Between Depiction and Experience: The Exile Dreams of Paula Ludwig

Well before her exile to Brazil in 1940, the Austrian-born poet Paula Ludwig began to associate dreaming with the loss of Heimat (homeland)—a notion that she adopted as a literary motif in her lyrical prose volume Traumlandschaft (1935). In Träume (Dreams, 1962), Ludwig displayed her continued interest in the dream motif—this time as a means to confront the exile experience. In a close reading of selected Träume texts, this essay demonstrates the ways in which Ludwig's complex, dynamic notion of the dream—conceived as a means to record and to create worlds—allows her to thematize the dialectical relationship between experience and depiction in exile. To further enhance the readings of Ludwig's texts, I draw on examples from exile theory and memoirs, revealing the ways that the relationship among dreaming, writing, and exile is figured in these discourses.