Colloquia Germanica
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0010-1338
Francke Verlag Tübingen
Es handelt sich um einen Open-Access-Artikel, der unter den Bedingungen der Lizenz CC by 4.0 veröffentlicht wurde.http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/61
2013
462
The Second History of National Socialism in Contemporary Austrian Crime Fiction
61
2013
Anita McChesney
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The Second History of National Socialism in Contemporary Austrian Crime Fiction ANITA MCCHE SNEY Te x a s Tech Univ ersity As the production and consumption of crime fiction reach new heights worldwide so also have the number of texts that link the detection of fictional crimes to historical aspects of National Socialism. 1 The German-language texts alone cover themes from the Euthanasia, «Aryanization,» and forced labor programs of the Nazi Regime, to later struggles of first-, secondand third-generation German victims and perpetrators to come to terms with lingering repercussions of the past, the much-debated Vergangenheitsbewältigung. 2 Nazi crime fiction that focuses on the later generations typically uses the form of the novel of retrospective historical investigation (retrospektiver historischer Ermittlungsroman, in Achim Saupe’s terms). 3 Set in the present, these texts feature a contemporary detective whose investigations lead him or her into the shadowy recesses of the historical past. The dual time frame enables the novels to portray the effects of the past on the present and it also creates a metastructure to critically reflect on the processes of portraying a history such as that of National Socialism. While discussions on representing National Socialism often focus exclusively on Germany, an analysis of novels of retrospective historical investigation from Austria offers a contrasting perspective on Vergangenheitsbewältigung that reflects the unique development of the «second history» of National Socialism in Austrian discourse. 4 «Second history» as defined in Der Nationalsozialismus, die zweite Geschichte: Überwindung, Deutung, Erinnerung means that the focus lies on the post-history (Nachgeschichte) of National Socialism. This after story considers the events from the National Socialist era and how they are publicly remembered and thereby defined for later generations. (8) Crime novels by contemporary Austrian writers Eva Rossmann and Lilian Faschinger portray this second history in Austria as a generational concern. The novels’ protagonists are the children and grandchildren of participants in and victims of National Socialism who reveal the secrets of those previous generations as they investigate crimes. The two novelists frame the consequences of uncovering the past quite differently, yet both depict the silenced history of National Socialism as a cultural inheritance. In their texts this legacy manifests itself in the pathology of the chil- 140 Anita McChesney dren and of a society both of whom repeat destructive patterns from their family’s and nation’s unresolved past. This article examines the portrayal of National Socialism in Eva Rossmann’s Freudsche Verbrechen (2001) and Lilian Faschinger’s Stadt der Verlierer (2007). Particular focus is on how the history of National Socialism is positioned within the plot and how the structural elements and motifs address the legacy of National Socialism in contemporary Austria. Examining how the texts use the crime genre to frame the second history of National Socialism, I show how they critique the ways a responsible society has avoided confronting its own historic wrongdoing and how they emphasize the continuing effects of those choices on later generations and on society. Finally, I propose how the differing approaches taken in the two texts demonstrate both the possibilities and limitations for representing National Socialism in fiction. While both novelists use the detectives’ search to illustrate Austrian society’s ongoing desire to ignore and/ or revise uncomfortable aspects of its past, in Rossmann’s novel the successful resolution of the crime naively suggests the possibility of achieving closure to the historical past. By contrast, the untidy resolutions in Faschinger’s text point to the continuing adverse social effects of an unresolved past as well as the illusoriness of attaining a satisfying, linear resolution. A central challenge when discussing «Nazi» crime fiction is the seeming contradiction between events that can only be described as inarticulable and unrepresentable and a genre best known for providing answers. Crime novels characteristically satisfy readers with master detectives who investigate the past to solve its mysteries and thereby provide a complete understanding of the events, including their causes and effects. This dilemma is not only confined to the crime genre, however. As Helmut Schmitz notes in German Culture and the Uncomfortable Past, an inherent paradox with any discourse on National Socialism, particularly when presented as a type of Vergangenheitsbewältigung, is that it envisages a finality to the process. «Mastering the past» suggests a successful integration of something into a larger narrative that is supposed to achieve closure. (3) While the experiences of National Socialism and the Holocaust demand an adequate response, Schmitz aptly notes that to approach these events is «to encounter the limits of feeling, reason, and representation» (3). National Socialism has been a particularly problematic issue in Austrian discourse due to the country’s relatively late official acknowledgment of culpability in the movement. The Allied designation of Austria as a victim nation, «the first free country to fall a victim to Hitlerite aggression» as stated in the Moscow Doctrine from 1943, served as the official historical explanation of the country’s role in the The Second History of National Socialism 141 war after it was adopted into Austria’s state treaty in 1955. 