Marianne Fritz - there is a class of artists whose work is so strange and extraordinary that it eschews all gradations of the good and the mediocre: genius and madness are the only descriptors adequate to its scale

Marianne Fritz, The Weight of Things, Trans. by Adrian Nathan West, Dorothy Project, 2015.


Excerpt




The Weight of Things is the first book, and the first translated book, and possibly the only translatable book by Austrian writer Marianne Fritz (1948–2007). For after winning acclaim with this novel—awarded the Robert Walser Prize in 1978—she embarked on a 10,000-page literary project called “The Fortress,” creating over her lifetime elaborate colorful diagrams and typescripts so complicated that her publisher had to print them straight from her original documents. A project as brilliant as it is ambitious and as bizarre as it is brilliant, it earned her cult status, comparisons to James Joyce no less than Henry Darger, and admirers including Elfriede Jelinek and W. G. Sebald.
Yet in this, her first novel, we discover not an eccentric fluke of literary nature but rather a brilliant and masterful satirist, philosophically minded yet raging with anger and wit, who under the guise of a domestic horror story manages to expose the hypocrisy and deep abiding cruelties running parallel, over time, through the society and the individual minds of a century.


In the first novel available in English by the late Austrian writer Fritz (1948-2007), a woman faces her dark past when friends visit her in a mental hospital.
Set in Austria between 1945 and 1963, this poison cocktail of a novel swirls together painful personal histories and desperate hidden lives. A chauffeur named Wilhelm returns from the war to the city of Donaublau to marry Berta, keeping a promise made to a friend killed in battle. Berta’s friend Wilhelmine, a cleaning woman, eyes his arrival with suspicion and jealousy. Early on the novel reads like farce as the narrative clomps around in time; the misdirection doesn’t generate much mystery but pays dividends as events unfold. Things pick up when the action skips ahead 15 years to the day Wilhelm and Wilhelmine, now unhappily married, debate the best time to “pay Berta a visit and cheer her up” in the mental hospital. Fritz layers in much beauty and tragedy to show how Berta’s life was undone by grief, rancor from Wilhelmine, parenting two difficult kids, and “yearning for an ideal.” Fritz puts on a stylistic show, the prose dancing in West’s translation from camp to romance to psychological horror amid name games and wild monologues that often hide the truth. The title is Berta’s name for the evil in the world that will crush innocence out of her children. The climax is a moral challenge to readers: the book's most sympathetic character commits its most horrific act. In a caged hospital ward, Berta is befriended by a woman called Wise Little Mother, who intones bons mots like, “life is hope and hope is a wound,” with a logic as beguiling and twisted as that motivating the sane in the outside world.
At times unwieldy but a harrowing book about the horrors of motherhood, jealousy, and war trauma.
- Kirkus Reviews


Fritz’s slim first novel takes place in Germany, loosely from 1943 to 1963. The narrative follows the story of Bertha, a young woman who gets pregnant by a German music teacher named Rudolph, who quickly dies in the Second World War, leaving Wilhelm, his best friend, to marry Berta. Berta’s unhappiness grows as she gives birth to a baby named Rudolph and later, another named Bertha; neither child bears much wit or will to survive. The narrative is slippery, never reliable or predictable, lyrical in one moment and transforming into dry domestic satire in the next. Time shifts frequently as well, and though the novel begins after Berta has acted drastically and Wilhelm is preparing to marry her best friend, it lopes back and forth in time at a dizzying pace, mirroring Berta’s own feverish mind. This makes for a difficult (though innovative) reading experience—there is little to anchor the reader in what descends into a spooling riff on despair, making the story more puzzle than legible timeline, and requiring patience. Still, the prose is rewarding when it occasionally slips temporarily out of Fritz’s stark lack of sentiment and into quiet meditations on the self, as when Fritz writes of Berta that “the inwardness she had struggled for, tirelessly and to no purpose, now suffused her face, and it would never leave her thereafter.” That inwardness of the mind shifts cleverly in a way that makes it not an easy read, but surely an important one. - Publishers Weekly
“Starts out simply and gently and then wades into resonant darkness. A tiny, shattering masterpiece.”—brian evenson


Marianne Fritz's The Weight of Things begins in 1945, the war coming to an end and Wilhelm Schrei coming to the home of Berta Faust and Wilhelmine. The war has taken its toll: the three Faust boys haven't been heard from recently and can be presumed dead, and Wilhelm was sent by Rudolf, the music teacher who knocked up Berta a few months earlier and clearly hasn't survived either. Wilhelmine suggests Wilhelm stay:
Nowadays all the cities look more or less the same. A heap of rubble is a heap of rubble no matter where you go. Nowadays everyone has to start from scratch.
       Readers quickly learn that Wilhelm married Wilhelmine -- but only in 1960; scenes from three years later have them visiting an institutionalized Berta. As to the events in the years between, these are only gradually revealed, as the novel's fairly short sections move fluidly back and forth across time.
       It turns out that Wilhelm married Berta first, and Berta had two children, Little Rudolf (the child she was pregnant with from Rudolf) and then Little Berta (Wilhelm's child). Wilhelm, who works as a chauffeur, hoped and expected to raise: "competent citizens with both feet on the ground", but, as a scene describing a boating excursion on a lake suggests, they can't swim and seem destined to flounder and sink.
       The family-idyll is tenuously held together:
Their lovely outings inevitably ended with her and the children embroiled in some catastrophe that Wilhelm somehow always knew how to fix.
       Of course, Wilhelm isn't always there -- and even when he is, Berta: "could only wonder why it was that this man Wilhelm was so difficult to fit into her life". Things go from bad to worse, with what promise at least Little Berta showed lost. As to the dissolution of the family, and the reasons for Berta's institutionalization, -- and Wilhelmine usurping Berta's place as Wilhelm's wife -- Fritz bides her time in revealing what transpired.
       "She's a child", Rudolf had told his friend Wilhelm, and Berta does seem limited from the beginning: when Wilhelm arrives it's Wilhelmine who does the talking and explaining, then as later Berta does little more than giggle and say: "So, so." (a refrain that echoes through to the story's conclusion in 1963). She isn't simple-minded, but the damage, of war, of loss, is evident. Tellingly, Fritz presents her having but unable or unwilling to articulate more complex thoughts:
     "When our little girl sleeps, she looks like the Madonna," Berta wanted to say, but did not.
       And:
     "When she's asleep, you know, she's not so caught up in the world, so concerned with the surface of things. The stamping and molding hands of life, the rolling, pressing, and flattening fingers -- the weight of things, life as such, it can't hurt her so long as she's asleep. It's that simple. Sleep startles everything away. Everything and everyone."
       Fragile Berta breaks -- and acts on this worldview she expressed (albeit not aloud) here; oblivious Wilhelm never saw any of it coming.
       It takes manipulative and controlling Wilhelmine many years to wrest control, but as was clear from practically the beginning, she eventually does. A necklace with a tiny Madonna is totem and symbol in the novel, from the opening sentences to its conclusion: making the necklace hers seems more important to Wilhelmine even than getting Wilhelm, while for institutionalized Berta it is one last hold she can cling to.
       As translator Adrian Nathan West also notes in an introductory note, Fritz is anything but subtle with her names and references in The Weight of Things, from the family names ('Schrei', 'Faust') to the fictional Austrian city where the action takes place, 'Donaublau' an obvious echo of the Straussian 'Blue Danube' melody that Rudolf played for Berta ("Do you get it ? 'The Blue Danube': Strauss, of all things. Do you understand me ?" Rudolf had recounted to Wilhelm). Elsewhere, word-choice and selection also matters, of course, and it's not easy to capture all the shadings in the English -- beginning with the title: interestingly, when published as an excerpt the closer-to-the-German 'The Gravity of Circumstances' was used (though even that fails to convey all of it, as, for example, 'Verhältnisse' also means 'relationships'). Despite some of the subtlety (and, as noted regarding the names, not-so-subtlety) that's lost here, the English version of The Weight of Things captures Fritz's dark arrangement strikingly well.
       Fritz's characters reveal little emotion or depth. Her descriptions remains surface -- actions, words, and occasional thoughts --, appropriate in a world that is, in so many ways, lacking. It's (almost surprisingly) effective, even as the characters remain in many ways ciphers -- what is Wilhelm thinking ? .....
       If the presentation, shifting back and forth across the years and events, seems at first confusing it ultimately works very well, and what seems like a low-intensity narrative comes to pack a devastating punch. - M.A.Orthofer


