Linz: Stories from the Edge
Book Presentation at the Leipzig Book Fair, March 12th-15th, 2009
Five Upper Austrian authors confront Linz’s margins, limits and borders—artificially created ones and those that have been engendered by history—from multifarious points of view: from the perspectives of the excluders and the excluded, the winners and losers of political, social, cultural, ethical and economic balances of power; from the perspectives of those who have been disadvantaged or privileged by the ministrations of the welfare state; from the perspectives of immigrants and emigrants; and from the perspective of cultural and geopolitical adjacency to neighbors in the Czech Republic, Bavaria and all along the Danube.Author/translator Erich Hackl pursues the traces of historical events that occurred between 1917 and 1945. The point of departure is Tschofenigweg, a street named after Gisela Tschofenig who was murdered by the SS in late April 1945. In Linz’s Ebelsberg neighborhood, the way leads to the north and then west before ending in a cul-de-sac.
Anna Mitgutsch, likewise an author and translator, has collected vignettes from everyday life in diaries she has kept since her days as a schoolgirl in Linz. Like photos, these observations jog her memory, reviving reminiscences about people hardly anyone recalls anymore but who nevertheless left their mark on this city.
Walter Wippersberg, author, theatrical director, filmmaker and photographic artist, deals with reputation and legacy. In his research, he has gone beyond the realm of what’s been made known heretofore about two Linz authors, Franz Kain and Karl Wiesinger, their lives and deeds in the 1960s and ‘70s when Linz was still a steel town in the true sense of the word.
Returning to Linz after a 20-year absence spent abroad, author Margit Schreiner hardly recognized the city in which she spent her childhood. Excursions take her to the sites she now calls into question: Are her parents’ ashes really buried in St. Martin’s Forest Cemetery? Out in Hörsching, besides the airport, does a notorious reform school actually exist there, and did Günther Nenning and a handful of ‘68ers really demonstrate for the inmates’ release 38 years ago? And who actually is buried in Hitler’s grandparents’ grave in the Leonding Cemetery?
Ludwig Laher unmasks images—those held up as a model to emulate and those that prove to be fraudulent. For instance, Franz Stelzhamer, the man often called Austria and southern Germany’s greatest dialect poet. In 1952, one of his works was declared the official anthem of the Province of Upper Austria, and one of the monuments to him stands in Linz’s Volksgarten. Who was this Stelzhamer in reality?
Idea/Concept // Alfred Pittertschatscher
Collaborators // ORF – Austrian Broadcasting Company’s Upper Austria Regional Studio and Linz09
Erich Hackl was born in 1954 in Steyr. He is a writer and literary translator. After graduating from high school, he studied German and Spanish language & literature at the Universities of Salzburg, Salamanca and Málaga. In 1977, he became a lecturer in German language and Austrian literature at the Complutense University of Madrid. From 1979 to 1983, he taught German and Spanish in Vienna; from 1981 to 1990, at the University of Vienna’s Department of Romance Languages. He has been a free-lance author since 1983.
Anna Mitgutsch was born in 1948 in Linz. She studied German and English language & literature at the University of Salzburg, earning her doctorate in 1974 with a dissertation on English lyric poetry. From 1975 to 1978, she was an assistant professor in the University of Innsbruck’s Department of American Language & Literature. Her teaching career then took her to England, where she taught German language & literature at Hull University and the University of East Anglia, and then to Seoul, South Korea. From 1979 to 1985, she lived in the USA and taught at Amherst College in Massachusetts, Sarah Lawrence College in New York, and at Simmons College and Tufts University in Boston. Following the publication of her first novel, “Die Züchtigung” (Punishment), she returned to Austria. She is now a free-lance author living alternately in Linz and Boston. Since 1974, she has written numerous articles and works of literary scholarship on contemporary English-language and German-language literature.
Walter Wippersberg was born in 1945 in Steyr. He is a writer, director, filmmaker and photographic artist. He lives in Losenstein, Upper Austria and in Vienna. Wippersberg studied theatrical arts, art history and psychology in Vienna. From 1965 to 1970, he was a set designer and director with various small theater companies. Since 1990, he has taught screenwriting and dramaturgy at the Vienna Film Academy.
Margit Schreiner was born in 1953 in Linz. After graduating from high school, she studied German language & literature and psychology in Salzburg. From 1977 to 1980, she lived in Tokyo, where she began to write. In addition to short stories, the free-lance author creates radio plays and dramas. Beginning in 1983, she lived in Salzburg, Paris and Berlin; she moved back to Austria in 2000. Since then, she has also published numerous essays and other contributions to newspapers, magazines and anthologies, as well as forewords to books by Mela Hartwig and Adalbert Stifter.
Ludwig Laher was born in 1955 in Linz, and studied German and English language & literature and classical philology. After completing training as a teacher in 1979, he joined the faculty of a Salzburg high school and also taught classes at the Universities of Salzburg and Klagenfurt. Until 1998, Ludwig Laher worked in parallel fashion as both a teacher and an author; since then, he’s devoted himself to writing. His publications include prose, poetry, essays, radio plays, screenplays, translations and scholarly works, for which he has received numerous literature prizes and grants. His books have been translated into Spanish, English, French, Croatian and Japanese. Ludwig Laher is a member of the board of directors of the International Network for Cultural Diversity and of the Austrian writers’ guild IGAA, and a member of the Council for German Orthography and of the Graz Congress of Authors. From 2005 to 2007, Laher was president of the European Council of Artists.
