delirium clemens

> GERMAN VERSION
The idea is not really new. ‘Postcolonial approaches’ to the late Habsburg Monarchy are already to be found in Robert Musil’s famous novel Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (“The Man Without Qualities”), and we can find instances of such a view with other contemporary observers as well, such as the Viennese art historian Hilde Zaloscer. Born in 1903 to a middle class, German-speaking Jewish family in Banja Luka, Bosnia, Zaloscer and her family fled to Vienna after the First World War, and then, in 1938, further to Alexandria, Egypt.

In her autobiography entitled Eine Heimkehr gibt es nicht (“There’s No Coming Home,” Vienna 1988), she repeatedly compares her “happy childhood days […] ‘on a volcano’”* with her Egyptian exile which at the time was de facto still under colonial rule:

“Basically it was the same constellation as in Bosnia before the First World War. There, too, a foreign ethnic group – in this case, the Austrians – in a country appropriated through violence, kept the people at an educationally inferior level by means of skillful politics.” (p. 129)* Continue reading →