About the work
“Die Wand” (The Wall) is a novel by the Austrian writer Marlen Haushofer, published in 1963 by Sigbert Mohn in Gütersloh and regarded as her principal work. Haushofer began writing it in Steyr in November 1960; the original working title “Die gläserne Wand” (The Glass Wall) was shortened while she was still at work on the manuscript. The novel's landscape is modelled on the area around Molln, where the author grew up: the Lackenhütte served as the model for the hunting lodge and the Haidenalm for the mountain pasture. In the theatre the material is performed in dedicated stage versions based on the narrator's first-person account.
Plot
A nameless woman of about forty travels with her cousin and her cousin's husband to a hunting lodge in the mountains for a weekend. When the couple fail to return from an evening trip down into the valley, she runs into an invisible wall at the mouth of the gorge, beyond which people and animals seem frozen in place. Cut off from the world, she learns to live on supplies, the forest and a garden together with the dog Luchs, a pregnant cow and some stray cats, and in her third winter she writes down what has happened. When a strange man suddenly appears and kills the young bull calf and the dog for no reason, she shoots him; her further fate remains open.
Cultural significance
After early praise the novel was long forgotten and became a cult book of the women's movement in the 1980s. It has been read as a critique of civilization, as a female Robinsonade and as a parable of the threat of the Cold War. Julian Pölsler's film adaptation starring Martina Gedeck premiered at the Berlinale in 2012, and the same year Vienna's Burgtheater presented a stage version.