Abstract
One of the most useful texts for examining fictional engagements with the idea of Europe is Hilde Spiel’s The Darkened Room (1961). It deals with a heterogeneous group of exiles in New York in the late 1940s, all busily imagining their own version of the continent. This essay relates their discussions to prevalent cultural and political discourses on Europe, while also analysing the novel’s ambiguous narrative, which presents the various options available to European émigrés in the USA. Critiquing the narrator’s final decision to reject the complexities of Europe in favour of assimilation into a new life as an American housewife, the novel as a whole suggests that the way to come to terms with European identity is through accepting its fundamental cosmopolitanism.
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- 1.
See Anderson, Imagined Communities, p. 6.
- 2.
See, for example, Paul Michael Lützeler, Die Schriftsteller und Europa: Von der Romantik bis zur Gegenwart (Munich: Piper, 1992), p. 11.
- 3.
Stråth, ‘Belonging and European Identity’, in Gerard Delanty, Ruth Wodak and Paul Jones, eds, Identity, Belonging, and Migration (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2008), p. 24.
- 4.
The nation has come to be taken so much for granted that Anthony D. Smith can claim that of ‘all the identities in which human beings share today, national identity is perhaps the most fundamental and inclusive’ (Smith, National Identity (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1991), p. 143).
- 5.
Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989), pp. 31–43.
- 6.
See Anderson, Imagined Communities, pp. 26–36.
- 7.
See Ulrich Beck and Edgar Grande, Cosmopolitan Europe, trans. by Ciaran Cronin (2004; Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007), p. 137.
- 8.
See, for example, Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, trans. by M.B. Debevois (1999; Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2004), pp. 108–10.
- 9.
See Christoph Parry, ‘Gibt es eine europäische Literatur (auf Deutsch)?’, in Peter Hanenberg and Isabel Gil, eds, Der literarische Europa-Diskurs: Festschrift für Paul Michael Lützeler zum 70. Geburtstag (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2013), pp. 50–62.
- 10.
See Wolfgang Huber, ‘Die jüdisch-christliche Tradition’, in Hans Joas and Klaus Wiegandt, eds, Die Kulturellen Werte Europas (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuchverlag, 2005), p. 69.
- 11.
These are the supposed pillars of European culture on which Ernst Robert Curtius based his seminal study Europäische Literatur und lateinisches Mittelalter (European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, 1948) and which have recurred more recently in Rémi Brague’s Europe, la voie romaine (Europe, The Roman Road, 1992).
- 12.
On the shift from ‘Christendom’ to ‘Europe’, see Denys Hay, Europe: The Emergence of an Idea, new edn (1957; Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1968), pp. 58–9, 73–96.
- 13.
Gerard Delanty maintains that it ‘was colonialism and conquest that united Europe and not peace and solidarity’ (Delanty, Inventing Europe: Idea, Identity, Reality (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995), p. 7).
- 14.
See Edgar Morin, Penser l’Europe (Paris: Gallimard, 1987), p. 56.
- 15.
See Gerard Delanty and Chris Rumford’s discussion of ‘hyphenated identities’ as a typically American option in Delanty and Rumford, Rethinking Europe, pp. 71–2. Europe as America’s other is discussed in Daniel J. Boorstin, America and the Image of Europe: Reflections on American Thought (New York: Meridian Books, 1960), pp. 19–39.
- 16.
Delanty, ‘Is There a European Identity?’, Global Dialogue, Vol. 5, Nos 3–4 (2003), p. 80.
- 17.
See, for example, Beck and Grande, Cosmopolitan Europe, p. 137, and Delanty and Rumford, Rethinking Europe, pp. 21–4.
- 18.
Ette, ‘European Literature(s)’, p. 129.
- 19.
As Julia Kristeva points out, even in the eighteenth century the cosmopolitan could be regarded as a threat to the identity of the community (Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, trans. by Leon S. Roudiez (1988; New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), pp. 140–3).
- 20.
On Anna Gmeyner and other exiles in Britain, see J.M. Ritchie, German Exiles, British Perspectives (New York: Peter Lang, 1997), pp. 201–17.
- 21.
Only recently has more attention been paid to issues of foreignness and acculturation: see Dörte Bischoff and Susanne Komfort-Hein, ‘Introduction’ to Bischoff and Komfort-Hein, eds, Literatur und Exil: Neue Perspektiven (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2013), pp. 1–19.
- 22.
See Zweig, Die Welt von Gestern: Erinnerungen eines Europäers, new edn (1942; Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 1952), p. 17. The Jewish contribution was expressly emphasised by Spiel in her English language cultural history of Vienna, Vienna’s Golden Autumn, 1866–1938 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1987), pp. 235–6.
- 23.
See Spiel, Die hellen und die finsteren Zeiten: Erinnerungen 1911–1946 (Munich: List, 1989), p. 54.
- 24.
A drastic description of this experience of stigmatisation can be found in Jean Améry, Jenseits von Schuld und Sühne: Bewältigungsversuche eines Überwältigten, in Améry, Werke: Bd. 2: Jenseits von Schuld und Sühne; Unmeisterliche Wanderjahre; Örtlichkeiten, new edn (1966; Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2002), pp 149–77.
