The purpose of this article is the contextualization of Elfriede Jelinek's Die Klaverspielerin within the tradition of social criticism in Austrian literature, to which several authors from the interbellum period belong. After 1945, Austria's literary establishment strove to create social peace by means of the diffusion of a harmonistic ideology. The aim of this ideology was to reestablish a system of values inherited from the Monarchy in te 2nd. Republic and the emergence of a literature of protest and estrangement in Austria in the 1980's can be seen as a reaction against this project of restoration of an anachronistic ideology. The central conflict structuring Jelinek's narrative - a conflict between Erika Kohut, her mother and Walter Klemmer - is here seen as a kind of metaphorical representation of conflicts characteristic of a society divided between its attachment to the glories of a vanished cultural tradition and the unremitting assault of global mass media, structured over parameters that are diametrically opposed to this tradition. At the same time, I attempt to situate specific ways of behavior and Weltanschauungen portrayed in this novel within the cultural atmosphere where they emerge, particularly that of the so-called Österreich Ideologie, pointing to principles of social conviviality that seem to derive from Habsburg ideology and which remain as partly unconscious and illusory undercurrents in Austrian culture in the 1980's and 1990's.
Austrian Literature; Elfriede Jelinek; Franz Kafka; Habsburg Empire