5 This so-called Opfermythos went largely unchallenged until the Waldheim affair of 1986 finally forced public discussions that then lead the Austrian government in the 1990s to revise its «hegemonic post-war memory regime,» as historian Günter Bischof calls Austria’s disavowal of its past, and in the years 2000 and 2001 to finally instate restitution programs for possessions seized during the era. (17) The differences in German and Austrian literary representations of their respective country’s Fascist past reflect Austria’s delayed official acknowledgement. According to Mila Ganeva, post-1945 German generational novels have evolved in three stages from the first to third generations of writers. Whereas the first generation (the authors of post-war literature) was hesitant to address the recent past, the second generation attempted to come to terms with that past by confronting their parents and penetrating the silence that cloaked guilt and responsibility. The third generation, Ganeva notes, now moves away from «such grandiose gestures of coming to terms with the past (‹die große Vergangenheitsbewältigung›)» and the texts consist largely of testimonies «to some private obsessions with history» (150). Distancing themselves from political programs or ideological agendas, the protagonists are more interested in personal stories that can heal and reestablish emotional ties with previous generations than rupture them. They investigate the past to better understand and accept their predecessors rather than to confront and disagree with them. (150) Contemporary Austrian generational novels show little evidence of a similar movement from confrontation to reconciliation as their German counterparts. Juliet Wigmore sees a direct link between the literary and historical developments in the two countries. She claims that Austrian authors often adopt a more provocative stance due to the country’s late dealing with the past. She suggests that the texts do not offer freedom to the younger generations who have inherited the pre-1945 history as part of their national identity and that the past «haunts them and conditions the way they behave» (106). Contemporary Austrian crime fiction highlights the burden of these ghosts with narratives in which the protagonists seek to understand if not overcome the sway of the unresolved past. Indeed, due to its inherent structure the crime genre provides a singular approach to portraying National Socialism. The emphasis on exploring and reconstructing the past in the crime plot makes crime fiction by definition a type of Vergangenheitsbewältigung, as solving the crime is contingent on understanding the past. The novel of retrospective historical investigation, in particular, emphasizes the ties between past and present since its historical plot sends the contempo- 142 Anita McChesney rary protagonist into the historical past to understand contemporary events. The historical plot thereby echoes and accentuates the dual timeframe of the crime narrative. By doubling the characteristic narrative structure of crime fiction in the crime and historical plots, historical investigation novels create the unique potential to reflect both on past events in connection with their current effects as well as on the possibilities and limits of their representation. 6 The genre’s potential and its barriers can be elucidated through analyses of Eva Rossmann’s and Lillian Faschinger’s differing approaches to portraying Austria’s past in their crime novels. Eva Rossmann’s work closely follows the familiar conventions of crime fiction. Her 2001 Freudsche Verbrechen maintains the genre’s traditional triad structure (crime, detection, resolution) 7 and also offers an unambiguous depiction of National Socialism’s heritage in contemporary Austria as a failure to deal with the past. Stylistically and thematically, Rossmann’s approach to Nazi crime fiction reflects the author’s background and writing career. After earning a degree in law from the University of Vienna, the author worked extensively as a constitutional lawyer, political journalist, political campaign manager, journalist, and news editor. She also published several non-fiction books on women, politics, and the media, before turning to crime fiction in 1998. As of 2014 Rossmann has written 16 novels featuring Mira Valensky. The female detective in the series mirrors the author in many respects. A lawyer by training, Valensky works as a journalist in Vienna where she is drawn into criminal cases involving financial, legal, and political corruption and which reveal a contemporary Austrian society whose members and media are predisposed to concealing those crimes and scandals. 