Bad Words

Ilse Aichinger (1921–2016) was born in Vienna, Austria. Her mother was a Jewish pediatrician and her father was a Catholic schoolteacher. After their parents divorced, Ilse and her identical twin sister Helga were raised primarily by their maternal grandmother. (Chillingly, in 1933, a young Joseph Mengele knocked on their door and expressed interest in meeting the twins but was shooed away.) During the war, the sisters were persecuted as "half-Jews": Ilse was forced into manual labor in a button factory while Helga escaped on the last Kindertransport out of Vienna. Aichinger hid her mother in her room at the Hotel Metropol for the duration of the war. Their grandmother and their mother's siblings were deported and murdered. A member of the famed Gruppe 47, Aichinger, who is credited as the first writer to use the phrase “concentration camp,” won numerous awards including the Nelly Sachs Prize; she rejected the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany.

Christian Hawkey is a poet, translator, and educator. He has written several full-length poetry collections, including Sift, as well as the widely celebrated genre-defying book Ventrakl. He lives in Berlin, Germany.