In her enormous productivity, the world literary figure Friederike Mayröcker has produced an almost unmanageable oeuvre comprising over 100 books. To mark her 100th birthday, literary scholar Alexandra Strohmaier, who has been researching the Austrian poet for over 20 years, has published the first reference work on Mayröcker together with her Brussels colleague Inge Arteel. "I already dealt with the author in my dissertation. Her texts are unique and are often characterised as complex," says Strohmaier, describing her fascination. "I took the birthday as an opportunity to undertake an extensive mapping of her complete works with an international team. The handbook, published by Metzler-Verlag with contributions from around 30 Germanists, is a milestone in Mayröcker research and at the same time a fundamental publication on contemporary German-language literature.
Klaus Kastberger, director of the Literature House at the University of Graz and Bachmann juror, has also analysed the celebrated author - including the well-known towers of notes in her chaotic-looking study. One of his contributions has just been published in the publicly accessible Vienna Library in Vienna City Hall: "Friederike Mayröcker's writing is only conceivable against the backdrop of her anarchist workshop. Under mountains of linguistic material, she realised an artistic existence into her old age that was characterised by an irrepressible freedom of poetic form and an absolute immovability of poetic statement," Kastberger summarises. There is no other author who has come so far in these radical arts. "Now that these materials are organised in literary archives, all that remains of their original power is a distant copy. But even that goes to the heart," says the researcher.
