In the early 1970s, something strange happened in the SZ weekend supplement. A long prose text was printed on the first page, and the brief, thoughtful explanation stated that one was always writing about contemporary literature here. However, this contemporary literature itself would more and more elude itself, and in order to face it seriously, this text is now being printed.
The title was “The Lovers of the West Columns” and the author was Ilse Aichinger. At first glance, what was being read seemed completely puzzling. But the story was of a clear, precise language, with sharp, pierced images, and there were perplexed, scattered individuals in it. The attraction of the text was that it so thoroughly defied superficial understanding. By this time, Ilse Aichinger had long since become an almost mythical figure. She rarely published, and the language of this author had become more radical from volume to volume, breaking away from given meanings.
In her first book, the novel “The Greater Hope” from 1948, she had already focused on something that was beyond popular perception. Ilse Aichinger was born on November 1, 1921 and was later considered a “half-Jewish” in the Nazi diocese. Her grandmother and her mother’s younger siblings were murdered in the concentration camp in 1942, and her twin sister Helga was taken from Vienna to England on the last children’s transport in 1939, while she herself stayed in Vienna to support her mother. This forms the background for the novel. Shortly after its publication, Ilse Aichinger described the aesthetic consequences she drew from her concrete experiences: “If we take it right, we can turn what seems to be directed against us, we can begin to tell straight from the end and towards the end and the world will open up again. Then, when we start talking under the gallows, we will talk about life itself. “
Their stories like a raging river: whoever gets into it does not return
Her early prose implements this requirement with a sense of form. In 1952 she was awarded the Group 47 prize for the “Mirror Story”. The text is about a woman who is dying of an abortion and, like in a film that is being rewound, she relives her life. The story ends with the birth of the protagonist, and it ends with the words: “It’s over – they say behind you, she is dead! Quiet! Let her talk!” Aichinger’s reading was perceived by Group 47 as an outstanding event. Four weeks earlier, the group leader, Hans Werner Richter, had been in Vienna and met with Ilse Aichinger. He later recalled: “She never mentioned her past, for example in the Third Reich. It was as if she had put the cloak of oblivion on it herself. Only once did she say: ‘Here, at this point, I stood when my relatives were being transported away became.’ I kept that sentence. Until today. At that time I didn’t ask any further questions, perhaps out of fear of finding out more than I wanted to hear. “
The meeting of Group 47 with the award winner Ilse Aichinger and the readings by Ingeborg Bachmann and Paul Celan marked the end of the immediate post-war period. This conference in Niendorf ensures that young, German-speaking authors found connection to contemporary modernism. In retrospect, it is astonishing that Ingeborg Bachmann, who quickly became famous shortly afterwards, initially stood in the shadow of Ilse Aichinger. The two poets were close friends in their early days in Vienna.
It is a characteristic chapter in literary history how much the attributions diverged for them. This was mainly due to the fact that Ilse Aichinger soon married her well-known colleague Günter Eich and Ingeborg Bachmann continued her shimmering life as an independent, unbound woman. The lyric poet was received as extremely sensitive and feminine and thus hymnically celebrated, while Aichinger’s prose seemed to some to be more and more brittle. During this time she wrote to Bachmann that she was “working on ever shorter experiments”, “which can no longer be called stories. The next one will probably be a sigh to make it even shorter.”
“Sigh” – that is an ambiguous expression for these texts. One could perceive it as an aesthetic credo, but at the same time as its ironic abolition. The narration that Ilse Aichinger had tried out so far seemed to her to be more and more questionable. In a poetological utterance of those years it says: “Especially with the concept of storytelling, many people repeatedly associate the idea of comfort, of the gentle fire that warms their hands. Or they speak of the flow of the story and mean the flow that carries, which has friendly banks to the left and right, to which you can return as often as you want, and then let it glide calmly past you. But anyone who compares stories with rivers today must think of rivers that are raging, with steeper and more rocky banks, to which no one who has dared to take the plunge can come back so easily. “
She writes, they whispered. Or was she just doing crossword puzzles?
That “comfortable” storytelling that Aichinger is talking about here – “closeness to the audience” is one of the many more modern words for it – is always called for loudest when the repression is strongest. In the volume of short stories “Eliza Eliza” from 1965, she finally moved away from all external assignments. It breaks reality down into its individual components and puts them back together again. The logic of language creates new references and images out of itself, and the volume “Bad Words” from 1976 radicalizes this again. There is no longer any consent. The perspective of the outsiders, the persecuted, the useless, who oppose the success and efficiency thinking, becomes central.
However, this cannot be translated politically in a single line, everything is consistently carried out in the language itself. There is only one volume of poems by Ilse Aichinger, its creation spans a period of more than twenty years. It seems so closed, so uniform in its barren language that time seems to be tied together to a single, incomprehensible point. In her last years, after living in provincial seclusion for a long time and after Günter Eich had died, she lived in Vienna again. And you saw her sitting in the corner of her café with a pen in her hand – “she’s writing,” one whispered, but then it turned out that she was just doing crossword puzzles.
That suited her, who was one of the great poets of the 20th century. “I no longer use the better words”, it says in one of her later texts: “Nobody can ask me to make connections as long as they are avoidable. I am not indiscriminate like life.”