Kohlröserl, Alpenglühen Und Patisserie – the Vision of the Exiled Children Deborah Vietor-Engländer

Imagining Austria: Kohlröserl, Alpenglühen und Patisserie – the Vision of the Exiled Children Deborah Vietor-Engländer Eva Ibbotson, born Eva Maria Charlotte Michelle Wiesner in Vienna on 25 January 1925, the daughter of the scientist Berthold Wiesner and the playwright and novelist Anna Gmeyner (1902-1991; also known under the names Anna Wiesner and Anna Morduch and the pseudonym Anna Reiner), was taken to Britain initially as a baby and definitively in 1933, aged eight. This paper wishes to examine the romantic vision of Austria created by Ibbotson in six of her novels and a book of nineteen short stories for adults (1981-1998), and in a book for children (2004), while living in Britain, compared to her realistic portrayal of exile and internment in Britain and of her own childhood as a chronically neglected child. Biographical elements are vital to the understanding of Eva Ibbotson’s work; hence a brief biographical summary is in order. As she herself tells the story, her parents, the dramatist Anna Gmeyner and the biologist Berthold Paul Wiesner met in Vienna. Gmeyner was longing to escape from her family and when, at the age of 22, she encountered a young biology student, weeping at having just finished eating the last pot of strawberry jam made by his mother before she died, it led to their marriage in 1924 and the birth of their daughter in 1925. Eva describes the bond between her parents as ‘a mutual unhappiness, a longing to get away from home […] and of course it was not enough’.1 Wiesner obtained a research appointment at Edinburgh University and in 1926 Gmeyner followed her husband there and took a great interest in the General Strike of 1926. She interviewed miners and her play Heer ohne Helden was the result. According to her daughter Wiesner initially studied the maternal behaviour of rats which he found more satisfactory than his own wife’s maternal behaviour.2 Wiesner and Gmeyner separated in 1927 and Gmeyner returned to Berlin, initially taking her daughter with her. Wiesner evidently remained in Edinburgh and neither parent seemed particularly concerned about the fate of their two year-old daughter. The Wiesners divorced in 1928 when Eva was three. Eva Ibbotson’s early childhood was spent shuttling back and forth in trains across Europe from one parent to the other and to her grandparents, as well as living in a ‘Kinderheim’ in Vienna. Anna Gmeyner’s play Heer ohne Helden was first performed in Dresden in 1929 and in January 1930 in Berlin.3 She worked on the film Don Quichotte in France with Georg Wilhelm Pabst in 1932 and 1933 and did not return to Germany after the ‘Machtergreifung’ except for a 166 Deborah Vietor-Engländer brief trip through Munich in 1934.4 In Paris she met and married the Russian-Jewish philosopher Jascha Morduch who had a British passport. In 1927 a Pregnancy Diagnosis Centre was established in Edinburgh by Zondek and Aschheim where Berthold Wiesner carried out research into gonatrophins. He pioneered fertility treatment (artificial insemination) in the 1930s and probably provided a great deal of sperm himself for donor insemination of the women who were treated. One does not know precisely how many half-siblings Eva Ibbotson may have, though a number have been traced.5 Wiesner brought his daughter to Edinburgh in 1933; her mother and stepfather arrived in England in May or June 1934 and soon went to live in Belsize Park. Eva again had to shuttle between both parents and basically felt as if she belonged to neither while trying to ingratiate herself with both. Gmeyner wrote the novel Manja for which she is best known today between 1936 and 1938, publishing the German version with the Querido Verlag in Amsterdam in 1939 under the pseudonym Anna Reiner (to protect her family, particularly her mother, still in Austria). It also appeared in English in London and New York in 1939, as well as in Dutch, and received excellent reviews in the mainstream press, but was then ‘swamped by the war’, as Eva Ibbotson puts it.6 A second novel, Café du Dome, also published originally under the name Anna Reiner, was similarly translated into English and published in 1941.7 Instead of the perpetual tug of war between Belsize Park and Edinburgh, Eva was sent to the progressive boarding school Dartington Hall in Devon. She then studied physiology and later married the ecologist and naturalist Alan Ibbotson who taught at Newcastle University. Whilst bringing up their four children she began writing short stories and, once her youngest son had started school, novels. Her first novel for adults was published in 1981 when she was 56. There are an exceptionally large number of autobiographical elements both in her books for children and in those for adults. In fact they represent a mosaic; she establishes leitmotifs in her early books and develops them in the later ones. According to Eva Ibbotson, at a young age her mother had been the acknowledged story-teller of the neighbourhood8 with an ability to turn anything into a story. She herself based many of her early stories on her mother’s family anecdotes: for example, the carp kept in the bath who refused to become the Christmas Dinner resulted in the early story ‘The Great Carp Ferdinand’ in 1984, recurring twenty years later in her most recent book The Star of Kazan.9 In general, romantic novels tend to escape critical attention although Eva Ibbotson did win the Romantic Novelists’ Award in 1983. However, her books for children (nine altogether) have received numerous awards and sold over one million copies. Here I have selected six novels and one book of .

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