My dissertation explores canonical writings of Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Robert Musil, and Franz Kafka from the period around the First World War, focusing on questions of empire, power, and identity politics in relation to ethnic minorities, with a special emphasis on the discursive representation of the Slavs as Other, and shows that the Slavic question plays a central role in German-Austrian literary modernity. I argue that the late Habsburg Empire, which constitutes the historical background of their writings, is comparable both to a colonial situation (with a metropolitan/Western center and an Eastern periphery) and a postcolonial situation (where the tensions between colonizer and colonized are internalized into the same geo-political space). By focusing on European inner colonialism, my work expands the scope of postcolonial theory and reconsiders these authors commonly regarded as apolitical, revealing their dangerous, ambivalent, and respectively transgressive political side. My methodology is to perform a postcolonial imagological analysis of the narratives, images, and stereotypes relating to ethnic otherness constructed both from the Austro-German metrocentric perspective and from other marginal positions, as they emerge in literary texts.

The three authors map out distinct manners of encountering ethnic otherness: with Hofmannsthal and Musil the discourse and the regime of representation is anchored in the Austro-centric perspective, and the asymmetry of power between the Austro-German self and the Eastern other shows similarities to that of other imperial contexts. While Hofmannsthals texts unambiguously align themselves with the colonial discourse of othering, Musils texts are more ambivalent. In contrast to both, Kafka, brings a radically new de-centering, transgressive perspective on the dynamic of self and other in the imperial situation. The dissertation presents not just three different positions that major authors like Hofmannsthal, Musil, Kafka could take vis--vis the Slavic other in the late Habsburg Empire but, more importantly, three modes of textualizing this relationship. These modes are summarized by the terms panic (a modality in Hofmannsthal that casts interactions with that other in terms of horror), ambivalence (a modality whereby Musil problematizes the untranslatability of cultural otherness), and polyphony (a modality that leads in Kafka to both political and textual complexity).