Going Dutch with German Writers (7): Why is Austria such a difficult place?

Who?

Julya Rabinowich is an Austrian writer, born in St. Petersburg. She writes plays and has published three books so far, Spaltkopf (Splithead, trans. Tess Lewis), Herznovelle and Die Erdfresserin. She and I are both in the Swiss town of Solothurn over the weekend, for a delightful literary festival. We met by chance when her translator Tess introduced us, and we instantly got on – so I asked if she’d like to go out drinking with me. The answer was yes, except she doesn’t actually drink.

Where?

We start off at a meal for the writers and translators involved in the festival, upstairs at the Restaurant Kreuz, and move on to the lower-key Pizzeria Türk, Solothurn.

What?

Red wine, water

What did we talk about?

It’s hard to say what we started talking about. We’d hit it off the night before because I told her she reminds me of my quasi-stepmother, who’s half-Czech and half-French and teaches English to refugees in London. Which brings us to the subject of Julya’s former work with refugees in Vienna, interpreting at therapy sessions. I think we were still at the Kreuz when we talked about Mikhail Shishkin, whose Venushaar/Maidenhair is about a Russian interpreter working with refugees in Switzerland. Everyone in the whole of Solothurn is besotted with Mikhail Shishkin because he’s an excellent writer and a charming person. Julya too (I haven’t read him but was impressed when I saw him talking here) – only his book made her feel rather sad because it came out before hers and dealt with a similar subject, which wouldn’t have been a problem if it hadn’t been excellent. Ah well. The Kreuz is very crowded and people keep moving around between the tables. It’s a difficult atmosphere, as we end up discussing later. There’s always a certain aspect of professional envy, with scope for mistrust and resentment, when lots of writers are in the same room. I find it similar (although less intense) with translators who work in the same direction as I do, but I think it’s worth making the effort to keep relations positive. What I forget to say at the time is that I do find literary translators incredibly supportive, for the main part. So we move on to the Türk, where there are fewer distractions.

Between the Kreuz and the Türk we slip into relationship talk, the staple stuff of female bonding. It’s hard to get out of it and back onto topics I can write about here. We order the Spanish red – it’s delicious. Julya sips it and sniffs it and enjoys it, but I’ve already promised not to make her drink, or else I’d have to take her to hospital. I try not to be too demonstrative about how delicious the wine is; it doesn’t seem to bother her though. Who does she read, I ask her, steering us back to safer territory. Bulgakov is her great passion – Julya Rabinowich is a woman who’s not afraid to call herself passionate, and it seems to fit. At one point she suggests I might be a passionate person too. It feels like a compliment. Her parents, she says, “exposed her to Bulgakov’s force of nature” when she was only seven. And she’s read and re-read him ever since, discovering new aspects and understanding things differently every time. Was it scary? Oh yes. I don’t tell my story about reading Last Exit to Brooklyn at too young an age; it seems redundant in contrast. Julya talks about how she’s afraid of a lot of things; she talks about panic attacks. But she does the things anyway. The fear is her Jewish side, she says, and the Russian side doesn’t give a shit and goes ahead and does stuff. It sounds like a good way to get things done, I say. It is, says Julya, but it makes life hard work.

We talk about her plays. One is about three people trapped inside: a Natascha Kampusch character, an illegal refugee hiding out for six months so she can roll out her asylum application again, and a child held responsible for his dead father’s crime by another clan, who runs the risk of being killed if he leaves his own four walls. She writes a lot about refugees, with a third-person eye for “the migrant experience” that I think is lacking in a lot of German-language writing. It’s a thin line, I suggest, because she’s not uncritical of some of the family structures she’s seen in place among refugees. It’s tempting, or it might be easier, to view refugees as victims pure and simple, but in fact they’re three-dimensional characters, of course. And there are parallels between these people hiding out in modern-day Vienna and the Jews living underground during the war. Yes, she says, being sent back to a war zone is likely to kill a person, especially if they’ve experienced torture. But she doesn’t draw those lines explicitly, and I think that’s a good thing.

