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Centre for the Study of Contemporary Women's Writing (CCWW)

Friederike Mayröcker

Prolific and highly acclaimed Viennese author Friederike Mayröcker was born on 12 December 1924 as the only daughter of Franz Mayröcker, a teacher, and his wife Friederike, housewife and designer of textile objects and dolls. Until the age of ten, Mayröcker spent the summer holidays at the farmhouse of her paternal grandparents in the village of Deinzendorf in the Weinviertel, a region in Lower Austria. The author frequently identified expulsion from this ‘Garden of Eden’ in 1935 as the trigger for her creative writing (the family had to sell the farmhouse for financial reasons).

Friederike Mayröcker, 2015 (Franz Morgenbesser WikiCommons 2.0).jpg
Friederike Mayröcker, 2015 (Photo: Franz Morgenbesser via Wikimedia Commons CC BY-SA 2.0)

Her parents’ precarious financial situation prevented Mayröcker from studying History of Art and German at Vienna University. Instead, in 1941, Mayröcker embarked on a two-year commercial apprenticeship. Her intensive reading of English and French literature and interest in classical music helped her overcome intellectual frustration. In 1942, Mayröcker was enlisted as an assistant secretary for the Luftwaffe. She attended English-language courses at a private school in the evenings and passed the state examination in English in 1945. After the war, Mayröcker started working as an English teacher in Viennese secondary schools. Due to her family's continuing precarious financial situation, Mayröcker maintained this profession until 1969, when she took the plunge and started earning her living as a freelance author.

The beginnings of Mayröcker’s writing date back to 1939. Her own reports on when, where, and how she began to write are highly contradictory. What is certain, however, is that she would continue writing for the rest of her life. She made her debut in 1946 with poems in the new literary journal Plan. This small-scale, short-lived journal, in which other trailblazing post-war authors published (notably Paul Celan) sought to connect young Austrian authors with the historical avant-garde and modernist literature, especially the French Surrealists. In the same period, Mayröcker made the acquaintance of Hans Weigel and his circle of more conservative authors, as well as of Andreas Okopenko and the progressive future members of the Wiener Gruppe. At the 1954 Innsbrucker Jugendkulturwochen, Mayröcker met the poet Ernst Jandl. The date marked the beginning of an intense and lifelong partnership between two artists who differed greatly in their poetics and posture, and which lasted until Jandl’s death in 2000.

1956 saw the publication of Mayröcker’s first book-length volume of prose texts, Larifari. Ein konfuses Buch [Airy Fairy. A Confused Book]. She published some of her ‘free’ or ‘total’ poems in the series rot (1964), published by Max Bense, the Stuttgart theoretician of concrete poetry, which foregrounds the visual and acoustic aspects of language. Literary journals played an important part in this phase of Mayröcker’s career, as for many authors in post-war Austria and she regularly published in the influential manuskripte, protokolle, and neue texte.

The German institutional context would also become increasingly important in the following years. Rowohlt and Luchterhand Verlag, both dedicated to new Austrian literature, provided Mayröcker with opportunities for publication. Rowohlt published Tod durch Musen. Poetische Texte [Death by Muses. Poetic Texts], an anthology with poems spanning a period over twenty years in 1966, followed by two prose anthologies, Minimonsters Traumlexikon. Texte in Prosa [Minimonster’s Dream Lexicon. Texts in Prose] in 1968 and Fantom Fan [Phantom Fan] in 1971. Luchterhand published the next volume, Arie auf tönernen Füßen. Metaphysisches Theater [Aria on Clay Feet. Metaphysical Theatre] in 1972, as well as je ein umwölkter gipfel. erzählung [with each clouded peak. short-story] in 1973. Mayröcker left Luchterhand in 1975 mainly for political reasons (she did not agree with its explicit leftist orientation), and has published with Suhrkamp ever since. Her motivation for switching is also reflected in her poetics: in contrast to her fellow Luchterhand authors, Mayröcker did not define her poetics as a form of resistance against the restorative Austrian cultural politics.

During this period, Mayröcker gained recognition in another medium: the radio play. This move aligned with the growing popularity of the radiophonic medium at the time. Fünf Mann Menschen [Five Man Humanity] (1971), co-authored with Ernst Jandl, received the Hörspielpreis der Kriegsblinden, a renowned award for the genre of the radio play. In the next ten years, Mayröcker would write eighteen radio plays on her own and four more with Jandl. Most of these texts were commissioned by prominent radio studios that were, at the time, committed to radio plays and acoustic art. For example, Westdeutscher Rundfunk, Südwestfunk, and Bayerischer Rundfunk provided the opportunity to experiment with the new medium of stereophony and, on a more mundane level, to earn more money than with printed publications. Mayröcker was particularly drawn to this medium because of the relationship between language, sound, and acoustic experience, and she continued to write for radio and to authorise radiophonic adaptations of her texts.

