Aichinger, Ilse.

Aichinger, Ilse

(1921 - ) Austrian novelist and writer of short stories and radio plays. Although only in peripheral contact with the Nazi terror, she experienced the limbo of fear and hopelessness in which she and other dissenters lived. In the first few years after World War II, she abandoned her study of medicine to complete her first novel, Die gro [beta] ere Hoffnung (1948; translated as Herod's Children, 1963), which deals with the hopes and fears of Jewish children in Hitler ' s Reich. Her later writing experimented with new narrative forms: dialogues and radio plays, some of which have been translated in Ilse Aichinger: Selected Short Stories and Dialogue (1966). The main motif in all her later writing is concern about and exaltation of human values in a world that increasingly disregards them.