Somewhere on a battlefield in Europe is a cranium, in which echoes an asylum visit. The visit has not yet happened, and the echo is getting louder. It is not really an echo, more of a fugue, but we’ll get to that. More strongly another visit echoes. The two futures mingle. None of them have happened yet. Earlier, as the head was still attached to the rest of a body, this visit was running through it: Rudolf’s friend Wilhelm must go to Allerseelengasse, building 13, fourth floor, apartment 12, Donaublau. The address was repeated many times and worriedly drilled into Wilhelm’s head. What Wilhelm must do is take care of Berta. The phrase “see her with my eyes” is echoed several times, or, that note is struck several times. The future is worried into existence; Rudolf is sure he will die, and somewhere on that battlefield in Europe shrapnel bounces around in his head like an asylum visit.
Because it is a translation, and because I can’t help myself, I imagine that “to see [Berta] with/through [Rudolf’s] eyes” is one deft spaceless astronaut of a verb in German – I know it’s not, but the very fact that I’m reading a translation changes the way I read. I know everything that is told to me is supposed to have been said in German, and the English feels like a mask, more so than usual. The translator, Adrian Nathan West, puts on his own face backwards and hands me a mask for myself without instructions. Every echo unfurls. Every name gets a multiword epithet, like in epic poetry. And each time a sequence repeats itself, it is as though one turn of the calliope is acted out by eleven virtuosi. The manner of echo is very precise, almost obsessive.
So somewhere on a battlefield in Europe is a cranium, in which echoes an asylum visit. Berta, eighteen years afterwards, has a thing around her neck that Wilhelmine – Wilhelm’s new wife (they share a name and so they are different halves of the same person. However, this Platonic fact is only mentioned once, never echoed, so it rings false) – desperately wants. Berta turns to liquid. And when Wilhelmine gets what she wants, all sounds stop.
There is nothing humorous about getting torn to pieces by a deaf grenade in World War II, but there is something funny about a guy walking around confused looking for his lost head. Speed up tragedy enough, compress it like an accordion, and you find yourself with a comedy in your small hands. By the same token, if you linger on the joke a little while, let the instrument breathe, if you just allow the camera to rest its weary unblinking eye on the unwitting actors for a few seconds too long, you slip into tragedy again. The headless body collapses. The structure of story in Marianne Fritz’s The Weight of Things is a farcical one, but every punchline echoes back and the characters themselves hear them repeated. And it’s not funny.
I think, if I speak loud enough to myself, can I hear? Every time I try to define my me and think, these are finally the words that capture my essence, those words lose their power. For a long while, maybe two years, whenever I told people about the kind of situations I got into where I had to disappear, I would tell them things like “I turned to oil.” The liquid spoken would change depending on the situation. I turned to quicksilver and slipped away under a door. Turned to milk and trickled down the drain. To water and boiled away in the late summer heat. One day I described this to a friend and since then I’ve only been solid, perhaps made of glass, perhaps of stone, but the imagery doesn’t work anymore. I find a set of words that have power over me and let it echo, until it stops being true. Which is immediately.
In The Weight of Things everybody worries about what they will do next. Therefore, they do it. Everything they say they echoes from themselves, and it becomes what defines them, in the way that academics like to call “performative.” They are not me, because their words are not echoes: echoes lose their power over time, but each sequence here is as strong as the others. They are not some long harangue boiled down to a pithy quote, or a mess of imagery whittled into one symbol. They just are. That is why the near future can sound as strongly in the past as the distant future does, and why the now is reverberating. The future is actually what causes the present. What causes the future is the past as it could have been.
The echoes are recurring themes, in the musical sense. The story is a farce, but the structure of the book itself is a jazzy call-and-response. I am fugued along in the association game the author plays. There was a time when my memory was perfect, and it feels a lot like the structure of this book. I know I remembered every single conversation I had had with the first person I was ever in a relationship with, because my head was one of those heads full of potential like a rock teetering on the slippery edge of a waterfall. This proved a bit problematic when the relationship ended, of course. Love is unhelpful, sometimes.
One by one I would remember the conversations we’d had. As I was remembering them, however, I did not commit the remembrance to memory. This is the thing that is hard to explain, but the memory does not exist in compressed and uncompressed form at the same time. It is a piece of paper you open and close like a cramping hand, deforming the paper in the process. Eye witnesses are unreliable. Go, pick out your favourite memory and count the stars in the background, fold it up, unfurl it again and count them again. They’re different.
I saw in my mind a tree of hands holding onto helium balloons, clutching them. I dutifully inspected each balloon before letting it go, relaxing the muscles in the tree, and willing myself not to clutch at it with more of my thousand hands. I let go.
Somewhere on a battlefield in Europe a dead skull remembers a visit to the asylum eighteen years later. From our vantage point here in the future, we can see that meanwhile in the past, Berta has good grades. Her daughter, also called Berta – Little Berta, is supposed to have good grades too. Berta plays the same sequence too many times in her head and it disintegrates: she undoes the past like a shoelace. The problem is she puts her own grades in the same blue envelope as her daughter’s grades, nullifying herself. Her daughter has to go to a special school. What can you expect, with a mother like that. And somewhere in a field of poppies a face in the earth, nothing more than pareidolia, worries an asylum visit into existence.
It sounds like I have told you a story, but I have not. You have no idea what goes through Berta’s head or why she keeps saying “So. So.” You don’t know about the Wound of Life or its moulding hands. You don’t even know why Berta is in the asylum. - Johannes Punkt


