Marie Luise Kaschnitz's Fictive Diaries

Abstract

Marie Luise Kaschnitz's (1901- 1974) literary output was in large part determined by themes from her own life anti the lives of her nearest of kin so that the reader gets the impression that she has elaborated her life in literature almost without any estrangement or camouflage. Various diary forms, for example the fictive diary, hold a special place in her work. If "fictive" signifies something which has been "made up, presupposed, represented, created in the imagination" the fictive diary ought to register fabricated events, feelings and the conditions of an imaginary self. However, in the two works in which she uses the diary form, The House of Childhood (Das Haus der Kindheit) written in 1956 and the short story "Feet in the Fire" ("Die Füße im Feuer") from 1964, the reader finds a common more or less (auto)b io graphical base but they are nevertheless designated as fictive diaries, hi spite of autobiographical facts, that is , its element of real autobiography, these texts are examples of artistic prose in which the diary self, that is the I-narrator who is not identical with the authoress, observes and describes herself and the real outer world but in such a fashion that reality is fictionalized and literarized. The self is in the middle of the microcosmos from which it embarks on inner and outer journeys through the spaces of reality and the imagination. Because of the fact that the diary encompasses man/the self both in space and in time these journeys are also through time. For Kaschnitz the fictive diary is a way of capturing contents from her own life in which the very subjective and "recognizable" initial self experienced numerous transformations within the literary work. For Kaschnitz the diarist the post and memory are those temporal and spatial dimensions which (seem to) erase the present as a dimension of the time and the space of writing. The diary form lakes upon itself the registration of the inner process of a specific self but also prevents the disconnection of the passage back from the past into the present. In these works which can be designated as autobiographical diaries of memory, the form of the diary takes upon itself the function of narrating a self (THe House of Childhood) or thematizes tire alienation of lire individual within the contemporary world using the suggestive, immediate and concise form of the short story ("Feet in tire Fire").