After Me

The powerful and disturbing stories of legendary postwar Austrian-Jewish writer Ilse Aichinger

When someone pushes the bed out of the hall, when you see that the sky is turning green, and if you want to spare the vicar a funeral sermon, then it is time for you to get up, quietly, as children get up when the morning light starts to glint through the shutters, secretly, so the nurse doesn’t see—and quick!

Like the short fiction of Silvina Ocampo and Bruno Schulz, Aichinger’s chilling and surreal stories will haunt you long after reading. Her deft experiments with the language used and corrupted by the Nazis seem almost to bend time—reversing it and compressing it—so that possible future and past selves live among ghosts, the alienated, and the displaced. Like tricks of the eye, a crime seen from a distance, or an unlikely coincidence, Aichinger’s singular fiction—heavily influenced by cinema—questions the solidity of existence.

A member of the hugely influential Gruppe 47, which included Ingeborg Bachmann, Paul Celan, Uwe Johnson, and Günter Grass, Aichinger is one of the last of her peers to find world fame. Now available in Anne Posten’s deft translation, After Me collects the greatest of Aichinger’s short works.