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WORK TITLE: Angel of Oblivion
WORK NOTES: trans by Tess Lewis
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 8/26/1961
WEBSITE:
CITY: Klagenfurt
STATE:
COUNTRY: Austria
NATIONALITY: Austrian
http://www.wordswithoutborders.org/contributor/maja-haderlap * https://archipelagobooks.org/book_author/maja-haderlap/ * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maja_Haderlap * http://www.zyzzyva.org/2016/09/08/a-valley-of-phantoms-angel-of-oblivion-by-maja-haderlap/ * http://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/angel-of-oblivion-by-maja-haderlap-a-childhood-haunted-by-history-1.2754520 * http://eurolitnetwork.com/rivetingreviews-henrietta-foster-reviews-angel-of-oblivion-by-maja-haderlap/
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born August 26, 1961, in Eisenkappel, Austria.
EDUCATION:University of Vienna, Ph.D.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Novelist, poet, and essayist. Editor of the Carinthian Slovene minority literary magazine Mladje; Municipal Theatre of Klagenfurt, head of dramaturgy, 1992-2007; Alpen-Adria University, teacher.
AWARDS:Promotion Award of Carinthia, 1983; Award of Prešeren Foundation, 1989; Hubert Burda Prize as part of the Hermann-Lenz Prize, 2004; Women’s Culture Prize for Literature in the province of Carinthia, 2005; Austrian State Scholarship for Literature, 2006/2007; Ingeborg Bachmann Prize, for Angel of Oblivion, 2011; PEN America Translation Prize winner, 2017.
WRITINGS
Zalik pesmi (1983); Bajalice (1987).
SIDELIGHTS
Born August 26, 1961, in Eisenkappel, Austria, Maja Haderlap is a Slovenian-Austrian novelist and poet. She holds a Ph.D. in theater studies and German from the University of Vienna. She was editor for many years of the Carinthian Slovene minority literary magazine Mladje. In 1992 she became head of dramaturgy at the Municipal Theatre of Klagenfurt and held annual dramaturgy classes. In 2008 she became a freelance author, publishing volumes of poetry and essays in Slovenian and German and translations from Slovenian. Her work has been published in various international literary journals and anthologies. She received the Ingeborg-Bachmann-Preis for her debut novel Engel des Vergessens (Angel of Oblivion).
In 2011 Haderlap published Engel des Vergessens, translated into English as Angel of Oblivion by Tess Lewis, a German and French translator and advisory editor of the Hudson Review, in 2016. The book focuses on the treatment of Slovenes living in southern Austria by Austrian Nazis during World War II, the militarily organized resistance against National Socialism, and the Carinthian minority of Carinthian Slovenes, who were non-Jewish victims of the Holocaust. In 1941 Heinrich Himmler, a high-ranking Nazi, ordered the removal of 37,000 Slovenian-speaking Carinthians and the distribution of their property to the nearby German-speaking population. Within six months, a quarter of a million Carinthians were sent to the Ravensbrück and Mauthausen concentration camps.
A writer in Publishers Weekly declared: “The book is an attempt to rescue the memories of her elders” from the angel of oblivion. Loosely based on the experiences of Haderlap’s own family, the novel draws on the recollections and actions of her family. Her grandfather and brother fought against the Nazis, her grandmother was sent to Ravensbrück, and her father, as a child, was tortured for information. Haderlap learns to understand why her father was a violent drunk, her grandmother was cold, and her mother tried to protect her from the past.
Henrietta Foster observed in a review for European Literature Network, “Haderlap graduated in theatre studies because even if the most dreadful things happen on stage, once the curtain is down it is over and forgotten—unlike for the damaged people she grew up with for whom the war was never over. She is a dramaturge and a poet and her prose is full of rich poetic images and constructions. It is a profoundly beautiful and deeply upsetting novel worthy of all the prizes.”
Writing in World Literature Today, Maria Luise Caputo-Mayr commented on how Haderlap chooses the German language to distance herself from her material, and how she interweaves family history with the destiny of an ethnic group exposed to war’s viciousness. “She is often brutal when dealing with Nazi persecution, which she contrasts with lyrical passages describing dreams, fantasy, and nature, having a mystical quality. She notes that the pace of the novel reproduces the rhythm of remembered walks with her father,” explained Caputo-Mayr.
In a review for the online Irish Times, Eileen Battersby noted the problems with the book’s use of present tense, which creates a narrative that reads as if written in a rush; nevertheless, she remarked, “There is a persistent sense of a struggle between the deliberate poise of a writer and the desperate human need to convey the communal pain felt by all, if the individual responses to it were varied. It is a fascinating book.” Writing on the Web site Millions, Brendan Driscoll stated: “Angel of Oblivion is, among other things, a book about the power of stories and storytelling. One aspect of this is its exploration of how stories shape personal identity.”
In 2014 Haderlap wrote Langer Transit: Gedichte, a collection of poems that reflects the impulsiveness and comparisons of strangers and coming home, landscapes and small dwellings, and people traveling looking for meaning in their life. Her poems evoke the senses of community, otherness, loneliness, language, and emotionality.
