Marianne Fritz may represent a limit-case of the blurring of life into literature. The small apartment she shared with her partner in Vienna’s 7th District, now preserved for visitors, is lined floor-to-ceiling with bookshelves, map cases, and card files; there are no accommodations for guests or relaxation, virtually no concessions to the demands of ordinary existence. When her writing went well, she would not leave her work room for weeks at a time; it was only when she had elected to take a “philosophical pause for thought” that she would discover what season it was. In fact her labor transcended the possibilities of a lone author, and she engaged her partner to toil in the archives, bringing home to her mimeographs of war correspondence, newspaper reports, ministerial records, and battle plans. “Going out was my job,” Dünser recollects. “At first she would research with me in the War Archives in the Stiftgasse. We were to look through 30,000 photos. Then she said to me: Otto, you do this.”
It is possible that a fictional topos as dense and expansive as Fritz’s is inconceivable outside of such isolating circumstances; that like a phantom limb, such imagined worlds may arise only after conventional reality has been hewn away. To say this is not to reduce Fritz’s work to aleatory hallucinations or to question her artistic integrity. On the contrary, just as Rimbaud argued for the systematic derangement of the senses, Fritz’s subjection of herself to the conditions necessary to reconceive the situation of war in all its staggering complexity must be considered a conscious, programmatic gesture.
In Naturgemäβ III, her work begins to revolve around Der Giftpilz, Ernst Heimer’s notorious anti-Semitic children’s book published by Nazi propagandist Julius Streicher. Reversing the text’s original schema, it is Nazism rather than Judaism that becomes the poison mushroom growing in Austria’s soil. For the writer and critic Klaus Kastberger, this episode leads to the essential question for an understanding of Fritz’s oeuvre: in what does the subjective experience of such a disaster as National Socialism consist? Paradoxically, the first person or free indirect approach is inadequate, for inner experience obscures the historical and social conditions by which it is determined. To Fritz, fidelity was to be found instead in the minute recreation of a society down to its very fundaments, and to this end, nothing was irrelevant. The purpose of imagination became less the fashioning of persons and events from whole cloth than the rectification of those gaps in official documentation through which the lives of so many at society’s bottom ranks had filtered:
what moves me are the “blank spaces,” the “not established,” the “crossed out,” the “unmentioned,” the “irrelevant,” the “superfluous,” the “redundant,” the fact that so much “information” is actually lived through […]3
Fritz’s writing has been described as a counter-history or a writing against history, but it is a counter-historiography as well, a supersession of the Great Man Theory (and the notion of free will underlying it) through a vision of historical events overwhelming their radically passive subjects. It is not, for all that, lacking in moral force. Fritz, who was from a humble background and only came to pursue literature after completing vocational studies to prepare her for secretarial work, shows an all-consuming contempt for the structures of class oppression. Indeed, her entire oeuvre works toward a vindication of the lives of the poor, men and especially women, who were expelled from the dignified arenas of Austrian society in the first half of the twentieth century and crushed like roaches under the millstone of history. Freedom is not absent amid the duress of time past, but remains in the artwork as an imaginative horizon: the space of the dreaming mind that cannot but turn away from its own degradation, and the compulsion to defiance that imbues it like a calling.
— Adrian Nathan West
1 Naturally, or, more precisely, in accordance with nature.
2 That is, the Null family, residing in Number 0, Null Street, in the town of Nowhere.
3 From a letter from Marianne Fritz to her editor included in the volume Was soll man da machen.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Marianne Fritz (1948–2007) was an Austrian novelist. She lived most of her adult life in a small apartment in Vienna’s 7th District, devoted entirely to her writing and dependent on small subsidies and occasional prize money. Her first book, The Weight of Things, marked the beginning of an ambitious cycle of novels with the overarching title of Festung, or “The Fortress,” comprising Das Kind der Gewalt und die Sterne der Romani, Dessen Sprache du nicht verstehst, and the gargantuan Naturgemäß, the third volume of which she was preparing at the time of her death.
ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
Adrian Nathan West is the author of The Aesthetics of Degradation as well as the translator of numerous works of contemporary European literature. He lives between Spain and the United States with the cinema critic Beatriz Leal Riesco.