How are the years 1938–45 represented in fiction from the immediate postwar era? Was it even possible to tell a »true« war story in German, when catastrophic nationalism had tainted the very fundaments of the language? This talk looks to Austrian writers who retooled the Zeitroman, a socially and politically engaged genre, by destabilizing the boundaries between historical documentary, fiction, and autobiography. At a time when literary representation was little match for lived experience, often-overlooked female authors—including Ilse Aichinger, Marie Frischauf-Pappenheim, and Mela Hartwig—refused silence and escapism, instead bearing witness to the ruinous bequest of World War II. In so doing, they undercut a widespread constellation of early-postwar myths: the »Zero Hour«, the possibility of reconstruction, the impossibility of expression, and the notion of Austria as Hitler’s »first victim« among them. These novels record, remember, and resist.

Alys George is the author of the award-winning book The Naked Truth: Viennese Modernism and the Body (University of Chicago Press, 2020). She has published and taught widely on 19th- through 21st-century Austrian and German literature, visual culture, and cultural history, with a special emphasis on modernism and the postwar period.

Supported by Stadt Wien

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THE LECTURE WILL BE HYBRID.

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