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
World Literature Today, Volume 86, number 2, 2012, Maria Luise Caputo-Mayr, review of Engel des Vergessens, p. 67.
ONLINE
European Literature Network, http://eurolitnetwork.com/ (December 15, 2016), Henrietta Foster, review of Angel of Oblivion.
Irish Times, http://www.irishtimes.com/ (August 13, 2016), Eileen Battersby, review of Angel of Oblivion.
Millions, http://www.themillions.com/ (November 10, 2016), Brendan Driscoll, review of Angel of Oblivion.
Publishers Weekly Online, http://www.publishersweekly.com/ (June 27, 2016), review of Angel of Oblivion.
Zyzzyva, A San Francisco Journal of Arts & Letters, http://www.zyzzyva.org/ (September 8, 2016), Devan Brett Kelly, review of Angel of Oblivion.
LC control no.: nr 96038112
Descriptive conventions:
rda
LC classification: PT2668.A27372
Personal name heading:
Haderlap, Maja, 1961-
Located: Klagenfurt (Austria)
Birth date: 1961
Affiliation: Universität Wien
Found in: Bajalice, 1987: t.p. (Maja Haderlap) jkt. (b. 1961)
Angel of oblivion, 2016: ECIP data view (Maja Haderlap is a
Slovenian-Austrian writer. She holds a PhD in Theater
Studies and German from the University of Vienna. She
currently lives in Klagenfurt, Austria)
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Maja Haderlap
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Maja Haderlap
Maja-haderlap-2012-ffm-080-a.jpg
Maja Haderlap (2012)
Born August 26, 1961 (age 55)
Eisenkappel-Vellach (Slovene: Železna Kapla-Bela), Carinthia
Occupation Novelist, Poet
Nationality Austrian
Alma mater University of Vienna, Austria
Period 1983 to present
Genre Novel, Poetry
Notable works Engel des Vergessens
Maja Haderlap (born 26 August 1961 in Eisenkappel-Vellach (Slovene: Železna Kapla-Bela), Carinthia) is a bi-lingual Slovenian-German Austrian writer, best known for her award-winning novel Angel of Forgetting, highlighting the Austria's only militarily organized resistance against National Socialism - the Carinthian minority of Carinthian Slovenes as one of the non-Jewish Holocaust's victims.[1]
She studied German language and literature at University of Vienna and has PhD in Theatre Studies.
Contents
1 Life and Work
2 Books
3 Awards
4 References
5 External links
Life and Work
After her graduation she worked as assistant dramaturg, as a program editor and a lecturer at the Institute for Comparative Literary Studies at the Alpen-Adria-Universität in Klagenfurt. Between years 1992 and 2007 she worked as drama supervisor at the Klagenfurt City Theatre under the direction of Dietmar Pflegerl.
Maja Haderlap is considered the most lyrical voice among Slovenian Austrians since her first book of poems 'Zalik pesmi' (1983).
She was editor of many years of Carinthian Slovene minority literary magazine 'Mladje'. She writes poetry, prose and essays in both Slovenian and German. Her work has been published in numerous German and international literary journals and anthologies. Maja Haderlap is a member of the Graz's Guild of writers and lives in Klagenfurt.
Books
Žalik pesmi, Poems (1983)
Bajalice, Poems (1987)
Poems - Pesmi - Poems (1989)
Deček in sonce (The boy and the sun), zadruga Novi Matajur, Cividale and Klagenfurt, Carinthia, Založba Drava 2000 ISBN 3-85435-330-8
Between Politics and Culture
The city of Klagenfurt Theatre from 1992 to 2007. The era Pflegerl Dietmar (2007)
Engel des Vergessens (Angel of Oblivion), Wallstein, Göttingen, 2011 ISBN 978-3-8353-0953-1
Awards
1983: Promotion Award of Carinthia
1989: Award of Prešeren Foundation
2004: Hubert Burda Prize as part of the Hermann-Lenz Prize
2005: Women's Culture Prize for Literature in the province of Carinthia
2006/2007: Austrian State Scholarship for Literature
2011: Ingeborg Bachmann Prize for the novel "Angel of Oblivion"
2012: Writer in residence in one world foundation in Sri Lanka[2]
Maja Haderlap is a Slovenian-German Austrian writer and translator. She studied German language and literature at the University of Vienna and has a PhD in Theatre Studies. She was awarded the Ingeborg-Bachmann-Preis and the Rauriser Literaturpreis for her debut novel Engel des Vergessens (Angel of Oblivion).
Maja Haderlap was born in Eisenkappel, Austria, and studied theatre and German at the University of Vienna. From 1992 to 2007 she was head of dramaturgy at the Municipal Theatre of Klagenfurt, and she continues to hold annual dramaturgy classes in Klagenfurt. Since 2008 she has lived and worked as a freelance author in Klagenfurt. She has published volumes of poetry and essays in Slovenian and German, and translations from Slovenian. She is the author of Gedichte–Pesmi–Poems (1998); Bajalice (1987); Zalik pesmi (1983); Engel des Vergessens (2011); and Langer transit (2014).
