Ilse Aichingers Lyrik: Das gedruckte Werk und die Handschriften by Hannah Markus (review)

Until the publication of Hannah Markus's study, Ilse Aichinger's poetic work had not been critically assessed and explored in its entirety. Compared to the author's postwar novel Die gröβere Hoffnung and her prose and dramatic texts, the extraordinary quality of her poems had been acknowledged, but not a single study had focused on this aspect of her oeuvre. In light of the political debates of the 1960s and 1970s and the priority given to prose and political theater at that time, lyric poetry as a genre had lost its appeal for readers, students, and critics as well as for authors. Aichinger had written and published a significant body of poetry during the postwar era, but like other poets of her generation, including Ingeborg Bachmann, she gave priority to different genres.

According to Hannah Markus the majority of Aichinger's poems, which had been published in different venues individually or in smaller groupings in the 1950s to 1970s, are collected in the volume Verschenkter Rat (1978), and in the latter's expanded version (1991), which appeared under the umbrella of the edition of Aichinger's collected works. Markus writes that the Aichinger files in the Deutsches Literaturarchiv in Marbach contain a large number of lyric texts and drafts that reveal that the author never stopped writing poetry. Markus mentions eight folders of poems and poetic sketches, many of which still await cataloguing (166). These materials include different versions of poems, thus providing insight into Aichinger's creative processes and development.

Markus is the first scholar to provide a scholarly book-length study dedicated exclusively to Aichinger's poetry. She takes into consideration essential elements of text production, assessment, and interpretation. In her extensive appendix Markus provides meticulous information and descriptions of the poems, commenting on existing variations and the publication history. Also included is a list of Aichinger's poems and the corresponding dates. This overview is an invaluable tool for future scholarship on Aichinger's poetry.

The immediate inspiration for Ilse Aichingers Lyrik: Das gedruckte Werk und die Handschriften was the transfer of the author's literary estate to the Literaturarchiv Marbach. The practice of living authors releasing their legacy to an archive as a "Vorlass" is no longer uncommon, as the "Vorlass" of Habermas and others indicates. This step on the author's part encouraged Markus to undertake a broad, text-based discussion of Aichinger's poetry and an examination of published and unpublished material. She establishes connections between the unpublished works and the poems in Verschenkter Rat, which she treats as a collection of individual works rather than a poetic cycle or thematically ordered anthology. Either view has its justifications: On the one hand, the poems in Verschenkter Rat do not follow a chronological order, which reveals that the author put them into a particular sequence, but on the other hand, they originated in different time periods, which suggests that they can stand on their own.

Markus contextualizes her textual analyses within the larger literary and critical environment and provides a survey of scholarship on Aichinger's poetry since the 1960s. Her commentary on the critical studies indicates developments in Aichinger's writing and in the critical discourse. Following the introductory report on Aichinger research, Markus examines the published poetry in chronological order and identifies elements and idiosyncrasies that remain constant in Aichinger's poetic practice. These pertain, among others, to rhetorical figures, sound structures, syntactic elements, and colors. Thereafter Markus discusses changes in style, rhetoric, and topics that occurred over time. She pays special attention to shifts pertaining to themes of religion, death, and language. Markus also discusses some of the earlier prose poetry and other texts not included in Verschenkter Rat. In conjunction with the prose poetry she raises the issue of Aichinger's collaboration with her husband, the poet Günter Eich.

In her exploration of the unpublished works in Marbach, Markus thematizes the origins and...