The rebirth of Austrian literature after 1945 has been attributed to Ilse Aichinger and her paradigm-shifting novel The Greater Hope (1948). Aichinger’s text is just one case study from a wider project, which both interrogates and offers a corrective to the canon of postwar German-language literature. Contrary to prevailing literary histories, I offer a constellation of mostly forgotten Austrian novels written by women between 1945 and 1955, which give fictional form to the years 1934/38–45. By refusing silence and escapism, and instead bearing witness to the ruinous bequest of World War II, Aichinger and others undercut widespread, tenacious postwar myths: the “Zero Hour,” the possibility of reconstruction, the impossibility of expression, and the notion of Austrian national “victimhood” among them. These novels record, remember, and resist.