- 25.
As Spiel wrote in 1977, ‘[t]o have left the Old World for ever and to need not just to live in the New World but also to feel at home there, that was the insoluble problem for these people’ (Spiel, ‘Das Sternbild Europa’, in Paul Michael Lützeler, ed., Hoffnung Europa: Deutsche Essays von Novalis bis Enzensberger (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1994), p. 441).
- 26.
Spiel reveals in her autobiography that Lisa is loosely based on a friend of her youth in Vienna, who might be described as a representative of the jeunesse dorée of the 1920s and early 1930s and who, after living in Italy, spent her last years in New York (Spiel, Welche Welt ist meine Welt? Erinnerungen 1946–1989 (Munich: List, 1990), pp. 182–3).
- 27.
Spiel, The Darkened Room (London: Methuen, 1961), p. 44.
- 28.
In Homi Bhabha’s view, such ‘gatherings on the edge of “foreign” cultures’ belong to the typical experiences of exile (Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 139).
- 29.
See Spiel, ‘Sternbild Europa’, pp. 442–3.
- 30.
See Spiel, Darkened Room, p. 83.
- 31.
Ibid., p. 82.
- 32.
Ibid., pp. 81–2.
- 33.
Ibid., p. 82.
- 34.
Ibid., p. 81.
- 35.
Ibid., p. 81.
- 36.
Ibid., p. 82.
- 37.
Ibid., pp. 82, 83.
- 38.
Ibid., p. 84.
- 39.
Adorno is perhaps not entirely serious when he discusses the role of chewing gum as a kind of consumerist surrogate metaphysics (Adorno, ‘Aldous Huxley und die Utopie’, in Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1998), X, 112).
- 40.
See Christoph Parry, ‘Von der Un-Kultur der neuen Welt, Ein Stereotyp, seine Struktur und sein Vorkommen bei Thomas Mann und Theodor W. Adorno’, in Peter Pabisch, ed., Patentlösung oder Zankapfel? ‘German Studies’ für den internationalen Bereich als Alternative zur Germanistik Beispiele aus Amerika (Bern: Peter Lang, 2005), pp. 91–109.
- 41.
Gürster, ‘Geistige Aspekte der amerikanischen Zivilisation (Fortsetzung)’, Die Neue Rundschau, Vol. 3 (1951), pp. 25–6. Similar comparisons are not unknown in the USA, with its consciousness of having evolved as an alternative to Europe. America holds up a mirror to Europe just as Europe does to America (see Boorstin, America and the Image of Europe, pp. 19–39).
- 42.
See Spiel, Darkened Room, p. 18.
- 43.
Ibid., p. 83.
- 44.
Some critics have evidently done so: see, for example, Peter Pabisch, ‘Hilde Spiel—Femme de Lettres’, Modern Austrian Literature, Vol. 12, Nos 3–4 (1979), pp. 339–421.
- 45.
Spiel, Darkened Room, p. 7.
- 46.
Ibid., p. 183.
- 47.
Elisabeth Bronfen sees Lele’s conversion as a device used by Spiel to introduce the religious dimension of exile as the banishment from paradise (see Bronfen, ‘Entortung und Identität: Ein Thema der modernen Exilliteratur’, The Germanic Review, Vol. 69, No. 2 (1994), p. 77).
- 48.
Spiel, Darkened Room, p. 92.
- 49.
Lorenz considers the conscious negligence of Lele and Jeff to be largely responsible for Lisa’s death (see Lorenz, ‘Hilde Spiel: Lisas Zimmer—Frau, Jüdin, Verfolgte’, Modern Austrian Literature, Vol. 25, No. 2 (1992), pp. 79–95).
- 50.
Spiel, Welche Welt ist meine Welt?, pp. 186–7. The difference between the public role and status of the intellectual in Great Britain and those in mainland Europe has been noted elsewhere. See, for example, Anna Boschetti, ‘La recomposition de l’espace intellectuel en Europe après 1945’, in Gisèle Sapiro, ed., L’espace intellectuel en Europe: De la Formation des États-nations à la mondialisation XIXe–XXIe siècle (Paris: La Découverte, 2009), p. 170. The fact that Spiel devoted much energy to cultivating an enormous social network in Britain was obliquely but recognisably satirised by Norbert Gstrein in his novel Die englischen Jahre (The English Years, 1999), with its unflattering reference to the autobiography of ‘die Katz’ (Gstrein, Die englischen Jahre, new edn (1999; Munich: DTV, 2008), pp. 156–8).
- 51.
Spiel, ‘Sternbild Europa’, p. 434.
- 52.
Delanty, Inventing Europe, p. viii.
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Parry, C. (2016). Between Yearning and Aversion: Visions of Europe in Hilde Spiel’s The Darkened Room . In: Hammond, A. (eds) The Novel and Europe. Palgrave Studies in Modern European Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-52627-4_4
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