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language: German
country: Liechtenstein
year: 2012
form: short fiction
genre(s): literary, speculative
dates read: 11.3.23-13.3.23
Oh, wie klein ist Liechtenstein, edited by Armin Öhri, is…The most Liechtenstein short story collection it could possibly be, which makes sense, because a) the stories are apparently by high schoolers (I didn’t read the introduction till afterwards lmao) and b) it was assembled specifically to commemorate the purchase of Schellenberg and Vaduz by the House of Liechtenstein in 1712. no surprise, then, that it draws primarily on cultural, historical, and geographic referents specific to Liechtenstein. if you’re not at least vaguely familiar with the country I think some of this would make no sense — even I, tumblr’s resident Liechtenstein Expert, was unfamiliar with (e.g.) the Guschger Sennenpuppe, which meant that the Gary Kaufmann’s »Die Guschger Schicksalspuppe« fell a little flat.
anyway. this was a mixed bag. the prose throughout was fine. serviceable, nothing particularly stood out, with the exception of Fabian Kleeberger’s »Dunkle Zeiten«, about a woman accused of and then executed for witchcraft, which was both appropriately harrowing and interestingly structured. the final sentence, »Der Tod als Belustigung der Masse« (death as mass entertainment), also is. oof. going to stick with me.
other than »Dunkle Zeiten«, the highlights were:
the theme of excusing Liechtenstein from social evils comes back in »Der Mann, der Charlie Chaplin den Schnauzbart klaute«, the second-to-last story in the collection, which presents (barely concealed until the “reveal” at the end) Franz Joseph I and Josef Hoop’s meeting with Hitler in Berlin in 1939, with both bad gender politics — the two of them struggle not to laugh at him because this “great orator” they’ve been expecting turns out to be an »unscheinbar auftretendes Männlein« (insignificant-seeming manlet) — and then go home and mock him some more. this is, uh, ahistorical, and almost worse than the story I was expecting, which would have been about the attempted Nazi coup in 1939 (which frankly is a much more, like, narratively compelling incident even if it also lends itself to liberal propagandizing).
there’s a certain element of it in »Bruchlandung«, as well, about an American pilot crash-landing in Liechtenstein at the end of WW2 and being sent safely back to Switzerland and then home to the US; the story has him telling his family the story and then announcing that they’ve been invited to visit Liechtenstein to commemorate the anniversary — conveniently positioning Liechtenstein as basically an ally and also conveniently eliding the fact that Liechtenstein sheltered hundreds of White Russian soldiers after the end of the war before they were granted asylum in Argentina. hmmmmmm.
most of the rest of the stories were just kind of forgettable. »S’ Kriagsbüachle« — about Liechtenstein’s last “military engagement” in the Brothers War in 1868 — was both boring and didn’t even include the salient Fun Fact about it, namely the out-of-work Austrian soldier they recruited. »Die Goldene Boos« and »Heimkehr« could have been interesting but didn’t quite seem to know what they wanted to do. »Gold für Liechtenstein« I thought was boring but now that I know it’s a high school student imagining that in four years he’ll be an Olympic gold medalist with a wife and a kid I think it’s funny and has bad heterosexual politics.
what am I missing. oh. »“Wähla isch hald amol a Männersach!”« is attempting to be a satire of regressive gender politics (good!) but ends up accidentally kind of reinscribing women as politically naïve/ignorant (less good). »Schwein gehabt« I think was trying way too hard to set up the joke at the end. »Staatsfeiertag mit Turbulenzen« just felt kind of pointless.
anyway. gave it 3 stars; it was going to be 3.25, but »Der Mann, der Charlie Chaplin den Schnauzbart klaute« was too yikes.
as a final observation, one thing that was weird/interesting about this is that despite being written and edited by Liechtensteiners it uses the German-Austrian spelling norm and not the Swiss-Liechtensteiner one (Spaß rather than Spass, e.g.). not sure what that was about.
moods: dark, lighthearted, wacky