Genre and Memory in Margareta Heinrich’s and Eduard Erne’s Totschweigen and Elfriede Jelinek’s Rechnitz (Der Würgeengel)

Abstract

Towards the end of the Second World War, on the night of 24/25 March 1945, days before the arrival of the Red Army, approximately 200 Jewish slave-labourers were murdered in a small Austrian village on the Hungarian border, purportedly in the context of a party hosted by Countess Margit Batthyány at Rechnitz Castle. The exact events of that night remain shrouded in mystery, the perpetrators have not been brought to justice and the mass grave has not been found to this day. Instead a wall of silence has descended on the village regarding the events of that time, with Rechnitz serving as a model case for the repression and silencing surrounding the Nazi past in post-war Austria. In spite of its active participation in the Second World War and the Holocaust, Austria, as an ‘annexed’ country during the Third Reich, was not held culpable for its execution of Nazi crimes and was pronounced ‘the first free country to fall a victim to Hitlerite aggression’ in the ‘Moscow Declaration’ of 30 October 1943 (Joint Four-Nation Declaration, 1943), a Lebenslüge (grand delusion) upon which the Austrian Second Republic built its post-war identity. It was an illusion that was only shattered by the Waldheim Affair of 1985–1988, whereby it emerged that the presidential candidate Dr Kurt Waldheim had lied about the extent of his involvement in the Nazi war machine, which did not stop him being elected.

The research presented in this chapter was made possible by the generous support of the Leverhulme Trust. Translations from the German are my own unless otherwise stated. Print Austrian newspaper articles were consulted in the Dokumentationsstelle für neuere österreichische Literatur Zeitungsausschnittsammlung [Documentation Centre for Modern Austrian Literature Newspaper Cuttings Collection], Vienna, Austria.