Maja Haderlap. Engel des Vergessens
86.2 (March-April 2012): p67.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2012 University of Oklahoma
http://www.worldliteraturetoday.com
Maja Haderlap. Engel des Vergessens . Gottingen. Wallstein. 2011. ISBN 9783835309531
Engel des Vergessens is a first novel by a Slovenian-Austrian author from the southeastern comer of Carinthia, bordering on Slovenia. This bilingual and bicultural area rarely appears in current Austrian literature, despite having been in the limelight of political-ethnic controversy. Maja Haderlap, a native of this region, registers through her first-person narrator, beginning as a child and then as a maturing young woman, what happened during the Third Reich. Known as a Slovenian poet and translator, she studied theater at Vienna University and worked for fifteen years as chief literary manager ( Dramaturgin ) at the city theater Klagenfurt (Celovec ); she also teaches ar the Alpen-Adria University.
The book (winner of both the 2011 Austrian Ingeborg Bachmann Prize and the German Ravensburger Bookprize) is both a biography and a political/cultural history of the author's people in the valleys around the village Lepena; it is a gripping document of unresolved issues confronting this minority. Ir presents above all a long overdue account of the historic and heroic role of the Slovenian partisans during the Nazi period in Austria, who were regarded as enemies of the state and fiercely persecuted together with their families and friends. The book can be considered a memorial to their "forgotten" sacrifices: the torture, beatings, hangings, deportation to concentration camps, devastation of their homes, farms, and lives. The author's grandmother was a survivor of Ravensbrück and remembered as a strong matriarch and a sort of family historian through her letters and memorabilia, her Lagerbuch (camp diary), and documents from her life, which were preserved by a neighbor. Haderlap felt compelled to write to reach clarity for herself and to connect the fragmentary information into a coherent picture.
The title of Engel des Vergessens (Angels of forgetting) refers to pictures of two guardian angels that the Catholic mother of the child-narrator had hung up over her bed for divine protection. The narrator's visits to concentration camps and former Nazi prisons reinforce her insight into experiences that traumatized her people. The tragic stories of neighbors and relatives are embedded into the seasonal flow of village life.
Haderlap chooses the German language to create a protective distance from her material, a "Schutzschild" (protective shield) and a "Denksprache" (a language of thinking). She is often brutal when dealing with Nazi persecution, which she contrasts with lyrical passages describing dreams, fantasy, and nature, having a mystical quality. She notes that the pace of the novel reproduces the rhythm of remembered walks with her father.
The family history, interwoven with the destiny of an ethnic group exposed to war, fanaticism, brutality, and discrimination, reverberates strongly in our world. It mirrors on a small scale our global problems.
Maria Luise Caputo-Mayr
Temple University
Caputo-Mayr, Maria Luise
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Maja Haderlap. Engel des Vergessens." World Literature Today, vol. 86, no. 2, 2012, p. 67+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA281462303&it=r&asid=0be0a93c8b6dd9467436533300d7ea61. Accessed 25 Feb. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A281462303
Angel of Oblivion by Maja Haderlap: A childhood haunted by history
Haderlap’s novel of growing up in rural Carinthia is part autobiography, part memoir
The sculpture Frauengruppe, by Will Lammert, at the memorial site of former concentration camp Ravensbruck, in Fuerstenberg, Germany. Photograph: Michael Gottschalk/photothek via Getty
The sculpture Frauengruppe, by Will Lammert, at the memorial site of former concentration camp Ravensbruck, in Fuerstenberg, Germany. Photograph: Michael Gottschalk/photothek via Getty
Eileen Battersby
Sat, Aug 13, 2016, 03:18
First published:
Sat, Aug 13, 2016, 03:18
Book Title:
Angel of Oblivion
ISBN-13:
9780914671466
Author:
Maja Haderlap
Publisher:
Archipelago Books
Guideline Price:
£12.99
It begins with vivid, if randomly recalled, memories of a childhood spent in the Carinthian countryside, near Austria’s border with the former Yugoslavia. Most importantly of all, though, Austrian poet Maja Haderlap opens her debut novel with the solid word referring to the defining presence in her life: “Grandmother.” This determined, ruined old woman emerges as an almost symbolic force. “Grandmother signals with her hand, she wants me to follow.” And follow is precisely what Haderlap’s narrator does. The only way she will ever begin to understand the history of her family, and also that of her culture, is by heeding Grandmother’s words, not merely her advice, but also her stories, dominated as they are by wartime experiences in Ravensbrück, the infamous concentration camp in northern Germany.
One of the earliest statements the narrator offers, if in an ironic context, shapes the entire book: “I, on the other hand, believe every word Grandmother says.” The reader will too, as the old woman bears the burden of survival. She is also the leader of the household and has little faith in her daughter-in-law, the narrator’s mother. The feelings are mutual.
Initially, it seems, much of the domestic tension may be the clash between Grandmother and the little girl’s hapless mother, a woman given to weeping who also possesses a liking for poetry. While Grandmother rules the house, investing everything she cooks with the pervasive scent of her dark, smoky kitchen, the daughter-in-law appears to know her place, which is working outside, doing the milking and tending animals. “She usually comes up to the kitchen window to look for me . . . and calls out . . . sometimes she just leaves without a word.” But there are other, far sadder reasons for the mother’s unhappiness.
