Conflicted lives: care work in Austria and Slovakia. Susanne Gregor interviewed by Sarah Escritt

Susanne Gregor’s Halbe Leben or “Half Lives” tells the story of two women, Klara, an Austrian architect, and Paulina, a nurse from small-town Slovakia. Klara’s mother, Irene, has recently had a stroke; Paulina’s husband has left. Klara can no longer keep all the plates spinning; Paulina cannot make ends meet. So Paulina takes work as a carer in Austria and alternates, on a fortnightly basis, between her teenage sons and Klara’s mother, between a 7th floor flat in Prievidza and a house with a view of the Magdalenaberg, between a guinea-pig and a dog. We know from the opening pages that it will not end well.

Susanne Gregor discussed her book at the Austrian Cultural Forum with Dr Andrea Capovilla and translator, Eleanor Updegraff. The conversation was so fascinating that Sarah Escritt caught up with Susanne to ask some questions for the European Literature Network.

Sarah Escritt: Your book addresses care work and the urgent questions that it raises: who does this work and at what cost to whom? Was there a particular trigger?

Susanne Gregor: The inspiration came from multiple sources. I’m Slovak and it is always in the back of my mind that many of the Slovaks in Austria are here as care workers. So that was probably the most important trigger. 

A second factor was that I know from Slovakia about the families who are left behind when the women come to do care work in Austria. What is happening in Slovakia is a catastrophe and there is a further cruelty in the fact that people are coming to work in a more wealthy country and returning home to a less wealthy existence. 

I experienced this dislocation first hand when I was eight and my father took a job in Austria. He worked there during the week and came home at the weekend. He did that for about a year, going back and forth for work, as a lot of people do, before he decided that the whole family should move to Upper Austria. So this story of Paulina and Klara is a story which I feel qualified to tell. 

I was very interested to read about carers commuting across the Slovak/Austrian border in shared taxis. But for me the particular surprise was the ease with which care was apparently arranged in Austria, given that the expense of it is such a major issue in the UK.

It’s an expensive solution. Not everyone can afford it but in rural areas, where houses may have been inherited, it can be more manageable. Upper Austria is one of the more wealthy areas of Austria, but actually there are wealthy pockets throughout Austria. In the countryside, there is probably a greater tendency to arrange live-in care, especially as young people often move away to cities, leaving old people on their own. In cities care tends to be more institutionalised but it is outsourced in cities too. But bear in mind that mine is a Slovak perspective. 

Is there any resonance between the present pattern of people coming from Slovakia to work in Austria and migration within the old Austro-Hungarian empire?

In the Austrian empire and the Austro-Hungarian empire, Austrian citizens were first class and Hungarians and Slovak citizens came second. But there was exchange between the countries and nationalities. For example, students went to study in both Prague and Austria. This mutuality stopped with National Socialism and its rhetoric of different peoples and races, and then after World War II the Iron Curtain brought a different form of division. So now we are dealing with 100 years of division and a habit of thinking of each other as some kind of other. So, yes, there was an imbalance within the Austrian empire, but from there things got much worse.

You’ve talked about the culture shock that you encountered when you moved as a child with your family from Slovakia to Upper Austria. In this book the Slovak carer, Paulina, feels compelled to ‘enjoy’ hill-walking and a trip to the spa. But she also listens to the gruesome fairy tales told by the elderly lady she is employed to look after. Did Austrian fairy tales form part of your culture shock? 

We moved from Žilina to a very rural area in Upper Austria where walking in the mountains was a very important part of the culture. There were frequent hiking days (Wandertage) at school, when rucksacks took the place of the usual school bags, and quite often we used to walk up to a ruined castle where we would listen to gruesome stories. I think in Slovakia there were fairy tales too but we heard them in a classroom, not in the mountains.

Both in your previous book, Wir werden fliegen (“We Will Fly”), and in this book you show the precarity of the migrant. But there is also the suggestion that Klara is a deer who has unwittingly invited a fox into her home. Do you worry that this might feed fear of and antagonism to migrant workers?

