From Locus Amoenus and Heterotopia to a New Posthuman Oikos: M. Haushofer’s "Die Wand"/"The Wall"

Haushofer’s work has long been misunderstood, although the authoress rather anticipated central issues of feminism. Her modernity is particularly evident in "Die Wand"/"The Wall" (1963), her masterpiece, which, thanks to its great interpretative potential, not surprisingly contributed to the rediscovery and reinterpretation of the writer’s entire oeuvre. It is also the only novel that does not focus on the private and claustrophobic sphere of the domestic dwelling. The peculiarity of this text lies in the fact that, on the one hand, it is still highly topical and, on the other, its different interpretations complement rather than exclude each other, thus paving the way for always new hermeneutic approaches. This paper offers a posthuman reading of the text, which traces the stages of the protagonist’s metamorphosis as a progressive dissolution of the self and of its anthropocentric perspective in an ‘entanglement’ of spacetime reticular interconnections and in a ‘fusion’ of the human with the animal and even the inorganic kingdom. In this way, although the ambivalent initial mountain idyll suddenly seems to turn into a heterotopic open-air prison, it ultimately proves to be a space for the protagonist’s ‘re-location’ in a new paradoxically ‘public’ oikos of nature.