An Austrian Auden: A Media Construction Story

Abstract

W. H. Auden (1907–1973) was one of the most acclaimed writers in the English language in the twentieth century. When he divided his final fifteen years between the United States and Austria, in between foreign fame and local unknownness the poet materialised as a celebrity in Austrian television: it is a peripheral, small-nation media audience which the September-1967 episode of the documentary feature series Das österreichische Porträt [The Austrian Portrait] addresses and projects. This paper investigates that televised biographical representation in terms of Stuart Hall’s conceptualisation of the narrative construction of identity, with the help of tools from British Cultural Studies and film studies. The case study especially considers how–through audio-visual strategies that add up to a metaphorical manoeuvre–the Anglo-American poet’s life and work in Austria are storied along those of Austrian poet Josef Weinheber, whose entanglement with National Socialism gets blanked out in the film. It is in the specific context of a peripheral celebrity culture, and peripheral celebrity life writing, that the foreign identity is thus metaphorically translated into local frames of reference. The case study also has implications for TV documentary as a life-writing (or life-depiction) genre as regards its audio-visual rhetoric in the context of a discursive truth effect and the naturalised codes of televisual representation.