10 Annette Runte, Siegen Mourning as Remembrance. ‘Writing as (De-)Figuration in the Poetry of Rose Auslinder Viele Verwandlungen etlebte ich mit offenen “Augen; meine Erinnerung an sie ist intakt. (GW 4,227) {underwent many metamorphoses with open eyes. My memory of them is intact,]’ ‘The bunch of lilacs Rose Auslander felt transformed into on her ninth, birthday turns up as a rejected souvenir in one of her symbolist Gettomotive poems (Ghetto Motifs, 1942-1944). “Warum verfolgt mich noch ein Traum? / Ich rieche Flieder durch den Schlaf. / Verlal mich, blauer Fliederbaum! Es ist kein Glick, da® ich dich traf// Kann es bei uns noch Frihling sein?” (GW 1, 144-145) (Why does a dream still pursue me? / T smell lilacs in my sleep, / Abandon me, blue lilac tree! / Itis not good fortune that made us meet// Can it be spring here any more?”). Her infantile, romantic, psychotic boundlessness has been exchanged for the barest of existences.’ Auslinder’s poetry is a distant echo of this shock, and ‘ries to sublimate it.ul While Celan makes a radical break with prevailing modemist thought, Rose Auslander still clings to certain aesthetic and metaphysical ‘traditions. In this respect she resembles Nelly Sachs, While Sachs, using a transcendental, language-focused approach based on the esoterism of the etter, works towards a mystic conception of the Shoah,* Auslinder advocates a (seemingly more conventional) mythical retum to topoi of the unthinkable. Their common trust in language results in different poetic strategies. In the following contribution, I will argue that Rose Auslander’s project, a somewhat natvely epigonal* poeticization of a personal (pre-) history which is less ambitious than that of Sachs, tends to displace problems of metaphorical transfiguration rather than solve them, Auslinder’s writing, influenced by neoromantic, expressionist and ‘modemist literary traditions, appears to be characterized by a highly contradictory escapism.* If her poetic project consists in a redistribution of old elements in new configurations (GW 3, 286), it mainly employs -- and this is my thesis -- procedures of partial resignification without full designification. To “invent a new alphabet” involves confronting the reader, not only with the fundamental ambivalence of any poetic landscape (ch. Mein Turm, GW 1, 277; Die Quelle If, GW 1, 245), but also with a gesture of affirmation that introduces elements of undecidability Against the epistemological background of recent theories on the complex concept of the figure, Tintend to analyze discursive and rhetorical procedures involving configurations and refigurations. How is trauma, in the paradoxical logic of its temporality, to be overcome by writing conceived of as a means of survival? In this context, the problem arises2 whether deconstructive readings are compatible with a psychoanalytical view of subjectivity, specifically with the symptomatic inscription of contingency in the text, Auslénder’s representations of loss and identity, of femininity and motherhood (for instance Immer die Mutter, GW 5, 66; Jungfernjoch Il, GW 6, 368; Innengeburt, GW 7, 43) are also of central interest from the perspective of literary gender studies. ‘Translating Transference If “writing the Shoah” necessarily leads to a “poetics of failure” (Lehmann xxv), Auslander’s lyrical work calls into question the status of poetry “after Auschwitz”. Approaching the unthinkable in a rather indirect, symbolist way, as in her poems written during the period of persecution (Gettomotive 1942-44), she insists on the one hand upon the universal dimension of the Shoah in the light of human values, on the other upon her personal experience of exile, Although memories of the past recur frequently, they are not necessarily functionalized in reference to a polities of remembrance. Auslander’s optimistic affirmation of life as a cosmic whole counterbalances her melancholia, the “interminable mourning of an ”,” and therefore seems close to Walter Benjamin’s ungrievable loss Eingedenken (remembrance) - a sort of counter-memory spanned by oblivion.* Auslinder’s literary production, which is not accompanied by explicit metapoetic expression as poetic theory, manifests an underlying tension between her mythical conception of the word and a certain16 Moss an vn problurabe Are alenehver t key eahd 2 OCD be \Clieesid bob Peassrdse fresumubly More ved 13 awareness of the philosophical debates on the crisis of language at the beginning of the twentieth century. Whereas the event of the Shoah --in its specific singularity ~- raised new questions, the answers given were not capable of resolving what became an onerous “double bind”; the ethical and ontological problem of the German mother-tongue’s having become the idiom of murderers.” “Schreiben war Leben, Uberleben [...] wahrend wir den Tod erwarteten, wohnten manche von uns in Traumworten ~ unser ‘raumatisches Heim in der Heimatlosigkeit.” (To write was to live. To survive [...] while we were waiting for death, some of us inhabited dream- ‘words -- a home in our trauma, our homelessness. GW 3, 286.) As she always insisted on the autobiographical dimension of her work, traces of ‘trauma in her poetry should be examined as evidence of a process of transposition between collective and individual history The author of around 5000 poems, Rose Auslander (1901-1988) grew up in an assimilated Jewish middle-class family in Czernowitz, the capital of the Bukovina, situated on the Easter border of the Austrian Empire. She thrived in the multi-cultural intellectual atmosphere of her home town," a cultural melting-pot of Jewish, German and Slavic populations. (Paul Celan later punned on the region’s name: Bukovina was a place where “books and people lived”.") Charmed by her father’s Chassid background, she was mA even more fascinated by the vitality of Constantin Brunner’s holistic pantheism, which combined Eastem spiritual and Western rationalist takegrehkonsey ? ‘thought. Brunner was a pro-assimilationist Jewish philosopher who was popular in academic circles at Czemowitz. Basing his belief on the metaphysical opposition between mental creativity and physical4 reproduction, he argued that all human beings were ay within at universal Onnes” Rose ater intelectual Sand wom who . called herself a “Spinozist atheist” but was also temporarily attracted by 7 ay revivalist and leftist movements, worked for many years as a bank clerk in the USA. During her first American exile in the 1920s, after her father’s sudden death, Rose Auslander wrote in German; but after her mother’s death in 1947, an event at which Rose was not present, she ‘suffered a deep depression and stopped writing in German for a decade, By claiming that the foreign language simply forced itself onto her, later vanishing as mysteriously as it had come, she underlines the passivity of her role in what might seem a repressive choice: Ende 1946, Existenzkampf. Umorientierung, [..]. Nach ‘mehrjahrigem Schweigen uberraschte ich mich eines Abends beim Schreiben englischer Lyrik. Einer meiner ersten Englischtexte fing an: ,,Looking for a final start, [..]. Warum schreibe ich seit 1956 wieder deutsch? Mysterids, wie sie cerschienen war, verschwand die englische Muse. Kein auBerer AnlaB bewirkte die Rackkehr zur Muttersprache. Geheimnis des Unterbewusstseins (GW 3, 287). [Late 1946. Struggle for existence, Reorientation.[...] After having been silent for several years, I caught myself one evening ‘writing poetry in English. One of my first English texts began with the sentence: “Looking for a final star. [...] Why have I written in German again since 1956? My English museus disappeared as mysteriously as it came. No outside event caused the return to my mother tongue. Mystery of the subconscious. ] Although the linguistic switch could be explained by her traumatic holocaust experience, her personal crisis and exile situation, it seems plausible that a phenomenon of psychological transference was at work in the semiotic operation of “translation”, a kind of “othering” which ‘transcends metaphysical oppositions. Alternative explanations, for example 4 psychological rationalization that regards the switch away from the mother tongue as a mere reaction of despair or resistance, fail to take into consideration the difference between symbolic introjection (as unconscious identification) and dimensions of imaginary projection (the product of a rocess of differentiation), Perhaps one might say that even when she went back to writing in German, Rose Auslinder never returned to the same ‘Mutrersprache (“mother tongue”), even if she denies a change of identity Ich habe mich In mich verwandelt ‘Von Augenblick zu Augenblick in Sticke zersplittert, auf dem Wortweg.116 ‘Matter Sprache setzt mich zusammen Menschenmosaik (GW 3, 104) [tured myself Into myself From one moment to the next broken into fragments on the word-path Mother language puts me together a human mosaic. |"? ‘The tautological metamorphosis (of oneself into oneself) is followed by a destabilization of the subject and its reintegration by means of a ‘communicative medium which evokes a subliminal “partial object,” the ° and thus preserving narcissism mother’s voice, replacing the “lost object” from the threat of symbolic triangularization, that isthe interruption of dyadic mirroring by the intervention of a third element,deprecaked, eyed 7 7 Saved from, Saved by the Mother Tongue Its interesting that Auslander’s language switch was accompanied by a poetological turning-point: Rhyme “broke down”, “the words all had to be replaced.” Auslainder, influenced partly by Anglophone modemism, for {instance by E. E. Cummings, who treated grammatical categories as ‘material objects,"° shifted away from neoromantic mannerism towards free verse, syntactic fragmentation and reduction of metaphor; she also owed ‘much to Paul Celan—who devalorized “Bilderknechte” (slaves of the image)"’—and the French literary avant-garde with which he was connected. It was no longer the demons of the big city or modern life, which had haunted Auslinder’s early expressionist poems, but instead feelings of loss and melancholy, that dominated her lyrical output from the 1950s on (Lajarrige 7), Existential anxiety was purged of pathos, because formal reduction favored a reflexive, even ironical distance. As her poetry became increasingly self-referential, a series of sublimated “lost objects” (parents, native country, trust in humanity) came to be substituted by Janguage itself, But does this process of de- and refiguration necessarily ** as Kathrin M. Bower thinks? Does assume “a kind of maternal quality, the oral quality of language provide compensation for the loss of the “first Other”, the mother? Although Rose Auslinder and her mother both survived the holocaust, by chance, her mother’s death shortly afterwards amounted to apagar ‘rakaRingiaie! ? Presmably meant hee Psytlae ~em ty bid Claseernsiemt ) San Phtsnure off Sobriquel? 