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These homely scenes detailing the daily chores are gentle and quite beautiful, with faint echoes of a Heaney poem. It is clear that the narrator’s religious-fanatic mother, a good worker, is faulted for not being from farming stock, so the narrator learns her lore from Grandmother. The old lady doesn’t spend much time praying, although she does attend Mass every year to give thanks for the end of the Nazi era, and come All Souls’ Day she places a loaf of bread and a pitcher of milk on the table for the dead. Her reasoning is more practical than spiritual: “So they’ll have something to eat when they come at night and will leave us in peace.”
Present day
It all seems to belong to a far distant time. But then mention is made of the poor reception the family receives of Slovenian television, and suddenly the story moves much closer to the present day. “The men walk around the perimeter of the house holding the antenna which looks like a bare Christmas tree, and we call out the window, ‘now!, now!’ . But the picture is no clearer. “We have no choice but to make do with the shadow television and to feel like pirates in the fog.”
The childhood being described belongs to the 1960s and 1970s. Maja Haderlap was born in August 1961 and grew up speaking two languages: Slovenian and compulsory German.
Angel of Oblivion, although presented as a novel, reads far more as an intelligent, heartfelt memoir recounted by a witness intent on finally telling an unknown story. The narrative is both personal and historic; thoughtful and hasty. The prose is uneven as the language, which is initially plain and factual, becomes increasingly lyrical, almost as if it is charting the narrator’s evolution as a writer. At times, it has a declamatory urgency. Elsewhere there are memorable anecdotes, such as the death of a beloved cow whose calf had been drowned at birth when the cow fell into a river. She is rescued only to subsequently die and be mourned.
There is a persistent sense of a struggle between the deliberate poise of a writer and the desperate human need to convey the communal pain felt by all, if the individual responses to it were varied. It is a fascinating book but the problems in the writing and use of the continuous present tense are less to do with the translation – although “The stallion’s perspiration” does jar – than with the original editing; the narrative reads as if written in a rush, which is at odds with its deliberate intent.
The material does outweigh the stylistic misgivings yet also compounds the feeling that it reads as a memoir, not a novel. If Haderlap appears overwhelmed by her story it is not surprising, as most readers will share this sensation.
Shadows run through the book. There is the shadow of history itself and that the narrator’s family as part of the Slovenian-speaking minority in Austria are also shadows. While Austria, which was annexed by Nazi Germany in 1938, fell into a victim role, the plight of its Slovenian-speaking population was to be forgotten or, at best, grouped in with the Yugoslav partisans. Initially a backdrop, the politics seeping through the pages becomes central to the shaping of the individual lives.
No matter how much her mother tries to become involved with the narrator in little ways, even hanging saccharine images of guardian angels over the child’s bed, Grandmother is ever present. She certainly dominates, and her experience in Ravensbrück, where most of the prisoners were women, is the heart of the book, particularly as she appears to make telling reference to her time there, almost in passing: “Early in 1945, more and more transports arrived in Ravensbrück. There was no more room in the barracks, the women had to sleep three or four to a bunk. Many women from Poland and Slovenia arrived, many city women from France, Belgium, Holland, good Lord, how those women fought for their dresses and furs, Grandmother says.”
Kindly influence
The narrator’s emotional mother inhabits a vague hell all her own. Trapped in an unhappy marriage, which she once claimed that the Virgin Mary had warned her against, she appears a more kindly influence than she is granted as it was her who wanted the narrator to receive a good education. The mother eventually turns to writing poetry and seems intent on salvaging her life.
But if Grandmother is a towering figure, the mangled existence of her son, the narrator’s father, also features as an ongoing family disaster. He is frequently drunk, often unbalanced and reeling from the various traumas he has undergone since being hung from a tree as a 12-year-old boy by Austrian police quizzing him about the whereabouts of his father. His threats of suicide punctuate the narrator’s childhood. He survives, for the narrator, as an adult and published poet, to haul him from taverns. Still, his chaotic misery does convince as wholly dreadful, utterly human.
Autobiographical novel or memoir or messy hybrid, Angel of Oblivion has so much information, as well as images which will linger, that its actual genre is almost irrelevant. When the narrator’s attention moves more to herself, it is less interesting. But she does mention standing on Republic Square in Ljubljana on June 26th, 1991, when the new Slovenian flag was raised for the first time.
German non-fiction writer Eugen Ruge turned his family’s history into a disciplined and convincing debut novel In Times of Fading Light (2011, translated by Anthea Bell, 2013). His methodology is more coherent than Haderlap’s; his voice more restrained. Yet stylistic misgivings aside, Angel of Oblivion, with its doomed and colourful cast of real-life characters, as well as multiple cruel twists of fate, is a devastating story, never less than wholeheartedly told.
