The work of Ilse Aichinger (1921–2016), one of the great German-language authors of the twentieth century, is characterized by a commitment to the perception of a different reality—as experienced during the time of National Socialism and repressed after 1945. Aichinger’s first and only novel, Die größere Hoffnung (1948, Engl. The Greater Hope, 2016)Footnote 1 centers on the fears and hopes of Viennese Jewish children before their deportation. Her short story “Spiegelgeschichte” (1951, Engl. “Life Story in Retrospect”)Footnote 2 received one of the first awards by the Gruppe 47, and her contemporaries compared the precision of her texts, which were reality-shattering and coolly saturated by reality at the same time, with Beckett’s later plays and Harold Pinter’s radio plays. Biographically speaking, Aichinger always expressed a “mad” (“wahnsinnige”) passion for seafaring “from the very beginning” (“von Anfang an,” 2005, 184). The sea represented salvation for her twin sister Helga who reached exile in England by crossing the channel. Perhaps as a result, the motif of the sea pervades Aichinger’s texts as the possibility of escape to England and the United States. In Ilse Aichinger’s poetic topography, the sea represents the origin and end point of all writing. All hopes for linguistic renewal and redemption from the “dried-up tracks” (“eingetrockneten Fahrspuren,” Aichinger 1991, 120) of narration are directed at this permanently moving element.

Already in The Greater Hope, the sea, having risen to produce a flood, appears as both a destructive and saving force in relation to cultural knowledge. In her early poetological essay “Das Erzählen in dieser Zeit” (1952, literally “Narration in This Time”), she takes the movement of water as a metaphor for short prose forms, which, after 1945, can no longer build a long narrative stream. Though Aichinger attests that the metaphor of the ‘narrative stream’ is still viable (“noch immer richtig,” [1952] 1991, 9), she also claims that contemporary narration has reached an impasse in that one can no longer speak of meandering and peacefully flowing waters. If the metaphor is to be retained, one has “to think of more torrential rivers, with steeper and rockier banks, to which no one who once dared the jump can easily return” (“an reißendere Flüsse denken, mit steileren und steinigeren Ufern, an die keiner, der einmal den Sprung gewagt hat, so leicht wieder zurückkommt,” Aichinger [1952] 1991, 9). First and foremost, all questions regarding contemporary narrative are to be directed at the open sea: Narrative streams enter into it, and it is in its shapelessness where they begin.

Ever since, Aichinger’s language has remained “always close to the sea” (“immer in Meeresnähe”), in constant flux (Aichinger [1978] 1991, 199)—except if it appears, as in Bad Words (2018, orig. Schlechte Wörter, 1976), in the form of dehydrated “stains” (“Flecken”). Aichinger’s increasingly shorter prose pieces no longer provide space for an epic stream; rather, the water levels swerve between two extremes: the dried-up stain and the sea-turned-flood. Instead of forming narrative streams, water changes its condition; it rises and falls like the sea, coming up and withdrawing again with the tide (Aichinger 2005, 78).

Thus in Aichinger’s prose, water levels indicate the liquidness of language. In early twentieth-century literature, textual movement along a vertical axis characterizes the manifestos of the avant-garde, whose protagonists (Majakovskij, Chlebnikov) enjoyed looking down from “skyscraper heights” (“Höhe von Wolkenkratzern,” Burljuk et al. 1912, 28) on the older generation (Pushkin, Dostojevski, Tolstoi, Gorki) in their “dacha on the river” (“Datscha am Fluß”). Yet Aichinger’s texts, in which water is rising and falling, crystallizing and turning into snow, are searching for a selective, interrupted liquid perspectivation. The author, who has always professed an infatuation with disappearance, and who connects this passion for nonexistence with that for seafaring (Aichinger 2005, 184), searches for forms in which water and language are left to themselves. Time and again, Aichinger’s prose pieces question anew in what ways, from the infinite open sea of linguistic possibility, a text can be literally brought to dry land—without lapsing into dried-out linguistic patterns.

