#GermanLitMonth25 The Wall

by Marlen Haushofer

Finish date: 14.11.2025
Genre: SciFi novel (dystopia)
Rating: A
#GermanLitMonth25 – #SciFiMonth2025

Good News: Life shows up with a sledgehammer…in this case an invisible wall…and the reader expects the main character to crumble. But she doesn’t. That is what kept me reading. I wanted to see how she battled the risk of mental collapse.

Good News: And when the test comes…dystopian scenes on an Austrian mountain top …the clock’s already running. The woman finds fragile ways to survive despite total isolation through
through writing and caregiving to her animals: cow (Bella), cats (Pearl, Tiger, Panther) and a dog  (Lynx).

Bad News: I was not enthusiastic with Ms Haushofer’s writing style. The first 50-60 pages were the perfect hook…but soon fell into a repetive cycle: Eat, sleep, care for the animals, maintain a food supply in the forest, rince and repeat. This went on for the next 200 pages!

Good News: Despite my feeling about the writing style (….others may have no problem with it), I should not diminsh the message Ms Haushofer reveals: don’t try to escape solitude…embrace it. This was an  was an unnerving read…really! Can you imagine trying to survive after an apoclolyptic disaster and you were isolated? The strong point of the book is that it makes the reader (me) uncomfortable, lets the reader squirm.The situation demanded that the woman break, but she did not. She built something out of nothing and carried the weight of caring or her animals.

Personal: Struggling to get a few comments about The Wall on paper. It had an impact on me from many sides: writing style – dystopian dread of inevitable death…just so much to unpack. Animals? It hard to read when the nameless isolated woman loses a beloved friend/animal. I had to skim some pages. This book reminds me of On the Beach by Neil Shute: a profound feeling of doom and the inevitability of death once the food, ammunition, matches….run out. This doom is not depicted as violent….but rather through a creeping, quiet, and inevitable approach of death the nameless female character feels. The book was unnerving at times b/c I kept asking myself how would it feel to be so isolated? The book followed me all day after finishing it….such a terrifying situation to be in.

Marlen Haushofer  (1920 – 1970) was an Austrian author, most famous for her novel The Wall (1963)