Grandmother told the narrator not to make any noise. “Not so loud, she says, or you can’t hear anything.” Haderlap heeded her, heard a great deal and has shared it.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent
#RivetingReviews: Henrietta Foster reviews ANGEL OF OBLIVION by Maja Haderlap
Dec 15, 2016 • No comments
As we approach the end of 2016 there are very few things to be grateful for and a visit from an angel of oblivion seems like a perfect alternative to the alarming reality all around us. In Austria, the recent election of the Green Party candidate as their president over a far right candidate, is one thing to be grateful for. And Austria provides us with another reason to be joyful – the English translation of Maja Haderlap’s 2011 novel Angel Of Oblivion. Her first novel has already garnered an impressive collection of prizes – the Ingeborg Bachman Prize, the Bruno Kreisky Prize, the Ravensberger Verlag Foundation Prize and the French First Novel Prize. The sparkling and hugely sympathetic English translation by Tess Lewis has just been long listed for the 2017 Pen Translation Prize.
Loosely based on Haderlap’s own family, the novel is about memory and relationships. Things said and things not said. A father and daughter. A grandmother and granddaughter. A mother and daughter. Their relationships with the land and with history. It starts with the grandmother and a childish recollection of being cherished but against a heavy background of unresolved and unexplained pain. At first I am reminded of my own relationship with my grandmother: instead of faraway Carinthia take rural Shropshire – damson jam, snowy white linen warmed by coals from the fire, wintery walks on The Wrekin and getting ready for church on Sunday. My grandparents also had their tales of the war. Memories of the Home Guard practising for a German invasion on the front lawn, coupons, rationing and children being sent away to school. Once my brother and I found a rifle in their attic which we took out into the garden to play with. It was the only time my grandfather ever lost his temper with us. A time of deprivation and hardship but not of betrayal, racism and violence.
In 1941 Himmler ordered the relocation of 37,000 Slovenian-speaking Carinthians and that their property should be given to the nearby German- speaking population. Within less than six months, and thanks to the enthusiasm of the local police, over a quarter of a million Carinthians were sent to Ravensbruck and Mauthausen. The partisans took to the forest and fought for their land and freedom from the Reich. It is a chapter of the war that has been largely overlooked. ‘Angel Of Oblivion’ is about how you continue to live and function after such history.
For Haderlap both the Carinthian landscape and people are scarred and even the woods are full of wounds. The people still have their scars, whether as concentration camp tattoos like the heroine’s grandmother, or as physical wounds like her great aunt Leni – “On certain days she can feel the scars on her neck, back and bottom left from the Gestapo interrogation. It’s the past knocking on my door, Leni says, it calls out to me and starts tormenting me.”
You can see the bullet-holes on the chin and hand of the next-door neighbour who survived the massacre of her family. Another friend still has the scars on his ribs from the beating he received from the local police. But much worse that the physical scars are the mental ones. Both the grandmother and father have interior scars that will never heal.
The heroine inherits her grandmother’s journal and discovers that the main event of her life – eighteen months in Ravensbruck – are relegated to three small pages. After the war the grandmother changes from being an elegant rich farmer’s daughter to a woman with thin hair and a kerchief around her head. She made it back to her farm but had to wait a few years for the State to reassign it to her. She stores the chocolates that friends give her in her cellar and they become inedible. Sometimes she sleeps in the same room as her granddaughter and it’s then that the habits she learnt at Ravensbruck come flooding back. She feels no shame in being naked in front of the child and tells her not to put dirty newspaper into her vagina when she is menstruating – a tip she learnt in the camps. The grandmother sleeps with her arms tightly around her, as though she were still in the cold prison huts, yet in the morning it is as though the physical intimacy between grandmother and granddaughter never happened. Rather than the facts, it is learning to live with the facts that dominates Haderlap’s astonishing novel.
Even more “expelled from life” than his mother is the heroine’s father who cannot ever find a sense of peace or calm. As a ten-year old boy he was captured by the police and tortured for information as to the whereabouts of his mother. Three times the police staged a mock hanging of the boy. On their final attempt his mother ran out of house and was arrested. The grown-up boy wanders around the farm restlessly with a noose threatening to kill himself. When challenged by his daughter he claims that he will never do it but that holding the noose calms him down. The father is the most unsettling presence in a book full of people who cannot come to terms with what they have lived through. Once his mother dies he directs his rage towards his family as well as the outside world. He is drunk and aggressive, cruel to his wife and at times vicious with his children.
The father has learnt “the ABC of forgetting” but can never understand those fellow countrymen who denounced him and his family. On the 50th anniversary of the Anschluss he receives 5000 schillings from the State as a victim of Nazi oppression. He decides to spend it all on himself because he was the one who suffered. He is a lost soul and there is something hopelessly vulnerable about him. He exudes an air of danger and resentment. He is the ‘moral inheritor’ of the war.
Angel of Oblivion ends with the Bosnian war and Slovene independence. The heroine cannot quite feel a part of that independence because she is neither Slovene not Austrian but both. The older generation cannot believe that all the atrocities they lived through in the 1940s are happening again only fifty years later. Nothing has been learnt. Haderlap graduated in theatre studies because even if the most dreadful things happen on stage, once the curtain is down it is over and forgotten – unlike for the damaged people she grew up with for whom the war was never over. She is a dramaturge and a poet and her prose is full of rich poetic images and constructions. It is a profoundly beautiful and deeply upsetting novel worthy of all the prizes. Thank you once more Austria.
