The Final Year By Ilse Tielsch

In this gentle and simultaneously amusing, yet ominous, autobiographical novel, Ilse Tielsch describes the events of 1938 on the Austrian-Czech border, as seen through the eyes of a bright-eyed and curious ten-year-old girl. We watch as the divisive vitriol of Hitler’s politics destroys the sense of community that had prevailed between speakers of Czech and German, as the awareness of ethnic differences comes to divide people, and as people mysteriously begin to disappear from the village. Throughout the year, Elfi’s parents are increasingly reluctant to answer questions; though they attempt to keep Elfi ignorant of politics, the reader understands before she does what tragic events are building momentum in this region. Elfi’s narrative gives vivid life to the personal histories that are taking place against the background of larger historical events.

Ilse Tielsch was born in 1929 in the Moravian town of Auspitz/Hustopeče. She fled to Austria in April 1945 and earned a doctorate in journalism and German studies at the University of Vienna. As a free lance writer since 1964, Ilse Tielsch is the author of more than a dozen novels, including Die Ahnenpyramide (1980) (Ancestral Pyramid, 2001) as well as numerous essays and radio plays. Her work has been translated into at least seventeen foreign languages, among them English, French, Dutch, Turkish, Swedish, and Arabic. Numerous prizes and honors have been bestowed upon her, among them the Anton-Wildgans prize and the Austrian Cross of Honor for Science and Art.

Anne Close Ulmer is a professor of German at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota. Her areas of specialization are Austrian literature and culture; 20th-century German prose; poetry and drama; European fairy-tale; youth literature, turn-of-the-century Vienna, Rilke and his circle; and German language. Her previous translations include Peter Henisch, Negatives of My Father (Ariadne Press, 1990).2009