Flood and Memory

In the opening scenario of The Greater Hope, the sea—in the form of a flood—presents a historical caesura. A hypothetical point of origin, from which language has distanced itself in the course of its history, the sea returns as a mighty flood:

All around the Cape of Good Hope, the sea was turning dark. The shipping routes blazed with light one more time, and died out. The aerial routes disappeared, as if they were out of place. The groups of islands drew together anxiously. The sea overflowed all the lines of longitude and latitude. It laughed at the world’s knowledge, and nestled itself like heavy silk against the bright land so that the southern tip of Africa could be no more than sensed in the twilight. The sea smoothed out the shredded-looking coastlines and deprived them of their purpose. (7)Footnote 3

The cataclysm captures all connecting lines and structures. Culture and knowledge sink into an increasingly dark, world-encompassing ocean, but the flood does not only destroy: it also brings hope for linguistic renewal. The opening of Aichinger’s famous novel, dedicated to the fates of Viennese Jewish children threatened by deportation (Pelz 2005), has been read as a parallel to Ernst Wiechert’s novel Das einfache Leben (literally “The Simple Life,” see Karnick 1986). Published in 1939, this cult book-to-be of early postwar Germany likewise starts with a global darkening. In Wiechert, too, the focus is on an increasingly shadowy globe, coastlines become blurred, and valleys turn dark. But in this novel, which also searches for a new beginning of civilization, the protagonist retreats to the loneliness of a watery island out of an aversion to the world.

In Aichinger’s novel there can be no idyllic way out; the rupture of civilization runs across language itself, what in German is called Zivilisationskritik (cultural critique) appears as work on language itself here. In contrast to Robert Neumann’s (1929) and Stefan Andres’s (1949–1959) Zeitromanen (a specifically German tradition of the historical novel, focusing on the portrayal of a specific period), which similarly cast the breaking point of civilizational order during the World Wars in the image of the Old Testament flood, Aichinger connects the motif of the great flood on the plot level with the historical trauma of National Socialism, and on the level of language, she urges to counter the threat of a catastrophic oblivion with new, sustainable forms (see Mulsow and Assmann 2006, 131–132).

In The Greater Hope’s fourth chapter, titled “In the Service of a Foreign Power” (“Im Dienst einer fremden Macht”), the demand for a postdiluvian language renewal is rendered in concrete images. In the garret of their former school, whose lower floors are already occupied by the Wehrmacht, the Jewish children secretly study English, the language of their desired countries of emigration. On their way to school, a Hitlerjunge (a male member of the Hitler Youth) in uniform finds the vocabulary book that little Herbert has lost through a hole in his bag:

In the middle of the street, a school exercise book was lying open on the grey roadway, an English vocabulary book. A child must have lost it, the wind from the approaching storm was turning the pages. When the first raindrop fell, it fell on the red line. And the red line in the middle of the page overflowed the banks. Horrified, the meaning fled from the words to both sides and called out for a ferryman: Transl… Transport me!

But the red line swelled and it became clear that it was the colour of blood. The meaning had always been in danger, but now it was threatened with drowning, and the words remained like little abandoned houses standing straight and stiff and meaningless on both sides of the red river. The rain fell in streams, but still the meaning wandered on the banks, calling out, and already the flood had risen to half its height. Transl… Transport me!Footnote 4

In this quote, the menacing flood reaches the level of the single word. Like in the biblical flood, the question here, too, is that of rescue from the rising waters and of the concomitant danger that meaning gets lost. Aichinger’s productive critique of language through translation (Ratmann 2001, 51) is represented in the novel by the efforts of the little boy who has lost his book, learning English in order to “unlearn German,” or “to learn it anew” (75; i.o. “das Deutsche [zu] verlernen” and “es neu zu erlernen, wie ein Fremder eine fremde Sprache lernt,” Aichinger [1948] 1991, 90).

Narrative Riverbed, Run Dry

Aichinger’s poetological writings from the 1950s to the 1970s directly connect to the novel’s scenarios of flooding, but increasingly turn from the imagery of flowing language to dried, crystalline stains—from the narrative flow of the long novel form to single, isolatable, and autonomous prose miniatures. The short prose text “Das Erzählen in dieser Zeit” (1952, literally “Narrative in This Time”) reflects on the conditions under which meaning, ‘stiffened’ during the National Socialist era (cf. the preceding quote), could return to narration. Even after Auschwitz, Aichinger insists, there has to be narrative, but such narrative is only thinkable in the form of a stream dashing to its own end in the sea; thus, paradoxically, all narrative begins at sea, at the point of death, at the end: “All rivers urge toward the sea … . Form has never developed from a feeling of safety, but always in the face of the end” (“Alle Flüsse drängen zum Meer … . Form ist nie aus dem Gefühl der Sicherheit entstanden, sondern immer im Angesicht des Endes,” Aichinger [1952] 1991, 10).

