The Changeling

Fate has been unkind to Zitha. Born as the illegitimate child of a farm girl, she is mentally retarded and physically handicapped. The people in the village, biased by their Catholicism and superstition, have a simple explanation for the girl’s fate: evil spirits have stolen the child after birth and replaced it with a bewitched girl. A changeling, as it is known as in the myths and ghost stories of the Alpine regions. It is said that it will bring bad luck to the whole of the village. So the collective delusion runs its course, against which even the mother’s love is powerless. In the end, the villagers go so far as to seek to kill the child. Christine Lavant describes the social exclusion of a weak member of the village community with great intensity. The story, which was posthumously published in 1998, also stands for the danger to our civilisation that emerged not least during Christine Lavant’s lifetime, with the “extermination of worthless life“ propagated by the National Socialists.

After being out of print for some time, “The Changeling“ is now republished by Wallstein, edited by Klaus Amann, who is preparing a special edition of the complete works of Christine Lavant with a commentary.

Christine Lavant, the great Austrian lyricist, is rediscovered as a writer of prose.
Her matchless story “The Changeling“ is now available again.

Christine Lavant
Born in 1915 in poor circumstances in St. Stefan in the Lavant Valley region of Carinthia, Christine Lavant was prone to severe illnesses from a very young age, which affected her for the whole of her life. She earned her living by knitting. She began writing in the 1930s, and her first publications appeared at the end of the 1940s. As well as a large number of other awards, she won the Georg Trakl Prize for Poetry in 1954 and 1964, and the Great Austrian State Prize for Literature in 1970. Christine Lavant died in 1973. A considerable part of her literary estate has not yet been published.

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Arabic world: Kana’an