Reviewed by Henrietta Foster
Angel Of Oblivion
Written by Maja Haderlap
Translated from the German by Tess Lewis
Published by Archipelago Books
Henrietta Foster is a television producer and writer. She works mainly for the BBC and has just finished ‘Beyond The Grace Note’ – a documentary film on women orchestra conductors. She is also writing a book about Hungarian Jews.
A Valley of Phantoms: ‘Angel of Oblivion’ by Maja Haderlap
by Devan Brettkelly
Posted on September 8, 2016
Angel of Oblivion In her novel Angel of Oblivion (289 page; Archipelago Books), Maja Haderlap depicts a dilapidated, Slovenian-speaking valley in Austria following World War II. During the war, the Nazis identified this area in the south of the country as one riddled with partisans. Many were hunted down and killed, while others were taken away to the camps. (Among the survivors, it is debatable which fate was worse.) Now it’s the 1960s, and fragmented families people the valley, farmers who repeat the stories of their neighbors’ and kins’ annihilations like chants. Haderlap’s story focuses on one particular group of survivors, the Zdravkos, a family preoccupied by food and death, just like everybody else in the valley.
Pulling from her own family history, and narrating the story through the Zdravkos’ daughter, Haderlap introduces each member of the clan through his or her relation to food. When we meet Father, he is working with the cattle. “You can read Father’s moods from the cowpat’s flight. If he tosses the manure in a high arc to the back of the heap, he’s feeling confident. If he flings the cowpats hard against the front of the manure pile, he’s irate.” Father’s past colors the entire novel, never allowing us to forget his nightmare of hiding from the Nazis, alone in the mountains as a boy of 12. Thus his irate moods can burn toward the suicidal. One of the novel’s most striking scenes happens early on when Father locks himself in the apiary with his gun. We sympathize with his pain, and continue to do so afterward, even as he later threatens the rest of the family with the same gun.
Mother is first mentioned in relation to her absence from the kitchen. “Grandmother says my mother doesn’t know enough to work in the kitchen. She has no idea how to cook and whatever those nuns taught her in school has no place in our house.” The entire household seems to hate Mother because she was spared the violence of war. She doesn’t know what it was like to run from the Nazis or know the trauma of their camps. This bitterness is somehow passed on to the reader, though one can’t be sure if this aversion to Mother is deserved or merely a consequence of adopting the criticism of characters we find dear.
And there’s Grandmother, who was a cook at Ravensbrück concentration camp where she survived off of potato peels while imprisoned. But “whether or not she’s glad she’s alive, that she can’t say.” She feels she belongs underground next to Grandfather’s bones, and sobs in protest as Mother and Father begin to tear down the old farm house in order to build a new one. Her life such as it is revolves around cooking and baking, especially baking bread. She believes bread that is blessed can kill or save a person, and even hinges her own existence on such a conviction. “Grandmother had a special loaf of bread made that she keeps in her wardrobe. When it starts to get moldy, she will die.”.
Perhaps the most readily relatable Zdravko in Angel of Oblivion is its narrator. We follow her life from that of a young girl and into early adulthood, though the story focuses mostly on her childhood. In the first half of the novel, her age is rarely made clear, possibly to emphasize the idea of youth being as opaque as the valley itself. “I was planted in my childhood like a wooden stake in a yard that is shaken everyday to see if it can withstand the shaking.” Kids are so overlooked in this story, in fact, that it’s easy to forget that the narrator has younger siblings. She barely mentions them, though they are present through much of the “shaking” she endures. Growing up in a community stained by horror takes its toll on her. She is given such chores as collecting her drunk and unruly Father from the bar. The alcohol loosens dark memories from Father’s lips, and the narrator meditates on these memories, along with Grandmother’s, until she, too, becomes possessed by them. “I’m afraid that death has taken root inside me, like a small black button, like a lattice-work of dark moss creeping invisibly over my skin.” But between the darkness, there are flashing moments of light in this girl’s life, such as in the beautiful and simple scene where she and Father search for the queen in a honeycomb.
Angel of Oblivion was originally written in German (translated here by Tess Lewis), and this knowledge renders poignant one of the novel’s conflicts: Slovenian speakers having to use German. As the narrator says of Grandmother, “how hesitantly the German language crosses her lips because it’s more or less just the language of the camps.” Haderlap’s novel brings to mind the work of artist Anselm Kiefer (whose work can be seen at the SFMOMA’s “German Art After 1960” exhibition). His paintings evoke the same desolate feeling of a landscape, natural and mental, poisoned by the Holocaust. Though Kiefer’s art is influenced by foreign myths and symbols, there is that same idea that Maja Haderlap confronts in Angel of Oblivion: that even the generation born after the fall of the Third Reich is affected by its legacy.
