Unkeuschheit» in his own confession: «So habe ich meine schwarze Seele behalten» (52). Thus, racial and sexual difference first gain reified meaning in church prohibitions that create hierarchical categories; such categories not only constitute an inside and an outside of Austrian identity but also both reinforce and disavow an operation of abjection continuous with the fascist past. Significantly, Henisch both subverts and reinscribes a projection of sexual difference onto the racial other in his use of the Prater, that strange and exotic park totally within the city of Vienna yet containing so many abject elements of Austrian identity (a theme also emphasized strongly by Faschinger in Wiener Passion), as a site for little Peter and Puschnig’s activities. The Prater can be viewed as a symbol for those polymorphously perverse desires and identifications inside Austria which, however, are projected onto others viewed as primitive and belonging to the «outside.» It has been well documented that the Prater functioned as a location where racial outsiders were exhibited for the viewing pleasure of the Viennese in the early twentieth century. 31 Since his mother’s apartment is directly across the Danube Canal from the Prater, Peter quickly discovers this urban park as his own private jungle: Dann tauchte ich aber wirklich ins Unbekannte. Dichtes, staubig-grünes Gebusch und Gerank. Da und dort hingen von den Bäumen Lianen. Dazwischen liefen schmale, gewundene Schleichwege. / Und immer wieder überraschende (nun wirklich noch nie erblickte) Lichtungen. Altweibersommerfäden oder zwischen hohen Halmen gespannte Spinnennetze glänzten in der Sonne… Mein Gott, war das schön, mein Gott, war das (ja) erregend! Ich spürte diese Erregung im ganzen Körper, in der ganzen Seele. Ich war Tarzan, den ich natürlich im Kino gesehen hatte, aber Johnny Weissmueller war mir zu weiß. Ich war ein den Weißen, die sich die Herrschaft über mich und meinesgleichen angemasst hatten, glücklich entflohener, schwarzer Prinz. (23) Described in this way, the Prater becomes a primal forest outside of the constraining limits of Viennese culture, yet also within the city itself. It is thus not only a place of wild, lush vegetation but also of sexual excitement, somewhat akin to Gustav Aschenbach’s vision of voluptuous phallic flora when he first encounters the strange, animalistic foreigner in the English Garden in Death in Venice. We recall that Thomas Mann also associated forbidden desire with 202 Gary Schmidt the non-German, even the non-European, while at the same time irrevocably situating such desire within the psyche of the German artist Aschenbach and hence challenging the drawing of a clear boundary around national and sexual identity only to reinscribe such boundaries in Aschenbach’s demise. In this sense, Mann’s novella functions very much as the abject is described to operate by Kristeva in Powers of Horror. The narrative project of Schwarzer Peter, it seems, is to challenge this abjection of the racial and sexual outsider in affirming a queer sexuality that foregoes the drawing of identity boundaries. Yet the ultimate failure of this project seems to lie not only in Austria’s investment in maintaining the boundaries between white heterosexual identity and racially hybrid queerness but also in the utopian and possibly self-abnegating nature of Peter’s queer desire, illustrated in his love-hate relationship with his childhood tormentor, Robert Reiter. When Robert first encounters Peter on the soccer field, he calls him a «Murl» and excludes him from the game. Later, Peter gains Robert’s respect and they become close friends, until Robert becomes uneasy about their growing intimacy: «Es war schön, einander so nahe zu spüren,» Peter tells us. «Ich genoss es. Anscheinend genoss ich es ein bisschen zu sehr. Auf einmal löste sich mein Freund sehr abrupt von mir and schaute mich an, als hätte ich etwas falsch gemacht: befremdet» (132). Later Robert and his friends trap Peter, whose guard is down, and beat him up, calling him a «warme […] dreckige, schwarze Sau! » (142) That this act of abjectification - expulsion from the white male Austrian community - is a central psychological factor in Peter’s inability as an adult to conform to the expectations of heterosexual family life is seen in Robert’s return at the end of the novel to destroy Peter’s marriage through blackmail and seduction. In these final scenes, Robert’s psychic wholeness is itself revealed as a mirage - «ein einsames Häufchen Unglück» (531) who succumbs to alcoholism, he is himself an abject figure - yet at the same time Peter’s unshakable desire for Robert is revealed as a weakness that is strangely juxtaposed to Peter’s own regressive longing for his mother, who «ausgerechnet damals sterben [musste]» (534). «Weißt du, jetzt, da Du tot bist, kann ich es Dir ja sagen,» Peter writes to his dead mother. «Auf Roberts Zebrafell habe ich an Dich gedacht. Ich weiß nicht, ob Du verstehst, was