Language and Life

Austria, a country with eight million inhabitants and six official languages, is fertile ground for friction between language and politics, history and memory, centre and periphery, which in its day marked the literature of Joseph Roth, Ingeborg Bachmann and Robert Musil. Within this tradition we also find the Austrian Slovene author Maja Haderlap, a writer of prose in German and poetry in Slovenian, with which she explores the interaction between language and identity, and what it means to belong to a cultural minority. In an interview with critic Mercedes Monmany, we will enter Haderlap’s poetic and literary universe, at the centre of which lies the partisan and concentration camp experience of the men and women in her family during the war. This approach will take us to the heart of contemporary central European literature.