Elvia Wilk
In Marlen Haushofer’s 1958 novella, a riveting and disturbing tale of blame, shame, and consequence.
Killing Stella, by Marlen Haushofer, translated by Shaun Whiteside,
New Directions, 87 pages, $14.95
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A woman has been murdered. No one killed her. How can this be? In Marlen Haushofer’s novella Killing Stella, the world is full of un-murdered women who are nonetheless brought to death—either literally, like the titular Stella, or figuratively: by being so confined in their social roles that they’re dead on their feet.
Originally published in Austria in 1958 under the more damning title Wir töten Stella (We Kill Stella) and now vividly translated into English by Shaun Whiteside, the book asks whether a bystander is as guilty as a perpetrator—or whether that distinction holds at all. Sparse yet unsparing, it is a riveting, merciless fable of blame, shame, and consequence.
The narrator, a homemaker named Anna, writes the story in a two-day jag while her family is away. She’s determined to commit to paper what happened to Stella before she forgets. And she will forget Stella the second she puts down the pen, because she must forget in order to “resume my old peaceful life.” This logic is self-deceptive from the start. Forgetting is premised on remembering? If what happened was so violent it must be forgotten, was the old life really peaceful? From the outset, this narrator is not so much unreliable as reliably human: an infernal contradiction, known only partly to herself.
Anna has long been trapped in a psychic “prison.” But “since Stella’s death, the gilded cage has turned into a dungeon,” and she’s terrified. Of what? Not punishment, worse: that no consequences will befall her and that she will stay forever frozen at the window, silent and complicit. “Stella is avenging herself on me,” she writes, then revises: “Stella can’t take her revenge,” because she is dead, therefore “I am taking Stella’s revenge on myself.”
Anna’s four-person family structure is rigid, its hierarchies and allegiances clear. Her husband, Richard, a capricious, corrupt lawyer, rules the home, depending on Anna for warmth and comfort while indulging in reckless affairs—his cavalier duplicity eroding her integrity. “No one is a stricter guardian of morality than the secret lawbreaker,” she observes, “for it is clear to them that humanity would crumble and perish if everyone lived as they did.” The family has “two sides”: Anna’s aligned with her sensitive, intelligent teenage son, Wolfgang, whom she adores with erotic intensity; Richard with extroverted young daughter, Annette. Together they perform what she calls “the game,” upholding appearances and avoiding taboos.
Into this lockstep enters Stella, the nineteen-year-old daughter of Anna’s friend Luise, whom Anna secretly despises, as she seems to despise all women. Stella has been living in a convent for eight years and is now enrolled in business school, biding time until she’s old enough to inherit a fortune from her dead father. Anna agrees to house her out of a vague sense of propriety. The whole family regards Stella, modest and plain, as a dull inconvenience. Anna remarks that she’s more “like a big gray cat or a young deciduous tree” than a human being. Anna and Richard mock Stella for knitting socks for the poor, seeing this as embarrassing and dull-witted rather than saintly.
However, it dawns on Anna that, beneath her shyness and drab clothes, Stella is beautiful. With the dubious motive of somehow “triumphing” over Luise, she buys Stella new outfits and transforms her. It’s not the makeover but Stella’s discovery of her own beauty that draws Richard’s notice. “You can’t bring the lamb into the wolf’s cage,” Anna admits, “and that’s exactly what I did.”
Soon, she guesses where Stella is going instead of to her Italian lessons. Richard’s philandering doesn’t shock her—what leaves her aghast is his choice to stoop so low with this “clumsy, earnest child.” She pities Stella for what she assumes is foolish first love, and can only imagine that she is “utterly devoted and enslaved to him,” ignoring evidence (ripped buttons, sobbing) of coercion.
Richard tires of Stella, Stella is bereft, and the silence is deafening. “I wondered a hundred times whether or not I should speak to her,” Anna recalls. “I didn’t want to hear a confession, because there was nothing I could have said in response, and I was fed up with lying.” The logic is oxymoronic and unimpeachable. If you cannot speak the truth and you refuse to lie, there is nothing to say. One day, after a chance encounter with a gynecologist—whom Richard once defended in a vicious divorce suit—Stella is visibly stricken, and Anna can’t pretend she doesn’t understand. A matter of days later, Stella’s hit by a truck. Anna identifies the body. Anna feels relieved. At least Stella had the decorum to make it look like an accident.
Throughout the novella, Anna harshly indicts herself, then absolves herself, then doubles back. Yes, she was silent out of “cowardice and convenience”; on the other hand, speaking would have made no difference, because Stella’s fate was sealed from the start. The sense that she had no choice is not due to Richard’s overt violence. It’s that Anna is so demoralized by Richard’s cruelty that her sense of self is destroyed. He feels no guilt; he fears no punishment. “Richard is a monster: a considerate paterfamilias, a valued lawyer, a passionate lover, traitor, liar, and murderer . . . the whole world plainly knows and accepts it, and no one puts him on trial.” Still, she craves his love, the love of their son, and their family stability. So “corrupted” is she by these competing desires that she’s envious of Stella, who “escaped successfully on her first attempt.” A person can only hold so much contradiction before she self-destructs.
For this reason, I can’t help but read Stella alongside Ingeborg Bachmann’s Malina (1971), whose last line famously reads: “it was murder.” The victim here is the narrator herself, a woman who vanishes into a crack in the wall, having found no way to exist that is not defined in relation to men. Even resistance is co-opted and turned against her. As Anna says of Richard: “It is precisely his shamelessness that makes me mute with shame.”
Malina features dreamlike sequences portraying a tyrannical, abusive “father” who unambiguously stands in for the Vaterland and rules over domestic space as a despot. Haushofer’s Richard is no less emblematic of the national condition (she once referred to Austrian men as “former-still-and-always Nazis”), although in Stella, as in most of her work, she barely mentions a “war.” Haushofer is often discussed in connection with Bachmann and other Viennese postwar contemporaries, like Thomas Bernhard and Elfriede Jelinek, and due to her relative lack of fame, she’s perpetually part of a “rediscovery” narrative. Some have suggested that her lack of prominence in the canon is due to her lack of explicit references to the grand epochal trauma. Yet Stella shows how a book of silence can be a book of violence.
In the Anglophone world, Haushofer is best known for her glorious, devastating The Wall (1963), also translated by Whiteside, about a nameless woman, akin to Anna, alone in the countryside and penned behind an invisible barrier—isolated yet liberated from precisely the type of “game” Anna is ensnared by. That The Wall imagines the possibility of femme freedom through speculative fiction is all the more remarkable when compared to what could be read as its prequel, a book so grim and so suffocating and that feels so disturbingly real. Stella may have been a departure point for Haushofer, but it’s a total, self-encapsulating project—about a total, self-encapsulating doom.
Elvia Wilk is a writer living in New York. Her third book, a novel, will be published in 2026.