118 repetition of the catastrophe on a personal level, abruptly ending the isted between them. In a comparable mother-daughter-symbioss that had situation, Nelly Sachs dreamt of holding “the infant body of her [...] deceased mother in her arms” (Bower 105). Auslinder’s homeland had always been an imaginary “motherland,” merging the matemal and the verbal into a personal variant of popular matriarchal myths, for instance in her Eva-Gedichte."° Although the transmission of Jewish identity passes through the matemal body, only the letter, Holy Scripture, represents the divine law; Auslinder rejects this genderffed dichotomy, favouring Pantheism (One = all) and a spinovist equation of God and nature,2” realized in her evocation of the “green mother” of the Bukovina.”! The “Dlack Sappho of the East”, as Alfred Margul-Sperber called Auslinder.2 ‘was using philosophical discourse as a strategic master-trope, Back in Europe since the early 1960s, and writing poems in German since 1956, Auslander did not encounter much popular interest in her work ‘until she met her later editor, Helmut Braun, in 1972,” The formal ‘compromises and nostalgic themes of her prize-winning poetry” seemed obsolete in the atmosphere of 1968. Unlike politically engaged writers, who treated nature lyric with derision (Ganther Eich wrote nature poetry himself, but was aware of the problems it posed, Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s position was clearer), Auslinder did not reject her romantic inheritance, She used Eichendorff’s nightingale motif as an emblem in a nostalgic fairytale scene: Meine Nachtigall19 Meine Mutter war einmal ein Reh Die goldbraunen Augen Die Anmut [...] Jetzt ist sie eine Nachtigall Nacht um Nacht hore ich sie Im Garten meines schlaflosen Traumes [...] sie singt das alte Osterreich sie singt die Berge und Buchenwalder (...] (GW 2, 317) [My Nightingale My mother was a deer once the golden brown eyes the grace [..] Now she is a nightingale Night after night I listen to her in the garden of my sleepless dream [...] She sings the old Austria she sings the mountains and the beech groves]”*logrently, Joes Warr fellas vos - | a fentnad / 120 Still identifying deeply with German culture, Auslander finally chose Dusseldorf as her last place of refuge, retiring into care at Nelly Sachs, a Jewish home for the old, after a strenuous wandering life, “I don’t lodge, 1 just live”,”* she would say, claiming language was her only true home;?” she never even defended her return to writing in German. Thus Auslinder’s approach to language differed from that of Paul Celan, Celan’s poems, by calling German language into question, and nining its “tropisms”** from. ‘within, enact the personified resistance of symbolic processes not as @ structural or functional, but as a differential and thus virtually self doconstructive potentiality.” Auslander, in contrast, does not comment on problems of imprinting or deformation. She seems to retain a vitalist confidence in the magic power of verbal creation. For Ausliinder, language is not so much its own meta-language as a performative medium, which she ‘often compares to breathing - a recurrent metaphor referring to the Lurian ccabbala and in particular to the unceasing impulses of divine emanation and retreat (Beil 346). Austinder’s productivist conception of language as an otiginary force of creation, both in the biblical and mystical sense (Beil 41), remains within the tradition of Hamann, Herder, Novalis or Wilhelm von Humboldt, but also anticipates postmodem connotations of construction and playfulness. Unlike Celan, who undertook a search for designifying verbal material, Austinder kept oy most of her prewar motifs. Although her syntactic ellipsis (taken together with her renunciation of rhyme and meter) enhances semantic ambiguity, she reinvests it with an autobiographical auto-referentiality that still gives it a minimal message: “Nicht ich // Wer mich kennt / weil / daB ich nicht / Ich bin // nur eine / verschwiegene| Net-11 Sheol Hoss debion ergo Fide Lees? 121 Stimme // Mein Wort / du solltest es / besser wissen.” (Nof me) Who Knows me/ knows / that Iam not /me /1 am // only a/tactum voice // My word / you should know it / better. GW 4, 24) Auslander’s last poem ‘summatizes her project in one sentence: “Gib auf// der Traum / lebt / mein Leben / zu Ende” (Give up / the dream /lives out / my life /to its end, GW 7, 380). The semantic point of gnomic arguments lies in the syntagmatic Polyvalence of noun and verb phrases, which change sense according to their reference to either preceding or subsequent elements. Insofar as lexical analogy takes precedence over syntax, including the syntactically flowing borders of the verse-lines, there is still a residual meaning within the open texture of these poems, Moderate Modernism As “anxiety therapy”, Auslander’s lyrics undergo an aesthetic Purification through ellipsis, but do not dispense with figuration, Inthe end, this “infects” the letter, and commemoration becomes a parable for writing: Vom A zum B ist ein endloser Weg Zwischenraum Atome Der Atem ein Zug durch die Luft es geht122 von Adam zu Ade Aonenweg. letztes Alibi Amen, (Ow 7, 22) [From Ato B goes an endless way intermediate space atoms ‘The breath one gasp through the air from Adam to adieu path of aeons last alibi amen] ‘The alliterative declination of the first letter of the alphabet (Aleph in Hebrew) produces a thematic network of seven culturally relevant and epoch-making keywords (atom, air, Adam, adieu, acon, alibi, amen), the constellation of which limits the abundant potential of meaning. The infinitesimal continuum of non-significant discrete terms is never fully exploited by Auskinder’s lexical associations, which in retaining123, significance allegorize the activity of generating infinite sense from a finite, arbitrary set of elements. Auslander’s writing therefore belongs to the moderate current of modernism." Even if her late poetry radicalizes fragmentation, undecidability, and juxtaposition of the heterogeneous, it is not so much hermetic as hermeneutic, eager to decipher itself as it proceeds. It has even been argued that linguistic reflection and poetic construction maintain a “symbiotic relationship” in Auslander’s case (KGhl 323). In her short essay Alles kann Motiv sein (Everything can be a motif), Auslinder explains aesthetic changes against the background of socio-historical events, even taking on board the distortion of psychic temporality, its aprés coup-effect: “Was spater tiber uns hereinbrach, war ungereimt, so alpdruckhaft- beklemmend, da -- erst in der Nachwirkung, im nachtriglich voll erlittenen Schock ~- der Reim in die Briche ging. Blumenworte welkten,” (What was later to crash down upon us was so completely without rhyme or reason, so oppressively nightmarish, that -— but this only kicked in later, after the shock had been fully realised ~ rhyme broke down. The flower words withered, GW 3, 286) Although “Auschwitz”, as a point of no return, might be conceived of as a paradoxical rupture, a historical caesura that breaks with history and thus eludes itself, Auskinder’s interpretation of some of its effects as a trigger for an aesthetic turning point still retains elements of mimesis. Traversing the Mirror124 Even if we can divide Auskinder’s poetry into an early (traditional) and a Jate (modemist) phase, there is a certain number of redundant motifs or topics that persist throughout her work (that is the mirror, the mother), but certain figurations of space and time also recur, | am suggesting here that these core figures are evidence of phantom limbs, supplements to the “lost object” whose only existence consists in the fact of its having been displaced. ‘Whereas, in Auslinder’s lyrics, memory and remembrance are closely linked to the fictional construction of geographical, cultural or imaginary spaces (atmospheric childhood places, mythical landscapes), the phenomenon of time is represented by instruments of measuring or by its visible effects, for instance ageing, Subjectivity as self-consciousness, from introspection to narcisstic showmanship, is often staged in “mirror scenes”. These topoi sometimes cluster and overlap, as in the following lines Die Mutter und der Bruder waren Mythen ‘gcheimnisvolles Gut im kilhlen Schrank Aus Keller flog ein Duft von dunklen Bluten ‘Und wo ich stand war Zentrum (GW 1, 219) [The mother and the brother were myths ‘a mysterious store within the cool cupboard125, From cellars below rose a scent of dark flowers ‘And where I stood was the center] Ich trete durch das Goldportal Det Sonne in mein stilles Zimmer Die Zeit wobnt in der Welt der Zaht Ich werde nicht ihr Bigentamer. Die Wande richten sich nach mir Nach allen Richtungen. Ich sptre Die stumme Demat ihrer vier Korper und die Gunst der Tare Das Fenster ist die Gnade, der Kontakt mit StraBe, Stem und Kuhle. (GW 1, 284) [I step through the golden portal of the sun into my silent room Time lodges in the world of numbers Twon’t become its owner ‘The walls follow my directions in all directions. 1 feel the mute humility of their fouree Lib Fecettous 126 bodies and the door’s good will ‘The window is grace and favour, my contact with street, star and fresh air.) On the whole, Auslinder represents space referentially, but she employs ‘mannered rhetorical procedures, for example qualitative quantification, in order to illustrate her quite linear eoncept of time, Brunner, her monist ”, understood time and space as elements of the same cosmos, and conceived of movement as the unifying principle of being. One of her poems of the sixties, “Perspektiven der Zeit” (Perspectives of time), contains a list of metaphorically attributed diminishing unities, from years — “ein Wettrennen mit dem Tod” (a race with death), months -- “langsame Wiederholung” (slow repetition), weeks -- “Warten [...] auf die Traumhast (waiting [...] for the haste of dreams)” through days -- “zerbrdckeln” (crumbling), hours -- “Der bése und schéne Trug” (bad and beautiful deception) and minutes ~ “zu firth [...] oder zu spait” (too soon, [...] or too late) to the mystical nunc stans: “Nur det Moment ist ewig” (Only the moment is eternal, GW 2, 90-91). But her poetry also subsides into conventional synecdoche -- “In allen Hallen plappern Uhren / das dividierte Gesicht des Zifferblatts” (Clocks are chatting in all the halls / the divided face of the clock, GW 2, 236), facile contradictions -- “Die Zeit ist nicht. Wir sind die Zeit” (There is no time. We are time, Zeit J, GW 3, 179); or into popularization of philosophical problems: “{Zeit] ist da / vergeht und bleibt” (Time is there, passes and stays, GW 3, 74). The spatialization of127 "incar temporality, for instance, is dramatized in terms of a fight in Die Uhr (The Clock: “ich ringe um Raum mit der zwoltfingrigen / Null j ‘Baume wachsen ...] mein Papierfleisch / Die Uhr ist ein Wiederkduer / ‘rit mir Blatt um Blatt / aus der Hand” (Lam struggling for space / with the ‘welve-fingered zero [...] Trees grow [..] my paper flesh / The clock is a uminant/ eats one leaf after the other / out of my hand, GW 3, 101), AS athetorical medium, the mirror that produces unequivocal copies Ofts referent™ tums out to be a hostile device, Auslander ‘wrote about three dozen mirror poems; only the earliest, “Die Spiegel” (The mirrors), dating from 1939, celebrates a neo-platonic harmony between the micro- and the ‘macrocosm: the shining sky reflects the world by looking at i, and the human eye mirrors the earth as it glitters in a thousand looking-glasses,** Later on Ausliinder hints at the Phenomenological split between gaze and icture,™ the blind spot of the visual field, ‘Not capable of seeing himself Seeing, the observer must recognize that what he petceives are not his eyes, but their reflection in the mirror (Splegelungen, GW 2, 80). The subject not only follows the other’s 2aze ina picture, in Du und dein Bild (GW 2, 114), but feels regarded by the “open(ed) eyes” of the world ([vom] ewig aufgeschlagnen Blick” - in German the verb “aufschlagen’” often refers to the opening ofa book) in “Die Spiegel” (GW 1, 96). Tettied by the glassy abyss, “die Zwillinge / finden sich wieder / schwesterlich” (the twins / get together again / as sisters, “Spiel im Spiegel”, GW 2, 157). As a counterpart of the mirror image, the shadow (cf. “Schatten im Spiegel”, GW 3, 42) likewise evokes the old occidental suspicion of mere illusion (cf: GW 2, 237; GW 2, 241), But the mirror also serves as a medium of self-128 recognition:** “Nimm / deinen Korper / zur Kenntnis // Du blickst / dich an ‘und fragst / wer bin ich // Du bist nicht / du wirst / alter / alt.” (in “Spiegelbild” (Mirror Image), GW 4, 124). (Take / notice of / your body // ‘You regard / yourself/ and you ask / who am I // You are not / you are getting / older / old.) Self-appropriation requires self-confrontation. If multi-layered cross-over sometimes leads to peaceful coexistence, as in “Doppelt” (Double GW 3,46): “Der Spiegel / gibt mich / mir wieder [...] ‘Hier steh ich / Ich an Ich” (The mirror / gives me / back / to myself [:..] Here I am /I to D, it can also turn into aggressive rivalry or even duelling and revenge.** In an allusion to the Hegelian dialectic of master and slave, the talking mirror inverts the power structure: “Verwandelt / vertauscht // Ich war einmal anders / sagst du dem Spiegel // er glaubt dir nicht” (Metamorphosed, exchanged // 1 was different before / you tell the mirror / he does not believe you. “Uberholt II” (Surpassed II), GW 8, 79). Similarly, Death observes itself, a self-loving, but decadent figure. “Von Rosenblattern umrieselt /lichelt der Tod /‘und schaut ins Wasser / ein selbstverliebter Narzi8” (In a shower of rose-buds / Death smiles / and stares into the water / a seltamayfous ‘Narcissus, GW 5, 152). Or, ina later version, “Glaswald” (Forest of Glass): “Im / Glaswald verirrt / das Gesicht verloren / Narzif //’ Wiederholung im See.” (Forlom in the glassy wood / his face lost / Narcissus // Repetition in the lake. GW 7, 371). One of Auslinder’s early English poems (“The Mirror”) reife the riddle of Eros and Thanatos: “Soul of glass in whose limbo / things live untouchable / ‘separate and lonely together” (Auslnder 1995, 106). In the late sixties, another poem seems to start with the Lacanian mirror stage, the constitution129 of the Self from the position of the Other. In a dialogue with the lyrical ego, in “Verrat IT” (Betrayal II), the mirror denies that the reflected person has an identity (“you are not you”). The person tries to negotiate, but the mirror remains unyielding: “Ich bitte ihn / verrat mich nicht / ich schenk dir einen /feinen Rahmen [... Spiegel:] ich bin dein Rahmen / du bist / mein Bild.” (Leg it / don’t give my secret away /T'll give you a/ nice new frame L assume that the frame is the transcendental condition of the picture”, the |] Lam your frame / you are / my picture, GW 3, 205). If we ‘medium corrects the optical illusion of its user. In contrast to Auslander’s ‘mirror images, most of Nelly Sachs’s somewhat more enigmatic mirror images are charged with mystical connotations. In her mystery play on the Shoah, the mirror is a witness of murder, enriched with allusions to Ovidian myth, Grimms fairytales and Rilke’s poems (“Stembild Reiter”). In “Stemnverdunkelung”, one of the poems dedicated to her mother, though, the tone has changed: “aber in den beiden Spiegeln / deines weiften Gesichts / hat sich der Sommer erhalten” (Sachs, 150). (“but in the two mirrors / of your white face / the Summer has survived”).** (De-)Figuration of Word as “Motherland”? If maternal and paternal images in holocaust literature function as “polysemous tropes spanning cosmic, terrestrial, and temporary realms” and serve as “representations through which the poets strove to recover a sense of [...] equilibrium” (Bower 57), there is one striking disproportion130 ‘here parental figuration in Auslander’s poetry is concemed, Whereas only 4 few poems are devoted to her father, “mother” occurs as a signifier in about fifty poems. Its rhetorical use ranges from passing references to longer narratives. Identifying mother as the “locus of origin” and “the embodiment of refuge”, Bower interprets “Motherland” and “mother tongue” as a “surrogate home”. But already in Getfomotive the two syllables of the invoked magic formula ‘MUT-TER’ are forlorn and lost (GW 1, 154), Mourning over her mother’s death, Ausliinder dedicates two Tequiems to her, the first (“Requiem I. Meiner Mutter”) consisting of a single rhymed trochaie strophe: Aber sie war gréfer als ihr Sterben [...] bis aus ihrer durchsichtigen Gabe ‘jth ihr Bild erstrahlte und der Platz ‘war hinfort ein unethorter Schatz. Ihr Erscheinen hing als ein Geschmeide in der Luft ~ und wurde Trauerfreude (GW 1, 298) [But she was bigger than her death [...] until out of her transparent gift suddenly her picture shone and that place131 ‘was henceforth an unheard-of treasure | Her appearance hung like jewellery | In the air ~ turned into mourning joy] ‘Compared with the echolalic second requiem (“Requiem II”, GW I, 301) with its Iullaby-rhythm and soft internal rhymes -- “Mutter, Wesen, das um mich gewesen / wie die Luft und der Atem rein” (Mother, being that had been all round me / pure as air and pure as breath GW 1, 301), “Requiem I” sublimates emotions more densely, with contradicting affective results. In another versified poem (“Nur diese Gabe”, GW 1, 298) the “gift of the ‘universal mother” (“die Gabe der allgemeinen Mutter”) is revered by the orphan as if it were a substitute for the paternal law, The universalization contrasts with the sensual mood it evokes. Ich habe keine Habe, nur die Gabe der allgemeinen Mutter Thren intimen Rhythmus sommerlicher Pfade ‘In meiner Stube — O unverdiente Gnade! (GW 1, 298)132 | [Ihave no possession except for the gift of the universal mother her intimate rhythm i of summery paths | in my parlor Oh undeserved grace!) ‘The bulk of Auslinder’s mother poems could be classified by their formal structures as well as by semantic effects, The realistic poems, less ‘numerous, invite biographical readings (for instance “Nur die Mutter”; “Heimat 1”, “24 Stunden”) and can be distinguished from the symbolist lyrics, in which the “mother trope” tends to have a meta-poetical status, In the first category, it appears as a “nurturing force, ensuring peace and life” (Bower 64): Nar die Mutter blieb mild auch im Tod Alle anderen sind wild zwicken deinen Atem, wollen deine Not,133, hassen dein warmes Blut. Nur die Mutter blieb gut. (Gw1,297) [Only mother was mild even in death All the others are wild pinch your breath, ‘want your distress, hate your warm blood. Only mother remained good.] ‘Whereas the lyrical ego longs for the impossible resurrection of a dead mother (Kristensson 233), itis the idealized maternal image itself that interrupts the regression into fantasy in a kind of double bind: “Mich ‘rosten kindliche Traume /[...] die Mutter sagt / Liebling / vergi8.” (Infantile dreams console me / ...] my mother tells me; / Darling / forget, GW 7, 52). On the other hand, the “guardian of memory and suffering” seems to be “a barrier to the child’s painful acquisition of autonomy” (Bower 64), at least from the point of view offBo Paychology; if one reduces psychoanalysis to a science of the self (as consciousness), the ambivalence of narcissistic bonding refers to a “fantasy of incestuous fulfillment” as well as to a pre-oedipal “desire for union” (Bower 72).134 In “Trauerblumen” (Mourning Flowers), a “Muttermal” (Cbirthmark”) is juxtaposed with a “blossoming wound” (GW 8, 181). The poem “Irrsinniger” (The madman) focuses on the dark side of symbiosis: “Br mordet die Mutter / sie lebt weiter / im Traum / und kt in / aufs Herz.** (He murders the mother / she lives on / in dreams / and kisses him / on the heart. GW 8, 113). Ifthe fixation on the mother leads to psychotic transgression, a symbolic matricide can be conceived of as the condition of ‘reation.*" AS the sign implies the absence of the thing, the “daughter poet” has to renounce her “mother muse” (Bower 72). In a poem from the 1920s, “Herbst in New York” (Autumn in New York), Auslander expresses feelings of separation: “Mutter stromt ins Gefuth!” (Mother is streaming into my feelings, GW 1, 25). Ten years later, she finds emotional intensity in melancholy: “Nur aus der Trauer Mutterinnigkeit stromt mir das, ‘VollmaB des Erlebens ein” (Only from the motherly tenderness of ‘mouming does the fullness of experience stream into me, GW 1, 66). ‘Overcoming the “schwarze Mutter / die meine Bilder gebart” (the black ‘mother / who gives birth to my images, GW 5, 139), involves replacing the wise, dead mother (Auslinder 2004, 179) by the mother tongue, taking ‘one’s lyric out of the dead mother’s sleeve: “Aus dem Armel der toten ‘Mutter hol ich die Harfe” (From my dead mother’s sleeve I fetch my harp, GW 3, 119), As exile becomes home, “Motherwords” (“Mutterworte”, of Zeit Il, GW 5, 80 and GW 6, 27) become simply words: “Worte / Matter und Vater / meiner {...] Kinder” (Words / mothers and fathers / of [...] my children; “Widmung”, GW 8, 186). The thetoric of (re)birth as a metaphor for creation” is anchored in a performative act, the unconscious135, (re)affirmation of the founding signifier, in this case projected onto the first Other, in a spectacular inversion which is reminiscent of late medieval mysticism: Mai ‘mein Monat ‘da habe ich ‘meine Mutter geboren Sie sang JA zu mir (in Mutterlicht, GW 4, 152) [May month of mine when I gave birth to my mother She sang YES to me}ic 136 Exposing the act of entry into the symbolic order as a positive answer that is not spoken, but sung, the approval by the M/Other draws attention to its imaginary, narcissistic primacy. Hence, in her poetic credo, Auslander rejects realism under a romantic premise: “Ich habe, was man Wirklichkeit nent, auf meine Weise getraumt, das Getrdumte in Worte verwandelt und meine getraumte