Identity In Doubt
Martin Liebscher portrays the Austrian writer Norbert Gstrein.

In 1995 the Austrian writer Norbert Gstrein published Der Kommerzialrat: Ein Bericht (The Distinguished Businessman: A Report, Suhrkamp), in which he described the interplay between the pressures of conformism and the threats of exclusion by the inhabitants of a small village in the mountains of the Tyrol. Behind the scenes of an ideal tourist town appears a merciless and envious society that vainly uses cynicism and alcohol to hide emotional confusion. The story is told from two different perspectives: rumours about the machinations of the Kommerzialrat are juxtaposed with a written report by the protagonist himself. However, neither of these angles tells the whole story, as the events of the death of the Kommerzialrat remain shrouded in darkness. In the end, the reader finds himself standing at the dead man’s grave searching in vain for the right moral perspective.

This feeling of helplessness is not unknown to readers of Gstrein’s writings. Beginning with the author’s first story, Einer (One, Suhrkamp, 1988), his changing of narrative perspectives has continued to challenge and excite readers. When the text first appeared, critics and public agreed that Norbert Gstrein represented a promising new face in the world of Austrian literature. The story, which critically examines the author’s biographical rural origin, could easily have been placed within the Austrian literary tradition, but Gstrein’s challenging style of narration pointed to something much deeper. Ignoring his attempts to develop this theme in works such as the story Anderntags (Otherday, Suhrkamp, 1989), the novel Das Register (The Register, Suhrkamp, 1992) and the novella “O2” (Suhrkamp, 1993), critics focused instead on the story’s setting in the countryside. This in turn led them to claim that after the publication of Der Kommerzialrat the author would have nothing left to say.

But in 2000, Gstrein proved these critical voices wrong when he published his novel Die englischen Jahre (Suhrkamp; The English Years, translated by Anthea Bell, Harvill). The book is about the fate of an imaginary writer named Gabriel Hirschfelder who had to emigrate to England in his teens. Because of the success of his writings, he became an important part of the exile-studies community in post war Austria. As in Gstrein’s previous writings, the narrative perspectives change. First the reader follows the investigations of a young woman who, in trying to track down her former lover, happens to get interested in the biography of the writer. When she gets to know some of the women in Hirschfelder’s life she, by chance, learns of the story of a man who had lived his life under an alias. He had won his new-found identity in an English deportation centre as a part of a game. The man, originally known as Hirschfelder, a native of Vienna, lost that game and was thus deported to Newfoundland but died when his ship sank during the voyage.

At the end of the novel, the woman meets her former lover again and suggests that he should write the real biography of Hirschfelder, beginning with the sentence ‘Ich wünsche Ihnen viel Glück mit Ihrem neuen Roman.’ This is actually the opening line of Gstrein’s last story, Selbstportrait mit einer Toten (Suhrkamp, 2002). It is at once a fierce protest against cultural authorities who praise only themselves and gradually lose contact with society’s demands, and, at the same time, a reflection on the author’s role in this very culture.

Tracing Gstrein's development from his first stories down to his last Hirschfelder texts, it shows no significant break. Gstrein's work should be seen as an ongoing attempt to determine the value of identity and subjectivity within a community. Of course, the settings change, but the question of human individuality and moral integrity remains the same, whether the scene is a deportation camp or a tourist resort.

Due to the changes of perspective and the demolition of a common narrative pattern, the reader’s expectations are continually broken down. Events are described from various points of view. Every time the narrator’s story begins to sound plausible its credibility is undermined by the introduction of a different point of view. Therefore one has to be aware that the biography of a famous scientist and honoured emigrant may turn into the history of a Nazi opportunist who slipped into the identity of the Jewish emigrant years ago. In the background of these shifting perspectives and identities hovers the pessimistic insight that no realm of moral knowledge remains impervious to questioning and doubt, so much so that identity itself is called into question, as Gstrein’s most recent text clearly shows. A fictitious author silences and humiliates his girlfriend, a doctor one of whose patients has committed suicide, because he cannot stop complaining about his petty literary frustrations for even five days. His narcissistic illness proves to be more important to the woman than her own identity or even her patient’s death. Thus, it is through this story that Gstrein widens his nihilistic diagnosis of today’s society and applies it to his own person and his profession as a writer.

The fact that the reader still feels challenged to choose the right perspective arises from his need to find a contradiction within himself. At the end, it seems that there is a demand on enlightened literature, whereby the aim should be more to raise questions than to provide the reader with ready-made moral attitudes toward the world. Given these demands, the books of Gstrein are a valuable contribution to people’s search for meaning within our so-called post-modern world.

Martin Lieb is co-ordinator and lecturer at the Ingeborg Bachmann Centre for Austrian Literature at the Institute of Germanic Studies. The centre is primarily committed to the study of the development of Austrian literature since 1945.

You may also be interested in an extract in English from Gstrein's 'The Craft of Killing', courtesy of litrix.de