Aichinger, Ilse (Writer)

(1921- ) poet, short-story writer, novelist

Ilse Aichinger was born in Vienna, Austria. Her father, Leopold, was a Jewish doctor, and her mother, Berta Kremer, was a gentile teacher. Aichinger grew up in vienna and Linz, graduating from high school in 1939. The Nazis prevented her from attending medical school because of her Jewish heritage. During World War II, many of her relatives were killed in concentration camps. Aichinger became fiercely antifascist, a trait that would characterize her postwar writing.

Following the war, Aichinger enrolled in medical school in vienna. She quit after five semesters to devote herself full time to a writing career. In 1948, she worked as a reader for Fischer Publishing Company and wrote Die Grofiere Hoffnung (The Greater Hope, 1948), a novel about a Viennese girl who sympathizes with her Jewish friends after the Nazi takeover of Austria. The following year, Aichinger cofounded the Hochschule fur Gestal-tung (Academy for Arts and Designs) in Ulm, West Germany. She married poet Gunter eich in 1953. The couple occasionally attended the annual meetings of the German writers’ association, gruppe 47.

Aichinger wrote numerous short stories, radio plays, and poems in the second half of the 20th century. Influenced by the Holocaust, Aichinger’s writings often take the perspective of the victims of German-Austrian society. Literary scholar James Alldridge explains that “her appeal is to a humanity deep within each of us, addressed in a language unadorned by flourishes and unadorned by experiments in usage.” Aichinger won numerous German and Austrian awards, including the Georg Trakl Prize for Poetry and the Literature Prize of the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts.

Other Works by Ilse Aichinger

The Bound Man and Other Stories. Translated by Eric Mosbacher. New York: Noonday Press, 1956.

Herod’s Children. Translated by Cornelia Schaeffer. New York: Atheneum, 1963.

A Work about Ilse Aichinger

Alldridge, James C. Ilse Aichinger. Chester Springs, Pa.: Dufour Editions, 1969.

Next post:

Previous post: