It is easy to define Ilse Aichinger by a single novel. Published in 1948, Herod’s Children depicts, from the perspective of persecuted children, a world in which menace and imagination intertwine. The book is central to her work – but not representative of all the paths Aichinger took as a writer. The tenth anniversary of her death, on 11 November 2026, offers an opportunity to look beyond this familiar title towards her many different ways of working with language.
To remember Aichinger only as a novelist is to overlook a writer of short forms, voices and interruptions. She wrote stories and poems, dialogues and radio plays. Rather than expanding a narrative world, she repeatedly turned to rupturing, compressing or shifting it. This does not make the shorter texts minor works. Instead, it changes what might be considered the centre of her oeuvre.
A story that moves backwards
Before the novel came the experience of Nazi persecution. Aichinger was born in Wien in 1921; her mother was Jewish. During the Nazi era, the family was unable to emigrate. Her grandmother and other relatives were deported and murdered; Aichinger’s twin sister managed to escape to England in 1939. These biographical facts provide essential background, but not a template that can explain every turn in her writing.
Beyond the novel, too, Aichinger found a form that unsettles familiar rules of storytelling. In 1952, she received the Gruppe 47 Prize for Mirror Story. The story proceeds backwards, reversing the customary direction of a life story. This is more than a formal conceit: the ordering of time itself becomes the subject, and reading requires us to suspend our expectations of cause, consequence and closure.
Voices, pauses, countervoices
Aichinger began writing for radio in 1953 with Knöpfe (Buttons). The form offered her more than a stage for dialogue. Voices can fail to connect, repeat themselves or fall silent at a boundary; what remains unspoken acquires weight. In her later radio plays and dialogue texts, too, language is never a transparent tool that simply reproduces reality. It is a material whose inadequacy becomes audible.
This scepticism also shapes her short prose. Aichinger pares things down, leaves transitions open and places everyday terms in unfamiliar company. Her texts do not necessarily call for a hidden message to be uncovered at the end. Rather, they keep understanding in motion: a word can sound familiar and at the same time become strange. This is not mere obscurity, but close attention to how language orders reality – and how it fails to do so.
The novel as a beginning, not a boundary
In 1978, Aichinger published a volume of poetry, Verschenkter Rat (Squandered Advice). Poetry does not stand apart from prose and radio drama in her work; an engagement with rhythm, pauses and shifts in meaning connects the genres. Her later writing in short forms is equally important. After a lengthy break from publishing, she returned with columns between 2001 and 2005, which were collected in book form. Here, observation, memory and concise turns of thought enter into a different relationship from that found in the early novel.
An act of remembrance that declares the novel the sole point of entry thus narrows precisely what remains remarkable about Aichinger: her persistence in using changing forms to test what can and cannot be said. Radio plays, poems and short prose are not peripheral additions. They reveal a writer whose work cannot be contained within a single narrative – and whose precision often begins where language pauses.
Original reviewed by the editors · 31 October 2026
