The End and the Beginning - Open Book Publishers

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Feuilletons and fairy tales. A
sampling
Editor’s Note
The following short stories and newspaper feuilletons, all translated by the
editor, have been selected from among the hundreds published by Zur
Mühlen because of the light they throw on her inspiration and motivation
as a writer. Their themes and topics pervade her entire oeuvre: the injustice,
violence, and cruelty of modern capitalist societies; the miserable lives
of the poor and downtrodden; the way a patriarchal culture prevents
women of all classes from developing into full human beings; and, not
least, the tensions within her own utopian aspirations. On the one hand,
for example, the conviction that it is a human responsibility, and especially
a responsibility of the artist, to confront an ugly and unjust world and
rouse others to confront and combat it, so that a better world may come
into being; on the other, nostalgia for the beauty, peace, and harmony of
the hortus conclusus, the protected childhood paradise that Zur Mühlen
herself once knew in her grandmother’s villa in the little lakeside resort
town of Gmunden. On the one hand, the writer’s moral responsibility to
create a literature of combat, a littérature engagée (“We Have to Tell Them”);
on the other, the temptation of estheticism, of excluding ugliness from
one’s writing in order to create a manageable and esthetically satisfying
imaginary world (“Painted on Ivory”). In her feuilletons as well as in her
novels, Zur Mühlen suggests that withdrawal from the world of conflict
and violence is not only immoral, but may result, for the artist, in an
impoverishment of her art, and that, in addition, an individual who has
shut herself off from the everyday world of passions and desires or who
has been protected from it, is rendered defenceless against the world
(“Death of a Shadow” – recognizably contemporary with the novel Unsere
Töchter die Nazinen). One of the feuilletons seems to suggest, however, that
any career as a writer requires sacrifice. To the degree that sympathizing