Blackwell Reference Online

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Michael Haneke has shown an affinity for a specifically Austrian modernist lineage in his literary adaptations: Roth, Kafka, and Bachmann have been the points of departure in his own literary “crossings over” ( über-setzen ). These authors all wrote “multifocal” works: works that reflect simultaneously on the virulence of racism in Austrian history while nonetheless longingly recalling the lost multiethnic, multicultural Austria-Hungary (cf. Rothberg). I would argue that Haneke's affinity to them arises from a particular historical imperative to “never forget” the Shoah. He interprets this as an injunction to interrogate the psychological dispositions that made fascism possible and that continue into the present, excavating older ways of thinking that either competed or symbiotically connected with these problematic dispositions in the first half of the twentieth century. In his effort to countermand what some have seen as a current (postmodern) willingness to reject mourning or melancholia – to abandon our lost objects under a regime of detachment (see Ricciardi 2003 ) – he subscribes to an aesthetic and ethic of bereavement in his adaptations. By doing so, Haneke participates in a larger social longing for a return to history (cf. Ryan 2004 ; Scribner 2003 ). With his own partiality for the early modern Joseph Roth, the high modern Franz Kafka, and the late modern Ingeborg ... log in or subscribe to read full text