Annemarie Selinko’s early works.

Written as multi-layered novels for girls, perceived as trivial literature

Abstract

Despite her great success, the writer Annemarie Selinko, born in Vienna in 1914, is hardly known today. Like Vicki Baum, with whom she has often been compared, she was percei-ved almost exclusively as a writer of trivial literature. This article will focus on her first two works, Ich war ein hässliches Mädchen (“I was an ugly girl”) and Morgen ist alles besser (“Everything will be better tomorrow”), which she wrote at a young age, before her emi-gration. They will be read as documents of contemporary history and analysed as girls’ literature. This article aims to show that Selinko’s first novels should be viewed in a more differentiated way than has been the case to date.