The horrifying crimes of Joseph Fritzl shocked Austria and the world. Recently two essays explored Austrian literature in an attempt to understand what cultural conditions could foster such monstrosity. Nicholas Spice, in
Up from the Cellar, explores the work of Nobel Prize laureate Elfriede Jelinek and her dissection of male violence. Ritchie Robertson searches for antecedents in
Josef Fritzl's fictive forebears.
[via The New Yorker's Book Bench]
posted by Kattullus
on Jun 8, 2008 -
63 comments
Hallstatt, Austria, besides being idylic, is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and is historically fascinating:
A Bronze Age cultural center, with a 2,500-year-old
salt mine (the world's first); beautiful
ice caves; and a Catholic cemetery so small that the dead were regularly disinterred after a time, their skulls painstakingly identified and decorated and stacked in an
ossuary.
posted by bigskyguy
on Aug 28, 2007 -
5 comments
Minimundus is an Austrian theme park with seemingly all the major architectural wonders of the world rendered in miniature; while their primary site is woefully low on imagery,
here's three pages worth of photos of their better exhibits.
posted by jonson
on Jan 23, 2007 -
20 comments
Austria's
AEIOU has
bar-by-bar analyses of major classical works (of composers associated with Austria): audio, annotations, scores, and performance/score animations in various video formats, together with biographical essays on the composers. Some possible points of departure:
1,
2,
3.
posted by Wolfdog
on Apr 12, 2006 -
10 comments
[Newsfilter] In mid-November last year, David Irving, arguably the world's foremost holocaust-denier (
Mel Gibson's dad comes a close second), was
arrested in Austria for doing exactly that (previously discussed
here). Today he was
jailed for it. Should we (read; Austria) be jailing people for their views, however reprehensible or otherwise incorrect they might be? Or is it justifiable in some cases?
posted by Effigy2000
on Feb 20, 2006 -
315 comments
The first weblog rallye ever. You may not have noticed it because it is in German language. All you have to do is signing up and following the links on top of 26 German and Austrian weblogs. Can you be faster than
36 seconds? The competition closes tomorrow at 2PM Berlin time.
posted by arf
on Aug 10, 2000 -
3 comments