Valerie Lorenz-Szabo

Valerie Lorenz-Szabo (born May 26, 1916 in Vienna ; † December 6, 1996 there ) was an Austrian writer.

Life

Grave of Valerie Lorenz-Szabo

Valerie Lorenz-Szabo, born and raised in Vienna, spent her youth in a liberal, cosmopolitan atmosphere. She graduated from the three-year federal college for women's trade, attended the arts and crafts school on the Stubenring and was a student of the sculptor Josef Heu . Married to the well-known Austrian poet and writer Wilhelm Szabo since 1937 , she put her literature under a bushel and only began to publish her stories in magazines and newspapers and give them readings late. Lorenz-Szabo came from a Jewish family, many of their relatives were exterminated in concentration camps . She survived the Nazi regime together with her husband in Zwettl Abbey , where they found protection from persecution. After the war she lived with her husband in small towns in the Waldviertel for many years . She got to know life in the country, the contrast between big cities and provinces , the dark and light sides of the landscape and its inhabitants, and she designed them in her works. The author lived in Vienna- Döbling from 1966 until her death in December 1996 . Valerie Lorenz-Szabo died on December 6, 1996, at the age of 81 in Vienna. She was buried next to her husband in an honorary grave of the municipality of Vienna, in the so-called Ehrenhain of Gruppe 40, number 130 at the Vienna Central Cemetery.

The book “Vera's Puppen” contains 15 stories and is the only independent publication by Valerie Lorenz-Szabo. In this volume, which appeared in 1994, women are at the center of the action. Old women, young women, women who rebel, women who embark on a new, strange path, women in exceptional situations, women in isolation, in dependency relationships. The location of the action is the area of ​​the Waldviertel, life in the country or closed rooms, mostly assigned the attributes mystical, unreal and eerie. Veras Puppen forms the title of the short story volume and the most extensive story in the volume. The image of the woman as a doll, who feels trapped in a cocoon , recurs in some stories and forms the central theme. The diversity in the narratives is remarkable, in addition to the retention and continuity of the main theme. In clear, simple language, she traces the lives of women who are confronted with aging, homosexuality, persecution, unhappy marriages, fears, and loneliness.

Works

• Vera's puppets , short stories and short prose, Edition Doppelpunkt, Vienna 1994