Ilse Aichinger (1921–2016)
Author of Herod's Children
About the Author
Works by Ilse Aichinger
Spiegelgeschichte : Erzählungen und Dialoge — Author — 5 copies
Franz Kafka. 1883-1924. Katalog zu einer Ausst. d. Bundesmin. f. Auswärtige Angelegenheiten, zsgest. v. Heinz Lunzer (1983) — Contributor — 2 copies
Spiegelgeschichte 1 copy
Seegeister 1 copy
Associated Works
The Art of the Tale: An International Anthology of Short Stories (1986) — Contributor — 381 copies, 3 reviews
Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness (1993) — Contributor — 377 copies, 2 reviews
Deutsche Kurzgeschichten : eine Auswahl für mittlere Klassen (1972) — Author, some editions — 5 copies, 1 review
Lübbes Auswahlband. Die besten Schauergeschichten der deutschsprachigen Literatur. (1983) — Contributor — 2 copies
Fiction, Volume 6, Number 1 — Contributor — 1 copy
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Canonical name
- Aichinger, Ilse
- Birthdate
- 1921-11-01
- Date of death
- 2016-11-11
- Gender
- female
- Occupations
- short story writer
novelist
Holocaust survivor
playwright - Organizations
- Gruppe 47
Berliner Akademie der Künste
Deutsche Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung - Awards and honors
- Austrian State Prize for European Literature(1995)
Literaturpreis der Stadt Wien(1974)
Marie Luise Kaschnitz Prize(1984)
Nelly Sachs-Preis
Georg Trakl-Preis - Relationships
- Eich, Günter (spouse)
Eich, Clemens (son) - Short biography
- Ilse Aichinger was born to Jewish-Christian Austrian parents, and was raised a Catholic. She grew up in Linz and Vienna. With the rise of the Nazi regime, her family began to suffer anti-Semitic persecution in 1933. Ilse's education was interrupted by these events and during World War II she was sent to forced labor and lost all trace of her mother. Ilse was originally refused admission to medical school because she was half-Jewish. Although she eventually did enter medical school in 1947, she left to concentrate on her writing and also worked as a reader at the S. Fischer publishing house.
- Nationality
- Austria
- Birthplace
- Vienna, Austria
- Places of residence
- Linz, Austria
- Place of death
- Wien, Österreich
- Associated Place (for map)
- Austria
Members
Reviews
Meine Sprache und ich, wir reden nicht miteinander, wir haben uns nichts zu sagen.
This was Aichinger's second collection of "stories" (Erzählungen), but you shouldn't expect actual narratives. They are surreal, dream-like flights of fancy, in which words, most of them very concrete, often domestic or agricultural in range, seem to be chosen with a calculated randomness so that sentences make short-range sense but fight against every attempt our minds make to impose some kind of long-range show more order or message or symbolism onto them. There are giants, like the milkmaid of St Louis, and dwarves, like the infantry who accompany Diogenes on his journey; there is a gigantic fan in the title story; there are hares who decide after living for many generations in the sandy bay of Port Sing to mount an expedition to the (unexplained and inexplicable) Sacred Mountain, and so on. Random travel seems to be a recurrent theme: a farmer in search of weather proverbs sails from Brittany to Western Scotland, goes thence by rocket to Utah, and ends up by the sacred river in Mecca. But there are theories, the narrator points out, that Mecca is not on a sacred river. Tell that to the crocodiles.
In the late story "Meine Sprache und ich", the narrator's language becomes a character in her own right, the two of them are travelling over various frontiers together, and it is the language, not the narrator, who appears suspect to the border guards. Aichinger seems to have had a deep-rooted and growing distrust for language herself, and she constantly feels the need to challenge assumptions about words and their meanings and associations. The stories are wonderfully disorienting and disturbing, but it doesn't do to read too many at once, or you end up like a visitor to a giant gallery of abstract art... show less
This was Aichinger's second collection of "stories" (Erzählungen), but you shouldn't expect actual narratives. They are surreal, dream-like flights of fancy, in which words, most of them very concrete, often domestic or agricultural in range, seem to be chosen with a calculated randomness so that sentences make short-range sense but fight against every attempt our minds make to impose some kind of long-range show more order or message or symbolism onto them. There are giants, like the milkmaid of St Louis, and dwarves, like the infantry who accompany Diogenes on his journey; there is a gigantic fan in the title story; there are hares who decide after living for many generations in the sandy bay of Port Sing to mount an expedition to the (unexplained and inexplicable) Sacred Mountain, and so on. Random travel seems to be a recurrent theme: a farmer in search of weather proverbs sails from Brittany to Western Scotland, goes thence by rocket to Utah, and ends up by the sacred river in Mecca. But there are theories, the narrator points out, that Mecca is not on a sacred river. Tell that to the crocodiles.
