A Victimized Daughter in a Post-Nazi Austrian Family: An Analysis of Brigitte Schwaiger's Wie kommt das Salz ins Meer

Wie kommt das Salz ins Meer was Brigitte Schwaiger's first attempt to expose the challenges faced by young women in their relationships with their fathers and husbands. This novel deserves more attention in that it set the tone for Schwaiger's later novels, to which it shows distinct thematic and narrative resemblances. Starting with theories on family studies, this paper discusses the daughter's status in two families—one dominated by her father and the other by her husband. It is necessary to consider the surrounding social atmosphere, with its lingering Nazi mentality, when analyzing how the daughter is denied adequate access to the public sphere as well as to domestic space. This paper argues that the daughter becomes a victim due to the double forces of Nazi mentality and traditional patriarchal authority in post-Nazi Austrian society.