IN ONE OF her later poems, Erika Mitterer wrote:

A remarkable feature of the Austrian writer's work is that over a literary career spanning more than seventy years she consistently engaged in both prose and poetry with wide-ranging aspects of social and political reality while remaining faithful throughout to her (traditional) ideas on form and style and to her rigorous Christian principles. Described as one of Austria's conservative writers, she was one of the few who in her postwar writing confronted her fellow Austrians with the country's Nazi past and was responsible for producing possibly the most striking, subtle, but incisive of inner emigrant oppositional works to have appeared under National Socialism, the novel Der Fürst der Welt (1940, English translation The Prince of Darkness, 2004).

A Life “Swimming against the Tide”: Society, Politics, and Religion

Erika Mitterer was born in Vienna in 1906 into a middle-class family. She describes her parents as unconventional and mildly “nonconformist.” Her father, a native of Lower Austria, was an architect and civil servant whose real passion was hunting, skiing, and nature, while her mother, a “half Jew,” grew up in Berlin and had been a painter before she married. The young Erika attended a grammar school in Vienna, after which she trained and worked as a social worker and nursery nurse, an experience that considerably broadened her social horizons. After short periods in Paris and Vienna, between 1926 and 1929 she took up posts as a local authority social worker in the Burgenland and North Tyrol regions of Austria.

She started writing poetry in her teens and at the age of eighteen began a remarkable correspondence in verse with Rainer Maria Rilke, during which she received almost fifty poems from the by now seriously ill poet, who recognized in her a kindred spirit, possibly even a younger self. Mitterer visited Rilke in Muzot, Switzerland, and the exchange continued until a few months before his death in 1926. The Rilke correspondence has caused many to neglect the rest of Mitterer's work, especially her later poetry.