Wortwirklichkeit in die Wirklichkeit der Welt ‘zurtickgeschickt.” (I have dreamt what is called reality in my own way, and ‘then transformed the dream into words, and I have sent the word:-reality of my dreams back into the reality of the world.) One of the mainstays of Auslander’s hybrid position between tradition and modernity has been described as the use of an “innovatory semantic mixture between the abstract and the conerete” (Lehmann 32), or as mediation between the conceptual and the figurative (Vogel/Gans 155). ‘Auslander confirms this opinion in a remark directed against hermefism: “Das allzu Dichte ist auch nicht immer das Beste -~ denn da geht die Anschaulichkeit verloren -- das Gedicht wird trocken, abstrakt.” (Too much compression is not always a good thing it means the visual gets lost - the poem gets dry, abstract. Vogel/Gans 129), But it is precisely those literary critics who think of her as an epigone that accuse her of resemantization by ‘a technique of escapist condensation, found in hybrid compounds like “Sonnenwort” (sun word), “Vogelwort” (bird word), etc. (Colombat 349) Outside of formalist options such as conceptual art or the postmodern re- evaluation of the figurative, beginning with Lyotard’s (1971) diacritics of psychoanalysis,“ the recent “aisthetic turn” of aesthetics, promoted by technological media, is still founded in sensualist imagery, If Niklas137 Luhmann overcomes the modemist opposition between abstract and concrete by a conception of omamental form, organizing space and time as an infrastructure of the evolution of representation,”” the tenacious epistemological dichotomy between concept and figure, ultimately between word and image (metaphor, etc.) has been deconstructed from several points of view. From a historical perspective, it has been stated that arguments equal figures, insofar as logic might be said to be founded in thetoric; so-that the aprior! of saying and showing would be a reciprocal one.** Furthermore, the romantic undecidability of the literal and the figurative has been re-read by Paul de Man as the double movement of sense-generating figuration and its defiguring exposure as something, arbitrary and contingent. Beyond rhetorical convention, allegory in Walter Benjamin's sense” itself allegorizes the insurmountable gap between the signifier and the signified. The consequence is: If figuration entails dofiguration, language can no longer be understood as its own meta- language, and if every concept derives from “dead” tropes (cf, Jean Paul, ‘Nietzsche™) which, as such, bring with them their own cognitive functions, there is no longer any essential difference between theory and literature, arts and science. Whether one rejects or accepts this position, grounded on the double movement of the reciprocal deconstruction of the elements of a binary opposition,”! the problem can be displaced one more time. Under the assumption that a theory of meaning should go together with a theory of subjectivity, breaking with the primacy of consciousness, the production of meaning (and literature) would have to be reconsidered in the framework of ‘a psychoanalytic topology that takes into account the symptomatic traces of138 signifying processes, without neglecting their discursive, intertextual, and aesthetic embedding. One persistent difficulty, I admit, lies in the heterogeneity of the two verbal modalities concerned, literary discourse as a fixed text and as an object of historical, philosophical and theoretical reconstruction, on one hand, and the dynamic living speech of the subject (performed, for example, in the context of psychoanalytic therapy) on the other. In any case, iteration (to use Derrida’s or Judith Butler's, ‘understanding of the word™) remains “open”, but not to just “any interpretation,” as Lacan states, In illustration of this point, I would like to give Rose Auslinder the final word in her English poem “Mother”, in which the binary meaning of a word-pair, linked and kept apart by the voicing and devoicing of the phonemes /v/ and /ff, gliding from soft to hard, seems rather telling to me, But you are veiled ‘Your face, eclipsed by shade, grows thin and pale. You and my letters fade. [...] Tam unworthy to describe you. I have failed. 1 spell you with a tear, a sigh. (Auskinder 1995, 112)139 Notes ' Unless otherwise indicated, German translations into English are by Annette Runte. ? Rose Auslinder, “Ghettomotive™ [1942-1944], in Gesammelte Werke in sieben Banden und einem Nachtragsband, ed, Helmut Braun, 1, 149-185 (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1985-1990) [quoted as: GW and number of volume}. 3 According to Giorgio Agamben, Homo sacer. Die souverdine Macht und das nackte Leben (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2002 [1995)), 13-17, 93, 100, 120), the reduction of human existence to a “living substance (process)” by modem biology led to the degradation of human existence to mere “bare life” as an object of totalitarian “bio-politics” (Michel Foucault) * Gisela Bezzel-Dischner, Poetik des modernen Gedichts. Zur Lyrik von Nelly Sachs (Bad Homburg /Berlin/Ziarich: Gehlen, 1970), 22 * Cf. Helmut Braun, Rose Ausiinder, Materialien zu Leben und Werk, (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1991), 245. Annette Jal Lehmann, Jn Zeichen der Shoah. Aspekte der Dichtungs- und Sprachkrise bei Rose Auslander und Nelly Sachs (Tubingen: Stauffenburg, 1999), 136. © Rémy Colombat, “Les images pogtologiques de Rose Auslander,” Etudes Germaniques 2 (2003): 339-361, 358-361 7 Sigmund Freud, “Trauer und Melancholie” [1917], in Gesammelte Werke. Chronologisch geordnete Werke aus den Jahren 1913-1917, ed, Anna Freud, E, Bribing, W. Hoffer, E. Kris, O. Isakower, vol. X, 427-446 (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1999[1946]), 429, 431-438,4 \youless / 1s Pb ytcvonble | 140 * Walter Benjamin, “Geschichtsphilosophische Thesen,” in Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hans Schweppenhéuser, Vol. 1.2, 693- 704 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1980), 704; also “Das Passagen- Werk”, GS 1980 Vol. V.1, 589. ° Victor Klemperer, Lingua Tertii Imperti (Berlin (Ost): Aufbau, 1947). " Andrei Corbea-Hoisie, “Vom Bildungsbirger zum Intellektuellen. Zum Profil der ,Czemowitzer Zivilisation”, in: “Worter stellen mir nach, Ich stelle sie vor”. Dokumentation des Ludwigsburger Symposiums 2001, 33- 54 (Hohengehren: Schneider, 2001), 50, ™ Paul Celan, “Ansprache anliisslich der Entgegennahme des Literatur-preises der Freien Hansestadt Bremen,” in Der Meridian und andere Prosa, 37 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1983): “es war eine Gogend, in der Menschen und Bucher lebten,” The German poe{est Annette von Droste-Hiilshoff already suggested the proximity of the two signifiers, “Buche” (beech tree) and “Buch” (book). "2 Gerhard Reiter, “Das Eine und das Einzelne. Zur philosophischen Struktur der Lyrik Rose Auslinders, in “Worter stellen mir nach, 154- 197, 170. English translation by Michael Shields, “Cf. Alain Vannier, Lacan (Paris; Belles Lettres, 2003), 71 Der Reim “ging in die Briche,” das “Vokabular mute ausgewechselt werden” (GW 3, 286). ' The American Tradition in Literature, ed. Sculley Bradley et al. 4th edition (New York: Grosset & Dunlap [distributed by W.W. Norton], 1974), 1036. "” Jacques Lajarrige, “Avant-propos,” in Gedichte der Rose Ausliinder,M1 ed. J. Lajarrige and Marie-Héléne Quéval, 317-38 (Nantes: Editions du Temps, 2005), 336 "Kathrin M. Bower, Ethics and Remembrance in the Poetry of Nelly Sachs and Rose Auslander (Rochester / New York: Camden House, 2000), 107. ” Cf. Maria Behre, Eva, wo bist du? Wirkungsmacht des Weiblichen im Werk Rose Auslanders (Berlin: AphorismA, 2005), 79-83, % Jean Firges, “Die jtidische und chassidische Tradition in den Gedichten Rose Ausliinders,” in: Gedichte der Rose Auslainder, 43-68, 67-68, 2! Andréa Lauterwein, “Cocon chlorophylle. Notes sur Rose Austinder et la poésie lyrique de la nature,” in Gedichte der Rose Auslander, 159-168, 162. ® Claire de Oliveira, “Images de la féminité dans oeuvre de Rose Auslander,” Liudes Germaniques 2 (2003); 265-281, 265 (footnote 1). ™ Ina letter to Hans Bender (26 August 1976), she still states that her lyrics ate little known: “noch immer sind meine ‘Kinder’ recht unbekannt ‘geblieben,” quoted in: Hans Bender, “Ich habe ein freundschafiliches Gefuhl far Sie’. Beim Wiederlesen der Briefe von Rose Austander,” in Mutterland Wort, Rose Ausidinder 1901-1988, ed, Rose-Auslander- Dokumentationszentrum, 117-122 (Dusseldorf, Rose-Aushinder- Gesellschaft e:V. 1996), 119 ™ For instance the Droste-Prels in 1967, the Ida Dehmel-Preis in 1977 or the Roswitha-Medaille of Bad Gandersheim, ef. Helmut Braun, “Sch bin finfiausend Jahre jung”. Rose Auslander. Zu ihrer Biographie (Stuttgart Radius, 1999), 204-205 5 Translated by Julia Samwer < boarder.gingerbeer.co.uk > (accessed 26 March 2008).142 Rezeptionsvarianten zur Post-Shoah-Lyrik (Frankfurt am Main et al.: Lang, 2000), 173, ”” Claudia Beil, Sprache als Heimat. Jiidische Tradition und Exilerfahrungin der Lyrik von Nelly Sachs und Rose Ausltinder, Hamburg: tuduy, 1991), 199. ™ In the sense of Nathalie Sarraute (Tropismes [Paris: Minuit, 1990 19399), ® Stéphane Mosés, “1952. Autumn. Poetry after Auschwitz“. 4 New History of German Literature, ed, David E. Wellbery and Judith Ryan, 856- 859 (Cambridge[Mass.] / London: Harvard UP, 2004), 859, %° Norina Procopan, “Poetologische und selbstreflexive Topoi in Rose Auslinders spater Dichtung,” in Gedichte der Rose Auslander, 169-182, mm. 3! Gabriele Kohl, Die Bedeutung der Sprache in der Lyrik Rose Auslanders (Pfatfenweiler: Centaurus, 1993), 314. ® Umberto Eco, “Ober Spiegel [1985], in Uber Spiegel und andere Phainomene, 26-62 (Machen: Beck, 1988), 34, cf 27, 52. * In “Der Spiegel”: “Das ist ein Wiederstrahlen ohne Ende! / Dort leuchtet grenzenlos des Himmels Spiegel, / und saugt in seine silberweiften Wande / die tiefe Welt, und prefit auf sie sein Siegel. / Da flackern mystisch Myriaden Sterne / aus seinem ewig aufgeschlagnen Blick; / sie dringen in die abgewandt’ste Feme / und schleudern machtig sie als Bild zurack. // Und aber unsrem rollenden Planeten / fingt hoch ein goldnes Aug” sein Bildnis auf, / [..] In tausend Spiegel schaut erstaunt die Erde: / ...] Doch143, Lngeteilt empfangt die ganze Runde / der reine, linsenkleine Augenspiegel” (GW1, 96). * Cf Jacques Lacan, Die vier Grundbegriffe der Psychoanalyse. Das Seminar, Buch XI (1964). 2nd edition (Olten/Freiburg im Breisgau: Walter, 1980), 80, 270. 55 August Langen, “Zur Geschichte des Spiegelsymbols in der deutschen Dichtung,” Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift 28 (1940): 269-280, 270. 5 In “Antwortlos”: “Vom Spiegel fordere ich / Aug um Aug / Zahn um Zahn” (GW 4, 168). 