The short prose piece “Meine Sprache und ich” (1968, literally “my language and I”) revolves around a dispute between an “I” and her*his language, between the concrete message and the system of signification. The I, the individual part of human discourse, aims at encouraging language into concrete articulations, but as a system, language does not make any statements. Language remains calm, prefers to stay close to the sea, and rivets its gaze on it, “always on the same spot” (“immer auf dieselbe Stelle”), which seems to be “the opposite of certain images” (“das Gegenteil gewisser Bilder,” Aichinger [1978] 1991, 200). From the original chaos in Genesis, the sea, at which Aichinger’s work directs its hope for language renewal, has emerged as well-arrayed water, but at the same time remains an untameable element, deprived of sublime emotions, entirely imageless and not to be contained by language.Footnote 5

The Sea: A Radio Play

Joseph Conrad “did not coincidentally come from familiarity with the sea to familiarity with words” (“nicht umsonst vom Umgang mit der See zum Umgang mit den Wörtern gekommen ist,” Aichinger 2005, 183), Aichinger writes in the short text “‘Nur zusehen—ohne ein Laut.’ Joseph Conrad” (1978) about how Conrad has taught her to “leave herself out of the game” (“selbst aus dem Spiel [zu] lassen”) when writing, to “demand silence from the narrative world” (“Erzählwelt Schweigen ab[zu]fordern,” Aichinger [1978] 1991a, 91). Here, the sea semantically drains language and puts it into a condition without paradigm or sign, which eventually signifies silence: “With Joseph Conrad in one’s luggage” (“Mit Joseph Conrad im Reisegepäck”), Aichinger concludes in Unglaubwürdige Reisen (literally “Incredible Journeys”), “it would have been easily possible to cross the Indian Ocean” (“wäre es leicht möglich gewesen, auch den indischen Ozean zu überqueren,” 2005, 89). For Ernst Schnabel,Footnote 6 who in his autobiographical novel Schiffe und Sterne (1943, literally “Ships and Stars”) likewise renders the sea the starting point of new narratives, every passing ship is in itself a place out of time (“außer der Zeit,” Schnabel 1943, 188), and jumping from coast to coast results in an endless series of always new, isolated encounters. What is remarkable about Schnabel’s writing style, however—as Aichinger puts it in her essay “Die Sicht der Entfremdung. Über Berichte und Geschichten von Ernst Schnabel” (1954; literally “The View of Alienation. On Reports and Stories by Ernst Schnabel”)—is that it discards old models of description and speaks in a new voice that requires listening (“Horchen,” 2001, 51).

Aichinger’s own radio plays of the 1960s and 1970s require attentive listening to the words’ sounds, particularly when the words spoken from the mainland toward the sea break with everyday habits and begin to become unfamiliar. The radio play Gare maritime, directed by Gert Westphal (ORF/Austrian Broadcasting Corporation) in 1974 and by Ilse Aichinger herself in 1977 (SWF/WDR) is set in a big, empty “maritime station,” in which the striated network of routes coming from the mainland ends and the passengers gather to leave a territorially occupied space, and continue the journey on the open, hard-to-occupy surface of the sea (see Deleuze and Guattari 1987):

Gare Maritime means sea station, actually a paradoxical word and at the same time an exact technical term for train stations that receive those passengers who are coming from the sea or want to embark on the sea, connect to the sea actually, if one could say this: change for/connect to the sea.Footnote 7

In the connecting station, only the voices of three characters can be heard, and in the beginning it sounds as if one had to listen in on “parts of a stranger’s conversation” (“Teile eines fremden Gesprächs,” Aichinger [1974] 1991, 263). The preface states that this kind of irritation will not disappear completely during the play, as much will remain unclear—the passengers, after all, would like to “change for the sea” (263), to a space of sound and fantasy that extends beyond habitual language. The few comprehensible elements of the play can be compared with the first pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that one cannot yet connect. Only while listening, an image of heretic seafarers is gradually assembled: They yearn to depart, try everything to become useless and unrecognizable in their prior contexts, and renounce all prior allegiances for a chance at renewal.

