Background
Friederike Mayröcker was born on December 20, 1924, in Vienna, Austria.
Friederike Mayröcker was born on December 20, 1924, in Vienna, Austria.
Friederike Mayröcker studied business before being drafted into the Luftwaffe in 1942. Mayroecker passed the state examination in English in 1945 and studied English in a Viennese secondary school from 1946 to 1967.
In 1954, Friederike Mayröcker met Ernst Jandl, her long-time collaborator, and in the 1950’s they participated in the avant-garde Wiener Gruppe (Vienna Group). They became members of Grazer Autorenversammlung (Graz Authors’ Association) in 1973, an alternative to the more conservative P.E.N. Club in Vienna. She has traveled throughout Europe, the United States, and Russia on reading tours.
The first phase of Mayroecker’s literary style is characterized by the poetry written between 1944 through 1965 and compiled in her book, Tod durch Musen (Death by the Muses, 1966). She moves from imaginatively lyrical poems to sparer, more precise poetry which reflects the rigorous experience gained from her writing group. Robert Acker, in the Encyclopedia of World Literature, dismisses this early work, saying it is “influenced by prewar avant-garde literary movements, especially surrealism, and her early texts from about 1944 to 1965 were thus somewhat simple and derivative.”
During the late 1960s through early 1970s, Mayroecker developed her second writing style, based on radical linguistic experimentation. In her short prose works, she combined elements from nonsense jingles, pop culture, dialects, foreign language, and jargon. She even includes drawings in some poems, and others are arranged in a graphic format. Mayroecker makes her influences clear, paying tribute, for example, to Gertrude Stein in ‘Tender Buttons fuer Selbstmoerder” (Tender Buttons for suicides).
During this same literary phase, Mayroecker collaborated with Jandl on a number of radio plays. Their award-winning radio play Fuenf Mann Menschen (Five Man Men, 1971), speech takes on different functions other than traditional dialogue and monologue. Speech patterns become sound effects, like a musical score. The play won the 1968 Radio Play Prize for the War Blind. The jury commended Mayroecker and Jandl.
In a collection of nine radio plays entitled Schwarmgesang: Szenen fuer die poetische Buehne (Swarm Song: Scenes for the Poetic Stage, 1978), speaking voices are superimposed upon each other in an exploration of the possibilities of stereophonic sound. This effect is meant to convey different views of reality. During this time, Mayroecker also collaborated on a television film and wrote and illustrated several children’s books.
Mayroecker’s work from the early 1970s to the present marks her third literary phase. She bases her prose on fragmentary dialogue and structural relationships, not plot or character, in a work based on a 1972 trip to the United States, Je ein umwoelkter Gipfel (Each a Cloud-covered Summit, 1973). She reduces a 1,000-page manuscript into a highly cross-referenced 140 pages in Das Licht in der Landschaft (The Light in the Landscape). Mayroecker evokes her experiences with dreams, fantasies, conversations, letters and sensations. At the center is a triangular love affair through which Mayroecker explores the nature of human relationships.
She continues in this more realistic style in recollections of a train ride from Paris to Vienna in Reise durch die Nacht (Journey through the Night, 1984). Mayroecker explores her fantasies, fears, joys and memories. She is even more autobiographical in her examination of writing and personal relationships, Mein Herz mein Zimmer mein Name (My Heart My Room My Name, 1988). In this latest work, Mayroecker worries that she is running out of time for obsessing and writing, a remarkable thing to consider in the twilight of such a prolific, varied and celebrated career.
Quotations: “I have succeeded in converting to the most precise language possible the traces imposed on me by life and the world.”
Mayröcker is a member of the Wiener Gruppe, Grazer Autorenversammlung (Graz Authors’ Association), Academy of Language and Literature in Darmstadt, Österreichischer Kunstsenat Wien, Kurie fuer Wissenschaft und Kunst, Akademie der Kuenste Berlin-West, Internationales Kuenstlergremium, Forum Stadtpark.
Quotes from others about the person
“Friederike Mayroecker is, without doubt, the most versatile and experimental of contemporary poets in the German language and also the most cosmopolitan.” - Ute Marie Sane
"Mayroecker’s work is memories, dreams, fantasies, perceptions, reflections and feelings are brought together in a timeless amalgam... traditional metaphorical use of language gives way to innovative techniques. The result is a network of associations in which all features of language - not only semantic meaning but also sounds, rhythms, and syntax - function as metaphor.” - Beth Bjorklund