On February 6th the Institute of European Studies Austrian Studies Program co-organized with the Department of German a presentation of Alys George entitled “The Rubble Women: War, Gender, and the Novel in Austria, 1945-49”. Alys George is Acting Assistant Professor of German Studies at Stanford University, specializing in 19th to 21st century German and Austrian literature and author of the book The Naked Truth: Viennese Modernism and the Body
George began her presentation with an explanation for why she chose to work on this project: Some years ago, in an antique bookshop in Vienna she stumbled upon a pack of postcards with the title “zerstörtes Wien” (destroyed Vienna), which showed buildings in Vienna that were destroyed during the Second World War. This stood in contrast to other postcards dating from that period that showed pictures where the building and their surroundings seemed to be intact. To her, this was emblematic of a discrepancy existing in German post-war literature. On the one hand there were writers aiming to do Vergangenheitsbewältigung (work of coping with the past) and to write Trümmerliteratur (rubble literature) and on the other hand there were authors that didn’t want to write about the past but move on from it as soon as possible and that were encouraging oblivion.
In her work George focuses on female Austrian authors who wrote different Trümmerliteratur, in the sense that they “wanted to make the past seen”. In her presentation she focused on two of them: Mela Hartwig and Ilse Aichinger. She dived deeper into Mela Hartwig’s work “Inferno” (written between 1946 and 1948) which is about a 19-year-old art student that joins the resistance movement during the Second World War. George provided excerpts of the book to underline its complexity and power, which is to be found in sentences such as: “Ein Verbrechen, das wir geschehen lassen, begehen wir selbst.” (A crime that we let happen we commit ourselves). The second novel George presented in depth was Die größere Hoffnung (The Higher Hope, published in 1948) by Ilse Aichinger (member of the Gruppe 47). The work is about children that had at least one jewish parent and that were targeted by the secret police. The book is considered a classic of Austrian post-war literature and Aichinger herself described it as “ein Bericht über die Kriegszeit, damit man weiss, was geschehen ist.” (a war report, so that people know what happened).
George finished her presentation by emphasizing how these women refused to clear and reconstruct Austrian literature, but instead insisted on regarding the past and reflecting on it. She also shared the thought that writing novels allowed these authors to take a certain aesthetic distance from their painful past while still serving as an artistic means to process it. This insight can make the reader think about the trauma felt and experienced by these war-time authors when writing about it whether it be in a historical context or a literary one.