8 Freudsche Verbrechen, Rossmann’s second Valensky novel, begins when Mira receives a phone call from a former school friend, Ulrike, who has just found a strangled 22-year-old New Yorker, Jane Cooper, in the Freud museum in Vienna where she works. The protagonist is catapulted into the role of amateur detective when Ulrike is subsequently charged with the crime. The police’s case against Mira’s friend intensifies after the murder of Ulrike’s boyfriend, a prominent Viennese psychiatrist and one of the few people Jane had become acquainted with during her visit to Vienna. Mira’s subsequent investigation leads through multiple layers of Austrian family history that begins with the Nazi «Aryanization» program in Austria in the 1930s. The amateur detective discovers that Jane came to Vienna to reclaim her greatgrandparents’ family home, which had been appropriated and auctioned off to the Bernkopf family by the state under the Nazi «Aryanization» program. Jane’s family had been deported to Auschwitz, where everyone died The Second History of National Socialism 143 except Jane’s grandmother, who had previously moved to New York with an American boyfriend. Mira eventually discovers that Jane’s murderer is Bernkopf junior, the grandson of the first buyer, who feared that a battle over the family home would devalue his stake in the house, which he had mortgaged to fund his entrepreneurial schemes. Rossmann’s text exemplifies how the novel of retrospective historical investigation uses its dual time structure to explore a fictional crime as well as actual history. Set in present-day Vienna, Mira investigates crimes that are rooted in Nazi programs in Austria in the late 1930s. Her investigations in New York and Vienna reveal both past memories and current attitudes about that past by later generations. Linking the past and present in the crime and historical plots, the novel reaffirms a staunch continuity in two attitudes towards National Socialism over the past 70 years. These attitudes are a pervasive lack of knowledge of the past and an unwillingness to confront and take responsibility for the events. Rossmann depicts the first aspect primarily by linking the lack of historical knowledge about National Socialism in Austria to the characters’ ignorance about the house’s history. Frau Bernkopf, wife of the current owner, tells Mira she and her husband are too young to know about the history of the house or the «Aryanization» program and the fate of the Jewish inhabitants: «Die armen Leute […] aber wir haben daran wirklich keine Schuld gehabt. Unseren Eltern ist es im Krieg auch nicht gut gegangen […] aber wir haben jedenfalls mit der ganzen Sache nichts zu tun. […] wir waren doch gar nicht geboren» (288-89). Frau Bernkopf thereby voices the familiar argument of the «Gnade der späten Geburt» («luck of being born late») generation, namely that because they were born after 1930, they can neither know about nor be held responsible for events during the Nazi era. 9 In Rossmann’s novel not only the perpetrator’s but also the victim’s family knows and wants to know nothing about the past. Jane’s father tells Mira he was unaware of his daughter’s trip to Vienna, unaware of the family house, indeed that he knew nothing about his mother’s past. Although he wants Mira to help him regain the property, he declines any additional information about his mother’s origins or her family’s fate under the National Socialists. As he resolutely states: ‹«Man muss in die Zukunft denken, das hat auch meine Mutter immer gesagt›» (157) and «‹Ich will es nicht wissen, mir reicht, was ich weiß›» (291-92). In Freudsche Verbrechen Rossmann connects the lack of knowledge about the past to a second problem: the choice of previous generations to repress or at the very least to selectively remember the events. Mira points out that she herself was ignorant about the «Aryanization» program prior to this case due to the Austrian school system and the unwillingness of the parents’ 144 Anita McChesney generation to discuss their role in National Socialism. 10 This aversion to facing the past continues to manifest itself in contemporary attitudes. When Mira wants to highlight the fate of Jane’s relatives and their property in a final news article on the murders, her editor instructs her to focus on the love story between Jane’s grandparents rather than the injustices suffered by the family in order to appeal to readers: «Es können viele Leute eben nicht verstehen, warum sie etwas zurückgeben sollen, das irgendjemand vor Jahrzehnten den Juden weggenommen hat. Zu unrecht natürlich. Aber es ist besser, in die Zukunft zu schauen. Wir stellen die Liebesgeschichte in den Mittelpunkt. Die zeigt auch, wie fürchterlich die Nazizeit war, aber anders. Irgendwie menschlicher» (165). The character Dora Messerschmidt, a historian whom Mira consults for information about «Aryanization» programs in Austria, underscores Rossmann’s final commentary on Austria’s current relationship to its historical past. Her simple statement «Österreich will seine Ruhe» (219) emphasizes how contemporary society still chooses the path of silent ignorance. Framing Freudsche Verbrechen as a retrospective historical investigation underlines Austria’s persisting aversion to confronting its own historic wrongdoing. The narrative form also emphasizes the continuing disastrous effects of those choices on later generations and society. As Mira pieces together the missing information about the current and past crimes, Rossmann suggests that the ubiquitous ignorance is a willing amnesia passed on through the generations. One of the most poignant testaments to this condition comes from Frau Bernkopf when her son confesses to Jane’s murder. «‹Das ist alles nicht wahr,› schrie seine Mutter weiter, ‹er weiß nicht, was er sagt […] oh Gott, mein armer Sohn, ich weiß von nichts. Gar nichts. Ich habe keine Ahnung›» (328). Her impassioned disavowal of knowledge, and thereby guilt, hold true of Jane’s murder and the entire context of the «Aryanization» program. She has no clue. Frau Bernkopf bequeaths this willful silence to her son. In his confession of Jane’s murder to Mira, Bernkopf