I don’t think Paulina was a murderer but I didn’t want her to be too much of a victim either: no one wants to read a perfect victim story. So I was trying to strike a balance. 

But in fact when I write I don’t have too much awareness of how things will turn out. Writing is a gamble. When I start, I know that there is a feeling or atmosphere that I want to create but I never know what’s going to happen: even if I think I do, I normally end up writing something else. There’s a sprinkle of magic – of intuition, or the divine, if you like – in every creative work.

Once I have the first draft I stand back and take a look. By then it’s too late to change anything fundamental about the story and the relationships. 

And I can never foresee what readers will criticise. On this occasion I’m lucky because what I have written about has struck a chord with readers.

But Klara was managing very well until she fell pregnant – with a boy, as it happens. It might have been this pregnancy, that her husband wanted, that tipped her over the edge? Whereas that secret bottle of Martini that Paulina allows Irene to drink, against all the rules, doesn’t kill anyone.

Exactly. Klara follows all the rules but she lives in a self-imposed prison. In Upper Austria society is patriarchal. It is very bound to traditions. A woman will have a job, kids, a beautiful house … you will see the bags under her eyes but she will say, ‘I’m fine.’ Meanwhile, men will meet at the tennis court and have a beer. Things are changing in Austria but in the countryside they are changing very slowly. For someone like Klara it is hard to think yourself out of the way you live: there are no examples of how else it can be done. In the city no one cares how you live your life whereas in the countryside, everyone lives in the same way.

In Slovakia too, structurally women are taken advantage of. When Paulina’s husband leaves, he doesn’t contribute financially and the state provides no safety net. There are big differences between small town Slovakia and rural Austria but they have in common a societal conservatism. 

The mothers in this book seem to have an ambivalence about their daughters. Does an internalization of society’s rules manifest in unspoken or unconscious misogyny? 

I think my question was more, why is this so difficult?

Klara and her mother, Irene, have a close relationship: it has been just the two of them since Klara’s early childhood. There’s more love between them than there was between Paulina and her mother. But the mothers of both Paulina and Klara had to shoulder everything, just as in turn Paulina and Klara do. They all have to earn money, run the household, look after the children, keep everything going. I was asking myself, what does this do to a mother?

Were you worried about causing offence in Austria and failing to fulfil the role of ‘good migrant’ (a role that Alan tries so desperately to live up to in “We Will Fly”)?

Yes, I worried about this a lot, especially whilst I was writing the novel. Once the book is published, it’s too late: it’s out. Whilst I was writing, it was scary – as writing always is.

I am a ‘good migrant’. I have learnt German – it’s the language in which I write my novels. I am a good citizen, am grateful for all the opportunities I have received in Austria and try to express my gratitude. But there is also the question of contribution. I believe that I can contribute by raising questions from the particular perspective that I have. It means that I have to walk a fine line. Above all I try to be honest.

The expressions and turns of phrase that your characters use can be very funny. Paulina, of course, has ‘golden hands’ and in “We Will Fly” Alan, a successful doctor, has the memorable line, ‘you know perfectly well I’m right’. Do you carry around a notebook to capture comments that you hear? 

I do carry a notebook but it’s not for expressions, it’s for the more general ideas. For example, if I am reading a book in which an animal has an interesting role, I may make a note of that, because I always put animals into my work. Or I might write notes about a scene, in case that turns out to be useful as the manuscript develops. The expressions themselves come from the characters as they develop and interact.

I’d like to ask you about language more generally. What impact did the switch from Slovak to German have? Do you think you would have become a writer had you stayed in Slovakia?

I have always been interested in reading and writing, but what the switch to another language did was give me an awareness of how language operates in us and in society, and what it demands from us. Slovak is a language that exaggerates a lot – to please or to be funny. In German I wanted to express myself in the same way, but people just said, that’s not true. German is a language that values honesty and precision. 