The experimental radio play Nachmittag in Ostende of 1969 (NDR/SWF) likewise brings together characters and events on the coast, which is said to be “famous for situation briefings” (“für Lagebesprechungen berühmt,” Aichinger [1969] 1991, 131).Footnote 8 Nothing in this radio play, however, clarifies the situation. The character names—Jason, Simplizius, Beatrice and Louisa—constitute single pieces in an intertextual puzzle, in which “paper places” (“papierene Orte,” Aichinger 1991, 131) such as the sea resorts Kolberg, Torquay, and Ostend blur with film titles and images. Ostend references both the Belgian city and the painting Namiddag in Oostende (1881) by Belgian expressionist James Ensor.Footnote 9 Torquay refers to a coastal town in the South of England, an important site for the preparation of the allied invasion of Normandy on 6 June 1944. The Baltic sea resort Kolberg (Kołobrzeg), destroyed in 1945, is introduced as a place of encounter and simultaneously references the autobiographical place of memory of Joachim Nettelbeck (1821/1823), author-sailor and adversary to Napoleon, Joachim, as well as the title of a National Socialist perseverance propaganda film of 1945, directed by Veit Harlan.

All names and references are thus imaginatively entered into a strategy of blurring: In the passages presenting dialogue, manifold suggestions for interpreting names, places, and genres are constantly called into play and produce a veritable flooding of meaning. The plurality of possibilities and the thus resulting non-sense make it impossible to allocate a “permanent spot” (“ständige Stelle,” Aichinger [1969] 1991, 119) to the spoken word at any point in the dialogue. Even Simplizius, a character “like pencil dust” (“bleistiftstaubige”), who is associated with the mainland and originally had nothing to do “with waves, nothing at all with the sea” (“nichts mit Wellengang, gar nichts mit der See,” 113), increasingly appears in this area when the sea is rough; he tries to pull Jason, the mariner, toward him; he tries to take a boat, and, like him, to become involved in ship departures and arrivals, as even for the likes of him it is “easier to move on water than in … dried-up tracks” (“leichter, sich auf Wasser zu bewegen als auf … eingetrockneten Fahrspuren,” 120). Thus taking a boat and pushing oneself off the mainland becomes a marker for a poetic method of the blurring and flooding of meaning, which can be described, with Roland Barthes, as “annulation-by-addition” (1989, 76). Barthes proceeds from the insight that “[s]peech is irreversible … . What has been said cannot be unsaid, except by adding to it … . In speaking, I can never erase, annul; all I can do is … speak some more” (76). Historical burdens of signification of language cannot be deleted or corrected other than in this very “bizarre form of addition” (76).

The radio play for eight voices Auckland, directed by Heinz Hostnik and first aired in 1970 (NDR), vocalizes the signs of linguistic dysfunctionality. Sailors returning from the sea are trying, through “helpless, stammering monologues” (“hilflose[n], stammelnde[n] Monologen”), to report a “comparatively simple thing: at sea, a flag curled up and was rolled out again” (“verhältnismäßig einfache Sache zu berichten: daß sich auf See eine Flagge eindrehte und wieder ausgedreht wurde,” Aichinger [1970] 1991, 215). Despite repeated attempts at dialogue, the play does not succeed to communicate the event in an appropriate form. It seems “as if the report cancelled out the event, language as a means of communication evades it” (“als ob der Bericht das Ereignis lösche, die Sprache als Mittel der Mitteilung entzieht sich ihm,” 215). The sailors help themselves by distorting the chronology of the narrative and continually start anew. A missionary undertakes “fussy attempts … to restore old chronological practices” (“betuliche Versuche, … die alten chronologischen Praktiken wiederherzustellen,” 216), but because of the repeated narration doubts arise: not just with regard to the truthfulness of history, but also concerning the possibility of reporting itself.

