'Places are Points of Departure': Thomas Wild's great essay invites us to discover Ilse Aichinger anew
'Doesn't everything have to be discovered again and again in order to continue to exist?,' Ilse Aichinger wrote in 1949 in her early text 'Reise nach England'. Her twin sister had escaped the Nazis through the Kindertransport to England, and Ilse Aichinger had survived in Vienna. This historical moment left its mark on Aichinger's entire work: chance survival after mass murder, the journey across the sea to her beloved sister and Dover, which lies 'tenaciously and on the very edge' of the English coast.
Thomas Wild has not written a biography. What he does instead is much simpler and more beautiful - he reads. He reads the famous texts sensitively and accurately, he reads unknown archival materials, and he reads the moving correspondence the author conducted with her sister. What emerges is a surprisingly up-to-date poetics of multilingualism and the ethics of hospitality. Just as Ilse Aichinger travels to England, her texts, too, repeatedly cross borders, along the edges, and, beyond this, let foreign words in.
