Situated at the convergence of literary studies, cultural history, and memory studies, this project recovers an important chapter of German-language literary history. It investigates how both well-known and long-overlooked Austrian female writers retooled the Zeitroman, a socially and politically engaged genre, by destabilizing the boundaries between historical documentary, fiction, and autobiography. In contrast to the highly masculine writing that dominated the German literary scene in the immediate aftermath of World War II under the keywords »Kahlschlagliteratur« or »Literatur der Stunde Null«, I center women’s experiences of wartime and postwar persecution, exile, and suffering. Rather than seeking to rebuild the nation through literature, these women captured in painful detail the ruinous bequest of the previous decade.

Alys George is Assistant Professor of German Studies at Stanford University. Her book, The Naked Truth: Viennese Modernism and the Body(University of Chicago Press, 2020), was awarded both the Modern Language Association’s Scaglione Prize for Studies in Germanic Languages and Literatures and the German Studies Association’s Best Book Prize in Literature and Cultural Studies. It was also shortlisted for the Laura Shannon Prize in Contemporary European Studies and the Waterloo Centre for German Studies Book Prize. George has published and taught widely on 19th- through 21st-century Austrian and German literature, visual culture, and cultural history, with a special emphasis on modernism and the postwar period. Her excellence in graduate and undergraduate teaching has been recognized with Stanford University’s Centennial Teaching Award and New York University’s Golden Dozen Teaching Award.