3 - Silencing the Past: Margarete Heinrich's and Eduard Erne's Totschweigen and Elfriede Jelinek's Rechnitz (Der Würgeengel)

Summary

Es ist mir und wahrscheinlich auch Ihnen oft durch den Kopf gegangen, wohin der Virus Verbrechen gegangen ist.

[The thought has often crossed my mind, and doubtless yours as well, where the virus of atrocity has got to.]

—Ingeborg Bachmann, Preamble to Das Buch Franza

TOWARD THE END OF THE SECOND WORLD WAR, on the night of March 24–25, 1945, days before the arrival of the Red Army, approximately two hundred Jewish slave-laborers 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 postwar Austria.

As Walter Manoschek has pointed out, the Rechnitz massacre was by no means a unique case in Austria in the final stages of the Second World War. It was one of a series of what Christiaan Rüter has termed “Endphasenverbrechen” (end-phase crimes) that took place in Austria in the spring of 1945. In contrast to the concentration camps largely situated in Eastern Europe (with notable exceptions, such as Mauthausen- Gusen and Ebensee in Austria), far away from the eyes of the Austrian and German civilian population, thereby creating a “räumliche, soziale und emotionale Distanz” (spatial, social, and emotional distance) from the events, the camp evacuations and death marches of tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews to Eastern Austria, which began in the summer of 1944, meant that the last phase of the Holocaust “spielte sich … vor der Haustüre ab” (played out … in front of the house door). The two hundred victims of the Rechnitz massacre were engaged in building the socalled Southeast Wall fortifications, designed to stop the Soviet advance.