[3][4] Gertrud Anna Fussenegger was born in Pilsen, a flourishing manufacturing city in Bohemia which at that time was a Crown land of the Austrian Empire.
[8] She later confided in her diaries that she sometimes felt a little regretful, listening uncomprehendingly to the chattering of her grandparents' Bohemian-born domestic servants, that having lived almost all of her first fourteen years in other parts of Austria, she had not more effectively mastered the Czech language.
[9] In March 1938, following an invasion from the north that met with little practical resistance, Austria was incorporated into an enlarged German state, albeit under very different circumstances from those that most nineteenth century proponents of such a "solution" would have anticipated.
By the time it ended in divorce twelve years later the marriage had produced four recorded children, including the artist Ricarda Dietz.
Fussenegger's own insights, reported by a Catholic newspaper, are instructive: In 1961 she relocated with her family, settling this time in Leonding, a small town near Linz.
[18] Fussenegger's relationship with National Socialism did much to define both her early writing career and a degree of controversy around her person which never completely went away.
[19] She took part on the Weimar Poets' Congress in 1938 and again in 1939, and was in touch with well-known "völkisch" authors such as Ina Seidel, Lulu von Strauß und Torney, Will Vesper and Wilhelm Pleyer.
[9] Two years after its publication one of her first books, "Mohrenlegende" (1937: loosely "Legends of the dark skinned ones") was (belatedly) banned by the party experts who now identified it as criticism of official race ideology and "Catholic dross" ("katholisches Machwerk").
[19][21] Many of Fussenegger's other pieces, mostly during this period religiously contextualised novels, poems and reviews, found their way into important party newspapers and journals.
Around fifty years later Gertrud Fussenegger's comment on the affair was capable of various interpretations, but it fell short of an unambiguous recantation.
The western two-thirds of Germany and the pre-1938 territory of Austria were both divided into military occupation zones, with Berlin and Vienna sub-divided between armies of the same four occupying powers.
In Germany's Soviet occupation zone two of Fussenegger's novels, "Der Brautraub" ("The Bride Robbery": 1939) und "Böhmische Verzauberungen" ("Bohemian Enchantments": 1944) were included in the official four volume "List of Discarded Literature".
Yet as late as 1952 she published a brief self-portrait in a literary journal which contained phrases chillingly redolent of National Socialist race ideology.
She belonged to a race characterised by "fair skin, bright [blue] eyes, sensitive to bright light, a hybrid of nordic and dinaric features" ("... hellhäutig, helläugig, empfindlich gegen die Wirkung des Lichts, ein Mischtyp aus nordischen und dinarischen Zügen").
In it she had employed National Socialist antisemitic shibboleths and stereo-types to condemn the city's Jewish community for the dire condition of the place.