Internet-Zeitschrift für Kulturwissenschaften	17. Nr.	Februar 2010
Sektion 1.11.	American and Austrian Literature and Film: Influences, Interactions and Intersections Sektionsleiter | Section Chair: Donald G. Daviau (University of California at Riverside) Dokumentation | Documentation | Documentation

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Austrian and American Ethnic Diversity in Lilian Faschinger’s Wiener Passion

Joseph W. Moser (Washington & Jefferson College, Pennsylvania)

Email: jmoser@washjeff.edu

Lilian Faschinger’s novel Wiener Passion (Vienna Passion), published in 1999, paints a broad picture of Viennese society at the end of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Framed by the story of Magnolia Brown, an African-American woman of Austrian descent who travels to Vienna in the 1990s, the main story rests on Magnolia’s great-grandmother, Rosa Havelka, who moved to Vienna in the 1880s as a Czech migrant worker and was executed in 1900 for murdering her husband. Originally, Faschinger planned to entitle this work Wiener Stimmen, which would have given credit to the many voices and stories in this text that illustrate Vienna’s multi-ethnic heritage, and simultaneously portray the city’s perpetual resistance to its rich cultural identity. Several characters from both turns-of-the-century perceive Vienna as monoethnically German, thus drawing connections between Georg von Schönerer’s nationalism  and that of Jörg Haider. The conflict of a city embracing and rejecting its rich ethnic heritage is one of many important themes in this novel. The oppression of women or the class conflicts within Austrian society are other significant themes, however, a full analysis of these issues would go well beyond the scope of this paper. By concentrating on the picaresque aspects of the novel and examining the construction of ethnicity in the text, this paper will show how Faschinger links a century of Viennese social history.

Before the publication of Wiener Passion, Faschinger was best known for her novel Magdalena Sünderin (1995), which many critics and the author herself have identified as having the characteristics of a picaresque novel.(1) The story of Rosa Havelka, which is quite different from Magdalena’s, also bears much resemblance to a picaresque tale. Growing up as the illegitimate daughter of a maid in the house of her father, Herr Gerstner, the stellvertretende Kurdirektor of Marienbad, Rosa is oblivious of the circumstances surrounding her social class and believes that God has chosen her and her mother to be servants. As a member of the large Gerstner household, she is allowed to take lessons from the same tutor as her half-sisters, but she does not fully realize that she will not have the same opportunities as the legitimate daughters of a local dignitary. Throughout the text, her situation becomes progressively worse, and Rosa only in retrospective fully appreciates her “Vertreibung aus dem Paradies”(105). After her mother dies as the consequence of having been overworked by Gerstner’s wife, Rosa is sent to a convent boarding school in Prague, a move that relieves the Kurdirektor of the presence of his illegitimate daughter. The Ursuline nuns educate her in Catholic doctrine, and Rosa is eager to learn and submit. Yet her life continues along a downward spiral. She falls victim to sexual abuse by a classmate, and the nuns punish her for this digression. She runs away from the school and seeks her fortune in Vienna, where she encounters harsh working conditions for Czech migrants.

Faschinger has commented that one of her goals for this book was to expose the myth of Vienna being a glamorous city.(2) Many workers from all over the Habsburg monarchy moved to the empire’s capital to seek employment, and yet Vienna had more than enough workers living and working under unbearable conditions. Rosa has to pay a horrendous fee to a job agency for domestic servants and finds employment as a maid with the family of Oberpostrat Lindner, but Frau Lindner works her so hard that she collapses and falls off a ladder receiving a concussion. She awakens in a hospital room but is ordered to leave because she cannot afford the hospital charges. She finds another job with the family of the Edlen von Schreyvogel, who seduces and impregnates her while his wife starves her. She finally loses this job for allowing the Schreyvogels’ offspring to play outdoors with children of the working class. Rosa has to visit an Engelmacherin to abort the child, and the reference that Frau von Schreyvogel writes for Rosa precludes future employment in domestic service. Praying to the patron saint of domestic servants, she meets Dora Vittoria Galli, a widow who invites Rosa to live with her. While Rosa sees this as a lucky turn of events for herself, her fate continues down a picaresque path. Galli believes in witchcraft and self-castigation. She forces Rosa to whip herself after she met with a young man, and this drives Rosa insane as she attempts to commit suicide. She and the young man are both locked up in the mental clinic in Vienna’s ninth district because the authorities believe Galli and not the young Czech laborer.