Anti-Semitism, domestic violence and sexual abuse

I say I’ve noticed Austrian writers are almost all very critical of their country, and Julya is no exception. She writes a weekly column in Der Standard, which has made her a lot of enemies on the far right. At one point we spot a group of arch-conservative Burschenschaftler walking past outside in their distinctive (and ridiculous) caps; both of us bristle. Yes, she says, Austrian society is awful. One government official after another has had to resign as it emerges that they’ve ordered from neo-Nazi websites; anti-Semitism, domestic violence and sexual abuse are hushed up and tacitly accepted. We talk briefly about the British cases of abuse by television personalities, and Julya’s impressed by how openly they’re being dealt with. To me, it feels like a watershed that all the news is coming out now, but it’s upsetting to find out what terrible things one’s childhood heroes did. Why is Austria such a difficult place, I ask – how can a country have so many excellent, critical writers and nobody listens to them, how can it be that many of them feel threatened by mainstream society, to the point of pathological fear? Julya thinks it’s because the Austrians never invited the people back who went into exile under the Nazis. What happened in Germany, she asks me. Germany was a different case, perhaps, because many exiles returned to help build the GDR, or the political parties in the West. And of course (it occurs to me now) the Germans were taken to task by the international community, whereas the Austrians had the excuse of the Anschluss – and used it.

I’m getting tired; it’s been a long day. I’m getting drunk and Julya isn’t, but she’s getting tired too. The conversation is still flowing but communication’s getting harder. Julya’s a painter and she often thinks in terms of colours. Unfortunately, I’m the world’s least visual person. Some confusion ensues when she compares emotions to the colour spectrum. What I think she means is that, like colours, there are a number of basic emotions: anger, sadness, joy, and so on. But just as there are infinite shades between yellow and blue, there are infinite variants on those primary feelings. Once I’ve understood what she’s talking about I ask how we know whether everyone sees the same shade of yellow the same way, and do we all experience anger the same way? We can’t know, she says; she seems very wise. I remember asking her how that translates to her writing; I can’t remember the answer. We talk about pain, but we have two different understandings, or rather two different experiences. For her, pain is a lasting memory that leads to fear; that’s why the refugees she worked with needed therapy. If we put our hand on the hot stovetop once, we’ll be afraid to do it again. For me though, memories of pain fade. Having led a sheltered life, my experiences of pain have been coupled with pleasure; essentially, she says, with hormones. I have no memory of the pain of childbirth because of the joy that came afterwards; likewise with pain in relationships.

The next day is Mother’s Day, we remember. We both hate the two-way pressure of bloody Mother’s Day, having to make superficial gestures to our own mothers and expecting our daughters to make the same empty gestures towards us. Julya reads me her column about it – it’s very funny. We agree that Mother’s Day ought to be abolished, and not just because the Nazis invented the German version. We show each other photos of our daughters, neither of whom participates in this whole Mother’s Day crap (to my disappointment). Her daughter is gorgeous; mine is too but she refuses to let me take her photo, so Julya is underwhelmed by the shot of her chin that I show her. Distracted by our beautiful offspring, we forget to take a photo of ourselves. But we do invite each other to stay on our respective sofas, if I ever go to Vienna or she comes to Berlin. Ah, Berlin! No matter how horrible Austria is, Julya’s scared of the big pond full of sharks as which she imagines Germany. I smile; perhaps I’m a shark.

There was more: as so often, which writers we respect and which we don’t; the perils of handing over one’s plays to a theatre and seeing what they do with them; the benefits of difficult childhoods. A session on the bad old days of drug consumption is particularly productive, yielding a short story about sex on an anthill and a discussion about the German word spießig (which doesn’t exist in English because all English people are like that so we don’t need a word for it) and the English use of anal as a personality trait (again, we agree that all Germans are anal in the English sense and so don’t need to spell it out – which is odd, because as Julya points out the idea is a Freudian one), which branches off into a fun exchange of swearwords in different languages and what they tell us about cultures. We settle the bill; the waiter looks confused that Julya hasn’t drunk much of her wine but has been talking so animatedly. And then we run the gauntlet back towards our hotels, along streets lined with writers more inebriated than we are. Hugs, kisses, email addresses exchanged. It was wonderful.

Hangover?

Yes. I’m not sure how much I drank in the Kreuz but my hangover feels disproportionate; perhaps it’s exhaustion. We bump into each other at the festival the next day and take a morning-after picture. Enjoy.