When William Thackeray becomes recognizable as a historically distant signaler, the report about the unattainability of the flag, piece of cloth and sign of sovereignty, becomes a test case for the possibilities of contemporary realist narrative. An inexperienced sailor reports dilettantish, disproportional attempts to catch the flag with the grappling hook. But after a promising beginning, the cloth gets torn; it was “too entangled, curled up perhaps fourteen times” (“zu verwickelt, vielleicht vierzehnmal eingedreht,” Aichinger [1970] 1991, 234). In the meantime, a second and actual sailor, who is used to having “water all around” (“ringsherum Wasser,” 245) does not waste a thought on rolled-up flags; he follows the motto “[f]ull speed ahead” (243) and can still remember he once had a skillful weaver aboard, before realist narrative had fallen out of fashion. His report makes clear that realist narrative at this point exists only in memories of bygone childhood reading. After the weaver left the ship, the flag of realist narrative can no longer be taken off the pole without tearing it apart: the ship, and narrative with it, are sailing under a false flag.

Stain-Sediment

The prose miniature Flecken (1975, literally “Stains”) finally succeeds in anchoring the resistant signs of liquidity in the text on the mainland—in the form of stains left by dehydration. The mobile, imageless sea is thus given the solidity on which signs depend in writing in the form of a stain-sediment. For, “properly speaking, there cannot be liquid words”: “Articulations can be as smooth as one wishes … . In order for language to function, signs must be isolable one from the other” (Bois 1997, 124): “Once they were wet” (“Einmal waren sie naß”), Aichinger writes about the stains, but now they are characterized by a “past wetness” (“gewesene Nässe”) and “limited by the condition of dryness” (“durch den Zustand der Trockenheit begrenzt,” Aichinger [1975] 1991, 17).

The text opens: “Now we have stains on our chairs. It looks as if someone had spilled sugared milk on them. Those stains are to be considered” (“Wir haben jetzt Flecken auf unseren Sesseln. Es sieht aus, als hätte jemand gezuckerte Milch darüber geschüttet. Diese Flecken sind zu bedenken,” Aichinger [1975] 1991, 15). The stains can be read as figures of thought regarding an event that one day simply happened. Their presence causes an irritating flood of inquiries—into who is responsible, at what point in time, to which consequences. But the questions remain unanswered, the stains simply do not make sense. Despite their meaninglessness and indeterminacy, they do not remain without function. As soon as they appear in the sphere of written signs, they interrupt the unwavering closure of gaps performed by signs, which—thus Aichinger—cannot really be crossed, not even by death and deportation.Footnote 10 The stains disturb the habitual reading direction and change meaning: “Another one, one carelessly says, and pushes the rows together. But these stains change the vertical. The hierarchy starts to falter” (“Wieder einer, sagt man leichtfertig und schiebt die Reihen zusammen. Aber diese Flecken verändern die Vertikale. Die Hierarchie beginnt zu schwanken,” Aichinger [1975] 1991, 16).

In contrast to the horizontal constitution of meaning, where gaps are closed time and again, the stains take the reading onto the track of the repressed, that which has escaped writing (Liska 2009, 203-204). They subvert the familiar order of signification, appear as haphazard, impure, unintelligible, and, due to their lack of determinacy, their form- and colorlessness, as feeble, ridiculous, and inconsolable. Because of their irreducible strangeness, the stains remain an apparition one can only approach by way of questions. They have to be admitted into the hierarchy of the archive in their “unbearable” (“unerträgliche”) form, which “cannot be created through words” (“in Worten nicht bildbar”). “Maybe it helps” (“Vielleicht hilft es”), Aichinger writes, “to look at them. To see them as the center of explanations that never come” (“sie zu betrachten. Sie als das Zentrum der Erklärungen anzusehen, die nicht kommen,” [1975] 1991, 15–16).

