Austria at war as told by women’s fiction

Doris Brehm’s Eine Frau zwischen gestern und morgen (A Woman between Yesterday and Tomorrow) was published again on April 1, 2025, 70 years after its original debut. Alys George considers the novel to be among the best of those written by Austrian women between 1945 and 1955, and it is one of more than a dozen novels her current book project, The Rubble Women, brings to light.

George, assistant professor of German studies, described changing attitudes toward gender and memory in literature about World War II and its aftermath in a recent Clayman Institute Faculty Research Fellows talk. Brehm’s novel is the first title put out by a new publishing series dedicated to forgotten women writers.

George’s current book project will undoubtedly guide conversations about memory, national myth-making, and literary visibility in years to come. The Rubble Women is about fiction writing by women during the decade of Allied occupation of Austria. All of them described in painful detail the years between the “Anschluss” and 1945 from the perspective of the home front. “[My framing] forces us to undertake a [literary] canon revision that results in a more inclusive and ultimately more ... accurate picture of what was actually going on in the literary field in postwar Austria and Germany,” she said. 

Writers like Brehm got caught between the urge to document widespread destruction and nostalgic yearning for prewar normalcy. They wrote about their girlhoods that had been interrupted, the burdens of motherhood in war, the possibilities of resistance to fascism, and the consequences of exile, “taking on the historical record in fiction,” George said. 

They published during the same years that saw the solidification of Austria’s “victim” narrative, which sought to absolve the nation of responsibility for National Socialism and Nazi crimes. Their novels together complicate the victimhood-and-heroism binary that we otherwise expect from war literature, offering nuanced representations of persecution, resistance, survival, moral compromise, complicity, solidarity, and recovery. 

Large German publishing houses remained out of reach for most writers between 1945 and 1955, both politically and practically. Smaller Austrian presses between U.S.- or Soviet-controlled sectors faced distribution challenges. Paper shortages across Germany and Austria limited literary circulation and forced difficult choices about what got printed. At stake was literary survival and cultural memory itself.

The Rubble Women embraces a deliberately fragmented, “rubble-like” structure. Its chapters are organized around motifs such as ruins, children, resistance, regionalism, and paper politics. George explained that this form mirrors the disjointed realities and dire material conditions her authors experienced and portrayed.