Ilse Aichinger, 1948
Lilly Axster
Katherine Klinger
Conversations
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Conversations
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Dagmar Fink
Tom Holert
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Billie Holiday, 1939
Jamika Ajalon
Rúbia Salgado
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Adrian Piper, 1983
Belinda Kazeem
Anna Kowalska
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Yvonne Rainer, 1990
Monika Bernold
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 These conversations are meant to open up spaces for thought between the authors and the ways they relate to the reference text. The editors pose a number of questions, which the authors may address or reject. It is up to the authors to answer, not to answer, or to introduce their own topics.
Conversations Lilly Axster / Katherine Klinger
Conzepte /
Please ask each other one or two questions—about each other’s texts.
Katherine Klinger /
Not for the first time, Vienna has been voted “the best city in the world to live in”, “beating” all major cities of the world such as London and New York. In light of our ongoing debates, what is Lilly’s reaction to this accolade, and how does she think it links with the history of the city and its past and present?
Lilly Axster /
Austria is a rich country, one of the richest in the world. This is due among others to what the National Socialist regime robbed from other countries, what profiteers took from the property of those who were deported or murdered, and to the profit derived by businesses from Nazi rule, war, exploitation, and others being deprived of their rights. The information about the city ranking does not mention the history of this source of wealth. Nor does it tell us for whom Vienna is “the best city in the world to live in.” Those who have been illegalized, for example, are in constant danger, anywhere in public, of being arrested in a police raid and deported. People whose names or appearance are labeled “non-Austrian” by authorities, employers, members of the majority, are often subjected to derogatory treatment via scopic regime or verbal attack.
As far as a question for Katherine is concerned: I can imagine that readers of your text in Austria would have the same initial reaction as me: impressed by the way you address questions of loss, home, place, passing down, memory, and responsibility, but also, as someone descended from Nazi perpetrators and currently living a privileged life in Austria, shy about commenting more than just to say “what an important text” or “I’ve nothing to add.” Non-reaction can be very powerful, establishing a silence that attacks, or at least disconcerts. That is a form of refusal. Refusal to do anything with what you’ve opened up. I assume you’re already familiar with this crushed response to your texts / statements / interventions in post-Nazi Austria. However hard I try, I can’t find a question I’d like to ask you. Finally, I consider asking you what kind of response you yourself would like to see from readers in Austria, but this means I’m throwing the ball back into your court. So I ask myself what kind of response I would like to see to your text, which means passing the same ball not to you but to imagined readers. Nothing works. As in my text: [1] No picture, no question. There it is, the gap that, for me, so often inserts itself between us as descendants of the two different kinds of “wrong grandparents.”
Conzepte /
Your selections from Aichinger’s novel overlap in one place. Incidentally, the passage in question is one where there is a significant difference between the published German and English versions. Where the German uses the word “Schuld” (guilt), the English version by Cornelia Schaeffer (from 1961) uses “fault”. (Our translator, Nicholas Grindell, has made a slight correction to the published English text at this point, reinstating “guilt”.) Which criteria did you apply when choosing passages from Aichinger’s text?
Katherine Klinger /
When I came to choose passages from the novel, I selected those that resonated with me and that I felt might offer me a starting point to begin to craft an article. I did not know what I wanted to write about both before and after I had selected them, or indeed if the quotations connected with each other; but it was important that I found passages I could personally connect to and would, in some way, even subtly, link with the period 1938-1945.
Lilly Axster /
When making my selection, I first focused on passages that spoke to me directly while reading. Then I chose a piece of very concise dialog that made the children’s world very tangible to me, as well as appealing to my specific interest in writing dialog for the stage. I also wanted to include excerpts that illustrate the novel’s stylistic diversity, as I assume most readers won’t have read the book. The “dramaturgy” of my text, based on the places visited by Aichinger’s child protagonists, prompted my choice of one passage (on the Danube Canal) that is clearly located. And finally, I chose an excerpt from the first chapter about the failed attempt to obtain a visa. In these days of Fortress Europe with its restrictive, inhuman border regimes, this establishes a direct link between the novel and the present.