ich meine, ich meine nichts Schmutziges. Oder gar nichts mehr. Scheiße» (534). Peter associates his desire for Robert with a longing for an irrecoverable maternal body; in his attempt to express this longing, meaning appears to break down and the only signifier remaining is that of bodily abjection: «Scheiße.» Peter’s relationship with Robert demonstrates how his queer desire migrates between a longing for the illusory wholeness of German-Austrian identity Austrian Identity and the Sexualized Racial Other 203 and an identification with its abject victims. In the army, Peter is attracted to a certain corporal Friedl, who is distinct from the others precisely in his lack of brutality, but whose appearance is stereotypically «Aryan» (blond and blueeyed); yet at the same time Peter is plagued by guilt about the victimization of the weak and intellectual Freislinger whose victimization by the unit serves to draw attention away from Peter. Although nothing happens between Peter and Friedl, who as the embodiment of the «German type» is a beneficent counterpart to the homophobic, xenophobic Robert, Peter himself has the opportunity to assume the role of the stronger who shows compassion for the weaker in an act revealing precisely the queerness behind the stronger’s projected phallic identity. In a clandestine homosexual encounter between Peter and Freislinger in the shower, Peter attempts to show Freislinger an affection that he cannot express in words: this private forbidden sexual act communicates what cannot be expressed publically in the all-male community of the army. Further underscoring the split trajectory of Peter’s desire is the fact that he finds himself attempting to imagine Friedl as he reaches for Freislinger’s penis. Unlike in Faschinger’s novel, homosexuality is not part of a developmental narrative in Schwarzer Peter. Neither do Peter’s youthful escapades with Puschnig and Robert lead him to become a homosexual as an adult, nor do homosexual encounters completely cease but remain as a queer potential that sometimes appear utopian and self-abnegating, sometimes self-affirming through compassion. The only resolution offered by the end of the novel is that the quest for an identity grounded in sameness must inevitably fail. Peter’s personal quest for his father fails just as much as his attempt for recognition by Austrian society. When his wife finds out about his extramarital and homosexual liaisons, she redraws the boundaries between her own white European identity and his unpredictable sexuality, the «dunkle Triebhaftigkeit» and «verfehlte Veranlagung» she sees resulting from his «genetic» difference (535). Queer sexuality and race are once again abjected and must remain in permanent exile. Notes 1 See, for example, Oguntoye et al. (1986 and 1992) and Ayim (1997). 2 See Reisigl and Wodak (2001) for a discourse-historical approach to xenophobic and racist political rhetoric in post-Cold War Austria. 3 See, for example, Vidulic (2004) and Kecht on Faschinger and Michaels (2002) and Dvorak (2004) on Henisch. 4 See, for example, Bersani, Dean, and Edelman. 204 Gary Schmidt 5 See discussion below of Thomas Mann and Wolfgang Koeppen. 6 See Halle (1995 and 2001), Hewitt, Meve, Grumbach, Jones, and Schmidt. 7 I use the terms «abject» and «abjection» as they are deployed by Judith Butler in Bodies That Matter, who builds upon Kristeva, who writes in Powers of Horror: «[I]t is thus not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules, the in-between, the ambiguous, the composite» (4). See Turner (111) for a definition of abjection from a queer theoretical perspective based on Judith Butler’s use of Julia Kristeva. 8 Historian Oliver Rathkolb writes of a peculiar Austrian solipsism or «Ich-Bezogenheit», «eine Konstante, die sich aus den letzten Jahrzehnten der Monarchie herleitet» (24) and is visible today in the highly developed national pride of Austrians (which stands in rather marked contrast to the national feelings of their German neighbors). 9 This affinity between antisemitism and antiblack racism was also noted by Franz Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks (90, 122). 10 In Elsaghe’s interpretation, Austria-Hungary is particularly problematic for Mann, appearing as a cordon sanitaire between the Reich and the non-German lands of Eastern and Southern Europe (39-52). 11 Consider, for example, the demise of the Buddenbrooks in the early death of the weak and sensitive Hanno or Gustav Aschenbach’s failure to produce a male heir. 12 As Sander Gilman writes, «[I]nterracial marriages were seen as exactly parallel to prostitution in their barrenness. If they produced children at all, these children were weak and doomed» (Pathology 107). See Naranch on fears of cultural and racial degeneration associated with German emigration to South America and Eastern Europe (31-34). 13 See Herwig, Pizer, and Marx, as well as my own critique of their heteronormative approaches to the Mann-Koeppen relationship in The Nazi Abduction of Ganymede. 