In the late story "Meine Sprache und ich", the narrator's language becomes a character in her own right, the two of them are travelling over various frontiers together, and it is the language, not the narrator, who appears suspect to the border guards. Aichinger seems to have had a deep-rooted and growing distrust for language herself, and she constantly feels the need to challenge assumptions about words and their meanings and associations. The stories are wonderfully disorienting and disturbing, but it doesn't do to read too many at once, or you end up like a visitor to a giant gallery of abstract art... show less
Schlechte Wörter is a collection of short pieces (essays, stories, prose-poems - take your pick) from the first half of the 70s. As originally published in 1976 it also included the radio-play Gare Maritime, but in the 2015 collected works edition that has been moved into a separate volume of plays, and the editors have added the uncollected prose piece "Friedhof in B."
(I wondered if there could be a concealed joke here, because "Friedhof in B." opens with the cemetery in Nancy, and show more directly follows, "Rahels Kleider", which talks about an English schoolgirl called Peggy. It's unlikely that Aichinger could have been a Swallows and Amazons fan, but maybe the editor was...?)
The pieces clearly show how Aichinger was exploring ways of getting beyond the forced connections and causality of ordinary narrative: she generally starts out with an innocent-looking phrase, something random she has seen, overheard, or has just popped into her head, e.g. "the balconies of the home-countries are different", or "lovers of the western columns", or "the forgetfulness of St Ives", or just a nonsense word, like "Hemlin". Then she chases this phrase through a semi-controlled network of free associations to see what will happen to it. I assume she must have thrown a lot of such pieces away when they didn't lead anywhere interesting, but those she actually published are never simply random gibberish, but always give us some sort of new light on the way our minds and language and the world we live in work. Sometimes funny, sometimes disturbing, always rather beautiful. show less
(I wondered if there could be a concealed joke here, because "Friedhof in B." opens with the cemetery in Nancy, and show more directly follows, "Rahels Kleider", which talks about an English schoolgirl called Peggy. It's unlikely that Aichinger could have been a Swallows and Amazons fan, but maybe the editor was...?)
The pieces clearly show how Aichinger was exploring ways of getting beyond the forced connections and causality of ordinary narrative: she generally starts out with an innocent-looking phrase, something random she has seen, overheard, or has just popped into her head, e.g. "the balconies of the home-countries are different", or "lovers of the western columns", or "the forgetfulness of St Ives", or just a nonsense word, like "Hemlin". Then she chases this phrase through a semi-controlled network of free associations to see what will happen to it. I assume she must have thrown a lot of such pieces away when they didn't lead anywhere interesting, but those she actually published are never simply random gibberish, but always give us some sort of new light on the way our minds and language and the world we live in work. Sometimes funny, sometimes disturbing, always rather beautiful. show less
Die größere Hoffnung was Aichinger's only novel, developed out of her first published story, "Das vierte Tor" (1945 - included as an appendix in the 1991 edition of the novel). Aichinger was never really comfortable with long-form texts - she revised and considerably shortened the book in 1960, and she's quoted as saying that she wished she could have condensed the book into a single sentence. We should probably be grateful that her publishers stopped her from going so far: it's a show more magnificent, beautifully written and very moving novel, a book that follows its own rules in a kind of spare, abstract, nightmarish modernism that resembles nothing else I know of. If you could imagine how Kafka might have rewritten Emil and the detectives after reading Mrs Dalloway you would have a vague sort of idea, perhaps...
