Aesthetics of Sameness and the Ethics of Narrative Representation: Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach (1830–1916) in the Context of the German-Czech National Conflict in Late Austria-Hungary

ABSTRACT The dominant historiographic narrative about late nineteenth-century Austria-Hungary has held that nationalist and colonialist thinking pervaded cultural and political life, conceiving the empire’s diverse population as divided along binary and increasingly exclusive lines of identity and difference. Not least, nationalist tendencies characterized Germanophone discourse in Central Europe. Propagating ideas about cultural superiority, for example over the empire’s Slavic-language speakers, such discourse often merged tropes of inner-European difference and exoticist imagery of European colonialism overseas. Inspired by recent revisions in Habsburg historiography, this paper, which emerged from the EGS’s annual Prawer Lecture, will discuss the ways in which some German-language writers in Austria-Hungary challenged the divisive rhetoric of their times on the level of narrative form, by creating alternative narrative languages that foregrounded sameness and commonality. Taking the prose fiction of Moravian writer Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach (1830–1916) as the primary example for exploring this so far neglected ‘aesthetics of sameness’, I will demonstrate how she contested nationalist ideas of separation by rendering ambiguous markers of national, ethnic, and linguistic belonging through the formal design of her stories.