2024-01-12 20:50:00
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With just three novels, Helena Adler has written herself into contemporary Austrian literature. Now she died at the age of 40.
Snotty, sarcastic and incredibly strong, that’s what the bratty girl is like, who has held up a mirror to the bratty provincial spirits from the very beginning. Where people fight and drink during the week and kneel humbly before the Savior in church at the weekend, only one principle applies to them: survival, at all costs. Especially with the means of language. In order to show the brutalization in the archaic Alpine country and thereby ironically keep it at a distance, she is happy with any caricature.
At dinner, “you pick out the remains of meat between your teeth with a pitchfork, which your mother then puts through the meat grinder to make sausages.” And as if nothing had happened, people sometimes greet each other with “Waidmanns Heil” in front of rancid village bars. “Isn’t this greeting forbidden since the Second World War?” asks the first-person narrator, this shimmering stranger surrounded by darkness.
Helena Adler is dead: a celebrated exceptional talent in contemporary Austrian literature
In “The Infanta wears the parting on the left” (2020) we still take part in the protagonist’s youth, in “Fretten” (2022) she barely grew up. We won’t know what will happen next for her, as her literary creator died on January 5th following a serious illness. At just 40 years old and with three novels under her belt – she made her debut with “Hertz 52” in 2018 – Helena Adler, born Stephanie Helena Prähauser in 1983, was a celebrated exceptional talent in contemporary Austrian literature.
Helena Adler, photographed in March 2023 in Salzburg. © Rudi Gigler / Imago Images
She mastered the malice of Thomas Bernhard as well as the pun of Elfriede Jelinek. Her radical art of language was all regarding exuberance and exaggeration. This was the only way she might pick apart the Biedermeier narrow-mindedness and the fascism swirling in the collective unconscious. Last but not least, her unique sound earned her an invitation to the Bachmann Prize. Due to her health deterioration, she might no longer accept them.
Helena Adler. © imago images/Manfred Siebinger
Helena Adler – her unmistakable voice will remain
When I asked her how she was doing in July 2023, she replied: “I want to live.” Like her Infanta, who had so much of herself in her. She, who grew up in the Salzburg area, she, who became a mother herself and ultimately bestowed this fascination on her heroine. The birth of the child is comparable to the “first remembered snow”, with “wide, star-shaped ice crystals that lighten the darkness under the light of the lantern”.
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Although this poetic tone only becomes apparent at the end of her last work, it indicates the variety of stylistic registers that Adler must have still possessed. So what else might we have expected from her? She mightn’t finish writing. However, her unmistakable voice will remain – in her furious novels! (Björn Hayer)
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