37 Cf. Jacques Derrida: La vérité en peinture (Paris : Flammarion 1993 [1978p ** In Sternverdunkelung: “aber in den beiden Spiegeln / deines weiben Gesichts / hat sich der Sommer erhalten.” ” Cf Cilly Helfrich, “Es ist ein Aschensommer in der Welt.” Rose Auslander. Biographie (Weinheim / Berlin: Quadriga, 1995), 65, “ In Zwei Silben verirrt (GW 1, 154). “Julia Kristeva, Histoires d'amour (Paris: Denoél, 1983). Kunst -- Zeugung - Geburt. Theorien und Metaphern dsthetischer Produktion in der Neuzeit, ed. Christian Begemann and David E. Wellbery (Freiburg im Breisgau: Rombach, 2002). Quoted after Harald Vogel / Michael Gans, Rose Ausltinder / Hilde Domin. Gedichtinterpretationen. 2nd edition. (Hohengehren: Schneider, 1997). “ Jean-Francois Lyotard, Discours, figure (Paris: Klincksieck, 1971).144 “ Aisthesis. Wahrnehmung heute oder Perspektiven einer anderen Asthetik. Essais, ed, Karlheinz, Barck / Peter Gente / Heidi Paris / Stefan Richter (Leipzig: Reclam, 1990), *° Claudia Ohlschlager, Abstraktionsdrang. Wilhelm Worringer und der Geist der Moderne (Munchen: Fink, 2005). “" Niklas Luhmann, Die Kunst der Gesellschaft (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1995), 181, “Dieter Mersch, “Argumentum est figura. Bemerkungen zur Rhetorik der ‘Vernunft,” in de figura. Rhetorik -- Bewegung ~ Gestalt, ed. Gabriele Brandstetter and Sibylle Peters, 101-126 (Manchen: Fink, 2002), 107 ® Anselm Hayerkamp / Bettine Menke, “Art. Allegorie,” in Asthetische Grundbegriff. Historisches Worterbuch in sieben Banden, ed. Karlheinz Barck et al,, 40-104 (Stuttgart / Weimar: Metzler, 2000), 70-79. ® Jean Paul: “Daher ist jede Sprache in Rcksicht geistiger Beziehungen ein Worterbuch erblasster Metaphem,” in Vorschule der Asthetik (nach der Ausgabe von Norbert Miller hg. von Wolfhart Henckmann), (Hamburg: Meiner 1990), 184; cf. Friedrich Nietzsche: “Ueber Wahrheit und Lige im aussermoralischen Sinne” [1873], in: Nachgelassene Schriften, Kritische Studienausgabe, ed. Giorgio Colli / Mazzino Montinari, 2nd edition, 875- 891 (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuchverlag, 1999), 51 Ingo Berensmeyer, “Gestus und Geltung: Zur Rhetorik der Theorie (de Man / Miller),” DYJS 3 (2001): 491-539, 528. Cf. Judith Butler, Das Unbehagen der Geschlechter (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1990)145 ® Frangois Dosse, Geschichte des Strukturalismus. 2 Volumes, Vol. 2 (Frankfurt am Main: S, Fischer, 1999 [1992)), 243.146 Marko Pajevié, Belfast On the Fringes: Mistrust as Commitment in the Poetics of Ilse Aichinger! Ilse Aichinger made her first appearance in the German-speaking literary landscape in 1946 with her short prose text Aufiuf cum Miptrauen (liicitement to mistrust), at the age of 25. It was striking. She presented her appeal as a homeopathic remedy: the individual should call him- or herself into question, in order to avoid going astray on greater questions. “Der Klarheit unserer Absichten, der Tiefe unserer Gedanken, der Gate unserer ‘Taten! Unserer eigenen Wahrhaftigkeit mssen wir miStrauen!” (We must mistrust the clarity of our intentions, the profundity of our thoughts, the goodness of our deeds! We must mistrust our own truthfulness!) One might ask: what is wrong with clarity, profundity, goodness and truthfulness, especially in a historical situation where the people had just been liberated from a mystifying and disastrous ideology? But Aichinger is probably referring precisely to this problem of judgment, since to the people who believed in national socialist ideology, it seemed to be just that: clear, also profound, good and truthful, That was the case even for some of the sharpest minds, Gottfried Benn, to name but one, justified himself in his, famous Amwort an die literarischen Emigranten (Answer to the literary emigrants) of the year 1933” by invoking precisely the same qualities that Aichinger called into question, Aichinger does not propose to start off by mistrusting other people (not that mistrust was in short supply at that time);147 nor does she speak of the gullibility of the Austrians and Germans who fell into the trap set by the Nazis, Instead, the certainties are what seem fatal to her. People who claim to know are the ones who lead to disaster. She concludes: “Werden wir miftrauisch gegen uns selbst, um vertrauenswardiger zu sein!” (Let's become more mistrustful towards ourselves in order to be more trustworthy!)* Aichinger has never renounced this private approach in the face of social and political aberrations, and has repeatedly been reproached for it by the critics—but isn’t it simply the approach of art in general? This question is clearly not the same as that concerning the relative artistic ‘merits of private and public orientation in works of art. In the following I wish to pursue the question of how this mistrust of one’s own truthfulness manifests itself formally in Aichinger’s literature. How does it take shape in its poetic form? And what is really the status of hermeticism and privacy in Aichinger’s literature? To answer these questions, we must first scrutinize a literary text: in how far does this poetically realized mistrust represent a form of commitment in Aichinger’s sense? Analysis of the Poem “Gebirgsrand” As an object of detailed analysis I have chosen the poem “Gebirgsrand™* since it seems to me to be particularly pertinent in our context but also because it has received intense academic attention’ and is one of Aichinger’s best-known poems. It is no coincidence that I chose a poem, as,148 in my opinion the poetical principle I wish to put forward works best in poetry.° It was written in 1958 and published for the first time in 1959, Gebirgsrand Denn was tate ich, ‘wenn die Jager nicht waren, meine Traume, die am Morgen auf der Ruckseite der Gebirge niedersteigen, im Schatten, {Mountain fringes Because what would I do, it wasn’t for the hunters, my dreams, that—in the moming at the back of the mountain ranges— descend, in the shadow: In order to better understand this poem, it is necessary to be familiar with Aichinger’s poetic language before engaging in a close reading of the text; parallels in her work are of the utmost importance and an invaluable aid to interpretation, Without them, the reader can easily take a wrong tuming, since commonly accepted terminology is often used in unexpected ways in ‘Aichinger’s work; Schatten (shadow) and Jéger (hunter), for instance, arelgpotichrel 1 149 not necessarily negatively-charged terms here, This poem has a strong connection with the recurrent theme of light and darkness, a theme that is of essential significance for our topic of the poetic form and its possibilities of commitment. This will become clearer in what follows. The title consists of a composite noun, rather unusual but far from astonishing, It might designate a landscape at the foot of a mountain range, between the mountains and the plains. It is preferable to put the title aside Tor the moment and come back to its meaning at the end of our analysis. The poem consists of a single sentence with a relatively clear structure: itis a full sentence with two appositions, simple vocabulary and a relatively consistent rhythmic pattern. Formally it represents a clearly delimited unit. This first impression, however, is already countered by the first word: since the poem starts with a causal or consecutive “Denn” (Because), it appears to refer to something preceding which is not named. ‘What follows in the poem is the consequence of something unstated; the cause remains unspoken. Syntactically, it is also possible to consider the ‘word “Gebirgsrand” as the (elliptically verbless) preceding part of the sentence. The first line suggests a question, more precisely a question concerning an action, even if it is @ conditional action, “tate” (would do); and it is the speaker’s own action, as is underlined by the emphatic final position of the word “ich” (1) In this way, every reader while reading must ask the question him- or herself, already in the first line Aichinger imposes her claim that every individual has to question him or herself.” ‘The question “Denn was tite ich ... wenn” (Because what would I do if) implies that, if ever the condition (of there being no hunters) were150 fulfilled, there would be nothing to be done, one would be absolutely helpless. The rest of the poem now gives these circumstances: “wenn die Jager nicht waren’ (if it wasn't for the hunters). The existence of the hunters is therefore the condition for the survival of the lyrical I who would not know how to carry on living without them. The sonic link between the vertically adjacent “Denn” and “wenn” (Because / if) also establishes a formal ‘connection, the introductory question is closely linked to what Follows Before allowing the poem to define these “hunters” more closely, we should consider two parallel texts that are obviously intertextually linked to our poem and which deserve to be mentioned, at least briefly, The first is the poem “Winterrichtung” (in Verschenkter Rat 46), written on 16 December 1960. Winterrichtung Winter direction ch lasse mich Het myself von den Jagdhornem, be chased from my hiding places aus meinen Schlupfwinkeln jagen, by the hunting hors, hin zu der Morgenrste towards the dawn unterm Schnee, under the snow, zum vergilbenden Gras, towards the yellowing grass. Mit meinen Handen With my hands151 erreich ich already reach schon die Gelibde der Alten, the vows of the elders die mich rasch aufwarts ziehen, who rapidly draw me upwards, hol mir [fetch for myself den winkligen Mond the angled moon. Hunter, moming and upward-movemisnt as opposed to the downward- movement in Gebirgsrand should suffice here to demonstrate the intertextuality, What counts for us is the function of a wake-up call that is attributed to the hunters and that is clearly positively charged in this poem since it leads the lyrical I of the poem to activity and awareness, Even more significant in our context seems to be the short prose text “In das Land Salzburg zichen” (Moving to the district of Salzburg).* In spite of the fact that this text was published only in 1982 and refers to an autobiographical experience which took placé later than the writing of the poem “Gebirgsrand” (Aichinger’s house move), we are confronted with ‘What is in my opinion a later explanation ~ or at least confirmation ~- of the earlier poem, Aichinger describes in this text her reading experience of Broch’s story “Der Berg” (The Mountain), in which a hunter disappears for some time in a mountain and, after his return, speaks only of the Barbarossa- myth without any further explanation of his experiences. Soon he stops talking altogether. He has told only the bishop in his confession which. leads the bishop to renounce his office and fall into silence himself. Soon152 after, both of them die peacefully. Aichinger claims that she has been accompanied by this hunter ever since -- “von meinem Jager (by my hunter), as she writes. She comments that this hunter does not carry a rifle, ‘that he has possibly left it in the depths of the mountain as a consequence of What he saw there, Aichinger too wants to know what the hunter doesn’t tell, but, as she says, without wanting to be told. Broch’s hunter obviously does not represent violence here (he does HOt have @ rifle) But on the Contrary” an insight into deeply hidden truths, and Aichinger strives towards the same insight. The following interpretation will show to what extent we have to understand the hunters in ‘our poem in the same way. It is also important to note that Aichinger suspects in her text that the hunter had seen Doomsday in the depth of the mountain, on a day that is described as being the brightest, and this, brightness together with the absence of darkness is associated with fear and cold, She claims that only few people know about such etemal light, as ‘opposed to the experience of the eternal night that had been “schon ofter ‘um uns” (already more often around us). She continues: “Aber der hellste Tag ist dem jungsten Tag gemalier als die finsterste Nacht. Wie sollte man auch im Dunkeln vethandeln und verurteien konnen?