junior explains that he strangled the New Yorker to silence her claims to the house: «Sie wollte hinausschreien, dass es sich um arisiertes Vermögen handelt» (323). The wording of his statement underscores that Bernkopf junior perpetuates his parents’ passive silence by actively silencing those who would scream out about the past. 11 The end of Rossmann’s Nazi crime novel adheres to the genre’s traditional model. The mysteries are solved, Bernkopf junior confesses and is arrested, and Mira’s detective skills proven. Similarly, Mira’s new, expanded understanding of the past suggests that readers will also be enlightened about the «Aryanization» program and, like Mira, appropriately dismayed that not The Second History of National Socialism 145 everyone has grasped the horrors of the past. And yet the clear resolution to the crime plot leaves readers with the uneasy feeling that the historical past has been wrapped up a little too neatly. Ultimately, this so-called enlightenment can be reduced to a few historical lectures on «Aryanization» and restitution in Austria and laments concerning the general lack of understanding. Even Mira’s comments that are designed to exemplify understanding and mastery of the past, ultimately consist of a series of clichéd assertions, such as her claim that through the case «war diese Tatsache für mich nicht länger abstrakt, sondern ganz konkret» (148). 12 As Schmitz notes in German Culture and the Uncomfortable Past, the very declaration of successful empathy and understanding about an event located at the «limits of feeling, reason, and representation» must be suspect, suspicions that Rossmann’s novel affirms. Proclamations on resolving the past do not equal understanding; neither does solving a contemporary crime that is rooted in the past mean that both have been sufficiently resolved and the past «mastered,» to use the language of Vergangenheitsbewältigung discourse. My skepticism about the novel’s efficacy stands in contrast to other readings of Rossmann’s text. Traci S. O’Brien, for example, concludes that the novel demonstrates how imagination can provide an ethical means to confront the past and to institute a type of belated justice. My reading however suggests that the superficial treatment of Vergangenheitsbewältigung does less to promote constructive imagination than to discourage a deeper engagement with the past. Freudsche Verbrechen thereby demonstrates the difficulties, rather than the successes, of using traditional, linear narrative forms to address complex historical events. The novel underscores the contradictions between an ordered crime schema that can resolve past crimes by making unequivocal statements on crime and society past and present, and a historical past that resists such structures. While the novel does not escape the traps inherent in narratives that marry crime fiction and discourses on National Socialism, it provides a useful template to examine contemporaneous Austrian crime novels that use themes and structures similar to Rossmann’s, but deliver a more nuanced image of the past and the problems of representation. Crime stories by Elfriede Jelinek, Gerhard Roth, and Lilian Faschinger, for example, similarly represent the «second history» of National Socialism as an inherited, psychological disease in present-day Austria. Yet, their experimental novels modify the linear structures of the retrospective investigation novel to emphasize the cyclical nature of an unresolvable past that manifests itself in perceptible and imperceptible ways in contemporary society. Lillian Faschinger’s Stadt der Verlierer is a less traditionally structured crime narrative and understated 146 Anita McChesney depiction of Nazism; it provides an informative contrasting approach to Rossmann’s novel. These modifications provide an example of the narrative possibilities for the novel of retrospective historical investigation to deliver impactful depictions of the past. Some of the differences between Rossmann’s and Faschinger’s approach can be attributed to the authors’ contrasting backgrounds. Lilian Faschinger holds a degree in English studies and history and her novel is part of a rich literary oeuvre. The themes in this author’s novels also mirror her childhood experiences in post-war Carinthia. Faschinger grew up in a rural area plagued by poverty, parochialism, and the devastating effect of Nazi ideologies and their aftermath. She also witnessed widespread social dysfunction, such as misogyny and child abuse, much of which she attributes to the corrupt policies of the Catholic Church. Faschinger’s literary work echoes her early experiences; her novels repeatedly portray aspects of a dysfunctional society in rural and urban Austria. 13 In Wiener Passion, to name just one example, the experiences of Magnolia Brown and her great-grandmother Rosa Tichy Havelka in the Vienna of the 1990s and 1890s, respectively, suggest how patterns of misogyny, racism, and social inequality in Austrian society have remained unchanged over the course of the past century. Faschinger’s work often draws on elements of crime fiction to portray Austria’s social problems. Yet, in contrast to Rossmann’s conventional sixteen-part Krimi series, only four of her eleven published novels (as of 2007) 14 could be considered part of the genre of retrospective historical investigations. The latest, Die Unzertrennlichen (2012) exhibits the more traditional narrative structure of crime fiction. These four novels play with aspects of the traditional generic form. In Stadt der Verlierer, in particular, Faschinger uses innovative modifications