Conzepte /
How did you arrive at the form your text eventually took, its stylistic and structural elements? Did you have a particular readership in mind?
Lilly Axster /
The novel is set in Vienna, I live in Vienna, Malmoe, [2] the magazine that printed my piece, is published in Vienna. Essentially, I imagined it would be read by people who know Vienna. An early version wasn’t built around a walk through the city, as we didn’t know yet where the text would be published. While reading the novel, I was often surprised and intrigued by a great sense of clarity. That was something I wanted to pursue, to explore and understand through writing.
Katherine Klinger /
Once I had chosen the passages, I began to see patterns emerging: namely, the themes of identity, loss, home and place (in the sense of Heimat) and ancestry. As I then looked at the passages over and over again, the idea of somehow connecting them with the 1938 Vienna phone directory began to take shape.
The readership I kept in mind is a local one. Lilly Axster’s piece, like mine, continually refers to place and space—although her places are public spaces, and mine inhabit largely domestic territory. I kept the city of Vienna constantly in my mind as I wrote, and walked the streets and staircases in my imagination. The co-existence of a city that holds such a history, and yet is a modern, vibrant capital, has always interested me.
By way of illustration: not listed in my phone directory is the last known address of my grandparents, although it is held in the official records. During the conference Axster mentions in 1999 [3] when I refused to allow the translation of “Henker” (hangman) to be “the hanged,” I stole into the building where my grandparents were last housed before their journey from the Aspang Station Axster mentions. I have often wondered what the present-day inhabitants made of the clumsily-written note and sunflowers pinned to their door when they returned that night. What sense could they, or indeed anyone make of their modern-day rented apartment that previously housed two terrified Jews, waiting to be called to their deaths, forbidden to traverse the city or seek daylight.
Conzepte /
The novel’s narrator is a girl. Almost all of the book’s main characters are children, which is rare in writing for adults. Would you say this further heightens the sense of threat, or do these figures also have special strengths?
Lilly Axster /
The children in the novel react directly to the altered and hostile conditions of Nazi Vienna. They act without thinking. Presumably, only children can do this to such a degree. And that is also their strength. They do the most obvious thing in any situation, whatever they feel is most likely to get them where they want to go. Whether or not it makes rational sense or is ethically defensible is of no importance. Rather than being analyzed and situated within a system of social values, the anti-Semitic conditions described in the novel thus impact directly on the reader, in all their brutality, without commentary. Which actually emphasizes the sense of threat. Although I don’t imagine that Aichinger chose child protagonists for this reason, as a strategic decision, so to speak.
Conzepte /
What do you think of each other’s texts on Ilse Aichinger’s novel?
Katherine Klinger /
Remarkably, Lilly Axster’s piece (entirely unknown to me at the time of writing) reflects a synergy central to her writing that is the main theme of mine: Namely, naming. Axster writes: “Perhaps this is the most radical form of resistance: Establishing clarity. Naming.” In my piece, I literally name names, both as proof of existence and as symbol of memorialization.
Lilly Axster /
In 2005, together with my flatmates at the time, I went to the Documentary Archive on Austrian Resistance [4] to research the history of the apartment in Vienna’s sixth district where we were living. According to the records of the Jewish Religious Community, the woman who lived there in December 1941 was deported to Riga, where she was probably murdered. Katherine then advised us and helped us to post this information on the website of the Association of Jewish Refugees (AJR) [5] with an invitation, “to whom it may concern,” to visit the apartment and/or contact the current tenants for further research. After finding out about the history of the apartment, I began to see Vienna through different eyes. Katherine’s text on Aichinger’s book uses the municipal phone directory of 1938 to name the gaps in which people like me now live. She calls these gaps to mind, unfolds them, and thus changes what it means to be in and look at Vienna today.
Katherine Klinger /
The story of the Prater that is so central to Axster’s piece, as well as Aichinger’s novel, is an important marker for me and curiously links the three of us. Without fully realizing it, I named the owner of the Prater as one of the Jewish telephone owners later deported, both as a way of locating one of the most famous icons of Vienna but, more importantly, because my grandparents lived and telephoned on the Praterstraße.