* (But the brightest day is more appropriate to Doomsday than the darkest night. How could one, after all, negotiate and judge and condemn in the dark? 37) Doomsday as the last judgment of the world represents the final truth; however, itis a condemning truth, one that puts an end to life on earth. In Aichinger’s work, brightness and day are always ambivalent since they are associatedunten 153 with terror and harshness, Bearing that in mind, we continue our reading of ‘the poem. ‘The hunters are designated in the same line by means of an apposition as “meine Traume” (my dreams), the @ underlining in German a link between action (“tate”), hunters (“Jager”) and dreams (“Traume™). Dreams play a major role in Aichinger’s work: and earlier interpreters have accentuated the obvious link between this first and the last poem of the collection (Verschenkier Rat 106): Ineinem, In once Und hatt ich keine Traume, And if I didn’t have dreams so war ich doch kein anderer,I would still not be someone else, ich war derselbe ohne Traume, I would be the same person without dreams, wer rief mich heim? who would call me home? ‘This poem caused some malaise among Aichinger scholars since it seems to be opposed to all other tendencies in her work, denying the dreams any significance for the lyrical I. However, this problem can be solved when one realizes that the last line could be read in the conditional (this is the reading favored in the above English translation), thereby indicating that without dreams the “I” would not be called home, would have lost her home.154 We have already seen that the hunters in “Gebirgsrand” do not necessarily need a rifle, but the question remains: what do they hunt (with or without a weapon), since they are dreams and since -- in connection with ‘what has just been said -- we can suppose that they are on the trail of some form of home or feeling of security (Geborgenheit) ‘The hunters / dreams descend “am Morgen’ (in the morning). This is surprising, since normally hunters go out’ hunting early in the moming whereas dreams take place at night and would be over by moming. So they ‘would have spent the night in the mountains and come down now, to the “Gebirgsrand” (mountain fringes). If they are regarded as dreams they have spent the night on the heights and in the morning they approach human settlements; as hunters they have hunted ovemight, which is not really pertinent for hunters but can be accepted when applied to dreams. One could also imagine that they come down to human life to hunt for material ‘That they go down (“niedersteigen”) to hunt deserves some attention, since it could point to a hunt in lower spheres of consciousness, or simply in earthly matters. There is also a linguistic relationship between the mountain range and the feeling of security (Gebirge and Geborgenheii), thus the suspected hunt for Geborgenhett receives some confirmation in the dreams, It is worth noting that Aichinger writes “der Gebirge” (of the mountain ranges) in the plural since it would be more usual and logical to use the singular (“des Gebirges” instead of “der Gebirge”) and there can hardly be more than one mountain range. This gives a more general allegorical dimension to the mountain range: it seems to stand for something elevated, of difficult155 access, or (activating the word-play between Gebirge and Geborgenhelt) for something safe and secure, Apparently the sun has risen in the morning since “auf der Rackseite der Gebirge" (at the back of the mountain ranges) is shadow. In this shadow, the hunters / dreams come down again while as implicitly stated ~ they went up on this side in the evening, logically also in the shadow that seems to be their element, The enjambment links the shadow closer to, and emphasizes the downward movement of “niedersteigen” (descend), this refers again to depth and also implies an approach to the human beings that live rather at the foot of the mountain than on top of it. The positive associations of shadow in Aichinger’s work have already been mentioned. In the poem “Magdemangel” (Lack of maids) (VR 19), shadows are characterized as “diese Troster” (these consolers), in “Rauchenberg” (VR 23) we read “ je emeuerte Spur der Schatten / reicht mir den Weg’ (the renewed trace of the shadows / offers me the way.) And also in the poem “Neuer Bund” (New alliance, VR 87), the lyrical I prefers the shadow to the sun, Staying in the shadow is clearly Aichinger’s preferred state, Our entire poem can be interpreted in such a way that it is especially this moment when the hunters / dreams go down in the shadow that is crucial for the speaker. That would then suggest that it is this in- between state where some (but not too much) light already shines in the shadow where we can reach our dreams. They are no longer out of reach high in the mountains, they come down to us, protected by the mountains from too much light. In the morning, immediately after waking up, we are still close to the dream sphere, our consciousness is on the border betweener bominntyon 156 waking consciousness and the unconscious. It is no coincidence that there are so many Kafka stories -- and Aichinger is often compared to Kafka — that start out in this intermediate state of mind immediately after waking up, for instance in Der Prozef (The Trial) or Die Verwandlung (The Metamorphosis) At this stage we can return (o the title of our poem: the “Gebirgsrand” (mountain fringes) would be exactly this liminal sphere between the mountains and” the plains where we have access to boil This poem ultimately deals with the connection between two spheres; or, to be more precise, it deals with the support of the dream sphere for social reality which would be unreal without it, In reality, without this other dimension of realness, the human being would have lost his / her meaning. The Poetics of lise Aichiriger We have seen that Ilse Aichinger’s poetics stand for the conviction that too much light, blinding clarity, does not correspond to reality; the shadow, the nuances, the realm of in-between, on the other hand, offer the possibility of accessing realness, Aichinger’s mistrust aims at the clear certainties, at the linear logic, at the technical vision of the world in general, Martin Heidegger's much criticized Bremer Vorirage (Bremen Lectures), which draw a parallel between agricultural technologies such as battery hen houses and annihilation camps,’ is far from playing down the Churban,'® On the contrary it recognizes the essential horror of the mindset that is athel 157 the root of both phenomena, It is the horror of uncaring functionalism that eliminates all contradictory compl ty. Realness is more than functioning reality; in this understanding the ream, for Aichinger, is closer to realness than everyday-life and its automatisms. That is obviously connected with the radical individuality of life that Karl Krolow evoked in his eulogy of lise Aichinger, saying: “Nichts ist so unwiderruflich individuell wie Getraumtes, nichts so boden- und Bedingungslos auf” dis Person bezogen, die triumt* (Nothing is so irrevocably individual as what is dreamt, nothing so groundlessly and unconditionally focused on the dreaming person).'’ But defining this attitude as a “traumerische Revolution [...] gegentiber, dem, dingfesten Leben, gegendber der Resolutheit des Sichtbaren, Erkennbaren, Beweisbaren* (dreamy revolution against factual life, against the resoluteness of the visible, the knowable, the provable. Krolow 87) seems ambivalent since|it}implies an escapfsn} into the dream world, and that is not at all what Aichinger has in mind. In a conversation with Hermann Vinke she refers to the “Exaktheit der Traume, ihre Prazision* (exactness of dreams, their precision) and she confirms the view of her interviewer when he formulates: “Das ware ein St0ck Wirklichkeit in der Unwirklichkeit* (That would be a piece of realness within the unreal.) She reacts: Ja, cin Stick viel gréBerer Wirklichkeit, als die Wirklichkeit damals und heute zu geben imstande ist. Die Wirklichkeit ist nicht imstande, ohne Gegenleistungen zu geben. Sie kommt nurCom butns sssenbinliving 158 hervor, wenn man sie kontert, wenn man sie nicht anerkennt, ‘wenn man sich nicht anpaft [¥es, a piece of much realer realness than realness is and was capable of giving, Realness cannot give anything without reciprocity. It doesn’t appear if you do not counter it, if you do not acknowledge it, if you do not adapt ]' ‘The dreams are consequently not a counter-world to which to escape from reality, they are more precise realness,"* whereas it is reality that is unreal. Realness becomes a more intense form of being than the one normally allowed by social life. A reference to the philosophy of being is unavoidable here, But I do not wish to refer to Heidegger, whose thinking on language implies cssetial and mystifying tendencies. Martin Buber’s Das dialogische Prinzip (The Dialogical Principle)" on the other hand ties the access to an intense form of being, that is designated as “Wirklichkeit” (realness) as opposed to “Realitat” (reality), to an Ich-Du-Beziehung (Lthou- relationship) as opposed to an Ich-Fs-Beziehung (L-it-relationship), where the other is considered as an object. In an I-thow-relationship a direct relation between two poles and with a linking in-between is created, which leads from the everyday mode to a more deeply felt perception of realness, consequently to realness itself. The basis of this thinking is grounded in a very concrete mutual relationship with the surrounding worldComsoniuy YL 159 This conception can be applied to Aichinger for whom a “Kontem” (Countering), as she puts it, a non-acceptance, is indispensable in order to reach this intense relationship with realness. This should probably be ‘understood as questioning the given, which leads to an awareness that would be lost if one swam with the mainstream, To pursue this metaphor: you have to swim against the current in order to feel the resistance of the ‘water and to become aware of yourself. ‘This awareness Of life represents for Aichinger the meaning of life: “Nicht suchen, sondem das Suchen suchen. Das kommt mir als das Ziel vor.” (Not searching, but searching for searching, That seems to me to be the goal.)'