“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.