Die grössere Hoffnung

"Who is the stranger, you or I?" Ilse Aichinger's novel, first published in 1948, about racially persecuted children during the Hitler era still provokes thought: It tells in alienating images of fear, threat, and the resistant hope of the "children with the wrong grandparents." These children, who are considered Jewish or, like the main character Ellen, half-Jewish according to the Nuremberg Laws, suffer from isolation, humiliation, and mockery. But after their hope for emigration has been shattered, a different hope arises for them, the "greater hope." This includes the certainty that one day the farewell will end and the reunion will begin, and it also means that love and suffering become one: "Whip us, kill us, trample us down; you can only catch up with us where you want to love or be loved." This hope has d.