14 In Tauben im Gras, miscegenation and the subversion of a Eurocentric definition of Germanness are linked in the narrative of Washington Price and Carla; whether or not their baby will be born makes up a significant element of suspense in the novel. This not-yet-born product of the union between a black American and a white German is the biological equivalent to the German-influenced jazz of Herr Behrend, who has married a Czech woman. 15 This is a point of continuity with the «Anti-Heimat» literature, e.g., Bernhard’s avowed purpose of destroying fairy tales and the myth of «beautiful Austria» (See Fetz 180). Fetz sees Faschinger as deliberately taking up the Bernhardian tradition in Magdalena Sünderin (181). See Michaels for a description of how Henisch can be situated in this group of writers (242-52). 16 See, for example, John (1996 and 1999), Rathkolb (2005) and Maderthaner (2005). 17 Linda Hutcheon’s definition in The Politics of Postmodernism: the aesthetics of postmodernism is a «complicitous critique» (9). Vidulic situates Faschinger in this proximity by describing Wiener Passion as a revisionist historical novel that emphasizes correspondences between past and present for the purpose of historical and contemporary satire: «Die zentrale Aussage dieser Satire lautet: Die Vergangenheit ist nicht abgeschlossen - sie ist omnipräsent» (Vidulic 411). 18 See Kecht for an analysis of the Binnengeschichte. 19 Further, for the cemetery visit Josef dons a «Lodenmantel,» that regional costume which comes to dominate the Viennese cityscape after the expulsion of the Jews in Hugo Bettauer’s 1922 satire Stadt ohne Juden. Austrian Identity and the Sexualized Racial Other 205 20 See Gilman (1985: 217-38) for the association of the artist with the madman and Mosse for a description of the genius as degenerate in Lambroso’s Genius and Madness. 21 Schubert entered the Hapsburg Court Chapel Choir at age 11 (McKay 14). 22 Compare Freud (240). 23 Significantly, Fanon discusses Anna Freud’s research on ego-withdrawal and impaired development (50-51), a topic highly relevant to Josef. Magnolia hence not only plays the role of Anna in her therapeutic effect on Horvath, she might even be interpreted as using her theories to recognize his impaired development. 24 Sissi plays an important role in the development of the ambivalent mother motif; like the city of Vienna, she too is described with mixed feelings by the neighborhood women who dominate Josef’s circle. 25 Magnolia’s function in the narrative cannot be described solely in terms of her status as an outsider who, through her naivete, serves to denaturalize petrified elements of Austrian culture and identity, as Vidulic claims: «Trotz des letzlich irrelevanten genetischen Erbes ist und bleibt die vorurteilslose und selbstbewusste Magnolia eine «Botin aus der Fremde» - die - selbst völlig immun gegen den Geschichtsmuff der Stadt - ihren wundersamen Gatten ganz spontan aus seiner Vergangenheitsfixierung befreit» (412). 26 Reisigl and Wodak claim that foreigners in Austria are commonly attributed with potency, fertility, and an overactive, predatory sexuality (55). 27 Reisigl and Wodak find the explanations offered by psychoanalysis and critical theory for fascistic racism and xenophobia, including «repressed homosexuality,» to be at least worthy of mention, although they distance themselves from the methodology of these schools of thought. On Elfriede Jelinek’s reading of Jörg Haider as a covert homosexual see Schmidt (9-10). Halle’s remarks on the problematic relationship between certain strains in feminist psychoanalysis and male homosexuality are also of significance (144-45). Fanon also suggests a connection between racism and repressed homosexuality (163-78). 28 See Schobel on Henisch’s move from more purely autobiographical forms to the use of «poetic license» in treating biographical themes. 29 See Dvorak and Schober. 30 Indeed, homosexuality was prosecuted even more harshly in postwar Austria than in Germany (Bunzl 132.) Henisch’s affirmation of a guilt-free juvenile homosexuality that is only later corrupted by church doctrine is diametrically opposed to Heinrich Böll’s portrayal of his own experience in postwar West Germany. For example, many of Böll’s male protagonists and narrators speak of never having dreamed of masturbation (alone or with other boys) until questioned by their priests if they had engaged in such activities. For Böll, the Church created such «perversions» through its constant surveillance of youthful sexuality (Schmidt 77-83). That the postwar Church, both Catholic and Protestant, was indeed obsessed with sexual sin is well documented by Dagmar Herzog in Sex After Fascism. «Shifting moral debate away from mass murder and onto sexual matters was one of the major tactics used by West Germans both in domestic politics and international relations. 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