Elizabeth Noel

Elizabeth Noel has called many places home, including the United Kingdom, the United Arab Emirates, Singapore, Australia, and New Zealand. She holds an MEd from the University of Exeter and an MLitt from the University of Saint Andrews and has taught at various universities in the UAE. Long-listed for both the Katherine Mansfield Sparkling Prose Competition and the Anthology Short Story Competition, Noel has published various short works. She lives in Sydney, Australia, with her husband and two daughters, on the land of the Gayemagal people within the Eora Nation.

As a child, Noel made regular visits to see her Austrian grandmother, or Omi, who encouraged her to chew on fennel seeds, sip herbal teas, and rub strange-smelling creams onto her skin. The city of Vienna, Melk Abbey, and the mountains and glass-topped lakes of Carinthia captured her heart. Her new novel, Beneath the Edelweiss, is the result of years of questioning what happened to her grandparents and great-grandparents, piecing together a narrative of Carinthia’s complex and tragic past.

My Q&A with the author:

How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?

The edelweiss is the quintessential symbol of the Austrian Alps. The flower has been protected under environmental laws since 1886 and features on the nation’s 2-Euro-Cent coin. It might bring forth images of Christopher Plummer as Captain von Trapp singing a love letter to his homeland in the classic 1965 adaption of The Sound of Music. Edelweiss, Edelweiss, every morning you greet me…

Austria’s Alps live and breathe in Beneath the Edelweiss so pointing to place in the title felt intuitive. However, the edelweiss denotes more than Austria alone. The flower is an illusion, appearing as a star against craggy limestone cliffs, you must look closely to see the tiny yellow flowers nestled inside what are fuzzy white leaves. Able to withstand freezing alpine winters, gale-force winds and thin soil, the edelweiss is a symbol for not only weathering the storm but knowing how to thrive once the clouds have passed. With its rugged alpine beauty, it clings to life against all odds.

The novel’s exact setting is Carinthia, Austria’s southern border province where history is as rich as it is heartbreaking. Beauty in Carinthia is omnipresent, and the dead are thought to mourn the landscape from heaven. Beneath the Edelweiss details Carinthia’s centuries old alpine herbalism tradition alongside it’s cradling of Nazism for it was in the region’s fertile soils that Austrian Nazism permeated.

Other strong contenders for the title included Of Wildflowers and War, Carinthia’s Shadow, and The Alpine Herbalist, but it was the edelweiss that won out as it always does.

What's in a name?

Sometimes a name can contain a cultural heritage, and to keep it during wartime can be an act of resistance, to change it a sign of new allegiance. In Carinthia during World War two Slavic sounding names were chiselled out of gravestones and replaced with more Germanic sounds, silencing certain letters like the people buried below.

The character names in Beneath the Edelweiss reflect those who inspired the story, as well as the ethnic diversity of Carinthia. Mitzi is a distinctly German-Austrian name and is the diminutive of Maria. The fictional Mitzi, and the real Mitzi, have a form of dwarfism. Depending on how the ancient root of the name is interpreted, Mitzi can mean wished for child, sea of bitterness, rebellious, or beloved. Mitzi’s life in the novel, what she must do and overcome, reflects these meanings.

As an alpine herbalist in training, she is charged with serving her community and protecting an ancient tradition. Her grandmother tells her that if she keeps the flowers safe the flowers will keep her. Oma was wrong, but if we only look at names, there was still foresight in her words.

Mitzi becomes beloved especially to Cvetka with whom she forms a maternal relationship. The two enable each other to become more fully formed. Cvetka is a distinctly Slavic name which means little flower, blossom or bloom.

How surprised would your teenage reader self be by your novel?

Of surprise I cannot speak, but my teenage self would devour this book because it shows people like her moving from brokenness to wholeness. Struggling with chronic illness, and a body I could not control, I needed heroines like Mitzi back then.

Do you find it harder to write beginnings or endings? Which do you change more?

Beginnings. I knew the ending must contain survival but everything else was open to change. The human response to soldiers or doctors knocking on the door asking to take disabled and sick loved ones away was varied. I wanted to rewrite what happened to my great grandmother through Mitzi and Cvetka. I wanted the characters to fight and resist in a way that enabled them to outlive the system hunting them.

The beginning kept changing. Originally, Beneath the Edelweiss started in 1937, a year before Austria’s annexation to Nazi Germany, but I wanted to understand how the seeds of Nazi policy were able to spread and this meant going back to 1927 when Nazism received just 0.2 percent of the national vote. I could have gone back further to Austria’s four-year famine between 1919 and 1922, and no doubt before that. Some ideas sit a long time in the soil waiting for the right time to germinate.

Do you see much of yourself in your characters? Do they have any connection to your personality, or are they a world apart?

All the characters contain parts of myself or my experience. I place this into a bowl with a cup of imagination and a cup of research and wait for what rises to greet me.

Cvetka’s experience with chronic illness is based on my own, so a lot of her around the diagnosis relates back to my lived experience as a child.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

Where do I begin? Beneath the Edelweiss is based on three women from my family. Ana the mother who was too sick to look after Elfriede the daughter, and Mitzi who fostered Elfriede on an alpine farm. I knew that Elfriede sat by the window looking at the valley waiting for Ana to return and that Mitzi led her by the hand into the alpine garden. I imagined Ana looking up at the mountain from the hospital, hoping she would see her daughter again. Ana never collected Elfriede because she died in a place where nurses killed patients as part of their daily duties under the regime. I could not tell Ana’s plight from within the hospital walls, so I asked Mitzi to explain what happened through the metaphor of the alpine garden and all the wisdom and joy it has to offer.

This story was the kernel for Beneath the Edelweiss, but my own evolving relationship with disease, recorded histories of people within Carinthia and Austria, artwork such as Little Big Woman Condescension by Dr Debra Keenahan informed the novel more broadly.

One story I was unable to include in my Author’s Note is how Maud’s escape from a terrorist bomb was informed by the true stories of Hermine Preis who had her fashion boutique plundered and stolen during Kristallnacht in 1938, and Norbert Futterweit who was targeted by Carinthian Nazis at his Jewellers shop in Vienna in 1933. Upon finding a bomb, Norbert attempted to throw it outside. The bomb exploded in his hands killing him in an instant but saving two other people inside his store.

Both Herbert and Hermine have become part of the Austrian landscape via a stumbling stone placed in Klagenfurt in 2012 and a plaque in Vienna in 2008. I hope that Beneath the Edelweiss can also serve as both a reminder of a tragic past and a pledge to a better future. In seeking to understand, we are presented with the opportunity to honour those who came before us and refuse to look away.

Visit Elizabeth Noel's website.

--Marshal Zeringue