An author loses the language. Renate Welsh tells of this nightmare in the story “I Without Words”, which she will present next Wednesday in Vienna. The 85-year-old talks about a stroke she suffered in Italy, about her hospitalization and the slow rehabilitation, the associated fears and exceptional situations that demanded all her strength and repeatedly overwhelmed her. She spares neither herself nor the readers.
Since “Das Vamperl” (1979), the story about a little vampire who sucks the poison out of people’s bile, Welsh has been considered one of the most renowned children’s book authors in Austria. With her commemorative volume “Kieselsteine” (2019) and the novel “Die alten Johanna” (2021), the sequel to her 1979 classic children’s book “Johanna”, she has most recently demonstrated this in the general literature segment. “I Without Words” is on the one hand the report of a very personal tragedy and its overcoming, on the other hand an encouraging examination of general problems in connection with old age and illness.
“I think I’m going to get a blow!” In Vienna in particular, this is a dictum. Welsh reports quite bluntly how brutally one’s wings are clipped when the time actually comes – including various humiliations, shame and one’s own alienation when one no longer recognizes what is left of one as a mutilated remnant. But the book is not just a case history, but also leads the author, thrown back into the helplessness of a child, back into the memory of her own childhood and lets her experience feelings from the past with great intensity: “Did there even exist a time where fear didn’t sit on my chest?”
Welsh does not have the humor with which Joachim Meyerhoff described his own medical history after a “Schlagerl” (“I was a Schlagerlstar!”) in “Hamster im Hinter Stromgebiet” as a tragi-comic expedition into unexplored areas of his own psyche, but he has a high degree of sincerity with which she reflects on what is going through her head, but only gradually regains control of her language – and with the help of many therapeutic measures. While she remembers her one-year stay in the USA as a student, lockdown measures or her husband’s aneurysm operation are currently getting in the way, and most recently a corona infection.
In the end, a lot has changed. She has become someone else. Can admit weaknesses and failures. And can no longer name everything as she was used to. One can only guess under what circumstances Welsh managed to write this book. “It will have to be enough if I keep striving for accuracy. I still believe that language can build its own worlds in which many things become possible that seemed impossible.”
(SERVICE – Renate Welsh: “I without words”, Czernin Verlag, 112 pages, 20 euros, book presentation on Wednesday, April 19, 7 p.m., Thalia Wien Mitte, Vienna 3, Landstrasser Hauptstrasse 2a/2b)