Errors of Young Tjaz

With its echoes of fellow Austrian novelist Robert Musil's novella Young Torless, and of Gunter Grass's The Tin Drum, Florjan Lipus's Young Tjaz, first published in 1972, helped moved the critique of Germanic Europe's fundamental social conformity into the postwar age. But Lipus, a member of the Slovene ethnic minority indigenous to Austria's southernmost province of Carinthia, wrote his novel in Slovene and aimed it not just at Austrian society's hidebound clericalism, but also at its intolerance of the ethnic other in its midst. When Austrian novelist and fellow Carinthian Peter Handke resolved in the late 1970s to explore his Slovene roots, the first book he picked up was Lipus's Young Tjaz, which served as his Badeker through the Slovene language, and which he faithfully translated into German and published in 1981.