The Beauty of Hatred: Hatred and Ugliness as Cultural Resistance in Contemporary Austrian Literature

Abstract

The article deals with a tendency in the most recent Austrian literature, which gives unrestrained and extensive room to hatred, not only in content but also in form. This is essentially an anti-cultural decision, insofar as the basic understanding of our culture is often a humanistic one. So-called social media are of course also pioneers for free hatred. Noteworthy: It is mainly young women who hate. In this respect, literary hatred also has a feminist component. The article not only wants to justify hating as a first-class literary occasion to write (like other feelings, love, sadness, fear, longing), but also to draw attention to the fact that literary hatred has a tradition in our culture: therefore there are separate sections for Elfriede Jelinek, Ernst Jandl and Werner Schwab. They point out that a miserable existence/world not only determines the contents of the writing, but also deforms the language itself until its form looks like the contents, i.e. higher authenticity is achieved.