5 - On the Fringes: Mistrust as Commitment in the Poetics of Ilse Aichinger

Summary

Ilse Aichinger made her first appearance in the German-speaking literary landscape in 1946 with her short prose text Aufruf zum Mißtrauen (Incitement to Mistrust), at the age of twenty-five. 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 Güte unserer Taten! Unserer eigenen Wahrhaftigkeit müssen wir mißtrauen!” (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 Antwort an die literarischen Emigranten (Answer to the Literary Emigrants) of 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; 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.