Inflicting Wounds and Leaving Scars: Marlene Streeruwitz's Morire in Levitate

Marlene Streeruwitz published her first novella, Morire in Levitate, in 2004. The Latin morire in levitate could translate into "dying with ease." In Italian, in addition to "die" morire also means "to fade, come to an end, vanish." The title thus foreshadows the gloomy mood and the wintry, icy surroundings presented throughout the narrative and hints at an act of disappearance. The life of the female protagonist and her body slowly disappear into nothingness. The "unerhörte Begebenheit" so central to Goethe's definition of a novella can be found in Morire in flashbacks - in images of death and individual memories of childhood as well as cultural memories of National Socialist rule (see Lorenz, "Sterbenswünsche").

This article argues that the novella examines the trauma that the second generation of the German-speaking population experiences as a consequence of the Nazi perpetrator's legacy. Streeruwitz's text explores how memory, gender, the ageing female body, the exclusion of ageing women in society and literature, the female voice, speaking, breathing, the Todeswunsch, and female suicide(s) are closely linked. Gaining and losing a voice and the danger of falling silent and becoming complacent in light of the Nazi past of Germany and Austria are the focal points in Morire. Aspects of memory, the female voice, speaking, and breathing, as well as physical and mental wounds, have not been explored in depth in previous examinations of this novella (Lorenz, "Sterbenswünsche"). In Morire and other texts by Streeruwitz, lung diseases and speaking problems are indications of women's suppression (Kallin, "Marlene Streeruwitz's Nachwelt" 340-48). In this novella, she connects disease with cultural production, in this case the female singing voice, which is most intimately associated with the Austrian cultural tradition.

Metaphors of wound and disease recur throughout this text as symbols of psychological instability rather than actual bloody wounds in the flesh. The protagonist's identity is fractured by trauma experienced as a child in the confines of her family. The connections between the gendering of illness, memory, and voice bear witness to deeper meanings at the interface of the female body and the female voice as sites of memory. These issues are intertwined in such a way that the protagonist, as a second-generation offspring, feels victimized by the Nazi legacy and condemns the grandparent and parent generations for their roles as fascist perpetrators or supporters of perpetrators. It is secondary traumatization that keeps the protagonist from finding her way and coming to terms with her family's history.

The wound has been a common trope in German and world literature to express difficulties that societies face. In Franz Kafka's Verwandlung, for example, Gregor's father hits his son with an apple and thus creates a wound that does not heal. Josef dies in silence, incapable of communicating the severity of his wound to his family. Thomas Mann was one of several twentieth-century authors who broadened the disease metaphor to represent the ills of modern European society, as in Der Tod in Venedig, Der Zauberberg, and Doktor Faustus. In Zauberberg, for example, Hans Castorp tries to overcome symptoms of a lung disease he does not really have. Similarly, Albert Camus in The Plague and Alexander Solzhenitsyn in Cancer Ward have used the literary device of disease and death to represent the decay of society. As Galili Shahar asserts on German literary fragments and wounded bodies:

And indeed, modern German literature can be read suggestively as an inventory of wounded bodies. Goethe's prose, Georg Büchner's dramas, Heinrich von Kleist's plays and novellas, E.T.A. Hoffmann's Nachtstücke, Wagner's operas, Franz Kafka's stories, Heinrich Böll's early works and Elfriede Jelinek's novels are examples of a literature of wounds.

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This "literature of wounds," as Shahar calls it, has also been an important part of early and contemporary women's writing, where in particular the "healing-" of the wound has been a major concern of feminist literature and theory. The wound has been employed as a feminist trope that describes the problems and...