Inherited Disorders: Stories, Parables & Problems

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A postwar Austrian poet — whose name you might not recognize but who was in his time a fairly prominent figure on the Viennese scene, a fixture of the literary circle at Café Raimund — struggled most of his career to free his poetry from the shadow of his father, a Nazi officer. No one suspected the son of any Nazi sympathies; he even married a Jewish woman. The problem, rather, was that all of his poetry was interpreted by critics as a meditation on his father’s crimes. In truth, he had no interest in his father, really no interest in the past at all. He cared about nature: mountains, creeks, ferns. He called himself, at various points, a creekpoet or fernpoet. Yet every creek, every fern, was construed by his critics — from his very first major review in Die Zeit in 1968—as a “reckoning” with the actions of his father, who had once shot 150 Hungarian Jews in one day with his own pistol. The critic noted the total absence in the poet’s poems of people, history, politics, fathers, et cetera, and saw their absence as a sign that they were actually the poet’s primary concerns, the unspeakable void at the center of his ferns. (The review was extremely positive.)

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