* In this questioning, in this searching, life loses what is simple and matter-of-course and has to be lived consciously. What is at stake here is resistance to the unquestioning acceptance of life: “Ich schreibe gegen das Konsumieren, gegen das Konsumieren des Lebens tberhaupt* (I write against consumerism, against consuming life in general Stettler 36) In this connection, a scene from the novel Die groflere Hoffiung (The Greater Hope)'* is telling: adolescent Ellen is questioned in a military guardroom, but her subtle answers disturb the orderly procedure, make the questioners question themselves and uncover the absurdity and unrealness of the military function which is equated, in a reversal of the situation, with sleep, death and captivity. She wants to awaken the guards to the state of dreaming. In the end the colonel who loses control of the situation, sums up the narrowness of the military life. He wants to prevent the dream and therefore needs his own limitedness and oblivion:Gebt euch zufrieden mit Namen und Adresse, hort ihr, es ist genug, Wift ihr nicht mehr, wieviel es bedeutet, ordmungsgemap gemeldet zu sein? Wit ihr nicht mehr, wie wohl es tut, in Reih und Glied zu gehen? {...] FaBt die Saboteure, wenn die Nachte hell sind, schaut nicht zuviel in den Mond! Der Mann im Mond bleibt allein, der Mann im Mond tragt Sprengstoff auf dem Ricken, Es tut mir leid, wir haben keine Macht, ihn ‘inzuliefern. Aber wir haben Macht, ihn zu vergessen. [Content yourself with name and address, do you hear me, that is sufficient. Don’t you know any more how significant it is to be officially registered? Don't you know any more how calming it is to march in rank and file? [...] Seize the saboteurs when the nights are bright, don’t look too much at the moon! The man in the moon stays alone, the man in the moon carries explosives on his back. Regretfully, we don’t have power to arrest him. But we do have the power to forget him.] 160 Consequently he accuses Ellen of a “Sabotage des Fragens und der unerwinschten Aussagen (sabotage of questioning and of making unwanted statements). The links with Ilse Aichinger’s poetological program are obvious Her heroine reacts to these accusations with a simple confirmation: “Ja” (Ves). The paradox, a widespread principle in Aichinger’s poetics, results in a “subversiven Erweichung von Verkndcherungen” (subversiveto? 161 softening of ossifications).'’ What is at stake here is a form of authenticity that can only be reached by countering; the act of writing against the languages offSsience and of everyday life is resistance to system formation (Slibar 58) which, of course, is identified with automatism, hence unawareness, hence unrealness. ‘The commitment((pthe word, just as Viktor Sklovskij presented it in Russian Formalism in his Resurrection of the Word, aims at awareness and at the conscious return to truly lived realness as opposed to unconscious functioning in practical constraints. Aichinger opposes determined and archivable knowledge with her intuitions which —- seen from the perspective of the intensity of life -- are in fact more precise, Her literature consists of permanent subversion, permanent because! Gor puch an attitude nothing can ever be secure, since security already signifies system and automatization, For Aichinger, it is essential to resist this, to speak from a ‘marginal position, a position on the fringes, to counter.'® This is why Ilse Aichinger again and again insists that the privatism of her writing signifies exactly the opposite of what critics wish to suggest by the use of this term: it is precisely through privatism that she gains commitment. This is so since private signifies, according to the dictionary, “relating to the individual,” and realness can only be perceived individually." Consequently for Aichinger language is always individualized language; she adheres to Withelm von Humboldt’s thinking, ‘on the subject. He called language a “todtes Gerippe” (dead skeleton) as Jong as it is not vivified in the context of the particular speech.” “Sprache ist privat” (Language is private), says Aichinger.”"original / chymelegered 162 Sprache ist, wo sie da ist, far mich das Engagement selbst, weil sie kontern muB, die bestehende Sprache kontern mu, die etablierte Sprache, weil sie fort muB aus dem Rezept der Wahrheit in Wahrheit, weil sie das Gegenteil von Etabliertheit sein muB, aus sich selbst. TFor mie language is, when itis really present, the incarnation of commitment because it has to counter, it has to counter the existing language, the established language, because it has to flee the method of truth and go into truth itself, because it has to be the contrary of establishment, Schafroth 29] ‘Truth, once it has become method, is not truth any more; the same is true for realness. And that then also affects the idea of commitment: a ‘commitment that proposes to change the system in a direct way, by means of a putatively clear communication of objectives, has already betrayed its objective, has already betrayed the human being since it is merely operating, another system, with empty shells of words, This is the dilemma of commitment, that it can only change a particular form, not the essential Aichinger’s commitment aims at being mote radical in the real meaning of the term: it wants to start at the roor—and this means for her, in the individual itself, hence in thinking, hence in language. Aichinger’s idea of mistrust is consequently also directed against the putatively clear communicability of realness. Mistrust equals the mistrust163 eypassill in (@) I of language|in language, This explains the extraordinary importance of silence in Aichinger’s poetics, a silence that is clearly far from lack of expression; on the contrary it is more significant than speech, and, as such, has to be integrated into speech. Writing is for her the best way of being silent, she says. It is also the expression of elements which otherwise would be lost, Writing, and consequently the reading of what has been written, allows one to perceive things that otherwise are more difficult to mediate. This implies therefore a misiriist towards the traditional notion of communication, We enter the field of the “ineffable,” a significant theme of German postwar literature ‘The Commitment of so-called “Hermetic Poetry” in the Context of the History of Ideas after National Socialism; Adorno and Arendt of- hat 2 oF ‘compler! ae f Ne Ob ychonnal In this context we have to address the entire complex linked to Adorno’s == Sen so-called verdict that after Auschwitz it is barbaric to write a poem. The reception of this quotation has been very mixed, but most of the time it is shaped by a misinterpretation rooted in abbreviation.” For this reason 1 should like to give first of all the full quotation: Je totaler die Gesellschaft, um so verdinglichter auch der Geist und um so paradoxer sein Beginnen, der Verdinglichung aus eigenem sich zu entwinden. Noch das auBerste BewuBtsein vom Verhangnis droht zum Geschwatz zu entarten, Kulturkritik164 findet sich der letzten Stufe der Dialektik von Kultur und Barbarei gegeniiber: nach Auschwitz ein Gedicht zu schreiben, ist barbarisch, und das friBt auch die Erkenntnis an, die ausspricht, warum es unméglich ward, heute Gedichte zu schreiben. Der absoluten Verdinglichung, die den Fortschritt des Geistes als eines ihrer Elemente voraussetzte und die ihn heute giinzlich aufzusaugen sich anschickt, ist der kritische Geist ni n Bewachsen, solange er bei sich bleibt in selbsigendigsamer Kontemplation [The more a society is total, the more the mind is reified and the ‘more paradoxical is its endeavor to escape this reification by its own force. Even the most extreme awareness of fatality risks being distorted into verbiage. Cultural criticism is brought face to face with the final phase of the dialectics of culture and barbarism: to write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric and this also taints the insight that expresses why it has become impossible to write poetry today. As long as it remains by itself in self-sufficient contemplation, the critical mind cannot stand up to the absolute reification that presupposes the progress of ‘the mind as one of its elements and that today prepares to completely suck it in.) Aichinger’s efforts to promote mistrust, and the form of her writing, are inseparable from the Zivilisationsbruch (rupture in civilization)”® which165 Auschwitz represents. Adotno’s thoughts on the cultural situation after Auschwitz are therefore parallel to Aichinger’s poetics, which they can elucidate We must consider Adomo’s sentence in the framework of his general cultural criticism resulting from the “Auschwitz” experience, and “Gedicht” (poem) is a code for culture here. It is therefore not so much the poem that is called in question, but rather the dialectics of culture and barbarism, hence whether itis possible at all, for art in general, to reflect “Auschwitz.” We should not forget that “Auschwitz” represents for Adomo only the final step, the climax of a long process, that it is inseparable from the entire cultural history since the Enlightenment, After this event, art can only exist for Adomo in incorporating this event, obviously not necessarily in a direct way. And Adorno already implies a claim to commitment in art in the last sentence of the above quotation. ‘Unfortunately, as Adormo together with Horkheimer have shown in their Dialektik der Aufidarung (Dialectics of Enlightenment);® enlightened commitment is dialectical by nature and hence brings with it from the start new mythologies and opposing processes. This is so because enlightenment as a form of control itself needs coercion against itself, insight is instrumentalized, cultivation always also implies suppression.”” ‘Adorno then condemns the German assiduity in cultural matters after 1945 as a discourse of repression that denies the fundamental rupture in civilization caused by National Socialism” This is summarized by Sven Kramer: “Die Beschworung des Geistigen verdecke vielmehr das dem Geist Inkommensurable.