of the crime schema to portray the social dysfunction in an Austria that, for her, persists under the cloak of silence and denial. Much like the postmodern crime novel as defined by Brian McHale and Michael Holquist, 15 Stadt der Verlierer stretches the genre’s narrative boundaries. The text includes, but also plays with, the structures of conventional crime fiction. Stadt der Verlierer, for example, is set in an urban environment (Vienna), it features the murder of a beautiful young woman, and it builds suspense with the detective’s efforts to solve several cases. Despite these familiar traits, Faschinger breaks up the narrative structure with two alternating narrators: the first person account of subsequent murderer Matthias Karner and the third person account of detective Emma Novak. This narrative structure inverts the traditional hierarchical relationship between detective and criminal and strips away suspense about the murderer’s identity. The split narrative voices also signal the impossibility of achieving order, The Second History of National Socialism 147 a concept that is reinforced by the novel’s themes and conclusion. A second modification is the position of the murder, which Faschinger’s text downplays by placing it in the twelfth of 19 chapters. Finally, although Matthias is caught, social order is not restored at the end. Instead, the crime and process of investigation reveal greater, unsolvable social psychoses passed on by the shortcomings of previous generations. Unlike Rossmann’s novel, Faschinger’s Stadt der Verlierer portrays National Socialism alongside other inherited elements that have shaped the present social dysfunction in Vienna. The «city of losers,» as the title already calls it, is rampant with misogyny, bigotry, racism, dysfunctional families, and hypocrisy. These attributes become most evident through the first person account of the social misfit and murderer Matthias Karner. A 30-year-old unemployed resident of Vienna, he supports himself through sexual relationships with wealthy women. Matthias’s thoughts and actions paint a disturbing image of an abusive misogynist, whose numerous social dysfunctions stem from his upbringing by abusive foster parents and an early sexual relationship with his foster sister. Another skeleton in his family’s past emerges when the wealthy Viennese restaurateur, Greta Mautner, hires detective Emma Novak to find the second of her twin sons whom she gave up for adoption while keeping his brother. This missing son is, of course, Matthias. Reuniting Matthias and his wealthy mother might explain his past but does not redirect his future. His hatred of women deepens as does his inability to come to terms with the past. He refuses to forgive the mother who abandoned him to a cruel foster family and is determined to take advantage of her wealth. His hate intensifies when he compares his life to that of his twin brother Nikki, now a leading European architect with a beautiful wife, Vera, coincidently also Matthias’s current lover. Driven by rage against his brother, the wife, his mother, and all women, Matthias strangles Vera’s cat and then Vera in a violent rape scene. He finally attempts to strangle his mother, who, however, outsmarts him. In Faschinger’s novel the brutal crimes seem to be inevitably interconnected with heredity, family history, and the oppressive environment of Vienna. The second narrator in Stadt der Verlierer, detective Emma Novak, reinforces the image of Vienna’s disturbed populace. Novak is a mediocre detective with a family life that is only marginally better than that of the criminal, Matthias. A divorcée, Emma has constant friction with her mother and her teenage son, who lives with his grandmother. Emma’s mother maintains a steady supply of young lovers at her home, disregarding her husband, a World War II veteran, who suffers from dementia and mainly spends his time in the attic reenacting war scenarios with his model submarines. 148 Anita McChesney National Socialist history plays an understated, but crucial role in Faschinger’s larger image of a city filled with «losers.» The few select references to that past suggest that the deep-seated misogyny, bigotry, and hypocrisy are part and parcel of the same neuroses that inform the uncomfortable, distorted perception of the National Socialist past. Matthias, for example, describes the six anti-aircraft towers from the Third Reich as the only positive to living in Vienna, «Die sechs Flaktürme sind das Beste an Wien. Eindeutig. Ein Grund, in dieser Stadt zu leben. Der einzige, wenn man es genau nimmt» (187). The imagined grandeur of the historical towers lacks any grounding in reality for the 30-year-old, who is too young to have any personal experience with the war. Thus, his view that surviving remnants from the National Socialist past are the best of Vienna derives only from the picture he has constructed of the past and not from reality. Indeed, he continually comments on his lack of knowledge and interest in anything to do with National Socialism. As he puts it when Vera tells him the tragic history of a famed photographer and student killed by the Nazis, «Sie interessierten mich nicht. […] Was ging mich das an? » (210). The context of the comments reinforces connections between Austria’s past and present dysfunctions. Matthias voices his disinterest in Austria’s past in an intimate conversation with his lover Vera, his twin brother’s wife, and in a chapter that will end with him spying on the couple outside their house and killing their cat, an act that foreshadows Vera’s murder. Uttered in the context