Wort-Anker Werfen: Ilse Aichinger und England by Rüdiger Görner, Christine Ivanovic, and Sugi Shindo (review)

In honor of Ilse Aichinger’s ninetieth birthday, the Austrian Cultural Forum in London held a symposium in March 2011; this slim volume stems is derived from that event. Eight scholarly essays; one personal memoir by Ruth Rix, Aichinger’s niece; and one artistic piece by Austrian writer Peter Water-house of “österreichisch-britischer Herkunft” (163) all focus on the eponymous connections to England within Ilse Aichinger’s body of work. The title signifies England as a place to which Aichinger was “sehnsüchtig verbunden” (7) and where she cast a proverbial anchor during the Third Reich’s persecution and long thereafter.

As the editors’ introduction states, such connections to England remain obscured throughout the first decades of her writing, and several articles in this volume uncover these connections. According to the editors and in Christine Ivanovic’s essay, the first direct connections arise in autobiographical sections of her prose volume, Kleist, Moos und Fasane from 1987 and in her three later books: Film und Verhängnis. Blitzlichter auf ein Leben (2001), Unglaubwürdige Reisen (2005), and Subtexte (2006). In these “Aichinger [referiert] immer öfter Erinnerungsbruchstücke, darunter vielfache Bezugnahmen auf England” (9, 92). These references of the last twenty-five years often return to the date July 4, 1939—her twin sister’s date of departure on the last Kindertransport to England, and to the years 1947 and 1948—when Aichinger first visited her exiled twin in England.

All of the contributions are well researched and would be of interest to experts. Three essays stand out. In an essay about Aichinger and her sister Helga, Nikola Herwig thoroughly researches the sisters’ letters—hundreds of which are still held in the family’s private possession; others are housed in the Deutsches Literaturarchiv (dla) in Marburg. Herwig received permission to read many of the private letters, including a 1946 Christmas gift—a private collection of letters entitled “Kleine Auswahl für Euch von mir”—that Aichinger gave to her sister and aunt (39). Aichinger could not send these letters during World War II; they were limited to Red Cross messages of no more than twenty-five words. Throughout what she defines as four phases of the sisters’ correspondence, Herwig maintains that Helga was Aichinger’s “Motor des literarischen Schreibens” (34) and that through the writing of so many letters, Aichinger developed her literary voice. As an example Herwig convincingly connects Aichinger’s writing technique to her detail-laden letters and journal entries; in all of these texts, Herwig suggests that the seemingly unimportant details of street names or daily life are Aichinger’s attempt “in Proust’scher Manier […] Menschen, Orte und ihre Begebenheiten dem Vergessen zu entreißen” (38).

The appealing essay by Sugi Shindo draws correlations between two separate publications by the sisters from 2006—Aichinger’s Subtexte and Helga Michie’s book Concord. Shindo intertwines interpretations of Aichinger’s texts with several visual artworks by Michie. Shindo usefully points out that despite differences of location, media, and language—Michie writes in English, for example—the sisters have “eine ihnen gemeinsame Erlebnis- und Erinnerungswirklichkeit” that creates a togetherness (54).

The third noteworthy essay is “Brittanniens [sic] Töchter und andere Ergebungen. Ilse Aichinger’s ‘Surrender,’” by Vivian Liska, in which Liska provides a rigorous, interdisciplinary examination of this text from 1971 (published in Schlechte Wörter in 1976). Here are some of the broad range of items Liska connects to this text: a 1940 speech by Churchill—Liska maintains that Aichinger questions if God and England—the two “Rettungsinstanzen” (109) mentioned by Churchill—really were such, because neither stopped or delayed the atrocities during the Third Reich (110); a 1971 UK immigration bill that was to block immigration for Commonwealth Citizens (111); several works by and the early death of John Keats, who is directly mentioned in “Surrender,” with Liska connecting Aichinger’s concise words about Keats to Georg Trakl...