After she is released she has nowhere to go, so she seeks shelter in the city’s sewer system. She steals a zither from a music store and makes money as a street musician until someone recognizes the stolen instrument and she is arrested and sent to prison in Wiener Neustadt. By mingling with petty criminals in prison, Rosa learns about prostitution and the places in Vienna, where prostitutes pick up clients. After being released from forced labor because her habit of speaking to herself had annoyed both the inmates and the nuns who ran the facility, she goes to Vienna’s Volksgarten, where the locally established prostitutes chase her away to the Prater Hauptallee. There she meets a lady who has been in the business for a while and gives Rosa some money to attend a performance at the Musikverein, where as a young woman she would be able to attract a higher class customer. At a concert in this venerable institution, she sees the Crown Prince Rudolph and makes eye contact with the heir to Austria’s throne. She also meets Engelbert Kornhäusel, a failing writer, who rents her a room and insists on writing his poetry on her skin until the ink poisons her and she falls ill. Subsequently the Crown Prince’s Leibfiaker visits her and tells her that Rudolph wants to meet with her. She becomes his concubine set up in a villa in Döbling. He even invites her to commit suicide with him, but after she declines, he kills himself and his other mistress Vetsera.

Rosa finds herself back in the sewer. She returns to the Volksgarten and this “beschleunigt ihren Niedergang” (452). She contracts syphilis, which she believes will be cured by sleeping with the executioner Josef Lang. In the Prater, she meets Dr. Doblhoff from the mental clinic, who invites her to live with him and take care of his household. His wife is deathly ill in a sanatorium in the South Tyrol, so he starts to make plans to marry Rosa and she becomes pregnant. However, his wife makes an unexpected recovery and Rosa must leave. Rosa’s daughter is taken care of by the Carmelite nuns in the second district, while Doblhoff procures her a job in the Hofburg as a silver polisher.

She meets a Fiaker driver, Karel Havelka, who decides to marry her because he thinks she looks like the Empress Sissi, however, she cannot tell him about her child, so she ends up sending her child with friends emigrating to the U.S. The child is Magnolia’s grandmother. Karel urges her to get him a job in the Hofburg, so he can be closer to Sissi. She has to wear a Sissi wig and even catches her husband cross dressing as the empress in front of a mirror. Despite this disappointment for Rosa, she sneaks Karel into the Hofburg, so he can catch a glimpse of the Empress, but instead of just ogling Sissi, he jumps into a bath with her. He barely escapes this situation and Rosa is fired for her alleged negligence. After this incident, Rosa’s life takes another negative turn. Karel sneaks out at night and rapes and murders women who remind him of Sissi. Rosa follows him and in defense of one of his victims stabs him to death. The courts, however, do not believe her and she is sentenced to death. In her cell she writes down her story and gives it to a nun, who holds on to the writing until she gives it to Magnolia’s aunt in 1950. Because of the nun’s introduction to Rosa’s narrative, Magnolia and the reader are aware from the beginning that Rosa will be executed for murder. However, it is not completely clear until the end how Magnolia may be related to Rosa, as her family is ashamed of descending from a murderer and withholds this information.

Magnolia’s story in contrast is by no means picaresque. She is an unemployed Broadway actress working as a waitress in New York, where she meets a producer, John, who wants to stage a musical about Freud and decides to cast Magnolia as Anna Freud. John explains to Magnolia that she could play Freud’s daughter, because the Jews in Europe resembled the Blacks in the U.S.(3) This is certainly an oversimplification of the issue, but it is an interesting point of departure for Magnolia, as she leaves for Vienna to work on her voice. Her initial impressions of Vienna are skewed by her aunt Pia’s strange apartment and her eerie collection of puppets starring down on Magnolia in the guest bedroom, the same room in which the reader later finds out that Pia’s daughter Wilma died of carbon-monoxide poisoning from the Kachelofen. Despite the racism that she encounters on the streets of the city and from her aunt, she falls in love with her music instructor, Josef Horvath, and the city, and she even begins to accept her aunt’s peculiar habits. The novel closes with her deciding to remain in Vienna with Josef, with whom she is expecting a baby. The frame of the novel, however, is not a simple story with a happy ending. Faschinger argues that it does not necessarily have a positive ending. As Magnolia helps to assert Josef’s feeble personality, he also becomes stronger and starts to put unreasonable demands on her like some of the men did with Rosa.(4) He tells her where she will live in his apartment and starts making plans without consulting her.