of a dysfunctional and soon-to-be deadly relationship, this attitude about the country’s past reinforces the fact that the failure to deal with all aspects of past history will inevitably continue to manifest itself adversely. A subplot with Emma’s father, Engelbert Novak, reinforces the links between Austrians’ present-day neuroses and their proclivity to reconstruct their own version of the past. Presumably due to his dementia, the World War II veteran spends his time constructing model submarines from the war. He reenacts heroic, but inaccurate, scenes of his past service to Austria and the National Socialists. Novak falsely believes that his submarine unit sank a British submarine in WWII for which he was awarded the Iron Cross. «So war es […] so und nicht anders,» he continually insists when Emma tries to correct him. «Wir waren Helden. Hitler ließ die gesamte Mannschaft in seinem Flugzeug nach Berlin einfliegen. Die Bevölkerung bereitete uns einen triumphalen Empfang […]. Wir waren Helden […] Admiral Dönitz hat mir persönlich sein Lob ausgesprochen» (69; 71). The father plays out his fabricated memories of the war with a handcrafted model of his supposed submarine. Novak’s seemingly harmless private fantasies about the past become The Second History of National Socialism 149 potentially dangerous when he launches the model submarine replete with swastika flag on the New Danube with Emma and his grandson. Passers-by quickly notice the swastika, a small group of people forms and they loudly voice their objections: «[E]s ist eindeutig ein Hakenkreuz»; «Das ist doch verboten»; «Ein alter Nazi-… Das ist der Gipfel»; «So etwas können Sie nicht machen-… Das fällt unter das Wiederbetätigungsgesetz»; «Genau, nationalsozialistische Symbole dürfen in der Öffentlichkeit nicht gezeigt werden»; «Unglaublich, die Dreistigkeit dieser ewig Gestrigen»; «Dem gehört der Prozess gemacht, ganz einfach» (204-5). Spurring each other on, the crowd becomes increasingly agitated until someone calls the police and the Novak family flees, abandoning the sinking model submarine. The story with the public outcry doesn’t end there. An official complaint is filed with the charge «In aller Öffentlichkeit nationalsozialistische Symbole zu verherrlichen» (237), which the father is determined to fight with the help of a fellow war veteran. As the friend proudly tells Emma, he found a legal precedent in Ingolstadt, whereby a fine was reversed for flying a model airplane with a swastika in public. The legal argument in that case was that mounting a swastika on a model that is an exact replica of an actual aircraft cannot be equated with a political sentiment. 16 This legal precedent immediately rings false in the Novak case, however. The friend follows his explanation of the Ingolstadt case by outlining the men’s plans to win the war by developing a new marine code to confound the enemy. He then punctuates his words with the battle cry: «Noch ist der Krieg nicht verloren. Man darf niemals aufgeben. Niemals! » (271-73). His comments underscore that he is in fact motivated by political ideology. Also of note is that the legal ruling specifies that the only exceptions to the ban on National Socialist symbols are models that replicate historical reality exactly. This wording thus precludes the submarine built by Emma’s father that is based on his imagined memories of the past and not on historical fact. While the story with Emma’s father might appear to be a minor subplot in Stadt der Verlierer, the parallels between the strained familial relationships of criminal, Matthias, and detective, Emma, within Faschinger’s portrait of the Austrian capital not only suggest associations between familial and national history, but also between the problems of the past and present-day «Verlierer» in Vienna. Emma and Matthias provide a microcosmic look into the larger, troubled macrocosm, Austria. Laura McLary similarly identifies a close parallel between family history and Austrian history in Stadt der Verlierer. She suggests that much like Austrian history, all of the family units contain holes ready to be filled with illusions 150 Anita McChesney or even lies. For both characters, however, the continual attempts to fill the gaps with a reconstructed history result in incomplete, even duplicitous identities. These attempts precipitate Matthias’s as well as society’s dysfunctions. (260-61) The parallels between familial and national history that McLary identifies highlight how Faschinger’s novel like Rossmann’s suggests that the pathology of the children and society stem from crimes of the past and the attempts to either silence or modify them. At the end of Faschinger’s text Emma solves the case and Matthias is arrested. However unlike Rossmann’s text, resolving the crime plot does not come with the satisfaction of having mastered the past or present. There is no sense of a better understanding of past history or any prospect of resolving its toxic bequest. Interweaving the portrayal of historical and present-day crimes with that of ongoing social dysfunction, Faschinger’s novel of retrospective historical investigation replaces a satisfying resolution that restores order and understanding with one that shows the impossibility of achieving that goal. Reflecting on the paradoxes inherent in the discourses on National Socialism, Helmut Schmitz suggests that literature even more so than other narrative forms has the potential to construct alternative representations to the closed narratives that suggest a successful «mastery of the past.» For Schmitz the solution must be sought in a form of