When reading The Weight of Things by Marianne Fritz, I found myself continually recalling a scene from Antonioni’s Red Desert. The film follows the perspective of Monica Vitti’s character, Guiliana, who has experienced a mental breakdown after a recent automobile accident. She wanders around with a visiting businessman named Corrado, moving through cold industrial compounds, foggy shipyards, and featureless buildings, which mimic her interior landscape. One night, in a moment of desperation, Guiliana visits Corrado, hoping that he can provide some insight into her condition. She looks toward him, past him, through him, pleading aimlessly. “What do people expect me to do with my eyes?” she asks. She looks down guiltily. How can she cure her mind if she cannot control her gaze? What can she know if no one knows what should be done with one’s eyes?
A similar question resonates throughout The Weight of Things, the question of what one is expected to do with one’s body. Fritz’s characters struggle to comport their corporeal selves, brushing “winding, wending” curls into “restful” straightened hair, training shaky, uneasy emotions to settle into the false lines of a smile. Their bodies attempt to contain “the weight of things,” a vague and faceless terror that haunts Berta Schrei (the novel’s Guiliana.) Likewise, Berta’s mental disintegration articulates itself through the simultaneous breakdown of bodies she yearns to protect.
The Weight of Things beautifully suggests the ineffable internal struggles of its characters through descriptions of their externally cultivated defenses. Fritz focuses in on the moments when these defenses break down, when small, uncontainable bits of “the weight of things” start to seep through. The novel begins by hinting at a strong undercurrent of tension between Wilhemine and her husband, Wilhelm, a professional chauffeur and “Come-hither-boy” the novel refers to as “Wilhelm The Smiler.” Of his smile, Fritz writes:
Wilhelm’s smile was cultivated. He knew just when to sneak a pinch of acquiescence into the recipe and when to leaven his stupidity with a dose of wit…He had a skeptical smile, a brooding smile, a sly smile, a moronic smile and a shrewd smile, a clear-eyed and a purblind, a dutiful smile, the smile of a deferential and devoted spirit…always ready to let one or another nuance recede, dwindle, or simply vanish.
As the two characters set off to pay a 40th birthday visit to Wilhelmine’s sister, Berta, who resides in a mental institution, Wilhelmine perceives that “Wilhelm The Smiler” is crumbling under this tension. His mouth looks wrong, “his gloom [cannot] be hidden,” and his defensive smile reveals he is not in control.
We learn that this tension arises from a strange event that occurred many years ago when Wilhem and Berta were married. We are led to believe Berta is unaware that Wilhem has married her sister since her institutionalization, that this 40th birthday visit functions as a reveal, in multiple ways: Wilhelmine intends to reveal their marriage, the passage of time, and thus expose the horrible event so Wilhelm’s heart will come to terms. Though the circumstances of this event are not initially revealed, we experience the weight of its effect through Berta’s bodily expression. She giggles constantly, eyelids fluttering up and down, as though they’re quivering from the aftershock of what they witnessed. Her language becomes an extension of her bodily reaction, nervous shudderings of endlessly repeated phrases. “So, so,” is her consistent greeting or response to anything another person says to her in conversation. When left to her own devices, Berta murmurs the same phrase like a mantra: “A man, a word, and then you’re lost.” Even Berta’s hair is an extension of her sorrow. When Wilhelm remarks that her hair looks different, an orderly explains the change: “Our mother Fortress, the best of all mothers, has brushed Berta’s hair straight. Her hair no longer knows the winding, wending, crimping, curving folds or furrows of the wound, Life. It has achieved a state of peace. It has come to rest.”
The novel moves backward in time to the marriage of Berta and Wilhelm, reconstructing the ways that the weight of things slowly built up, then broke everything down. Fritz insinuates a definitive contrast between the living experiences of Berta and Wilhelm. Wilhelm’s job often necessitated long journeys away from home, where he tended to the wealthy civilized family of Johannes Mueller-Rickenberg (literally translated to “rich man”). Berta, by contrast, must act as the sole caregiver for her children, whose bodies appear to prohibit their civilization. Her older son, Rudolph, behaves in an animalistic way. He constantly cries, stutters, grinds his teeth, bites his nails, wets the bed, and suffers explosive fits of diarrhea. His teachers and fellow students report that Rudolph is “an idiot,” an extension of his mother, who is “not right in the head.” As Berta battles against her own psychological dysfunction, she becomes obsessed with the fear that this idiocy will poison her young daughter, Little Berta. She lives in terror of the weight of things, the fear that her deepest anxieties permeate the air, the earth itself.
Fritz’s poetic auscultation of this weight, this madness, is absolutely astounding, both in its scope and its subtlety. It is difficult to summarize her methods, as they are woven so seamlessly into the narrative: its pacing, its movement through time, coalescing into a sensory experience. She describes a palpable environment of disorientation and loss, set against a tapestry of gray skies, war-ruined structures, and dark woods into which people disappear. The text is richly embedded with symbols; almost every name is a metaphor. Berta comes from the town Allerseelangasse, or All Souls Day. She lives with her children in the town of Donaublau, or Danube Blue, which invokes the name of a waltz a soldier once played on his fiddle when visiting her. The soldier, Private Rudolph, impregnated her with the child who became her son, Rudolph. While away on the front, Private Rudolph’s friend Wilhelm agreed to take care of Berta, if he died. When Private Rudolph did die in the war, Wilhelm took his place. Likewise, when Berta goes mad, Wilhelm marries Wilhelmine. These patterns of words spin an uneasy web through the atmosphere of the novel, a sense of profound, inescapable entrapment. Fritz’s language infuses her text with an air of inevitability; names and symbols repeat themselves, endless reflections of “life as such,” the weight of things.
Berta becomes obsessed with the idea that her daughter—Little Berta—resembles the Madonna while sleeping, likening her peaceful expression to a Madonna trinket on a necklace Wilhelm gave her. Little Berta—her namesake, her own replication—is the center of all Berta’s hope: the desperate belief that, with her name, a hopeless pattern will be broken. The tenuous structure of Berta’s life collapses when she learns that Little Berta is not performing well in school. When Berta protests that her daughter has “always been a quick learner,” the school teacher responds that intelligence is as much a matter of expression, of externalization, as it is a matter of “knowing” the right answers: “ she doesn’t know [them] when I ask her,” the teacher explains. “And I can’t know what’s going on in her head…Just try and imagine, worrying constantly over forty little minds! It’s impossible!” With this pronouncement, Berta realizes that Little Berta has inherited her madness, that her daughter’s thoughts are also lost in some strange and unviewable territory.
Of course, this is the point where everything unravels. Where is one to look when one’s perceptions are invisible? How can Berta raise her children in this world? What is to be done with these uncivilized, illiterate bodies? “What do people expect [her] to do with [her] eyes?”
Berta ponders this question through a series of disturbing dreams, the most haunting of which presents her body as a corpse. In the dream, her corpse is “delivered” to the doorstep of her apartment while her husband is away. Her children exclaim, “[T]he corpse is here!” and are overcome with absurd laughter. Of course, as a corpse, Berta finds she’s unable to care for her children, to bathe them or feed them, and they descend into animalism, walking “crablike on all fours” and howling “indecipherable sounds.” Upon his brief return, her husband mistakenly seals the apartment door, believing that Berta will care for the children inside. Locked in their own grave, the children dance and sing, “The weight of things, the weight of things. Did you dream it?”
Fitz writes:
The children were nailed inside the apartment with the corpse in question. As their tomb was quite generously proportioned, with numerous burial chambers, it didn’t occur to the children at first that they’d been buried alive. With time, though, the madness of hunger began to ravage the children’s brains; they began to circle the corpse; the madness of hunger tore their jaws open wide. For long days their hunger encouraged them, before they finally wedged their spindly fingers into their mother’s rotting flesh and gnawed down to her bones.
Terrified and illuminated by this vision, Berta pulls her children from school, vowing to treat them as a prince and princess in their home. She brings them breakfast in bed, tells them stories, and stages a “singing hour” which begins and ends with renditions of the song, “Danube so blue, so blue.” Their already uncanny lives descend into a nightmarish fairytale, a fairytale that culminates in Bertha’s execution of her “cursed creations.” Having ended the lives of her children, Berta stands back and sees, to her horror and dismay, that Little Berta never looked anything like the Madonna.
In fairytale fashion, the end of Berta’s story also comes full-circle, as she meets her sister and husband on her fateful 40th birthday. The novel reveals that Wilhelmine has also harbored a long-running obsession with the Madonna trinket Wilhelm gave to Berta. She sympathetically embraces Berta with the goal of procuring the Madonna necklace for herself, believing herself to be its rightful owner. Wilhelm’s life with Berta was a misbegotten error, a mistake to be erased, and thus forgotten, now, forever. Berta seems to understand the necessity of this conclusion and thus surrenders the Madonna necklace to her sister. In effect, she gives up what remains of her body, her hope of living, her burden of life, as though to say: Take this weight from me. I do not know what to do with it. - Meghan Lamb










