SCHINDEL, Robert

Nationality: Austrian. Born: Robert Soel, Bad Hall bei Linz, 4 April 1944. Education: Studied philosophy and pedagogy in Vienna, 1968-72. Career: Magazine correspondent; teacher, Viennese School for Poetry. Since the mid-1980s freelance writer. Publisher, Hundsblume, 1970-71. Awards: Hans Erich Nossack prize, 1989; City of Vienna Elias Canetti scholarship, 1991; Federal Ministry for Instruction and Art prize, 1992; Erich Fried prize, 1993; City of Fellbach Mörike prize, 1999; Eduard Mörike prize, 2000.

Publication

Poetry

Ohneland [Without Country]. 1986.

Geier sind pünktliche Tiere. 1987.

Im Herzen die Krätze. 1988.

Ein Feuerchen im Hintennach. 1992.

Immernie. 2000.

Novels

Der Mai ist vorbei. 1982.

Gebürtig. 1992; as Born-Where, 1995.

Short Stories

Die Nacht der Harlekine. 1994.

Other

Gott schütz uns vor den guten Menschen: Jüdisches Gedächtnis, Auskunftsbüro der Angst. 1995.

Editor, Klagenfurter Texte: Ingeborg-Bachmann-Wettbewerb 1999. 1999.

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Critical Studies:

"Jewish Identity and the Holocaust in Robert Schindel's Gebürtig " by Thomas Freeman, in Modern Austrian Literature, 30(1), 1997, pp. 117-26; "1992 Robert Schindel's Novel Gebürtig Continues the Development of Jewish Writing in Austria after the Shoah" by Ingrid Spork, in Yale Companion to Jewish Writing and Thought in German Culture, 1096-1996, edited by Sander L. Gilman and Jack Zipes, 1997; "The Politics of Recognition in Contemporary Austrian Jewish Literature" by Matthias Konzett, in Monatshefte fur Deutschen Unterricht, Deutsche Sprache und Literatur, 90(1), Spring 1998, pp. 71-88.

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Robert Schindel, born in 1944 in Bad Hall bei Linz, is the oldest of the three most prominent contemporary Jewish writers of fiction in Austria. (The others are Robert Menasse , born in 1954, and Doron Rabinovici, born in 1961.) From early on he was an accomplished poet on a wide number of topics that ranged from mythology to the modern city, and a number of his early poems, such as "Errinerungen an Prometheus" (1964) and "Wolken I" (1988), deal with the murder of the Jews during World War II. It was not until the publication of his popular novel Gebürtig (1992), however, that Schindel became known as a major contributor to postwar Austrian fiction dealing with the Holocaust.

In a public reading at the Literaturhaus in Vienna on 14 June 2001, Schindel accounted for the delay in giving an in-depth exploration of the Holocaust by citing his negative identification with Judaism as he was growing up in Austria. Born to assimilated Jewish parents deeply involved in the resistance movement as members of the Communist Party, Schindel spent the first years of his life hidden in a Viennese orphanage while his parents were active in France against Hitler. Both his mother and his father were eventually discovered and sent to concentration camps, and only his mother survived and returned. Growing up in an Austrian society largely silent about the participation of its citizens in the Holocaust, Schindel was also personally confronted with anti-Semitism a number of times.

Although not religious, Schindel maintains that the identity of all Jewish Austrians, regardless of their level of observance, is rooted in the existence of the concentration camps. Before 1980 he was not an official member of the Jewish community of Vienna. His avoidance of official identification as a Jew, along with his earlier membership in the Communist Party and his engagement in the student uprisings of the 1960s, indicates a search for identity that reaches far beyond Judaism. The fact, however, that Schindel never fully denied his Jewish background is clear from much of his work, for a number of early poems deal with the issues of both the Holocaust and Jewish identity. Poems such as "Errinerungen an Prometheus" ("Memories of Prometheus") and "Klagenfurter Frühlingsballade" (1986; "Spring Ballad of Klagenfurt") contain autobiographical elements and details about his parents' experiences during World War II and also deal directly with his identity as a Jewish Austrian.

The popularity of the novel Gebürtig turned Schindel into an internationally recognized author for its critical examination of the relationships between Austrian Jews and non-Jews in the contemporary era. The novel covers a wide range of topics on the subject, including the silence of Austrian society regarding the Holocaust and the difficulties of the second generation of Jewish victims and of Austrian perpetrators and bystanders. Containing both autobiographical elements and general commentaries on anti-Semitism in Austria, as well as a critical look at how Jews themselves confront the past, Schindel's work illuminates the complex situation of being both Jewish and Austrian 40 years after the end of the Holocaust. In more recent years Schindel has returned to the publication of poetry, and he has continued to deal with the Holocaust in some of his works, as in the poem "Dreiundzwanzig Jahre (Eine Chronik nach R. Hilberg)" ("Twenty-Three Years: A Chronicle according to R. Hilberg"), from the collection Immernie (2000).

—Lisa Silverman

See the essays on "Errinerungen an Prometheus" and Gebürtig.