Keeper of Stories: On Maja Haderlap’s ‘Angel of Oblivion’
By Brendan Driscoll posted at 6:00 am on November 10, 2016 0
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Ravensbrück concentration camp was built on a plain about 50 miles north of Berlin, in a wooded area near a lake. The largest concentration camp for women on German soil, Ravensbrück was a source of wartime slave labor for Siemens, and the site of some particularly cruel Nazi medical experiments. About 150,000 people, from over 30 countries, were registered as having passed through the camp. Tens of thousands perished within.
Today the memorial that occupies the site combines leafy serenity with an assortment of memorial fixtures: sculptures; stelae; refurbished buildings containing artifacts. But the memorial’s most arresting feature may be the grounds of the former main camp, which remain empty but for the foundations of the barracks, which have been excavated but recovered with cinders, preserving their floor plan in surface relief. The original plan, as envisioned by the architects who designed that portion of the memorial, was to have the excavation conducted by volunteers, gradually over decades, with the cinders coming from a large slag heap that would be visible to visitors. The intention, according to one commentator, was that the continual application of cinders from the heap would “layer” the “present over the past, encouraging us to reflect on the conundrum that this past cannot be brought to light without applying an arguably subjective language of representation.”
With Angel of Oblivion, Maja Haderlap achieves something very similar. The present described by the novel’s nameless first-person narrator is that of a girl growing up in the Slovenian minority community in the Austrian province of Carinthia in the late-1960s or early-1970s. Her subjective experiences — initially, the vivid sensory impressions of childhood, and later the ambivalent observations of a young adult — provide the story’s premise, and its structure, its texture. But beneath this surface layer, as far as the eye can see, lies the war with all of its various forms of devastation, trauma, and loss. And by the story’s end, Haderlap has succeeded in bringing into sharp relief some powerful truths about the war’s continued grip on those who survived it, and its impact, even decades later, upon their descendants. “The war is a devious fisher of men,” says her narrator. “It has cast out its net for the adults and traps them with its fragments of death, its debris of memory. Just one careless act, one brief moment of inattention, and it pulls in its net.”
Angel of Oblivion’s first word, and the most prominent character of its early chapters, is “Grandmother.” The narrator’s grandmother is tough; spirited; opinionated. Her forehead is “as wrinkled as the shingled roof of the grain silo,” and her force of will provides the centripetal force that keeps the family’s farm from chaos. She cooks with authority, tossing around pork schmaltz and scraping mold off of preserves, and “even the eggs smell like earth, smoke and yeasty air.” She believes in God and ghosts equally. Her dishes “can connect the here and now with the hereafter, heal visible and invisible wounds, [but] they can make you ill.” If she suspects a chicken is not laying, she “pounces” on it and jams two fingers in its behind. Grandmother may be the only family member who bothers to pay attention to her granddaughter, our narrator, and the girl follows her around as if Grandmother is a “queen bee” and her granddaughter “her drone.” Grandmother lets her have barley coffee, their little secret. Sometimes they dance together. Grandmother is a survivor of Ravensbrück, and dance, we are told, is one of her survival skills. She leaves food out for the dead, so they will leave her alone.
Grandmother is the family’s keeper of artifacts. She has saved her late husband’s Deutsches Reich Employment Record Book, inside which are recorded the dates of important family events, such as when they acquired the farm. She still has her diary from Ravensbrück, as well as her too-thin winter coat from the camp, which she keeps but does not wear. In her room she has squirreled away extra provisions, just in case.
Grandmother is also the keeper of stories: about how the Nazis killed their neighbors and pursued the Slovenian-speaking partisans into the hills; about the dog-bites and the experiments in the camps; about those who were arrested with her and did not come back; about the humiliation of begging for bits of grain upon her return. Here, she is shown a book about Ravensbrück:
It was this guard, Grandmother says, laying her index finger on the woman’s face, which disappeared beneath it. She was very young and very evil, very depraved. Good Lord, what people won’t do, Grandmother exclaims and spits on the photograph. Then she wipes the pages with her sleeve so they won’t stick together.
Sometimes she spits at the photograph of the SS camp doctor as a substitute for the SS doctors she came across when she was brought into the infirmary. The things these doctors did to the women, čudno, čudno, Grandmother says and, again, means “terrible” when she says “strange.”
She believes that, because of these books, no one will be able to accuse her of making up stories anymore. No one can call me a liar anymore, she says.
“She was saved, yes,” our narrator reminds us, “but whether or not she’s glad she’s alive, that she can’t say.”
The other major storytelling presence in our young narrator’s world is her father, who has also been scarred by the war. Unlike Grandmother, Father did not spend time in a concentration camp, but as a young boy he was tortured by the police, hanged on a tree until he lost consciousness, then taken to the police station and whipped. Turned into a resistance partisan at the tender age of 12, he ran for his life into the mountains, only to be later flushed out by his hunger:
The day our provisions ran out and the commando came, it was up and out, down the mountain, through the German soldiers, over, out, Father recalled. That was some kind of noise. At two in the morning they slid down the mountainside in deep snow, down a chute that was used to send tree trunks into the valley below. The Germans trained searchlights up from Kamnik. It was so bright, every movement was visible. There was shooting in the valley, and all you could see were red and blue streaks. Leaves and branches rained down from the trees and one partisan was lying on the ground yelling help me, help me, Father tells us, but he just ran as if the devil were on his heels…Because in war it’s like being hares in a hunt, only much worse, Father says.
