It wasn’t until the end of the 1980s that German scholar Ilse Helbich – when she was 65 years old at the time – began writing prose. She died on January 26, 2024 at the ripe old age of 100 in her hometown of Vienna. This was announced by the publisher Droschl.
27 January 2024, 08:40
“Her texts captivate with the inimitable sharpness of observation and naming, whether she describes everyday life, life in old age or the Vienna of her childhood. A great calm and clarity of mind is a prerequisite for such precise, vivid and intense images,” the publishing house paid tribute to its long-time author.
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Vienna’s City Councilor for Culture Veronica Kaup-Hasler (SPÖ) also highlighted the special style of the now deceased last fall on her 100th birthday: “As an acrobat of memory, you stretch a strong rope into the past, on which you seem to dance effortlessly.”
A whole century
After all, Ilse Helbich’s horizon of experience spanned an entire, eventful century. The future author was born on October 22, 1923 in Vienna, where she studied German. She worked as a journalist on the biography of Ludwig Wittgenstein, wrote numerous radio collages for the ORF and columns for “Die Presse”. Her late career as an author was reflected in the books “Schwalbenschrift” (2003), “The Old Days” (2004), “Actual Status. Seven Stories from Late Life” (2007) and “Strange Stories” (2010).
“The extraordinary and anti-cyclical biography turned Ilse Helbich into a writer late, but all the more productively. With her sensitive, multi-colored narrative voice, she has always succeeded in linking weighty and existential topics in a touching way and with a certain lightness,” said Secretary of State for Culture Andrea Mayer (Greens) the deceased. “Her death is a great loss for her readers and for all of contemporary Austrian literature.”
In her novel “The House” (2009), she processed the story of an old house she purchased in the center of Schönberg am Kamp in 1985, which she had renovated and where she has since lived alternately with the federal capital. In 2012 the volume ” Grenzland Zwischenland. Explorations ” was published, cautious reports of the drastic changes that age brings, of life with increasing blindness, of the fight for sovereignty over one’s own word and one’s own memory.
In “Vineta” (2013) she remembered her childhood in Vienna in many short chapters. In prose miniatures, images, sounds and smells of yesteryear are conjured up, from the screeching of tram brakes to the beating of carpets. In 2017, her collection of early and late poems “Im Walking” was published, which also addresses increasing immobility and other changes in old age. It said: “What needed to be said has been said. The other thing that is now evades the words. Deep inside there is now a melody that refuses to be sung.”
About dreaming, searching and finding
But these were not Ilse Helbich’s last words: in 2020, the volume “This Side. Collected Stories” collected a look back at her prose work, in which she also found unpublished material. At the almost biblical age of 97, she finally presented “Thought Games about Serenity,” in which she brought some highly dramatic memories to light: from severe pneumonia as a four-year-old to being impaled by a large piece of wood as a thirteen-year-old. “And I still don’t know whether I have become a serene old woman,” she writes there.
The volume “Elsewhere. On Dreaming, Searching and Finding” finally followed in 2022, in which she combined memories, self-reflections, philosophical sequences and interspersed “protocols” of thoughts. And shortly before the 100th birthday, Droschl Verlag published “How Life Plays” in which Helbich collected three literary village stories.
Text: APA/Red.