The Gravity of Circumstances

Of all the crooked arrows in the critic's quiver, the one labeled "genius" seems to fly most erratically. Rather than a substantive gesture of praise, in its normal application it frequently serves as an aggrandizement of the critic herself, who thereby claims the capacity to appreciate this ethereal property. Yet beyond able craftsmen of the Richard Ford stamp or the crowd-pleasers whose affability calls their integrity into question, there is a class of artists whose work is so strange and extraordinary that it eschews all gradations of the good and the mediocre: genius and madness are the only descriptors adequate to its scale.
Such is the case of the Austrian novelist Marianne Fritz (1948-2007), whose work is barely known outside her small circle of admirers. Praise, though scant, is neither tepid nor inconsiderable: from 1978, when she received the inaugural Robert Walser Prize for the unpublished manuscript of her first novel, to her winning the highly prestigious Franz Kafka Prize in 2001, her writing was repeatedly honored with awards and stipends. On Naturgemäß, Fritz's unfinished magnum opus, Elfriede Jelinek commented, "It is a singular work, before which one can do nothing but stand, like a devout Muslim before the Ka'aba." W.G. Sebald, meanwhile, dedicated to her a section of the late poem "In Alfernée." Here the image of Fritz working through her exhaustion, "one hand on the keys of her machine," recalls the passage in The Rings of Saturn on the melancholy of scholars and weavers, "harnessed to the machines we have created."
A contrasting view was held by Thomas Bernhard, who addressed his esteemed publisher, Siegfried Unseld, with characteristic charm in 1986:
Before my departure I have had another glance at your recent publishing catastrophe: the 3,000 pages you have had printed and allowed to appear are the greatest embarrassment I have been acquainted with to this day. To print and bind over 3,000 pages of mindless proletarian trash with all the bombast of a centenary event belongs, quite frankly, in the record books: as a world record of stupidity. I am not speaking so much of the begetter of this idiocy, rather of the fact that the publisher has handicapped himself by releasing this fatuous vulgarity.
The writing that inspired these extremes of reverence and ridicule began with The Gravity of Circumstances, a slim novelette about a woman impregnated during the Second World War by a music teacher who would be drafted and later die in battle. The man's comrade, a chauffeur named Wilhelm, returns to the mythical town of Donaublau and marries her, thus fulfilling the last wish of the deceased. The protagonist, Berta, gives birth to her son little Rudolf, who bears the same name as the music teacher, and then has a daughter with Wilhelm whom she names little Berta. Her conventional existence, which feels increasingly like a prison, becomes intolerable when her children, her "creations," as she refers to them, show signs of a feeblemindedness that will condemn them to the scrapheap of society. After a nightmare in which her son is crucified and jeered at as a bed-wetter, a coward, and an imbecile, Berta drugs her children, strangles them, and attempts to stab herself in the heart with a kitchen knife. Her life is saved and she is transferred to a mental hospital. The latter, tellingly, is designated by the term Festung, or stronghold—a word Fritz will use to describe the entirety of her fictional work.
This first book—written in a sparse, almost impoverished prose that mimics the inner destitution of its protagonist—was followed two years later by The Child of Violence and the Stars of the Romani. Whereas The Gravity of Circumstances covered the years 1945-1963, in her second novel Fritz would approach the period that she saw as the key to understanding the disaster of Western civilization: the years surrounding the First World War. The spare action of the book centers around Kaspar Zweifel, a sensitive young man who dreams of moving away to America. In 1914 he loses his beloved and is sent away to fight for the Austro-Hungarian army in the suicidal battles on the Isonzo front in present-day Slovenia. When he returns to the village of Gnom, he takes over his father's farm, makes a conventional marriage, and begins to complain of the "mongrelization" of the Austrian countryside. One night, drunk, he rapes a gypsy woman, and she and her community flee the area in fear of further violence. The woman returns in June of 1923 to leave Zweifel's child in the village parish house.
The novel went nearly unnoticed. While its rancorous subject matter and its convoluted structure were unsuitable to a broader readership, its failure to engage with the more self-consciously avant-garde work of the famous Grazer Gruppe left it far adrift with respect to Vienna's literary establishment. Yet it proved decisive for Fritz, both in regards to its stylistic departures from its predecessor and the augmentation of the author's vehemence and scope.
Only five years later, she would publish the provocatively titled Whose Language You Don't Understand, the 3,392 page prodigy that was the object of Bernhard's derision. It was natural that critical discussion surrounding a book of such proportions would not be confined to its literary import. Fritz's neologisms, intentional misspellings, and readiness to violate the rules of grammar in favor of the construction of her own eccentric poetic idiom left the text unfit to be fed through the computer her publisher used to weed out errors, and her proofreader gave up after a thousand pages, saying it was impossible to distinguish mistakes from the distortions characteristic of the author's style. Critics began to talk of classifying books by their weight, and spoke openly of the point at which they had abandoned their reading.
Whose Language You Don't Understand is the chronicle of the Nulls, a poor family residing in Nullweg, number 0, in the village of Nirgendwo, in June and August of 1914. Thomas K. Falk, in an article for World Literature Today, points out that the date is significant not only for its proximity to the Great War, but also as a marker for a period in which the traditional agrarian economy gave way to industrialization, when those who had previously worked the land became a despised and neglected appendage to the modern capitalist state. It is in this book that Fritz's partiality toward the insulted and injured became explicit: the patriarch, Josef Null, is killed in a worker's demonstration, as is his third son, Josef II; one of his brothers, the Dostoevskian August, is a farmhand and an anarchist and murders the landowning parents of his girlfriend Wilhelmine; another becomes a deserter and is chased down by the military and shot. Their mother is confined to the Festung first mentioned in The Gravity of Circumstances, and their home is destroyed, lest it serve as a remembrance of the possibility of resistance.
Eleven years later, Naturgemäß began to appear: five volumes in 1996, another five in 1998, just shy of 7,000 pages reproduced directly from Marianne Fritz's typescript. Set largely in Przemyśl, an "eternal death-territory" in southeastern Poland, it examines the lives of many of the characters in her previous books in the war years of 1914-15. Her publisher found setting the book's first part impossible; the published version consists of a bound facsimile of the typescript. At first, Fritz limited herself to employing a variety of fonts, spacings, margins, and unusual typographical markers, but when she learned how the book was to be printed, she began to incorporate drawings, maps, coded marks meant to draw links between various characters and situations, and copies of the innumerable notecards—her second memory, in the words of her partner Otto Dünser—that she used to keep track of the hundreds of characters and place names and thousands of events that made up her novel. (One critic complained that the book had to be turned around, like a steering wheel.) In her refusal of unilinear narrative, Fritz had largely dispensed with the traditional paragraph; text was often inverted or written at an angle, or a central letter would form the axis for three words that would be based on it, their letters curved to fit inside a drawing that appears to represent an oblique phase of the waning moon.
