Fremdheit, Feindschaft. Österreichische Ökumene bei Musil und Handke

"Kakania" was Musil's designation for the Austro-Hungarian Empire in its pre-war period. The Man Without Qualities refers to a political system without individual qualities, a country that defines itself only by means of metaphors and metonymies. The name also suggests the fragile construction of a multicultural society avant la lettre. While Europe's nations became restrictive ideological frameworks for hegemonical attitudes, the Habsburg Empire had passed into a post-imperial agony. As Musil puts it, late Kakania was quite a modern society, even without knowing it. In Peter Handke's writings concerning Slovenia and the myth of the "ninth land", the idea of a multicultural and multilingual community appears as a similarly vivid concept.