Wilkes’s Austrian scholarship feted

German scholar and international prize-winning translator Geoff Wilkes has notched up another milestone.

Gail Wiltshire, whose thesis inspired the project. Picture: Glenn Hunt

University of Queensland German scholar and international prize-winning translator Geoff Wilkes has notched up another milestone in bringing the literary works of 20th-century Austrian writer Ilse Aichinger to the English-speaking world.

Dr Wilkes will launch Film and Fate: Camera Flashes Illuminating a Life on July 16 at the university, accompanied by a dramatic adaptation of the book’s themes.

Eighteen months ago, his English translation of Aichinger’s wartime novel Die Grossere Hoffnung (The Greater Hope) — which has been on the list of the top 100 novels of the 20th century in Germany since 1948 — won the Austrian federal chancellery’s translation prize, a first for an Australian.

Both books are published by leading German publisher Koen­igs­hausen & Neu­mann.

The translation project, which has aroused the interest of German scholars around the world, will be highlighted at a London University symposium in January 2020 to be attended by academics from Berlin, Vienna, Salzburg, Jerusalem, Canada and Britain. Dr Wilkes will give one of the keynote addresses.

The project was triggered five years ago when a UQ honours student learning German under Dr Wilkes, Gail Wiltshire, wrote her thesis on The Greater Hope.

The thesis, awarded first-class honours, with marks of 95 and 98 per cent from external native German-speaking markers, was published as a book in Germany.

Supplemented with 40 pages of interviews with Aichinger’s family and friends, it was entitled A Spatial Reading of Ilse Aichinger’s Novel: Die größere Hoffnung.

Aichinger, who lost many family members in the Holocaust, died two years ago on Remembrance Day 2016 at the age of 95. As with her twin sister Helga Michie, who is still living in London where she escaped on the last kindertransport out of Vienna in July 1939, Aichinger had an intense fascination with the cinema.

Dr Wilkes said Film and Fate, published in German in 2003 when Aichinger was 84, is a collection of film reviews, essays on related subjects and personal reminiscences triggered by the films she saw.

As she describes in the text, the “landscape of film”, for her, was “simultaneously a refuge and a place of distance from one’s own person, of separation from it”. The cinema was “a form of disappearing. You submerge into the darkness, you’re invisible.”

It was also her escape during the war years, which she spent in Vienna in constant danger as a “mischling”, the daughter of an Aryan father and a Jewish-born mother, Dr Berta Aichinger, who had converted to Catholicism before the war.

“I wouldn’t have needed the sign ‘Jews Forbidden’ to make my addiction to the cinema, even my addiction to Nazi films, even more intense,” she wrote in the chapter entitled Getting Used to Goodbyes. “We were still allowed to enter cinemas anyway, as we were only half-Jewish.”

The pieces provide insights into a broad range of places and subjects. These include Laurel and Hardy, Nazi propaganda films and The Third Man, set in Vienna, in which her twin, Helga, had a role.

Aichinger saw it once a week for decades. She was also an avid student of the Bronte sisters’ novels.

The collection is also about Aich­inger’s home city as much as it is about film: “I can only live in Vienna … All the terrible things I’ve experienced, but also the beautiful things, are connected with this city.”