II.
The comparison with Joyce is both obvious and inapposite, and has been made by critics both within and beyond the German-speaking world. Against the clear dissimilarities in tone, subject matter, and working method stands the male genius as the archetype against which the female author is to be compared. If she passes muster, she may be crowned a "female Joyce"; if she falls short, her work is disqualified as an extravagance. A further injustice to a female writer of such staggering ambition is the lack of a feminine analogue to the stereotype of the "mad genius": women's madness cannot recur to the dignity of the late Nietzsche or Thomas Chatterton, but is classed with the aberrations of hysterics and cat-ladies.
Marianne Fritz may represent a limit-case of the blurring of life into literature. The small apartment she shared with her partner in Vienna's 7th District, now preserved for visitors, is lined floor-to-ceiling with bookshelves, map cases, and card files; there are no accommodations for guests or relaxation, virtually no concessions to the demands of ordinary existence. When her writing went well, she would not leave her work room for weeks at a time; it was only when she had elected to take a "philosophical pause for thought" that she would discover what season it was. In fact her labor transcended the possibilities of a lone author, and she engaged her partner to toil in the archives, bringing home to her mimeographs of war correspondence, newspaper reports, ministerial records, and battle plans. "Going out was my job," Dünser recollects. "At first she would research with me in the War Archives in the Stiftgasse. We were to look through 30,000 photos. Then she said to me: Otto, you do this."
It is possible that a fictional topos as dense and expansive as Fritz's is inconceivable outside of such isolating circumstances; that like a phantom limb, such imagined worlds may arise only after conventional reality has been hewn away. To say this is not to reduce Fritz's work to aleatory hallucinations or to question her artistic integrity. On the contrary, just as Rimbaud argued for the systematic derangement of the senses, Fritz's subjection of herself to the conditions necessary to reconceive the situation of war in all its staggering complexity must be considered a conscious, programmatic gesture.
In Naturgemäß III, her work begins to revolve around Der Giftpilz, Ernst Heimer's notorious anti-Semitic children's book published by Nazi propagandist Julius Streicher. Reversing the text's original schema, it is Nazism rather than Judaism that becomes the poison mushroom growing in Austria's soil. For the writer and critic Klaus Kastberger, this episode leads to the essential question for an understanding of Fritz's oeuvre: in what does the subjective experience of such a disaster as National Socialism consist? Paradoxically, the first-person or free indirect approach is inadequate, for inner experience obscures the historical and social conditions by which it is determined. To Fritz, fidelity was to be found rather in the minute recreation of a society down to its very fundaments, and to this end, nothing was irrelevant, and the purpose of imagination was less the fashioning of persons and events from whole cloth than the rectification of those gaps in official documentation through which the lives of so many at society's bottom ranks had filtered:
what moves me is the "blank spaces," the "not established," the "crossed out," the "unmentioned," the "irrelevant," the "superfluous," the "redundant," the fact that so much "information" is actually lived through [...]
III.
None of this yet touches on the most radical aspect of Fritz's undertaking: the explosion of the folk psychology that underpins the bourgeois novel. From its roots in the picaresque through to the so-called realism of Madame Bovary, the novel has been concerned with the aptitudes of the free will in conflict with adversity. The occasional concessions to determinism—Zola's invocations of heredity, for example—rarely transcend gimmickry. In many ways the crisis of the high modernist novel, and its retreat into the nullities of aestheticism, is largely traceable to the violent shifts in knowledge attributable to the application of quantitative methodologies in the human sciences, which had for centuries been the domain of intuitive speculation. If Deleuze is correct in saying that fiction ventures a response to the question "What happened?" then its task was rendered nearly impossible at the point that such figures as Weber, Marx, Tönnes, and Durkheim began to catalogue the manifold determining factors of human life, foregoing the alleged sovereignty of the wayward human heart. Indeed, the monumental proportions of such socially rooted novels as Musil's The Man Without Qualities, Doderer's Demons, and Weiss's The Aesthetics of Resistance can be seen as a reaction to the distress provoked by the claims of German social sciences on what had previously been the exclusive domains of art.
Heinz Schafroth described Whose Language You Don't Understand as a counter-history or a writing against history, but it is a counter-historiography as well, a supersession of the Great Man Theory (and the notion of free will subtending it) through its vision of the whims of history overwhelming their radically passive subjects. It is not, for all that, lacking in moral force. Among the strongly mythopoeic features of the novel are the countless verses interspersed throughout the book, sung at times by a choir, at times by a minstrel who memorializes the figures rubbed out of history. In a song dedicated to the deserter Johannes Null, the minstrel voices an acid condemnation of the gluttony of the state at war:
It sucks up the sea, devours the moon, swigs the sun and stars; and is not sated and is not sated; it eats young and old, women and men; the boys as well as the girls; and is not sated and is not sated; the trunk of the horse it devours, of the man, of the dog, it devours barley and heads, clover and eyes, it devours oats and wheat, cattle, swine, and hen, the bird as well as the fish, swallows the village, guzzles the town; and is not sated and is not sated; forests and viscera it devours, the hand, the foot, and the heart, savors blood; and is not sated and is not sated.
Elsewhere in the book, one of Johannes's brothers, the utterly destitute Franz, is forced to have intercourse with his landlady to pay the rent on his miserable basement dwelling. To achieve arousal, he focuses his thoughts on Magdalena, which is the name of both his sister-in-law and a cow he is rumored to have sodomized. Fritz, who was from a humble background and only came to pursue literature after completing vocational studies to prepare her for secretarial work, demonstrates here her all-consuming contempt for the structures of class oppression. Impotence in the face of history does nothing to negate the ethical imperative to condemnation. Indeed, Fritz's entire oeuvre works toward a vindication of the lives of the poor, men and especially women, who were expelled from the dignified arenas of Austrian society in the first half of the twentieth century and crushed like roaches under the millstone of history. Freedom is not absent amid the duress of time past, but remains as an imaginative horizon: the space of the dreaming mind that cannot but turn away from its own degradation, and the compulsion to defiance that imbues one like a calling.                      

