OF BORDERS AND ABYSSES
YouTube premiere "From Kreisky's living room"
TESSA SZYSZKOWITZ IN CONVERSATION WITH EVA MENASSE
OF BORDERS AND ABYSSES
Reflections on Austria's special situation
In her latest novel Dark flower the Austrian writer Eva Menasse, who lives in Berlin, deals with events in Austrian history that must be called crimes against humanity: the countless massacres of Hungarian-Jewish forced labourers who were herded into Burgenland and eastern Lower Austria in the final weeks of the Second World War to build the Southeast Wall, a senseless and megalomaniacal defence system of the German Wehrmacht. These so-called „final phase crimes“ in over 120 communities were covered up for decades, but only in Rechnitz, which has become notorious for this reason, have the bodies still not been found. Eva Menasse sets the story in the small fantasy town of Dunkelblum and uses historical facts from the entire region, from Mattersburg, Rechnitz, Jennersdorf and Deutsch-Schützen.
In this novel, the author is not only concerned with a literary reappraisal of Austrian history - or rather a reappraisal that has been far too long in coming. Menasse is interested on the one hand in the concrete dynamics of a small town where everyone knows everyone else and knows most things about each other, and on the other hand in the specific phenomena of this border region. For centuries, during the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, there was no border here; it was only drawn in blood in 1918-21. All kinds of crimes took place on it and because of it, and when in the summer of 1989 the Iron Curtain was the first to break here of all places, for a historical moment it seemed possible to come to terms with the past.
Eva Menasse is an Austrian writer. Born in Vienna, she now lives in Berlin. She started out as a journalist at profil and Frankfurter Allgemeine before becoming a successful author with her novels Vienna and Quasikristalle. She has received many literary awards, including the Austrian Book Prize 2017, and is a supporter of the Charter of Fundamental Digital Rights of the European Union and the Jerusalem Declaration on Anti-Semitism.
Tessa Szyszkowitz, London correspondent for profile, world columnist at the Butterfly, author of Real Englishmen. Britain and the Brexit