Rosa and Magnolia’s stories are linked not only by their relationships with men and some of the abuse that results from these liaisons, but also by their otherness in Vienna and the fact that they belong to an immigrant ethnic minority that the city does not fully acknowledge. Faschinger was conscious of the Habsburg monarchy’s diversity, and the novel concentrates on their experiences in the Empire’s capital. Rosa is conflicted about her identity, as she descends from a Czech mother but is raised in German, the language of the ruling class in Bohemia. Her mother teaches her Czech national folktales, which give her a multi-ethnic identity that she embraces and makes her a quintessential Old Austrian. She reaches Vienna with the help of a young man who belongs to the Young Czechs and introduces Rosa to the ideas of Czech Nationalism. In Vienna, she is drawn to the statue of Anton Pilgram, the mythologized builder of the Stephansdom, who also was a Bohemian migrant to Vienna. She seeks to find acknowledgment of the immigrants’ achievements in the city, however, she also encounters racism aimed at the new residents. The post office official, for whoms she works, criticizes his wife’s origins: “Frauen aus der Bukowina, aus der bessarabischen Steppe sozusagen, Steppenhexen sozusagen, seien durchtrieben bis in die Haarspitzen und hätten gutmütige Männer wie ihn binnen kürzester Zeit ruiniert“ (225). This is not an isolated comment and Rosa starts to look for people, who do not greet her with ethnic prejudice.

She meets Ljuba Zupan, an activist from Maribor who fights for the rights of domestic servants and who is quite aware of the discrimination that she suffers because of her Slovenian heritage. Rosa’s positive impression of Ljuba, who also happens to be the woman who finally emigrates to Minneapolis with Rosa’s daughter, is contrasted with the view of Ljuba of the Schreyvogel Hausmeisterin, who describes her as a “renitente Slowenin mit dem hinterhältigen Blick” (247). Rosa also experiences solidarity among immigrants to Vienna. A Slovak seamstress makes her a new dress for little money, because she believes that Slavs in Vienna should help each other. Rosa spends one of her happiest moments in Vienna, when with her friends she for the first time visits a Wirtshaus,, which she observes to be owned by Primoz from Maribor. Not all immigrants to Vienna embrace the city’s diversity. Dora Galli, who tortures Rosa with her obsession for self-flagellation, is of Italian origin from Triest, and yet she has bought into the German Nationalism of the time. Rosa sits on an embroidered Swastika in Galli’s apartment, and when Rosa suggests that she play Chopin, Galli dismisses him as “einen dekadenten frankopolnischen Schwindelsüchtigen” (319). Rosa enjoys the company of other immigrants. When she plays the zither in the Böhmischen Prater, she writes: “Gelegentlich gesellten sich zwei junge Männer aus Galizien zu uns, von denen einer die Leier und der andere die Sopialka, eine Art Schalmei, spielte und die uns Lieder über die Taten der Kosaken beibrachten, und wenn wir Glück hatten, durften wir uns manchmal einer aus Temesvar stammenden Zigeunerkapelle anschließen, die viermal pro Woche im Casino Zögernitz in Döbling auftrat und sich durch musikalische Darbietungen in den Straßen Wiens etwas hinzuverdiente” (384). Rosa’s experiences reinforce the idea of Vienna as a melting pot for the Habsburg monarchy’s peoples. Rather than just concentrating on zither music, which is often associated with traditional German-language music from Austria, the novel goes into quite some detail to show the variety of musical traditions that had reached Vienna at the turn of the century.

Vienna was, however, not only the center of migration for the many peoples of this multicultural Empire, but it was also the center of Nationalist hatred and harbored racist ideologues who would lay the foundation for even more severe racist hatred in the twentieth century. Ljuba and her friends who embrace their Slavic heritage are merely reacting against the German Nationalist rhetoric. While Georg Ritter von Schönerer does not appear as a character in the novel, many Viennese in the narrative cite his views on race. Frau Navratil, the Schreyvogel’s Hausmeisterin, whose name suggests a Czech origin, quotes Schönerer claiming “die slawische Rasse […] zeichne sich durch Faulheit und Stumpfheit aus, im Gegensatz dazu trachte das außerordentlich sympathische Ehepaar Schreyvogel unentwegt danach, seine Lebensstellung mit Fleiß und Ausdauer zu verbessern“ (459-460). The Hausmeisterin’s belief in these ideas in light of her Czech last name serves as a classic example of ethnic self-hatred. Yet, the ruling class embodied here in the aristocratic Schreyvogel family benefits from this racist ideology, which manages to oppress the most recent citizens of Vienna by installing a sense of racial superiority even in those Viennese who are only one or two generations removed from arriving in the Empire’s capital.

