Robert Neumann’s Hochstaplernovelle: the imaginary Balkans, Mediterranean and Central Europe

Hochstaplernovelle, Robert Neumann’s novella published in 1930, can be read as a distinct genre variety of the trickster theme (a topic popular in German literature), but is also analytically interesting due to its troubled representation of the Balkan complex. Consequently, this article focuses on the function of the Balkan discourse in Neumann’s fictional prose as well as its localization at the Mediterranean (nowadays Croatian) coastline of the former Dual Monarchy. Strategies of fictionalization employed in the novella point to a polyvalent potential of the Balkan discourse. The notion of Balkanism is understood and analysed as a discursive formation: references to older Balkan discourses from the cultural and historic space of the former monarchy quoted in the novella can therefore be described in terms of “nesting Orientalism” (Bakic-Hayden), a phenomenon in symbolic geography