A Very Little Woman By Peter Henisch

Nominated for the 2007 German Book Prize, A Very Little Woman continues Peter Henisch’s exploration of Austrian history through a familial lens. A Very Little Woman tells the story of Henisch’s paternal grandmother, Marta Prinz, the daughter of eastern European Jewish immigrants to Vienna. Narrated by Marta’s grandson, Paul Spielmann, the novel depicts her negotiation of various identities – including Jewish daughter, Aryanized wife, and postwar grandmother – within and against the changing sociopolitical structures of twentieth-century Austria. Engaging in and reflecting upon individual acts of memory, A Very Little Woman illuminates the intersections of personal, familial, and national narratives.
The grandson of Marta Prinz, Peter Henisch was born in Vienna in 1943. Having studied German literature, philosophy, history, and psychology at the University of Vienna, he published his first novel, Hamlet bleibt (Hamlet Remains), in 1971. He has since become a prolific and prizewinning author of novels, plays, poems, and essays whose subjects include the Austrian student movement, the historical and rhetorical controversies surrounding the “Waldheim Affair,” his own father, Jim Morrison, and such literary figures as Franz Kafka, E. T. A. Hoffmann, and Karl May. Ariadne Press has published two other novels by Peter Henisch in English translation, Negatives of My Father (1990) and Stone’s Paranoia (2000).
Craig Decker is Professor of German at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine. He has published on various topics in Austrian literature and culture from the nineteenth century to the present. His work on Peter Henisch includes the edited volume Balancing Acts: Textual Strategies of Peter Henisch (Ariadne Press, 2002) and English translations of Steins Paranoia (1988) and “Baronkarl” (1980).