Ilse Maria Aschner
Ilse Maria Aschner (born September 26, 1918 in Vienna , born Römer ; † October 10, 2012 there ) was an Austrian journalist and contemporary witness of the Holocaust . She was a member of the Graz authors' assembly (GAV).
life and work
Ilse Maria Aschner grew up as the daughter of an assimilated Jewish bourgeois family in Red Vienna in the 1920s and 1930s. Her parents Gustav and Paula Römer were both active and committed social democrats who were also active in the resistance against the Austro-Fascist corporate state under Engelbert Dollfuss .
She and her brother Wolfgang Römer (1913–2000) were baptized Protestants . Neither of them knew about their Jewish origins until Austria's annexation in 1938 . As the only member of her family, she managed to legally emigrate to Great Britain as a required labor after almost a year of delays in issuing permits . Her brother also managed to flee to England a little later. It was there that Ilse met her future husband, the journalist, editor and translator Peter Aschner (1918–1984). In 1946 she returned to Vienna. Here she learned only gradually that her parents and all relatives had been murdered by the National Socialists .
After residing in Salzburg , Linz and Prague for professional reasons, she finally returned to Vienna in 1962.
She began her journalistic career as an author for the communist women's magazine " Voice of the Woman ". In 1969, however, like many other intellectuals , she resigned from the Communist Party of Austria ( KPÖ ) in protest against the suppression of the Prague Spring and began to work with Günther Nenning on “ NEW FORVM ” . She then worked as a secretary at the Graz Authors' Assembly , where she worked closely with Ernst Jandl and Josef Haslinger , whose book "Politics of Emotions" also deals with their lives in one chapter. Since the beginning of the 1990s she played a decisive role in the First Vienna Reading Theater and the Second Vienna Impromptu Theater (together with Rolf Schwendter and Eva Fillipp on the "Board of Directors", the so-called "triple committee"). At the beginning of 2006, she resigned her functions with this and then appeared only occasionally as a reader.
From the 1980s she gave lectures as a contemporary witness at schools in Vienna in order to pass on the knowledge about the Holocaust , to which almost her entire family fell victim, and not to let it be forgotten.
Ilse Maria Aschner died in 2012 at the age of 94 and was buried in Vienna's south-west cemetery.
literature
- Roland Innerhofer: The Graz authors' meeting to organize an avant-garde. Vienna 1984.
- Josef Haslinger: Politics of Emotions, an essay about Austria. Frankfurt am Main 1995, ISBN 3-596-12365-8 .
- A letter to the stars. Jugend und Volk Verlag, Vienna 2004, p. 24 ff.
- Wolfgang Pichler: Function and effect of Ilse Maria Aschner in the Graz authors' meeting. Diploma thesis, 2008. (full text)
- Sonja Frank (Ed.): Young Austria. Austrians in British exile 1938 to 1947. For a free, democratic and independent Austria . 2nd expanded edition. with DVD. Verlag der Theodor Kramer Gesellschaft , Vienna 2014, ISBN 978-3-901602-55-9 .
Web links
- Literature by and about Ilse Maria Aschner in the catalog of the German National Library
- Entry on the website of the Graz Authors' Assembly
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Aschner, Ilse Maria |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Austrian journalist and contemporary witness |
| DATE OF BIRTH | September 26, 1918 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Vienna |
| DATE OF DEATH | October 10, 2012 |
| Place of death | Vienna |