The author would like to acknowledge the following: Uwe Schütte, for his essay Materialschlacht für eine andere Ordnung der Dinge as well as his personal recollections concerning W.G. Sebald and Marianne Fritz; Noor de Winter for her writing and correspondence concerning Fritz, and specifically on The Gravity of Circumstances; Kerstin Kellerman, for her blog post Marianne Fritz: Die Rübenmüdigkeit; Klaus Kastberger and Helmut Neudlinger for their pamphlet Marianne Fritz Archiv Wien. Eine Dokumentation; and the Theaterkollektiv Fritzpunkt for permission to excerpt from their online publication of Natürgemäß III. - Adrian West

WHO ? FOR EXAMPLE: o-dorn-A

Elisabeth Steger 

As a narcissistic sponge in satiety I would like express some of the impressions I got during "In your camp there´s Austria" in the "Stadt des Kindes" (the Town of the Child). Keeping the balance as a frontier commuter and acting again in sovereign precariousness these are my intentions for this year 2005, Christian Chronology. You know this forced jubilee in Austria carries you away.

For decades Marianne Fritz, an Austrian author, has been writing on her "Fortress-Project". She still does so and creates with it a musical, radical and complex prose cosmos consisting of thousands of written and, in parts drawn, pages which is quite simply extra-ordinary. She describes the Fortress as "a petrified soul-landscape" (associations with present Europe and the state of emergency are welcome, dear readers). The main subject in her books is World War I . "Basically the collective happening called WAR is moved completely into language, in such a way, that the reader is able to get back his innocence, he the literary disarranged war as the completely different" ( M.F. ) I think such a transformation is a noble aim if we consider that the war described was regarded as indescribable by a lot of contemporaries – indescribable with words. "In the Fortress Marianne Fritz is fighting against the institution of the Catholic Church as a political power. Her work contains a non-history of Austria/the bygone monarchy" experts were telling in the camp, experts whom I trust. Incidentally these are the reasons why I, an active recipient of pieces of performing art, chose this last installation of the Stadt Theater Wien to be subject of this interim report. Additionally I suppose that memories of my own school-ground – also a piece of 70ies architecture - drew my attention to this specific site somewhat stronger than any other building would have done. 

Fritz’s writing gives birth to an extensive work – extensive in such a way that you would need more than one life if you ever had the idea to read all her un/published books. Moreover the books are really expensive or again out-of-print, therefore not easy available for everybody – so that in the 80ies reading Fritz-texts was seen as an activity of selected snobs or experts – an expert said. Maybe this is still the case. I do not mind. Creating public space for this literary work which deserves to be read was one motivation of the Stadt Theater Wien to start a public appropriation, especially with Naturgemäß / Naturally I and II in Fritzpunkt (Fritzpoint) which opened the doors on April 9th 2002 ."In your camp there´ s Austria – an inhabitable scenic installation with house rules - Fritzpoint on the scene of action 3 " which took place just recently established a confrontation between an architectural/social model for the education of children - the Town of the Child, which was built on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the Austrian republic in the years 1970-74 by the architect Anton Schweighofer – and Fritz’s Fortress. 

