Petras Aufzeichnungen, oder Konzept einer Jugend nach dem Diktat der Zeit by Paula Schlier

Abstract

Reviewed by: Petras Aufzeichnungen, oder Konzept einer Jugend nach dem Diktat der Zeit by Paula Schlier Laura McLary Paula Schlier. Petras Aufzeichnungen, oder Konzept einer Jugend nach dem Diktat der Zeit. 1926. Edited by Annette Steinsiek and Ursula A. Schneider. Otto Müller Verlag, 2018. 206 pp. Cloth, €22.00. Several years ago, when I was researching an article on the image of the sister in Georg Trakl’s poetry, I discovered the writing of Paula Schlier. More than ten years after Trakl’s death in 1914, Schlier became a close confidant to Ludwig von Ficker, editor of the culture magazine Der Brenner, the most important venue for Trakl’s poetry during his lifetime. After World War I, Ficker promoted Paula Schlier as an emerging talent indicative of a radical postwar shift toward a Christian and socially and morally responsible writing. In my research, Schlier appeared in the letters of Ficker’s inner circle as more of an irritant than the “feminine genius” Ficker believed her to be. A whiff of scandal was apparent in their critiques of Schlier, who, as the research by Steinsiek and Schneider confirms, was pregnant with the child of the older, married Ficker in 1929, which likely led to her conversion to Catholicism in 1932. The Brenner circle’s rejection of Schlier colored my less-than-enthusiastic reading of her odd, dreamlike description of a meeting with Trakl’s dead sister, Grete, in a short prose text, “Die Welt der Erscheinungen” (1927; The world of appearances). The new edition of Schlier’s Petras Aufzeichnungen (Petra’s chronicles), edited and with commentary by Annette Steinsiek and Ursula Schneider in collaboration with the research institute of the Brenner Archive in Innsbruck, brings a welcome reintroduction to Schlier as an astute, exacting writer. The strengths of the republication of this nearly hundred-year-old work by Schlier are broadly threefold: the (re)discovery of a work that received strong attention when it was first published but then was quickly forgotten; detailed editorial annotations; and an overview of Schlier’s life and the context of her writing, including an analysis of Petras Aufzeichnungen. [End Page 131] Current-day readers are introduced to a writer who chronicled significant social and historical shifts of the early twentieth century. The nine chapters, introduced by a dreamlike foreword, correspond to Schlier’s biography, beginning with her work as a nurse in a military hospital at the end of World War I and ending with her return home after working as a secretary for an abusive employer in Austria. The best-known chapter, “In der Redaktion der Patrioten” (In the editorial office of the patriots) chronicles Schlier’s undercover investigation while working as a secretary at the Völkischer Beobachter (Populist observer) in Munich, including her experiences of Hitler’s Beer Hall Putsch on 9 November 1923. Schlier’s perspective as a woman from the middle class attempting to establish herself in the largely masculine world of journalism allows her to unobtrusively observe the world around her because “Eine Maschinschreiberin halten sie ja nicht für fähig, Wesen und Wert des Nationalsozialismus verstehen zu können, und so würden sie mich, selbst wenn ich ihnen opponieren wollte, für ungefährlich erklären” (71). (They don’t believe a typist is capable of understanding the nature and value of National Socialism, and so they would declare me harmless even if I intended to oppose them.) Yet clearly Schlier’s writing did have a sting, judging by the reaction of the editors of the Völkischer Beobachter when Petras Aufzeichnungen appeared, as Steinsiek and Schneider document with quotations from contemporary reviews. The disturbing published response to Schlier is misogynist and threatening, leading to her short imprisonment by the Gestapo in 1942, also thoroughly documented in the editors’ biography of Schlier. Indeed, the editors’ careful research of contemporary sources and what few letters remain provide one of the most comprehensive overviews of Schlier’s life. Additionally, the editors situate Schlier within the context of works by her better-known contemporaries, such as Vicki Baum and Irmgard Keun, as well as contemporary topics such as the experience of working women in the post–World War...