In addition, to these strong xenophobic and antislavic sentiments, Rosa also encounters Viennese antisemitism. Dr. Doblhoff, who first treats Rosa in the mental clinic and then lives with her and talks to her about her dreams, believes that his colleague and friend Sigmund Freud stole his ideas on dream interpretation. He refers to Freud in anger as a “Kaftanjude” (535). However, this not the only example of anti-Semitism in the novel, Rosa’s Hungarian neighbor, Frau Bartok, blames the crimes committed by the mysterious murderer and rapist on the immigration of Jews from the East and claims that Schönerer was right in arguing that these people had caused a rise in the city’s crime rate. Rosa cannot believe this talk because she knows that it is her husband, Karel Havelka, who has been sneaking out at night to prey on his victims. Interestingly, the woman who is saved by Rosa stabbing her husband is a waitress, Slavka from Ljubljana. However, Slavka refuses to acknowledge Rosa’s help and claims that it was not necessary for Rosa to assault her husband, and this precipitates the court’s decision to condemn Rosa to death.

Magnolia, arriving in Vienna almost a hundred years after her great-grandmother, finds a city that has certainly undergone some progress over the last century, but that still harbors some racist ideas. Her aunt Pia welcomes Magnolia as a “hübsches Kind […] aber schwärzer” (38) than she would have imagined. When Magnolia asks to adjust the heat on the Kachelofen, Pia responds that this was much too complicated and that Magnolia’s “schwarzafrikanische Herkunft” (65) precluded her from such an activity. Pia’s prejudices extend to all people with a different ethnic background, thus according to Pia, the Bosnian Hausmeister overcharges her for his assistance in heating her apartment. At the Zentralfriedhof, Pia shows her anti-Semitic side when she complains about the desolate state of the Jewish section of the cemetery. She completely ignores the fact that the abandonment of the cemetery is part of the legacy of the Holocaust and describes it as: “eine Schande für national und katholisch empfindende Österreicher deutscher Muttersprache“ (69). Strolling past the graves of artists at the cemetery, she continues with her ideas of German Nationalism by describing Mozart’s music as “eine so deutsche Musik” (69) and concludes her tour of the cemetery praising the Doktor-Karl-Lueger-Gedächtniskirche and referring to the church’s namesake as a “außerordentlicher Bürgermeister, ein aufrechter und patriotischer Wiener Mensch“ (69). While Pia espouses German Nationalist ideas, she is also aware of her Bohemian or Czech origins as she prepares her Kuttelsuppe, which she calls the “böhmische Nationalgericht“ (66). She also refers to her niece having old Austrian blood and this old Austria is undoubtedly a reference to the multicultural Habsburg Empire. Pia simultaneously accepts and rejects ethnic diversity, including her own Czech origins. However, the fact that Pia sees herself as Austrian, proves that Vienna is an immigrant city and one that does accept newcomers over the course of several generations. Acknowledging Austria as a country that allows for immigration brings up an important similarity to the U.S., with both countries being melting pots of various peoples.

On the streets of Vienna, Magnolia experiences other forms of prejudice and racial hatred that draw their origins from the racism Rosa encountered. An old lady with a dog runs into Magnolia near the Naschmarkt, and the old lady orders her spaniel: “faß die Negerin” (74). In the narrative, Magnolia ironically reports this incident with the old lady:

Wo wir hinkämen, wenn diese Kreaturen [Black immigrants] auch noch unseren schönen vierten Bezirk überschwemmten, meinte sie dann, ihn bevölkerten mit ihrer abstoßenden schwarzen Brut, sich auf Kosten österreichischer Steuergelder von der Wiener Gebietskrankenkasse einen Kuraufenthalt nach dem anderen in Bad Gastein, in Bad Hall, in Baden bei Wien bezahlen ließen, wogegen sie ihre Polyarthritis mit mühevoll im Lainzer Tiergarten gesammelten Heilkräutern zu lindern gezwungen wäre, ihr Vater, der als Wirklicher Hofrat in den Ruhestand getreten sei, habe immer gesagt, er werde es gottlob nicht mehr erleben, daß unser gesegnetes Land von den Negern aus Afrika erorbert würde. (74).

