Make or Break?: Instability as an Aesthetic Tool in Progressive Austrian Literature from 1945 to 1955

This article centers on the potential of instability as an aesthetic as well as a political hermeneutic category, using the example of progressive literature in Austria between 1945 and 1955, during what is referred to as a “freeze” in Cold War discourse. In a bid to discuss the potential of the term instability for interdisciplinary analysis, it suggests that an “unstable equilibrium” (A. Okopenko) among the various aesthetic formations on the literary market in Austria during the first decade after 1945 was directly impacted by an equally unstable equilibrium among ideological positions in the Austrian version of a “transitional society” (Claude Ake).