cultural representation that avoids constructing meaning and reflects on the limits of representation with a metanarrative. Novels of retrospective historical investigation are one such metaform. As demonstrated by Lilian Faschinger’s text, the dual temporal structure creates the possibility to connect the effects of the past on the present as well as to reflect on how these connections are represented. While Faschinger’s crime novel should not be seen as the unequivocal fulfillment of Schmitz’s vision, I would suggest that Stadt der Verlierer does offer an alternative model that suggests a more productive use of crime fiction to treat the history of National Socialism. In its subtle portrayal of the interconnectedness of crimes and social ills, Faschinger’s novel more effectively depicts National Socialism as the cultural inheritance of the second and third generations and as a permanent part of the fabric of Austrian society. By avoiding tidy endings and explicit statements on understanding the past such as are to be found in Freudsche Verbrechen, Faschinger’s text underscores that there is no coming to terms with the past. There is no Gnade der späten Geburt for later generations; Austria’s past haunts the characters and conditions the way they behave. Faschinger’s crime novel thereby shows a productive shift away from narratives with foregone conclusions about the past to an open discourse that no longer seeks to «master» the past and to return to a broken The Second History of National Socialism 151 system of order but that instead indicates the need for ongoing engagement with the conditions that shape the past, present, and future. Notes 1 Katharina Hall provides the most comprehensive list of National Socialism in international crime fiction in her database «‹Detecting the Past.› Nazi-Themed Crime Fiction Database.» 2 Examples include: Bernhard Schlink’s Selb trilogy Selbs Justiz, (1987), Selbs Betrug (1994), and Selbs Mord (2003), which most famously thematize first-generation guilt and questions of culpability against the backdrop of the Nazi’s forced labor programs. More recent examples include: Rainer Gross’s Grafeneck (2007) and Ketenacker (2011) and Ulrich Ritzel, Der Schatten des Schwans (1999), which deal with medical experiments and Nazi euthanasia programs; Christian v. Ditfurth’s Mann Ohne Makel (2002), which addresses revenge and the restitution of property; and Wolfgang Schorlau’s Das dunkle Schweigen (2005), which deals with cases of lynch justice carried out against Allied soldiers in 1945. 3 Saupe terms the two types of fiction the «retrospektiver historischer Ermittlungsroman» and «historischer Kriminalroman» (267-70.) These terms correspond to John Scaggs’s distinction between the two types of historical crime fiction as «trans-historical crime fiction» in which «a contemporary detective [is] investigating an incident in the more or less remote, rather than very recent, past» (15) vs. «straight» historical crime fiction; «crime fiction that is set entirely in some particular historical period, but which was not written during that period» (125). 4 Space does not permit an extensive discussion of differences between the forms of Vergangenheitsbewältigung in Austrian and German discourse. For an informative overview of changing views of Nationalsocialism in Austria see Uhl, «Vom Opfermythos zur Mitverantwortungsthese,» and Rathkolb (in particular 237-66). For a comparative look at Austrian restitution policies see Uhl, «Recovering Austrian Memory: Stratifying Restitution Debates.» 5 Quoted in Thaler 47. 6 Indeed Peter Brooks maintains that Todorov marks detective fiction as the «narrative of narratives» (25). 7 More in-depth discussions of this triadic narrative structure can be found in essays by Richard Alewyn («The Origin of the Detective Novel»), Roger Caillois («The Detective Novel as Game») and Frank Kermode («Novel and Narrative») in Most and Stowe’s anthology The Poetics of Murder: Detective Fiction and Literary Theory. 8 Rossmann’s experience in politics is evident, for example, in Wahlkampf, the first Valensky novel, where the journalist/ detective investigates crimes during a political campaign. Her interest in social inequality can be seen in the character Vesna Krajner, Mira’s «sidekick» who is a Bosnian immigrant and her cleaning lady, and as such repeatedly encounters racial and social prejudice. 9 The much-quoted phrase «Gnade der späten Geburt» («luck of being born late») was popularized by German Federal Chancellor Helmut Kohl in a 1984 speech in Israel, but was originally coined by journalist Günter Gaus, who one year earlier had referred to «Gnade der späten Geburt» in his book Wo Deutschland liegt. Eine Ortsbestimmung (1983). According to Margit Reiter, this claim has also outlived its day and has 152 Anita McChesney been replaced by a broader acknowledgement of Betroffenheit in German discourse. I see this general recognition of indebtedness to the past in subsequent generations also in contemporary Austrian crime texts. 10 High school education in Austria, she says, ended with the end of WWI, whereby the teachers told them, «der Rest sei zu neu, um schon als Geschichte gelten zu können-… Davon könnten uns die Eltern und Großeltern aus eigenem Erleben erzählen. Die wenigstens allerdings hatten das getan. Und wenn, hatten sie allzu sehr aus ihrem persönlichen Blickwinkel berichtet. Aber auch in meiner Familie war wenig über die Nazizeit gesprochen worden. Mehr hatte ich da schon über die Untaten der russischen Besatzung nach dem Krieg erfahren […]» (Rossmann 143). 