Writer Monika Helfer died: her baggage made her famous

The daughter had an accident in 2003

In fact, Helfer encountered death often and far too early in her family: her mother died when she was eleven years old, and her brother Richard, who was six years younger, took his own life at the age of thirty. And what probably hit her hardest was the death of her daughter Paula: Paula Köhlmeier, one of Helfer’s two children with her husband, the Austrian writer Michael Köhlmeier, had an accident on a hike in 2003 at the age of 21.

Perhaps this friendship with death has something to do with the fact that Helfer had the luck and the ability to deal with these deaths through literature and thus bring her loved ones back to life.

In her novel “Before I Can Sleep,” which was published in 2010, an aging psychiatrist who is haunted by her own personal misfortunes befriends a twelve-year-old girl, Paula Köhlmeier, obviously the daughter of Monika Helfer and her husband Michael. This helps the doctor to cope better with herself again. Last but not least, the novel is an equally tender and haunting portrait of Paula. Helfer also hints at the young woman’s fall to death: “The darkness of the forest attracts me, but I have to stick to my word and walk miles before I can sleep.”

At the time this novel was published, Helfer, who was born in Au in Vorarlberg in 1947, was already a well-known author who had won numerous awards in her homeland. Her 1977 debut, I Was Born in the Snow, featured illustrations by her brother, and her first novel, The Wild Children, appeared a few years later. If you will, an almost programmatic title for her next work.

Helfer paid particular attention to children, to their resilience and will to live, such as in her novel “Oskar & Lili” about two Chechen refugee children and their mother who are quickly torn apart in Austria. The novel was also made into a film in 2020.

In 2020, Monika Helfer became known beyond Austria and became a best-selling author in this country and a permanent guest in the nominations for the German Book Prize, first with her family novel “Die Bagage”. In it, based on an aunt’s childhood memories, she tells the story of her Vorarlberg grandparents and their children, especially that of her mother Grete. Helfer does this openly as herself and as a first-person narrator – and yet so literary that the boundaries between autobiography and fiction are hard to discern.

“The Bagage”, although a slim book told in a very small space, is a great historical novel, but also a book of the dead, with which Helfer also created a small memorial to her uncle Lorenz. It was Lorenz who took responsibility for the “Bagage” after the Second World War after his grandfather died. But he didn’t have a long life either; he was run over by a car in Bregenz at the age of 50.

Books about father and brother

“The Bagage” was followed by two more autofictional books: the one about her father, “Vati,” who was not exactly a caring person and was rather unfit for life, but was fond of books. And, much sadder, more enchanting, full of love and philanthropy, that about her brother Richard, called “Lionheart”, a great storyteller, “Schmähtandler”, as he was called in Vorarlberg, and Hans-Guck-in-die-Air. According to his sister, his motto: “Just look at the world. (…) In the end we will all say: We have done too much and seen too little.”

All of these books, including her last novel “The Virgin” about a friend, or the wonderful short stories “How the World Went On,” demonstrate the dedication to life with which Helfer went to work and how great her sense of literary beauty was. She now seems unable to have prepared for her own death. Her German publisher Hanser announced on Sunday afternoon that she died “surprisingly” after a fall. Monika Helfer was 78 years old.