Nothing else is said about the quality of the stains in the text except that the formerly wet, now dried sediment looks “as if someone had poured sugared milk on them” (“als hätte jemand gezuckerte Milch darüber geschüttet,” Aichinger [1975] 1991, 15). Such dried sediments are called marine and fluvial facies in geomorphology (Kraft 2005, 757); the memory of the deposits is inscribed in its surface appearance. Aichinger repeatedly emphasizes that these sediments are made of sugared milk, a crystalline, transparent substance of which “not nothing” (“nicht nichts”) remains:

Sugared milk…. But the stains, the sugared milk stains … . Incomparable to wild, young rivers … . But milk, to which was added, in small amounts, what does not belong … . Milk stains, and sugared ones at that, this makes self-abandonment worthwhile. This is where one saves up. Better yet: this is where something is being saved up…. Not nothing remains.Footnote 11

Within Aichinger’s literary cosmos, milk is connected with childhood memories of her deported grandmother and the open sea of linguistic possibilities. In the radio play Nachmittag in Ostende, Simplizius and Jason practice the art of milking sea cows (Aichinger [1969] 1991, 120). In his book La Mer (1861, Engl. The Sea), Jules Michelet (see also this volume’s introduction) talks about the milky sea as a viscous (114) ur-liquid made of innumerable suspended particles—remains of death that are returned to life. The natural law of the sea renders life in continuous transformation between the terminal stage and the starting point of quickly developing new organisms and still animate particles that “have not had time to die” (117). Following Michelet, every single cautious drop contains the first stage of a body that aims at organizing itself: If you take one drop from the sea, it will, in all its transformations, reveal the history of the universe (119)—given that we “[be] patient, and observe” (119), “wait … and watch” (“warten … und schauen zu,” 94).

Michelet’s understanding of water drops as “life’s first-born” (1861, 119) and Aichinger’s figure of thought of the stain as the center of explanations that never arrive anywhere, touch upon each other where single drops and stains contain the seeds of potential life and, hence, potential narratives. Under the microscope, Michelet observes fine, modest threads in the water, which he assumes to contain the natural history or matrix of all future life at sea and on land (119). In their immobilized form, Aichinger’s stains carry the memory of their “past wetness” (“gewesene Nässe”) and remind the reader that in the future, they will not be able to form a traditional narrative anymore: “comparable,” it is stated, “to the wild, young rivers” (“den wilden, jungen Flüssen vergleichbar,” Aichinger [1975] 1991, 17). The stains disturb and will not go away; the memory of the National Socialist era is sedimented in them; they mark the starting and end points of writing about something that has had no time to die and is denied the chance to organize itself into a vivid narrative.

“Writing the sea” is what Michel de Certeau calls a method of “library navigation” (1986, 138) in nineteenth-century literature: writing fiction on the basis of (other) fictions of travel (139). This method, which is not “governed by the search for an origin, nature or truth that would be there before and behind the documents” (139) but works by amassing a variety of sources, aims at filling the gaps in oceanic geography with the names of the ‘great’ navigators and to semanticize the voids of the universe (129; 139). In this sense, seafaring history, in order to saturate the oceans with meaning, habitually recounts an act of name-giving, which, on the imaginary blank slate of the Pacific, slowly generates meaning in order to saturate the oceans. This act of nautical colonization turns the sea into a map that proclaims allegiances, in order to wrest them from the indeterminacy of the sea.

Aichinger’s oeuvre works in the opposite direction, decolonizing such significations and denouncing historical appropriations and allegiances. The passengers who want to “change for the sea” gather on the margins and shorelines in order to turn the inconvenient stain of repressed knowledge into a systematic component of language. At other points in Aichinger’s work, the removal from the habitual system of signification becomes thematic as a writing of stains and blanks. Remembering her sister’s emigration to England in 1938 with a Kindertransport (children’s transport), Aus der Geschichte der Trennungen (2002) reflects on the writing of gaps: “How does a gap that has yawned for decades become constructive—without looking for connections and recoveries that are no longer possible?” (“Wie wird die Lücke, die jahrzehntelang klafft, konstruktiv, ohne Querverbindungen und Rettungen zu suchen, die nicht mehr möglich sind?” Aichinger 2005, 68). In writings on author Ernst Schnabel, the stains turn into significant signs of discontinuity in the narrative flow—into an “identification of the real” (“Ausweis des Wirklichen”), whose “main characteristic [is that] it throws us out of habit, that it becomes uncomfortable—this regression into the negative out of which the real image comes” (“wesentliches Merkmal [es ist], daß es uns aus der Gewöhnung wirft, daß es uns unbequem wird—diese Rückentwicklung zum Negativ, aus dem das wirkliche Bild kommt,” Aichinger 2001, 55).