Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Iacovella, Matteo

Titel

The “Po-ethical Turn” in Post-War Austrian Literature Through Ilse Aichinger’s Texts

Ist Teil von

• Academic Journal of Modern Philology, 2020 (10), p.125-136

Ort / Verlag

Committee for Philology of the Polish Academy of Sciences, Wrocław Branch

Erscheinungsjahr

2020

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

EZB Electronic Journals Library

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• The publications of the short story “Das vierte Tor” (“The Fourth Gate”, 1945) and the novel Die größere Hoffnung(The Greater Hope, 1948) by Ilse Aichinger mark the beginning of post-war Austrian literature. Like several of her contemporaries, including Paul Celan, Ingeborg Bachmann and Milo Dor, Aichinger was part of a generation of survivors of the atrocities of war and National Socialism. After 1945, the “old guard” of poets incited the young generation to find a new voice within post-war German-speaking literature and set new standards in the literary field. The reading of Ilse Aichinger’s texts, which were first published in the immediate post-war period, is thus not merely a literary matter. Rather, it is a way to reach the core of post-war culture within the German-speaking world, especially in the Austrian context, where the tradition of language skepticism and Sprachkritik has always been linked to political and ethical issues. To reflect upon literature and cultural production in the context of Austria’s problematic denazification means to focus not on a “message,” but instead on a “poethics” as a new form of commitment. This was not only an individual effort by authors, but the expression of a collective act of will in which individual instances and political strategies (not all controlled by the authors themselves) played a role in the cultural field(s) during Cold War years. The paper also discusses the fundamental role played by literary magazines as an important instrument of cultural renewal, as well as by their actors, gate-keepers, and financial and political influencers in the post-war context.