Résumé
"Who still has the illusion of being able to turn the pages of their life forwards or backwards?"Reading old photo albums with Ilse AichingerIlse Aichinger's literary work can only be read against the backdrop of the European upheavals of the 20th century. The life of the young ‘half-Jew’ in Nazi Vienna, the exile of her twin sister in England, the deportation of several relatives: all these momentous events had a strong influence on the author. Her estate contains numerous as yet unpublished materials, including her diary and her correspondence with her twin sister during the war years, manuscripts, drawings, photographs and photo albums that document an eventful life. This paper will explore the question of how such documents from private archives can also shed new light on her literary work. What do old photographs from childhood tell us that would be relevant for the interpretation of the texts? How can all these archive materials be analysed from a literary perspective, especially the photographs and the five photo albums contained in the German Literature Archive in Marbach?These questions have preoccupied not only us researchers, but also Ilse Aichinger herself. At the beginning of the 21st century, the then eighty-year-old poet picked up her old photo albums again, perhaps initially in the (illusory)) hope of being able to ‘turn the pages of [her] life forwards or backwards’. However, she did not content herself with retracing her life story and illustrating the resulting retelling with pictures from her old albums.Based on a case study, we will see how the examination of old pictures gave rise to completely new texts, ‘flashes of a life’, which in their radical nature go beyond the framework of familiar childhood memories and conventional autobiographies. How does the octogenarian, who experienced the horrors of the 20th century at first hand, view the still unsuspecting girl in the early photo albums? How does the writer enter into dialogue with her young self, who, together with her twin sister, grins into the camera as if she were looking at her from the old photographs? This exploration of Ilse Aichinger’s photographs and handwritten material will allow us to follow her rediscovery of her old albums and, in so doing, to trace the way in which her act of reading transforms, little by little, into a very personal writing experience that slowly comes into its own.