The rebirth of Austrian literature after 1945 has been attributed to Ilse Aichinger and her paradigm-shifting novel The Greater Hope (1948). Aichinger’s text is just one case study from a wider project, which both interrogates and offers a corrective to the canon of postwar German-language literature. Contrary to prevailing literary histories, I offer a constellation of mostly forgotten Austrian novels written by women between 1945 and 1955, which give fictional form to the years 1938–45. By refusing silence and escapism, and instead bearing witness to the ruinous bequest of World War II, Aichinger and others undercut widespread, tenacious postwar myths: the “Zero Hour,” the possibility of reconstruction, the impossibility of expression, and the notion of Austrian national “victimhood” among them. These novels record, remember, and resist.
The College of Arts