The building including a gymnasium, in-door-pool and theatre has been unoccupied for years – a sorry sight not only for me writing these lines. The performers, the neighbours and other visitors I talked to confirmed this opinion.

But the whole thing left back a very cosy feeling and I confess: I am still a little stuck in "In your camp there` s Austria", this installation I inhabited. Let’s start from "The Starting Point": 

"A singular point falls victim to an extremely rare disease, he reflected on himself and was so frightened at this falling that he showed peculiarities which made him contrasting with the other points on the circular line, irreparably contrasting, he was no longer able to be devoted to the circular line, points which are reflecting on themselves get hurt easily, get bumps and look like a thumb in a thumbscrew."

You enter a new chronology when you pass the border to "In your camp there’s Austria". The FEZ (Fritz Einheits Zeit) is established throughout the whole performance project (22.9.2005 7 p.m. MET to 29.9.2005 10 p.m. MET) and, you know, a FEZ day has only 21 hours! 21 hours with all the consequences. 

In the beginning of the text-performance "The Non-marks in the site" programmes were handed out to clue up the unsuspecting audience: An architectural ground plan of the Town of the Child in a transparent sheet. This outline is marked with the stations of the walking performance to enable the audience to get the right orientation through reading it. Stations according to selected text-parts were: The Starting Point, The Linguistic-Sign-Street, To-The-Falls, 32 Storeys, Cracks and Splits, All Around, The Stupid Child, To The Ropes. 

Overleaf there is space left for personal notes. If you do not want to write down your thoughts you just leave the empty paper in the transparent sheet on which a few sentences written by the author Marianne Fritz are printed on: "...transparency like nowhere reigned in the crucial storey..." and the space is filled immediately. When turned around the whole thing changes into a week-planner in FEZ (and MET – for comparison) and the daily order of "In your camp there` s Austria" superimposes the architectural ground plan. 

A FEZ-day – Naturally - starts with a performance! Next comes dinner. Then there is time to sleep. Early exercises are followed by breakfast. The time until lunch could be used to hear or read M.F. in a set up library. And after all that there is still time left for a walk. 

In addition to that the public-address system was put into operation so everyone on the site and the near neighbourhood was informed too about the "right" time and knows what´ s the word.

"Time lifting patience leads back into time, so that the event of falling out of time can come up to discussion in which this event is at the same time stunned and not really ominous at a standstill."

I took part in the performance "The Non-Marks in the Site" three times. As you know, all good things come in threes. This is my third camp experience at all. They all have been border-camps: in the 70s a tent camp with girls from the young Catholic parish near the border between Germany and Czech Republic, in 2003 a no-border camp at the outskirts of Timisoara near the border to Hungary with the publiXtheatrecaravan and last but not least this "Fritz-camp" at the outskirts of Vienna – a playful invitation to play "camp" as well as a serious trial of the circumstances.

These are remarkable facts: to be part of a performance which starts at 7 o´ clock in the morning – abruptly you realize all the social pressures of this evening parties with which theatre plays are ending because there is no evening and therefore - no pressure. The day (in MET) just started. While walking through a building which is a former social format you are invited to follow at the same time a virtual walk through the Fortress of M.F. in which "She expanded the canon of written language with -in summa- social elements" (a literary experts voice) a successful experiment of combination. Not to speak of the deep light humour which had his finger in the pie – in both pies: the work of M.F. and the performers play.

If you are aware of the broken borders between actors and visitors a big space for self-reflection is opened. You know: we are living in post-dramatic ages and the whole building during the projects duration is the stage (which is confirmed through the permanent presence of the film-maker who commissioned herself – like me).

It depends on you and your perceptive faculties. The weather -Naturally- plays a role too.

Like the frequent desorientation of the reader - which is structurally designed in the labour of M.F. ( an experts voice again with which I want to agree because of my own reading experience), the confusions in time and space which could be noticed in the entrants of "In your camp there` s Austria" were intended through the set up installation. Performative expressions happened. Instead of simply describing social facts were created.

P.S. If the local government were interested in a lasting effort this piece of architecture would have not been given away from public authorty. A job creation could have been started for example. Local government is acting untrustworthy.

P.P.S. o-dorn-A is a character of the Fortress. An anagrammatically Adorno. - Elisabeth Steger


In an interview published three months before his death, W. G. Sebald referred to his aversion to the systematic and to his faith in the haphazard: “If you look at a dog following the advice of his nose, he traverses a patch of land in a completely unplottable manner. And he invariably finds what he is looking for. I think that, as I’ve always had dogs, I’ve learned from them how to do this.” Though my own aversion to structure is less an outgrowth of any faith in serendipity than a temperament both indolent and indecisive, rooting around has at times for me, too, yielded benefits that a single-minded approach to literature wouldn’t have afforded. And it is particularly fitting, in light of the quotation above, that I should have hit upon Marianne Fritz—whose novel The Weight of Things I have just translated—by following up on a footnote from Sebald’s posthumously published Across the Land and the Water, a selection of poems translated by Iain Galbraith.
In the late poem “In Alfermée,” named for a Swiss commune where Sebald twice visited the scholar Heinz Schafroth and where the ashes of the poet Günter Eich are scattered, the following two stanzas appear:

Threading sleep
letter by letter
comes a language
you do not understand
The exhausted eyes
of the writer the fingers
of one hand on the
keys of her machine