Conzepte /
Aichinger’s novel is one of the first to appear after World War II that address the Shoah. Unlike most novels against Nazism written before 1945 (mostly by writers in exile), Die größere Hoffnung has no clear story, no easily accessible message of resistance, not even a clear plot. It is a book full of playful language, dream sequences, and references to myth and religion. The book is a tough read not only because of its painful subject matter, but also because of the way it is written. What do you think of the novel?
Lilly Axster /
For me as a reader, the precision with which Aichinger describes thoughts, feelings, and even dreams in all their complexity, using associative images and experimental language, gives a clarity and an uncompromising quality that might be hard to achieve with a more down-to-earth text. So I was very impressed with the way she writes. She occasionally lost me in places where she seems to slip into the realm of myth and religion, but she always pulled me back with linguistic challenges such as unexpected adjectives, things taking on a life of their own, concepts, and associative passages: “A fly crept from Dover to Calais.” (p. 4) / “Ellen threatened the silence, but the silence remained silent.” (p. 18) / “But how little baggage one can take along for a short ride on a train’s whistle. Less than oneself.” (pp. 50-51) / “But the light was brighter than they had imagined. It burned their eyes, split their glances, and caught in their hair like a strange comb.” (p. 208)
Every line of the novel makes the hate, the exclusion, and the war against everything “un-Aryan” tangible, but without having to resort to the usual stock cast of monsters in Nazi uniform, blond sadists, and quaking victims. Throughout the text, the children suffering at the hands of anti-Semitic laws and the “annexed” majority preserve their dignity and ability to act, without the deadly might of their opponents being played down or relativized. That’s something I find unusual and powerful.
Katherine Klinger /
Aichinger’s novel, written in 1948, has no Shoah, no Holocaust, no convenient term to encapsulate the madness she had just gone through. It reminded me of some of the remarkable testimony Alfred Wiener [6] took from concentration camp survivors, also in 1948, as they waited, often in the very camps that had tried to murder them, to receive visas to new countries. Taking eyewitness testimony from them decades before oral history was invented, they too grasped to find a language that could convey their experiences. I remember in particular one survivor who wrote his testimony as if it were a fairytale: it was the only way he could even begin to express what had happened.
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The conversation with Lilly Axster and Katherine Klinger on their texts about Ilse Aichinger’s novel Die größere Hoffnung (literally: “The Greater Hope”) from 1948, published in English as Herod’s Children in 1963, took place via e-mail and has been shortened in the editing process. Sabine Rohlf asked the questions.
Translation from the German by Nicholas Grindell (Lilly Axster)
Literature
Ilse Aichinger, Die größere Hoffnung (literally: “The Greater Hope”), Amsterdam 1948
Ilse Aichinger, Herod’s Children, New York 1963. Translated from the German by Cornelia Schaeffer
Notes
1) “I think of my encounter last summer with two women visiting Vienna from the United States and England who wanted to visit the Prater. Sitting on a bench in the park was something they said they owed to their mother, who had to be rescued from Vienna by the Refugee Children Movement. And to their grandparents who were deported from Vienna and murdered. They asked if I wanted to come with them, an invitation I turned down. Because I couldn’t picture it at all. Neither sitting with the two of them on a bench in the Prater. Nor standing beside the bench, or behind it. Nor sitting on a different bench. No picture was possible.”
2) www.malmoe.org
3) The Presence of the Absence. International Holocaust Conference for Eyewitnesses and Descendants of “Both Sides”, Vienna 1999
4) Dokumentationsarchiv des österreichischen Widerstandes (DÖW): www.doew.at
5) Association of Jewish Refugees (AJR): www.ajr.org.uk
6) Alfred Wiener was a German Jew who began collecting documents on anti-Semitism and the activities and plans of the Nazis as early as the 1920s. In 1933, he fled with his collection to Amsterdam and then in 1939 to London. There he founded the Institute of Contemporary History & Wiener Library, now one of the oldest archives and Holocaust research centers in the world: www.wienerlibrary.co.uk (Editor’s note) |
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