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Between Depiction and Experience: The Exile Dreams of Paula Ludwig
- Women in German Yearbook: Feminist Studies in German Literature & Culture
- University of Nebraska Press
- Volume 17, 2001
- pp. 181-197
- 10.1353/wgy.2001.0012
- Article
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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.