All possibilities lay within the realm of constraint in her work. In her early stories created between 1948 and 1952 - among them the famous mirror story that won the Group 47 prize - Ilse Aichinger radically opposes the repression of death and war during the post-war period. She turns the success ideology of that time on its head by asserting that only through the awareness of threat, destruction, and farewell can an intense experience of the present be achieved. Ilse Aichinger approached her storytelling from the perspective of the things and fates, with a courage that was a dreamlike protest, a revolt against the tangible life.