“ (On the contrary, the conjuring up of the spiritual166 sphere rather covers up what is incommensurable with the spirit. Kramer 506). ‘That means that it is not possible any. more to fight barbarism with traditional humanistic ideas of culture; instead these would in the final instance become the accomplices of barbarism by camouflaging what has happened. We are faced with a dilemma: the appeal to cultural forces ‘becomes itself a part of that barbarism which one wants to work against. ‘The only conceivable solution for Adomo is to develop a notion of culture that-is‘capable-of incorporating in itself what has happened:It has to be'@ notion of culture that eludes any form of integration and manageability, a notion that consists of refusal. Culture can only be critical, claims Adomo, in so far as it opposes any institution or generalization; any integration into ‘an institution would make it controllable and range it among the mechanisms of suppression that are affiliated to barbarism.” Taken that way, the activity of writing poems—probably chosen as the epitome of the cultural—would also be part of a cultural industry that belongs to barbarism. Adomo sees little hope of escaping this. As late as in his Negative Dialekttk (Negative Dialectics, 1973) he writes:*° Wer fiir Erhaltung der radikal schuldigen und schabigen Kultur pladiert, macht sich zum Helfershelfer, wahrend, wer der Kultur sich verweigert, unmittelbar die Barbarei bef&rdert, als welche die Kultur sich enthallte, Nicht einmal Schweigen kommt aus dem Zirkel heraus; es rationalisiert einzig die eigene subjektive Unfthigkeit mit dem Stand der objektiven Wahrheit und entwardigt dadurch diese abermals zur Lagebot | 167 [Whoever makes a plea for the conservation of the radically guilty and shop-soiled culture becomes an accomplice, whereas whoever refuses to take part in it is directly supporting the barbarism that culture proved to be. One can not even escape the circle by being silent; this simply rationalizes one’s own subjective incapacity by referring to the position of objective ‘truth; and thus degrades itonce-again into a lie) ‘Adomo then develops a method of countering this dilemma in the form of the essay, which for him implies that all definition is but tentative and fallible; direct commitment is impossible in art. Adorno says of art: “helfen onnte nur, wenn sie nicht sich gebairdet, als ob sie ihm [dem Menschen} halfe.” (the only thing that could help would be for it to not act as if it wanted to help him [the human being].)* Silence, which Adorno rejects as ‘an option in the above quotation, is finally just as valid an attempt to reflect, oon the Churban, provided it is integrated into poetic speech and thus given form. Its, then, a natural consequence that those postwar poets who deal in the most intense and aware way with the Churban—Paul Celan, Ingeborg Bachmann, Nelly Sachs, and last{aot least Ilse Aichinger—have made silence a constitutive element of their poetics. I clearly do not intend this as a refutation of Adomo’s statement, but rather to demonstrate a capacity of reflection of the poetic that -- much as in philosophy Adomo had postulated reflective powers for the tentative essay form —- can open up a possibility of dealing with Adorno’s still valid insight. : rebar _ eee y?168 In contrast to Adomo, for whom the aporia resulting from Auschwitz also affects the arts, Hannah Arendt believed in the possibility of speaking of Auschwitz in literature, Indeed she even calls for it, even if this writing cannot lead to anything but mourning and despair.*? Admittedly, at a later date, Adomo also concedes to the arts a non-barbaric possibility of utopian existence: as fulfillment of art in real life.** For Arendt, however, History (if memorable) consists of disruptions. These are in the first instance merely “Stoff-der Geschichte” (the material of History) aid only become historical by their poetical transformation.** This is summarized by Thomas Schestag: “erst die erzahlten Geschichten sind Geschichte.” (only told stories are History).** And he develops Arendt’s thought: Geschichtlich ist erst das Gedicht. Und zwar einzig und allein Jenes Gedicht, das der geschehenen Unterbrechung. entspricht. Diese Entsprechung geschieht nicht dadurch, dain konventionellen sprachlichen Foren von _unerhorten auSerordentlichen Begebenheiten erzihit und berichtet_ wird, sondem die Entsprechung geschieht—entsprechender—als Einbruch eines unerhorten sprachlichen Artefakts in den geldufigen pragmatischen Umgang mit Sprache. [it is the poem that is historical. More precisely, what is historical is solely that poem which corresponds to the disruption that came to pass. This correspondence does not ‘occur by letting conventional speech forms narrate and report169 unheard-of, extraordinary events, but instead occurs—dis- respondingly—as an irruption of an unheard-of speech artefact into the current pragmatic practice of language. Schestag 52) The disruption therefore has to take place also in the form of speech in order to break through the habitual, from the fringes. It is precisely because it is unheard-of that it creates remembrance, and consequently History. Does this not take us too far from Aichinger’s poem, which, after all, does not narrate a historical event? It is only at this point, it seems to me, that we really encounter the poem, because it is precisely in its inaccessibility that it represents a rupture with the “pragmatic handling of language”. It is by this rejection of clearly situable communication that it achieves the historical disruption that Arendt called for. It provokes thought because it cannot easily be taken in. Only as such a poem does it do justice to what must be narrated as something unheard-of. Such a procedure is historically conditioned, of course, and this fact hhas been acknowledged. The Gottingen research group on Group 47 refers to Walter Holleret’s preface to his important anthology Transit of the year 1956, where he identifies the most individual expression with the most objective one, Hollerer explains this claim by the fact that the “truth of the lyrical moment” in its essentially present nature clashes with the rigid structures of time. The poem therefore is a naming of tendencies which have not yet risen above the threshold of consciousness.* The research group comments on this:We same off to xt] 170 Gerade indem also die Lyrik am utopischen Anspruch von Literatur festhielt, wurde sie in dem Mabe in die Abstraktion gedrangt, in dem die Gesellschaft sich verschloB. Die Losung vom Gegenstandlichen, von der deutbaren Metapher, wurde begriffon als ein Akt der Befreiung. [Precisely-by-maintaining the utopian claim of literature, poetry was forced into abstraction to huch-an)extent that society closed itself fay. The dissociation from the conerete, from the interpretable metaphor, was understood as an act of liberation,” Poetry then was the most appropriate means of breaking up the system, it represented resistance to the freezing-over of society—which also explains its blossoming in the fifties. Aichinger’s poetry is consequently genuinely radical in its historicity, as Aichinger has always claimed for it, and this fact can now be acknowledged. The Gottingen research group sums up: Esoterik, Verweigerung von Kommunikation durch monologische Lyrik, Rickzug in Abstraktion und Entgrenzung der Méglichkeiten von Sprache ~ eine radikalere Keitik an der alltaglichen Realitat durch Literatur mochte in den finfviger Jahren kaum méglich gewesen sein.m1 [Esotericism, refusal to communicate in monologic poetry, Totreat into abstraction and delimitation of the possibilities of language—a more radical criticism of everyday reality by literature was hardly possible in the fifties. 111) This shows that poetic speech can be eminently political. Schestag stresses this: Das Ziel sprachlichen Handelns, Inbegriff des Politischen, ist die Poietisierung des handelnden Worts, die Risse durchs Milieu kommunikativen Handelns legt, weil sie das Wort aus allen Handlungs-, Gebrauchs- und —Verweiszusammenhéingen herauslést und zum Erinnerungsstiick verdichtet, [The goal of speech action, which is the epitome of the political, is the poeticization of the word in action, that sends fault-lines through the milieu of communicative action by dissociating the word from all correlations—of action, of usage, and of reference—and condenses it to a work of remembrance. Schestag 87] This protest against the dominant discourse, however, also implies the danger of becoming incomprehensible and detached—and therefore placed poetry in a paradoxical position. It is precisely in its commitment that it could be perceived as mere “Sprachartistik” (verbal gymnastics).**172 Sebld les no}, Usb) nous, been taleeduced This is elles ebevy This is not a simple dismissal of W.G, Sebald’s criticism of postwar literature. In opposition to all tendencies to, deny the experienced horrors, Sebald represents the ideal of truthful and unpretentious sobriety. Poetry is opposition, is being unexpected. Being unheard-of is an essential element of the poetic. As long as this stands in opposition to the standard discourse of its era, it can clearly also take the form of a crystal-clear realism. And as every era is multilayered, there is no room for Manichaeism in respect of the poetio-Sebald-affirms Umgekehrt ist die Herstellung ‘von’ dsthetischen oder Pseudoisthetischen Effelten aus den Trimmer einer vernichteten Welt ein Verfahren, mit dem die Literatur sich ihrer Berechtigung entzieht, [On the other hand, the creation of aesthetical or pseudo- aesthetical effects out of the rubble of a destroyed world is a procedure by which literature withdraws from its zone of legitimacy,]” This objection has to be taken seriously, but it does not acknowledge the legitimacy of placing another form of real life in opposition to reality —- of creating something ~~ which in the final instance is what poetics signifies: ppoiein (making). And therefore itis precisely this so-called privatist poetry that has the potential to act on reality, to shape it instead of suffering it; far from being a denial of reality, itis the reverse.173, Aichinger’s privatist poetry consequently does not turn its back on reality, it is rather a way of confronting the affirmation of the cultural industry that destroys culture. This makes it a genuine commitment against the confusion of the time, a commitment that, in its situation in cultural history, can take place only from a fringe position, in an exchange with the ‘mountains, Notes "This chapter has been published in a German version as “Am Rand Misstrauen als Engagement in der Poetik Ilse Aichingers,” in: flse Aichinger. Misstrauen als Engagement, ed. I. Rabenstein-Michel, Fr. Rétif, E, Tunner, 37-52 (Warzburg: Konigshausen & Neumann, 2009). ? In Gottfried Benn, Doppelleben, in Sdimtliche Werke, Bd. V, Stuttgarter Ausgabe, ed. Gerhard Schuster (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1991), 87, 91-94, 97. All translations in this essay are by myself * Ise Aichinger, “Aufruf zum MiBtrauen,” in Ilse Aichinger. Materialien zu Leben und Werk, ed. Samuel Moser (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1990), 16-17. “Ilse Aichinger, Verschenkier Rat. Gedichte, Taschenbuchwerkausgabe in acht Banden, ed, Richard Reichensperger (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1991 [2001)), 13. All Aichinger quotations refer to this edition and will subsequently be integrated in the text. * Inher study of Aichinger’s poetry (Sprache als Widerstand. Anmerkungen zu lise Aichingers Lyrikband ‘Verschenkter Rat’ (Frankfurt am Main: Peter