The Grea­ter Hope

Ellen is eleven years old and alone. She is looking for her mother, but she is already in America. A strange consul denies Ellen permission to emigrate because she has the "wrong" grandparents, which is a dangerous thing in these times. She befriends a group of Jewish children. For Ellen, the fact that her new friends are not allowed to sit on park benches, that footfalls on the stairs cause their bodies to freeze up so as not to make a sound, and that the cemetery is the only place where they can play is the haunting, frightening and degrading reality under the Nuremberg Laws. Yet a greater hope grows from the rubble of her childhood: freedom.

Rich in imagery, jarring and deeply moving, Ilse Aichinger's novel describes childhood during wartime and unwavering resistance. Written in 1947, the book broke taboo and only recently came to be seen as a milestone in postwar literature. It is now being performed in Germany for the first time under the extraordinary, poetic direction of Salome Schneebeli.