Language asks something of you. There is a gap or space between you and language. It is a creative space – a language-empty space or a meta-space – and this is where I go to write, to find the things that can’t be translated into words or said out loud. I think this is why in this book Paulina, the Slovak carer, is often speechless.

This book has recently been staged by the Volkstheater in Vienna and you have spoken about how they have drawn out the humour in the book. Having watched the trailer, I think it also looks quite sinister. Thinking beyond translation from text to stage to translation between languages, is there anything implicit in the book that translation into Slovak has made explicit?

I agree that the play has sinister moments. It could be a thriller. But I would say that, yes, the prevailing mood is humorous.

I haven’t read the Slovak version of my book but I have looked at it. I take the view that once a book is translated it is out of my hands. It becomes the translator’s book. The translator can capture a voice, an atmosphere and, as Eleanor Updegraff pointed out, the rhythm of the language, but ultimately it becomes a different book. As far as the subject matter is concerned, the issues that the book addresses are widely recognised in Slovakia and talked about in literature and the arts. Migration has had a devastating effect on society in Slovakia. In Austria and Germany, by contrast, the response has been: why has this not been covered in literature until now?

In Das letzte rote Jahr (“The Last Red Year”) you write brilliantly about three families in Žilina as they live through the uncertainty of 1989. From a western perspective it is sobering to realise how little information was filtering through. How would those characters feel now about the way things have turned out? 

They would not be surprised. In Slovakia we were never at the centre of things. It was something we lived with; it was part of the natural order of things. People never wanted to come to Slovakia and since 1989 there has been a huge brain drain. People complete their education and leave, or they go away for an education and never come back. But the people I wrote about would still be delighted by how things have turned out. Now they can travel; before they couldn’t. 

The people that Paulina meets in Upper Austria are busy with their own lives. But in case any reader is interested in exploring Slovak culture, your book gives us a couple of starting points. Who are Juliana Sokolova and Dara Rolins? 

The quotation at the start of my book comes from Sokolova’s poetry collection “House Work” which has not (yet) been translated. They are the most beautiful poems about house work – by a woman who does it, about other women who do it, and about her kids in the background.

Because the literary market in Slovakia is so small, writers work across different genres and media. So Juliana Sokolova is a poet but she is also an editor and teaches philosophy. And because it is very difficult, or impossible, to live off literature in Slovakia, the literature is more experimental. Sales figures become irrelevant so there is more space instead for rawness and honesty. 

As for Dara Rolins, she started singing on TV when she was eight years old. She epitomizes Slovak pop music: everyone knows her. I had Paulina choose to play Dara Rolins at the party because it’s a neutral choice. She simply represents Slovak music – not any particular era or genre.

“The Last Red Year” explored relationships between neighbours – from the perspective of the teenage daughters. “We Will Fly” pivots between sibling relationships and Half Lives revolves around mothers. Do you know yet what constellations will shape your next book?

My next book will be published in Spring 2027. It is shaped by relationships again but this time I am focusing on the perspective of the older woman. It’s my favourite perspective. In “Half Lives” Irene sees things that Paulina and Klara do not recognise. Even in her dementia, and even when she is not listened to, she is the voice of reason. But of course, not everything can be written. I’m back in that meta-space – beyond language.

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Susanne Gregor was born in Žilina, Czechoslovakia, and moved to Austria as a child in 1990. She attended university in Salzburg, taught German as a foreign language at the University of New Orleans and now lives in Vienna. Her first novel, Kein eigener Ort, appeared in 2011. Her fifth novel, Wir werden fliegen, was nominated for the 2023 Austrian Bookprize.

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Sarah Escritt takes every opportunity to engage with German books. She has written book reviews for Die Germanistin and conducted author and publisher interviews for New Books in German. She has been shortlisted for the 2025 Goethe-Institut Award for New Translation.