Poetics of the ‘Gruppenbild’: The Fictions of Vladimir Vertlib 1

Taking as its starting point Vladimir Vertlib's noted ability to cross borders and represent otherness in his writing, the article examines this Russian‐Austrian‐Jewish author's use of narrative form in all his work to date. While his deceptively conventional realist narratives achieve provisional closure at the level of plot, they are structured so as to juxtapose voices, times and modes in a way which probes, but does not resolve, a range of contemporary problems. These concern migration (in Abschiebung and Zwischenstationen ), memory, remembrance and twentieth‐century European history (in Das besondere Gedächtnis der Rosa Masur ), Jewish identities and the negative German‐Jewish symbiosis (in Letzter Wunsch ), and the remembrance of the Third Reich in central Europe (in Mein erster Mörder and … und alle Toten starben friedlich …). Close readings reveal Vertlib's increasing integration into Austrian culture, while stressing the global import of his dialogism and border crossings.