Alys George - The Rubble Women. War, Gender, and the Novel in Austria, 1945–49

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.