11 While this analysis focuses on generational issues in the novel, Rossmann also links past and current Austrian attitudes on National Socialism to psychology. The novel’s title (Freudsche Verbrechen) insinuates that the crimes of the present and past have psychological underpinnings, which is intensified by situating the two murders in the Freud house in Vienna. Dora Messerschmied underscores this connection when she explains the concept of repression to Mira and suggests that repressing the past is responsible for the upsurge of extreme right politicians and neo-Nazi attacks in Austria today. See O’Brien for more on the role of psychology and repression on multiple levels in Freudsche Verbrechen. 12 Mira’s statements in the novel echo the author’s comments in the acknowledgements. Her goal in writing this novel, she states, is «die Mechanismen der Nazizeit zu begreifen» and «Indifferenz für nicht zulässig zu erklären» (331). Rossmann specifically thanks historians for helping her to finally understand the era through the «Aryanization» program, by giving her «entscheidende Einblicke in die ganz realen Auswirkungen so gennanter ‹Arisierungen›» (331). I would suggest, however, that the novel contradicts such statements and demonstrates instead the impossibility of reaching a point of understanding. 13 McLary, Winning Back Lost Territory 1-8. 14 Here I’m referring to the novels Magdalena Sünderin (1995), Wiener Passion (1999), and Stadt der Verlierer (2007). 15 Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fiction (1987), or Michael Holquist in «Whodunnit and Other questions: Metaphysical Crime Fiction in Postwar Fiction» 1983. 16 «Das Urteil wurde mit dem Argument begründet, dass das Anbringen eines Hakenkreuzes an einem vorbildgetreuen Flugmodell nicht mit einer politischen Gesinnung gleichsetzt werden kann» (Faschinger 273). Works Cited Bischof, Günter. «Victims? Perpetrators? ‹Punching Bags› of European Historical Memory? The Austrians and Their World War II Legacies.» German Studies Review 27.1 (February 2004): 17-32. Brooks, Peter. Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative. New York: Knopf, 1984. Faschinger, Lilian. Stadt der Verlierer. Munich: Hanser, 2007. Ganeva, Mila. «From West-German Väterliteratur to Post-Wall Enkelliteratur: The End of the Generation Conflict in Marcel Beyer’s Spione and Tanja Dückers’s Himmelskörper.» Seminar: Journal of Germanic Studies 43.2 (May 2007): 149-62. The Second History of National Socialism 153 Hall, Katharina. ‹Detecting the Past› Nazi-themed crime fiction database. http: / / www.academia.edu/ 1763356/ Detecting_the_Past_Nazi-themed_crime_fiction_ database, June 2013. Web 9 Mar. 2015. Holquist, Michael. «Whodunnit and Other Questions: Metaphysical Crime Fiction in Postwar Fiction.» The Poetics of Murder: Detective Fiction & Literary Theory. Ed. Glenn W. Most and William W. Stowe. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983. 149-74 accessed 9 March, 2015. 149-74. McHale, Brian. Postmodernist Fiction. New York: Methuen, 1987. McLary, Laura. «‹What Lies Beneath the Surface›: Hiddden Histories, Broken Families, and Other Crimes in Lilian Faschinger’s Stadt der Verlierer [Town Full of Losers].» Winning Back Lost Territory. The Writing of Lilian Faschinger. Ed. Vincent Kling and Laura McLary. Riverside, CA: Ariadne, 2014. 260-61. Most, Glenn W., and William W. Stowe, eds. The Poetics of Murder. Detective Fiction and Literary Theory. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983. O’Brien, Traci S. «What’s in Your Bag? ‹Freudian Crimes› and Austria’s Nazi Past in Eva Rossmann’s Freudsche Verbrechen.» Tatort Germany. The Curious Case of German-Language Crime Fiction. Ed. Lynn M. Kutch and Todd Herzog. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2014. 155-74. Rathkolb, Oliver. The Paradoxical Republic. Austria 1945-2005. New York: Berghahn Books, 2010. Reichel, Peter, Harald Schmid, and Peter Steinbach, eds. Der Nationalsozialismus, die zweite Geschichte: Überwindung, Deutung, Erinnerung. Munich: Beck, 2009. Reiter, Margit. Die Generation danach. Der Nationalsozialismus im Familiengedächtnis. Innsbruck: Studien Verlag, 2006. Rossmann, Eva. Freudsche Verbrechen. Vienna: Folio, 2001. Saupe, Achim. Der Historiker als Detektiv - der Detektiv als Historiker: Historik, Kriminalistik und der Nationalsozialismus als Kriminalroman. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2009. Scaggs, John. Crime Fiction. London: Routledge, 2005. Schmitz, Helmut, ed. German Culture and the Uncomfortable Past: Representations of National Socialism in Contemporary Germanic Literature. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2001. Thaler, Peter. The Ambivalence of Identity: The Austrian Experience of Nationbuilding in a Modern Society. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue UP, 2001. Uhl, Heidemarie. «Recovering Austrian Memory: Stratifying Restitution Debates.» Restitution and Memory: Material Restoration in Europe. Ed. Dan Dinermari and Gotthard Wunberg. New York: Berghahn Books, 2007. 233-54. -. «Vom Opfermythos zur Mitverantwortungsthese: NS-Herrschaft, Krieg und Holocaust im ‹österreichischen Gedächtnis.›» Transformationen gesellschaftlicher Erinnerung. Studien zur ‹Gedächtnisgeschichte› der Zweiten Republik. Ed. Christian Gerbel et al. Vienna: Turia and Kang, 2005. 50-85. Wigmore, Juliet. «Elisabeth Reichart’s Nachtmär - the Enduring Nightmare of Austria in the 1990s.» German Culture and the Uncomfortable Past: Representations of National Socialism in Contemporary Gemanic Literatur. Ed. Helmut Schmitz. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2001. 103-18.
