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Today the renowned Austrian writer Marlen Haushofer would have been 100 years old. She became particularly famous for her iconic novel “The Wall,” which was later filmed successfully with Martina Gedeck in the title role and is now being read and discussed a lot again in times of coronavirus.
Because loneliness is a problem, here and there. Outside, behind an ominous glass wall, the world in Haushofer seems to have fallen asleep for a thousand years. The narrator now has to manage her daily life with the acquisition of food, cutting firewood and a cat and a hunting dog as the only companions: she is locked up.
Autonomy beyond the “wall”
“The wall” is a narrative of superficial simplicity, allowing for a variety of interpretations: is it science fiction, a Robinsonade, or the parable of depression, or perhaps something else entirely? After all, what the first-person narrator has in “Die Wand” is not just “a room for herself,” as Virginia Woolf has asked women to write, but an entire world in which she learns to assert herself.
Relief of a housewife and mother
In the solitude of a mountain cabin, the city woman is forced to discover how much she can trust her own abilities. When she, in a dramatic climax, discovers a violent intruder, he has to lose his life, she is defending her world at all costs.
In this reading, “The Wall” is a utopia, not an idea of horror, and possibly a relief to Haushofer, who was not only a writer, but also a housewife and mother, and wrote his books on the kitchen table.
Write with a view to “Gewürzkasterl”
In the 2007 biography “I’m Probably Crazy”, literary scholar Daniela Strigl quotes Haushofer’s tongue-in-cheek comment on her writing situation: “I’ll sit in the kitchen and watch the Gewürzkasterl.”
Haushofer distinguished from his contemporaries that novels and short stories of world literature were classified under these narrow circumstances, which in shocking and drastic ways constantly deal with the real or mental escape from a petty bourgeois (married) life.
Earn money with children’s books
And it is a tremendous moment of identification for those working women who, during the curfew, now find themselves in the domestic office in the triple burden of work, housework and childcare, which for a long time they believed to have been overcome. He started writing when he was eight years old, soon with literary aspirations.
Their stories are reminiscent of this era of adult literature breaking lines, where child protagonists experience existential things, such as their childhood memories of “Heaven That Ends Nowhere” or the story of “The Fifth Year.”
Twice state award winner
Haushofer received the Austrian State Literature Prize twice, the second time for the narrative volume “Terrible Loyalty”. The greatest financial successes brought him the books of his children during his life, titles such as “Being good is difficult” and “Being bad is not a pleasure”.
Shortly before her 50th birthday, Haushofer died of blood cancer in 1970, her works were quickly dismissed as “women’s literature.”
The woman writer as a special case
It was only in the 1980s that it was rediscovered and subjected to a feminist reading, some texts were only published posthumously in the early 1990s, including the radio play “A Midnight Play” in the Ullstein series titled “Woman in the literature”. woman writing always thought of as a special case.
Haushofer has been with Ullstein all his life. A working edition has not yet appeared here, as biographer Strigl points out in the “Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung” on the occasion of the anniversary. He missed the year 2020, in which Haushofer’s birthday and his day of death celebrated their 100th and 50th years respectively.
