In the aftermath of Nazism, Ilse Aichinger produced works with a personal yet politically and socially sensitive vision of reality. Her prose and poetry offer conceptual alternatives that the Nazi use of language had all but erased through propaganda, media manipulation, and bureaucratization. Aichinger's writing is profoundly antifascist. Persecution, the loss of loved ones, and the threat of death shaped a gentle, pacifistic, but relentless poetic voice which insists on commemoration of the dead and on honesty as the basis for forgiveness. Aichinger has an affinity with the great Jewish poetesses of the German language--Else Lasker-Schüler, Gertrud Kolmar, and Nelly Sachs--and the most clear-sighted of Jewish children, Anne Frank.

Aichinger was born in Vienna in 1921 to Leopold Aichinger, a Jewish doctor, and Berta Kremer Aichinger, a gentile teacher, and grew up in Vienna and Linz. She graduated from high school in 1939. Classified as a "Half Jew...