Vergessen und Erinnern

Abstract

Long before an institutional remembrance culture of the Second World War and the Shoah had been established in Austria, the Austrian author Käthe Recheis inscribed experiences of the postwar period into literary traditions of cultural knowledge. Her novel Das Schattennetz, published in 1964, prompted controversial contemporary debates. Due to these critiques posed against the author and the work, the first edition of the novel was never reissued, erasing a significant literary testimony of the time from cultural memory. This article places Das Schattennetz in a tradition of Austrian post-World War literature, focussing on the poetics of the text and its subjectified presentation of the experiences of the young adult autodiegetic narrator Christine. As a nurse in a displaced persons camp, she cares for fatally ill Jews. Against the backdrop of the autofictional aspects of the novel, this article compares the original text with the revised edition Geh heim und vergiss alles, which was published in 1980.