The book deals with the experiences of children of Jewish descent in Nazi Vienna, obviously drawing to a large extent on Aichinger's own experience (she was a teenager at the time of the Anschluss, and remained in Vienna with her Jewish mother and grandmother while her twin sister was able to get away to England on a Kindertransport). The children in the novel - obviously a bit younger than Aichinger was herself - have to learn to deal with a world in which they are hated, feared, humiliated, and excluded from most aspects of normal life merely because they have "the wrong kind of grandparents". Ellen, who has enough of the wrong sort of grandparents for her life to be messed up, but not enough to qualify to wear a star and share her friends' fate, has to struggle to win the trust and friendship of the other excluded children. At first they plot exotic schemes to get "over the frontier" or "over the sea", but as the story goes on they come to see that these plans for physical escape will not free them, but that there is a "greater hope" that they can aspire to through a kind of Christian-Existentialist understanding of their own humanity. As long as they know that they are able to love and be loved, to renounce what they have willingly, and to forgive, they have nothing to fear from their oppressors. I'm not sure how an Auschwitz survivor like Primo Levi would have felt about this, but Aichinger clearly believes that this is how she managed to live through the horror herself, and she makes a convincing case. And you don't need to agree with her to find that the book tells you something very direct about what it must have felt like to be a child in those times. show less
The book deals with the experiences of children of Jewish descent in Nazi Vienna, obviously drawing to a large extent on Aichinger's own experience (she was a teenager at the time of the Anschluss, and remained in Vienna with her Jewish mother and grandmother while her twin sister was able to get away to England on a Kindertransport). The children in the novel - obviously a bit younger than Aichinger was herself - have to learn to deal with a world in which they are hated, feared, humiliated, and excluded from most aspects of normal life merely because they have "the wrong kind of grandparents". Ellen, who has enough of the wrong sort of grandparents for her life to be messed up, but not enough to qualify to wear a star and share her friends' fate, has to struggle to win the trust and friendship of the other excluded children. At first they plot exotic schemes to get "over the frontier" or "over the sea", but as the story goes on they come to see that these plans for physical escape will not free them, but that there is a "greater hope" that they can aspire to through a kind of Christian-Existentialist understanding of their own humanity. As long as they know that they are able to love and be loved, to renounce what they have willingly, and to forgive, they have nothing to fear from their oppressors. I'm not sure how an Auschwitz survivor like Primo Levi would have felt about this, but Aichinger clearly believes that this is how she managed to live through the horror herself, and she makes a convincing case. And you don't need to agree with her to find that the book tells you something very direct about what it must have felt like to be a child in those times. show less
I picked Kleist, Moos, Fasane off the shelf largely because of its intriguing title, without any clear idea of where it fits in Aichinger's work, and was immediately sucked in by the opening story, in which she looks back at her early childhood in her grandmother's kitchen in Vienna, in the years before the Nazis came to power, when she could still go to school like any normal little girl. Die Kräfte der Kindheit hielten die Welt zusammen. Und die Küche meiner Großmutter lag mitten show more darinnen. And she reflects on the arbitrariness of connections that only have meaning for the people who happen to have experienced them, like gym, needlework and singing (the three possibilities of afternoon school) or Kleist, Moss and Pheasants, which happened to be the names of three streets in the neighbourhood. Magnificent writing, in which everything is coloured by the grief we know is coming next, but nothing is twee or sentimental.
The book is in three sections, put together slightly arbitrarily (like Kleist, Moss and Pheasants). In the first part are half a dozen autobiographical short stories written between 1959 and 1982. In the second part are thirty years worth of notes from the author's diaries - sometimes a year gets a few pages, sometimes nothing. 1965 is represented by only one sentence: Einsicht bei Tageslicht, eine Hasengruppe. (Something like: "Insight by daylight, a playgroup."). Not all of them are so gnomic, and reading through them in sequence you can really start to make sense of Aichinger's growing doubts about the expressive possibilities of language.
In the third part of the book we get several essays about writers and writing. There's a hurried, but clearly very deeply felt, obituary tribute to Thomas Bernhard (added in the 1989 2nd edition), there are her thoughts on Adalbert Stifter and Georg Trakl, and there are tributes to Nelly Sachs and Franz Kafka in her acceptance speeches for their respective prizes - the Kafka piece is a wonderfully Kafkaesque conceit in which she describes how she once read a single sentence from one of Kafka's letters which filled her with a "strong dark happiness" that scared her so much that she never dared to read anything else he wrote.
A somewhat random taster, but definitely yet another writer I need to explore further. show less
The book is in three sections, put together slightly arbitrarily (like Kleist, Moss and Pheasants). In the first part are half a dozen autobiographical short stories written between 1959 and 1982. In the second part are thirty years worth of notes from the author's diaries - sometimes a year gets a few pages, sometimes nothing. 1965 is represented by only one sentence: Einsicht bei Tageslicht, eine Hasengruppe. (Something like: "Insight by daylight, a playgroup."). Not all of them are so gnomic, and reading through them in sequence you can really start to make sense of Aichinger's growing doubts about the expressive possibilities of language.
In the third part of the book we get several essays about writers and writing. There's a hurried, but clearly very deeply felt, obituary tribute to Thomas Bernhard (added in the 1989 2nd edition), there are her thoughts on Adalbert Stifter and Georg Trakl, and there are tributes to Nelly Sachs and Franz Kafka in her acceptance speeches for their respective prizes - the Kafka piece is a wonderfully Kafkaesque conceit in which she describes how she once read a single sentence from one of Kafka's letters which filled her with a "strong dark happiness" that scared her so much that she never dared to read anything else he wrote.
A somewhat random taster, but definitely yet another writer I need to explore further. show less
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Statistics
- Works
- 40
- Also by
- 22
- Members
- 529
- Popularity
- #47,054
- Rating
- 4.0
- Reviews
- 7
- ISBNs
- 89
- Languages
- 9
- Favorited
- 3