In addition to hateful prejudice against Africans and people of color, the old lady is afraid that immigrants and newcomers to the city might take away some of the benefits that she is enjoying. This ignorance mirrors some of the resentment and hatred that Rosa experienced. However, while the reader might be able to dismiss the racism of the nineteenth century as being an issue of the past, Magnolia’s experiences in Vienna are contemporary and link resentment against immigrants from the territories of the monarchy to present prejudice against immigrants from all over the world.

Roman Catholicism and its role as a politically authoritarian and oppressive force in Austria is a central theme to Faschinger’s oeuvre, much resembling Thomas Bernhard’s criticism of Austria.(5) Rosa suffers from clergy who reinforce the idea that it is God’s will that servants serve their masters unquestioningly. Dora Galli then introduces Rosa to an exaggerated version of Catholic self-flagellation, and the nuns in the women’s prison in Wiener Neudorf are the executers of an authoritarian regime rather than caring religious officials. Through Josef Horvath’s homosexual experiences with the prefect who seduced him in the dormitory of the Viennese Boys’ Choir, Magnolia soon becomes acquainted with some of the abuses of Catholic officials and fervent believers. Magnolia also experiences racism from supposedly religious Catholics in Vienna, who misinterpret church doctrine to espouse xenophobic rhetoric. Outside of the Peterskirche a lady stops her and urges her “sich mit dem uns von Gott zugewiesenen Lebensort zu bescheiden und nicht in übertriebenem Expansionsdrang die einem durch Voks- und Rassenzugehörigkeit gesetzten Grenzen zu überschreiten“ (390). Later on, Fräulein Haslinger, Josef Horvath’s neighbor, in reference to the racist attack on the young woman from the Dominican Republic claims that non-Christians could not expect God’s help as much as real Christians, and further she claimed that while the victim may have been a Catholic, “ihrer Meinung nach nehme die wahre Rechtsgläubigkeit allerdings mit zunehmender geographischer Entfernung vom Vatikan ab” (491). This statement mixes Catholic doctrine with Nationalist ideas and bears a striking resemblance to Thomas Bernhard’s criticism of Austrians as both Catholics and National Socialists.

The novel also incorporates contemporary issues of the 1990s. A masked neo-Nazi is assaulting female immigrants in Vienna, which causes concern for Magnolia’s friends, while she tries not to think too much about these incidents. Pia tells her about this event: “ein extremer Rechter habe in der vergangenen Nacht im Stadtpark eine als Krankenpflegerin tätige junge Vietnamesin überfallen und vergewaltigt und sich nicht gescheut, nach vollbrachter Tat auf der Polizeiwachstube Wipplingerstraße anzurufen und sich mit der Begründung zu dieser zu bekennen, langsam, aber sicher übertreffe die Zahl der Elemente minderwertigen Geblüts jene der reinrassigen Österreicher[...]“ (353). With this incident, Faschinger brings up the surge in extreme right-wing violence against foreigners in Austria in the 1990s. Magnolia remains unharmed, but the attack on a Vietnamese woman and other foreigners keeps her apprehensive about her surroundings. The reader, of course immediately recognizes a connection between Karel Havelka’s assault on women who reminded him of Sissi and the neo-Nazi attacking non-White women. Violence against women is an important theme of the novel, but ethnicity also figures into these attacks in the 1990s.

Vienna’s history in the first half of the twentieth century has been remarkably violent, and violence against minorities, most notably the extinction and expulsion of most of its Jewish population in the Holocaust, is hard to ignore. Contrasting Vienna at the end of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the novel shows that despite the tragic events of the twentieth century, xenophobia remains high. The world around Vienna has shrunk over the last century. While there is still resentment towards newcomers from countries nearby, such as the prejudice against the Bosnian immigrants, Magnolia as an African-American has come from much further away. Her (re-)immigration to Austria and her grandmother’s emigration to the United States, link the two countries as immigrant nations, or melting pots of ethnic difference.

Notes:

(1) Ellie Kennedy, “Identity through Imagination: An Interview with Lilian Faschinger,” in: Women in German Yearbook, vol. 18 (2002): 23.
(2) Gisela Roethke, “Lilian Faschinger im Gespräch,” in: Modern Austrian Literature, vol 33.1 (2000): 98.
(3) Lilian Faschinger, Wiener Passion, 48.
(4) Kennedy, 26.
(5) Ibid, 22

1.11. American and Austrian Literature and Film: Influences, Interactions and Intersections

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