Ein zweisprachiges Feld – zwei einsprachige Felder? : Brünner Literatur in den 1860er und den 1920er Jahren

Since over a century, the narrative of Brno literature has been one based on the principle of genius loci – Brno, the "Manchester of Moravia", a city of industry and proletarians "produces" industrial and proletarian literature. The – rarely questioned – problem with this unity of place and art has been that at the same time, the Czech version of this narrative excluded the literature of Brno written in German from it, and vice versa. The present paper suggests to take advantage of the theory of literary field (Bourdieu) as a tool for analyzing the literary field of the city to challenge the monolingual and monocultural approach to the history of Brno literature. Using the synchronic "cuts" of the 1860s when a new literature emerged following the easing of restrictions of Austrian magazine and book production as well as of activities of readers' and writers' associations in 1860/1861, and of the 1920s as a period of differentiated literary field(s) with popular fiction, bourgeois literature and various modernist and avantgarde groups, the paper attempts to show how the literary field(s) of Brno evolved. In the 1860s, in spite of already existing nationalist ideologies, there still was a largely unified field of Brno literature, based mainly on the fact that publishing houses operated in both languages and published parallel periodicals in German and Czech, whereas in the 1920s, this field was split in two structured monolingual segments which, however, still display numerous intersections and parallelisms.