In the notes to the poem, Galbraith quotes Schafroth as saying that his conversations with Sebald would certainly have touched on Marianne Fritz, author of two prodigious novels totaling some ten thousand pages: Dessen Sprache du nicht verstehst (Whose language you don’t understand) and Naturgemäß (Naturally, or, following the usage of several Bernhard translators, In the nature of things). Schafroth, one of the few critics to have addressed Fritz’s work, informed Galbraith, in a private communication, that it would not be “going too far” to call Fritz the writer in the poem.
Web searches on Fritz revealed surprisingly little. She wrote four published novels, three of which are out of print (Naturgemäß I and II, each consisting of five volumes, are still available on the Suhrkamp Web site for €256 and €298, respectively); she is the subject of one article in English, one in Spanish, and a handful of reviews, essays, and obituaries in German; and there is Fritzpunkt, a theater collective devoted to her work, whose Web site hosts a PDF version of the unfinished Naturgemäß III.
As a translator, I always have my eyes open for striking authors who are little known in English; as a reader, I often find something particularly alluring about outsiders. Much as I might admire Wallace Stevens or Henry James, there is something off-putting about the idea of the gentleman writer with his club dinners and harmless predilections. As Fritz’s compatriot Josef Winkler writes, recalling the favored authors of his youth,
And in those days, if a writer had not shattered himself against his own sentences and died while doing so, I could not believe a word of what he wrote. If I did not sense, when reading, that language lay in the balance, suspended, sentence by sentence, between life and death, then the book held no interest for me.
According to this criterion, Fritz easily passes muster. Born in modest circumstances in Styria in 1948, she studied clerical sciences before marrying the functionary and writer Wolfgang Fritz and moving to Vienna. At age thirty, she published her first novel, The Weight of Things, which was awarded the Robert Walser Prize. From then on, she devoted herself entirely to her writing. In 1979, she and her partner Otto Dünser moved to a small apartment in Vienna’s Seventh District, stripping it of virtually every modern convenience (her sole luxury was said to be a second typewriter, in case the first one failed her) and lining it from floor to ceiling with shelves packed with the books, file boxes, maps, and index cards essential to Fritz’s increasingly elaborate and dense work. She worked fourteen-hour days, seven days a week, oblivious to the date or the season, save for the occasional “philosophical pause for thought,” as Dünser described her infrequent outings. Though she would publish some eight thousand pages of writing between 1980 and 1998, when the second volume of Naturgemäß was released, she was hardly an advocate of the rushed approach César Aira describes as the “flight forward,” and edited her work scrupulously. “How would we ever get anywhere if we held onto everything?” Dünser quotes her as saying.
The Weight of Things is written in a jaunty, albeit acerbic German that presents few difficulties for the average reader. Her second novel, Das Kind der Gewalt und die Sterne der Romani (The child of violence and the stars of the Romani), which begins with a supple, lyrical prose bordering on poetry, soon dispenses with the rules governing German syntax in favor of a highly rhythmic, almost incantatory phrasing, rife with unwieldy neologisms, which left the few critics who dared to examine it perplexed. As a consequence, she was released by her publisher, Fischer; her third book, the 3,400-page Dessen Sprache du nicht verstehst, was picked up by Suhrkamp, whose director, the legendary Siegfried Unseld, hoped to market Fritz as a “female Joyce.” The book was a minor scandal: her proofreader gave up a third of the way through, declaring it impossible to distinguish errors from the author’s own idiosyncratic orthography, and reviewers spoke openly of the point at which they’d abandoned reading it. Bemusement gave way to open hostility in the nineties, when Naturgemäß I appeared: in one of the scant reviews, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung described it as a “Disneyland of Deconstruction,” a “provocation,” a game of Legos played with the detritus of the horrors of the twentieth century.

Manuscript pages from Dessen Sprache du nicht verstehst (Whose language you don’t understand). Image courtesy mariannefritz.at.

Yet Fritz’s experimentation is neither idle nor random, and the rewards it harbors for patient readers are perhaps unique in world literature. In The Weight of Things, the sparseness of Fritz’s language reflects the oppressiveness of the commonplace in the modest lives of a family torn between obedience and rebellion. Dessen Sprache du nicht verstehst sought to eliminate the nonessential, to shatter the strictures of grammar, which, according to Fritz, constituted the limits of thought. The German language, as the bedrock of the worldview of the German-speaking peoples, had been an essential actor in the horrors of the First and Second World Wars, impeding the development of independent consciousness on the part of the lower classes and subsuming them in a state that thrived on annihilation. For Fritz, the violence she records was inseparable from the cultural and historical background that gave rise to it, and hence, a reconciliation of her project with “life as such,” as she calls it in The Weight of Things, was out of the question. What was necessary was a new world, built from the bottom up, founded on new kinds of words and new ideas. There were no shortcuts: for the writing of her second novel, she built a scale model of the town of Gnom, where the action takes place, “to get a natural orientation”; she worked extensively with maps and photos, invented hundreds of characters, pursued the inner logic of her undertaking until all traces of convention were swept away. A body of work reminiscent at times of Beckett, at times of Brecht, at times of Rabelais terminates, in the later volumes of Naturgemäß, in something unprecedentedly strange and fascinating.
Wolfgang Nagel, one of Fritz’s more generous detractors, notes rightly that “detailed stylistic criticism is not possible here … One must either accept this language in its entirety, or reject it outright.” This is undoubtedly true: what perplexes me is the near-unanimity with which the literary culture of Germany and Austria opted for the latter. In general, the detractors of long, complex, unorthodox, or vexatious books have their counterpart in a small but fervent cult of readers: Joyceans, Nabokovians, those who claim to think highly of William Burroughs. In many cases, the esteem that accrues to difficult authors has little to do with their being read; a genius is born not of resolute bookworms slogging through arcane texts but of that critical mass of reviews, essays, and dissertations required to generate the clichés the reading public needs in order to sound intelligent—to make the comparison, no less inept for its ubiquity, of Knausgaard to Proust, or to apply the adjective Kafkaesque to any story about bureaucracy.
My question is not so much why Fritz hasn’t been read, but why she has been deprived of the regard showered on other writers people don’t read. And the only answer I have arrived at is that, despite the successes of feminist criticism in inspiring a measure of guilty conscience on the part of readers, there is something fundamentally gendered in the concept of “genius” and that the idiosyncrasies taken at face value in the case of male writers appear dubious in the case of their female counterparts, signaling a lack of restraint, a touch of hysteria, or mental instability. In Fritz’s case, an early review in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung described her “writing and discourse compulsion” as “in medical terms, a phenomenon extraneous to language”; M. Das Magazin dismissed her work as the record of aberrant thought patterns, asking, “Whence comes the misconception that this has anything to do with literature?” It is not that women as a whole are deprived of genius status—most readers have a token woman writer or two whose name they can trot out as proof of their alleged impartiality. It is rather that women, like blacks, like non-Europeans, tend more easily to be skipped over; that so often, there is something halfhearted and factitious in declarations of women’s genius, a wavering or self-congratulatory note, that is absent when people talk about Byron or Proust.
Translating The Weight of Things was my own small attempt to help redress this circumstance. Less zany, more amenable than Fritz’s later writings, it nonetheless contains the whole of her themes in miniature and serves as the keystone for her entire fictional project, which she referred to with the overarching title “The Fortress.” The Weight of Things tells the story of a poor young woman who loses her first love in World War II, who tries and fails to resign herself to domesticity and motherhood, and who is slowly consumed by the weight of circumstances outside her control; it presents, in succinct and unforgiving prose, a merciless indictment of postwar Austria, where the state’s violence turned inward upon its most vulnerable citizens, declaring their worth or worthlessness according to their degree of productivity, without regard for the individual dignity of their lives. - Adrian Nathan West