“It’s a sad poem,” Bettina said as we walked down the glistening wet ribbon of a Vienna street one rainy evening. “I don’t read it every day.” Bettina, a Viennese psychoanalyst, was describing the daily walk from her home in Leopoldstadt, in the Second District, to her office in the inner city, the First District. The journey takes her across a bridge over the Danube canal which bears a poem by Ilse Aichinger inscribed in cast iron along the span. The poem reads, in part: The world is made of stuff that wants watching, no eyes left to see the white fields,no ears to hear birds whirring in the branches.Grandma, where are the lips you need to taste the grasses, and who will sniff the sky till it’s done? When the German language billowed with Nazi contaminations, said George Steiner, it got “the habit of hell into its syntax.” Those who repaired that syntax and got it whirring again, those who after the Shoah expressed estrangement from the German language in German, were by and large “non-German Germans”: Paul Celan in Paris, Nelly Sachs in Stockholm, Elias Canetti and Erich Fried in London, and Ilse Aichinger in Vienna. Unlike German writers who found in the German language an inalienable form of belonging, each of these writers grappled with a language that had become foreign, hostile, a sign of non-belonging. Each of these adversaries of postwar forgetting wrestled with a language, as Celan put it, that “gave back no words for that which happened.” Of these figures, Ilse Aichinger, with whom the story of postwar Austrian literature begins, has been until recently the most overlooked and undertranslated. Since her death in 2016, a spate of new English translations affords us an opportunity to correct this literary injustice, to take some soundings from the still-potent body of work that Aichinger bequeathed us. Ilse and Helga Aichinger, identical twin sisters, were born in Vienna in 1921. Their mother, a Jewish pediatrician and one of the first women to study medicine in Vienna, and her father, a Catholic schoolteacher, were “opposites in race and character,” Ilse said. They divorced when the twins were six years old. “A threefold suffering dominates my life,” Ilse recalled. “The antagonism between my parents, the antagonism within me, the antagonism to my surroundings.” Only “the powers of childhood held the world together.” Ilse and Helga were raised in Vienna by their grandmother, “the dearest person in the world to me.” One spring day in 1933, a twenty-two-year-old Bavarian medical student spending the semester in Vienna appeared at their door and politely introduced himself as someone with a professional interest in twins. “My name is Josef Mengele,” he said. They shooed him away and never saw him again. Long before the Anschluss, Hitler’s annexation of Austria in March 1938, Vienna had suffered from virulent and politically successful anti-Semitism. But the Anschluss unleashed a pent-up brutality that amazed even the Germans. The German playwright Carl Zuckmayer described Vienna during the following days as a once-cultured city transmuted “into a nightmare painting of Hieronymus Bosch,” as if “Hades had opened its gates and vomited forth the basest, most despicable, most horrible demons.” The racial restrictions that had gradually taken root in Germany over the previous five years demonized Austrian Jews almost overnight. The National Socialist regime classified Aichinger as a so-called Mischling, a “half-breed” or “mixed-race.” In August 1938, SS officer Adolf Eichmann set up his Central Office of Jewish Emigration in an “Aryanized” palace not far from where Ilse lived with her grandmother. Ilse’s sister Helga escaped on July 4, 1939, with the last Kindertransport to leave Vienna’s Westbahnhof. She fled via Holland to London. Ilse’s father had urged her to leave, too: “I don’t understand it, it’s much nicer out there in England. A young person belongs outside.” The superficial materiality of his remark, Ilse noted in her diary, showed “a great lack of understanding.” Ilse chose instead to stay in Vienna to protect her mother, who remained safe from deportation so long as she had a “half-Aryan” child to support. As a Jew, the mother was ostracized, and forced to support herself as a factory worker. With this reversal of roles, the daughter protecting mother, Ilse and her mother — by then stripped of her job as a school doctor — lived in constant fear, billeted with a hostile landlady in a small room on Marc-Aurel-Strasse, adjacent to the Vienna headquarters of the Gestapo in the former Hotel Metropole. As Paul Hofmann, later head of the New York Times bureau in Vienna, recorded, the Hotel Metropole “became the synonym for terror and torture.” It was where former chancellor Kurt Schuschnigg and Baron Louis Nathaniel Rothschild were held. In March 1945, when the four-story building sustained heavy damage from an aerial bombing raid, a passerby cautioned Ilse: “Don’t look happy or you’ll be arrested, too.” (A scene in The Third Man, shot in Vienna in 1948, uses the building’s ruins as a stark backdrop. Helga makes a cameo appearance in the film. After the war, a plaque at the site described it as an “inferno for those who believed in Austria… It crashed to pieces like the Thousand-Year Reich.”) The twins meanwhile corresponded through Red Cross messages limited to no more than twenty-five words. In these clipped messages sent across the Channel — intended, as Ilse wrote to Helga in November 1945, “to rip the veil between us” — Aichinger whetted her terse prose style. The editor of their correspondence suggests that it served as Ilse’s “engine of literary writing.” Once released from their inhibitions, the Aichingers’ neighbors proved so untroubled by the roundups of Jews that before long the Gestapo conducted raids with impunity in broad daylight. In May 1942, Ilse watched as her seventy-four-year-old grandmother, together with her aunt Erna and uncle Felix (awarded the Iron Cross in the First World War) and about a thousand other Jews were forced before jeering onlookers onto a truck which disappeared
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