Quitting her teaching job in 1969 (the same year as Jandl) eventually allowed Mayröcker to fully concentrate on her activities as a writer. This turning point in her career provided the momentum for her impressive literary output, resulting in numerous volumes of both poetry and prose. It also facilitated the creation of a stronger artistic network in the following decades, with long lecture tours abroad (to the USA, the Soviet Union, France, and Italy), longer stays in Berlin (in 1973 and 1993), and regular attendance at initiatives such as the yearly Bielefelder Colloquium Neue Poesie. She also embarked on an increasing number of collaborative projects, especially creating literary dialogues with painters and, to a lesser extent, filmmakers. In 1988, the Friederike Mayröcker archives were established in the Vienna Library in the city’s Town Hall.

Until the early 1970s Mayröcker’s literature was highly experimental in nature. It explored the tension between a playful and freely associative poetics on the one hand, and concentrated discipline on the other. Mythological elements, motifs from fairy tales, and quotations from popular culture were adapted and deconstructed. In addition, Mayröcker experimented with semantics (instructions, manuals, encyclopaedic writing etc.) and the conventional organising principles of grammar (interpunction, paratactic syntax, deixis etc.). However, imagination and intuition always remained prominent, distinguishing her experiments from the more strict and objectified endeavours of many of her contemporaries.

The short-story je ein umwölkter gipfel  [with each clouded peak] (1973) saw Mayröcker place a stronger focus on ‘unconventional story telling’ (Mayröcker cited in Schmidt, 1984: 268). She turned to the patterns and motifs of autobiographical writing and the rendering of subjective cognition, such as confessional first-person narrators, themes such as childhood memories and romantic relationships, everyday anecdotes, letters, conversations with friends, and the suggestion of homely intimacy. The experimental character of her writing remained evident: the micronarrative elements did not develop into complete stories. Her writing did not aim at representing the life of the author or narrator but tried to present the consciousness, emotions, and memories of an authorial 'I', who experiences life in a two-fold aesthetic way: through all the senses (aesthesis) and through the appropriation of pre-existing art works, texts, and discursive material (aesthetics).

Mayröcker adapted various genres of autobiographical narration – such as the life journey (Reise durch die Nacht, 1984 [Night Train, 1992]), the testimony (mein Herz mein Zimmer mein Name [my heart my room my name] of 1988, the diary (brütt oder Die seufzenden Gärten which appeared in 1998 [Brütt, or, The sighing gardens, 2008], the requiem (Die Abschiede of 1987 [Goodbyes]), Requiem für Ernst Jandl (2001) [Requiem for Ernst Jandl, 2018]), and the epistolary novel (Paloma of 2008 [Paloma]) –  in a rhetorical gesture of repetition and variation. Mayröcker explicitly links this approach to the philosophy of Jacques Derrida. His texts, especially ‘La parole soufflée’ (1965; published under the same title in the English-language essay collection Writing and Difference [1978]) and La Carte postale: de Socrate à Freud et au-delà (The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, 1980 [1987]) reverberate throughout her work as endlessly re-appropriated intertexts. Mayröcker’s poems demonstrate in a more concentrated manner a similar endeavour to transform the ‘experientiality’ of the world into language, by fusing experimental calculation with transgressive pathos. Her adaptation of hymnal and elegiac poetic forms and lyrical conventions, such as the dialogical address of the ‘you’, grounds an intense poetics of affect that energetically switches between pain, mourning, melancholia, and euphoria. A rich historical continuum opens up here, linking Mayröcker’s writing with poetry from Goethe’s Sturm und Drang period and the early Romantic era right up to the lyrical expressionism of Else Lasker-Schüler and Rilke’s elegies. In the anthology Scardanelli [Scardanelli] (2009), a dialogue with the Romantic poet Hölderlin, Mayröcker explicitly situates herself in such a continuum.

Whereas Mayröcker had upheld the distinction between prose and poetry to some degree in previous decades, her most recent work – the trilogy études [studies] (2013), cahier [notebook] (2014), fleurs [flowers] (2016) – resolutely transgresses these categories, incorporating both prose and poetry in a constant metamorphosis of generic boundaries, resisting, once again, any trace of stagnation or ending.

Mayröcker was awarded numerous prizes for her writing, including the Georg Trakl Prize for Poetry (1977), Great Austrian State Literary Prize of the Federal Ministry for Teaching and Art (1982), the Friedrich Hölderlin Prize (1993), the Great Literary Prize of the Bavarian Academy of Arts (1996), the Else Lasker Schüler Prize for Poetry (1996), an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Bielefeld (2000), the Georg Büchner Prize (2001), an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Innsbruck (2015), the Austrian Book Prize (2016), and the Günter Eich Prize for Radio Drama (2017).

Friederike Mayröcker died on 4 June 2021. 

Compiled by Inge Arteel (Brussels)