In our narrator’s present day, the war is years in the past, and yet Father is still running for his life: drinking too much cider, crashing his motorcycle, lying down in the snow and refusing to move. He allows his daughter to accompany him into the forest, where he shares with her the celebratory rituals of hunting and shows her how to cross the border illegally from Austria into Slovenia. The forest was his refuge, but its silence always threatens to get the upper hand. The best thing to do when you are afraid in the forest, Father instructs her, is to sing partisan fighting songs.
Like Grandmother, Father is ambivalent about having survived the war. Our narrator’s childhood is punctuated with Father’s drunken threats to kill himself, to go out to the apiary with his rifle and end it all, perhaps taking with him any family members who try to stop him. They wait until he passes out, then pry his fingers from the gun.
At wakes and burials the stories come freely. Father and Grandmother don’t always agree on the details, but their stories merge into each other, forming a thicket of violence and loss. The accumulation of stories overwhelms our narrator:
As I listen, something collapses in my chest, as if a stack of logs were rolling away behind me, into the time before my time, and that time reaches out to grab me and I start to give in out of fascination and fear. It’s got hold of me, I think, now it’s here with me.
Angel of Oblivion is, among other things, a book about the power of stories and storytelling. One aspect of this is its exploration of how stories shape personal identity. We witness this with our narrator, who has been hearing stories about the war, from Grandmother and others, all of her childhood, and by adolescence has come to resent their omnipresence in her life. She harbors conflicting impulses: on one hand, she wants to collect and preserve all the stories, conscious of their importance to her family and their broader community. But she also seeks to distance herself from the past, to be free of the ghosts that haunt Grandmother and Father. She goes to Vienna to get an education and begin a career, but she returns. “The hills of my home region have turned into a trap that reaches for me and snaps shut every summer,” she asserts; “The war invades my internal space.” Later, she reads Grandmother’s diary and is “afraid of being overrun by the past, of being crushed by its weight.” In the end she makes a conscious decision to write about her family’s stories, allowing them to become part of her even if it means that they will change her.
So, too, do stories shape the narrator’s mother, a complicated character who is perhaps unfortunately overshadowed by Grandmother and Father:
When Grandmother was alive, Mother was almost never able to talk about herself. She sat next to those telling stories from the past and was never asked for her own. Her family’s stories were considered insignificant, nothing very bad happened to her mother during the war, it was said, of course she’d had to raise her children alone as a day laborer, but that was nothing unusual. In the Slovenian convent school where Mother completed a one-year home economics course, they drummed into her head that she must only read chaste, pious books and never pick up the works of depraved writers.
The other point about storytelling that Haderlap makes is its importance for community identity, particularly in a minority community, where stories may offer important counter-narratives to those promulgated by the majority community that surrounds them. This is a particularly salient point in the case of the Slovenian-speaking Austrians, a tight-knit minority community that offered the only sustained partisan resistance to the Nazis but has also historically been a target of discrimination by the German-speaking majority:
The memories of the residents of these valleys begin to revolt, they rise up and take over. After the end of Nazism, they still knew their stories, they told each other what they had lived through, they could recognize themselves in another’s suffering. But then the fear sets in that they’d be excluded because of their stories and seen as alien in a country that wanted to hear other stories and dismissed theirs as unimportant. They know their history is not mentioned in Austrian history books, certainly not in Carinthian history books in which the region’s history begins with the end of the First World War, is interrupted and taken up again at the end of the Second World War. Those with stories to tell know this and they have learned to stay quiet.
Along with everything else she accomplishes with this powerful work — a work of historical witness, a Sebaldian descent into the depths of memory, and a brave and innovative hybrid of fiction and memoir — Haderlap (and her English translator) deserve praise for breaking the silence to bring the stories of Slovenian-speaking Austrians to a much broader audience.
Maja Hanerlap, trans. from the German by Tess Lewis. Archipelago (PRH, dist.), $18 trade paper (250p) ISBN 978-0-914671-46-6
In her debut novel, Haderlap plunges readers into a morass of European history. The book is an attempt to rescue the memories of her elders among the Slovenes living in southern Austria during the aftermath of the Second World War from the “angel of oblivion.” The author recounts her childhood in a landscape that bears silent witness to her people’s betrayal and butchery by Austrian Nazis. The author’s family is reticent and damaged, yet as she grows up, she gathers their recollections. Her grandfather and brother were partisans, fighting against the Nazis, and for this the grandmother was taken to Ravensbrück. Her son, the author’s father, was tortured as a child for information, suspended by a policeman from a tree. “He thought I was foliage,” the author’s father says on his deathbed. As the narrator matures, she is able to discern the reasons her father is violent and drinks himself into oblivion, why her mother argues with her grandmother about the girl’s exposure to the past, and why her grandmother grows cold as she is dying. Parts of these people have been stolen— “the force of their memories disconcerts them”—so they must preserve the rest. (Aug.)
Reviewed on: 06/27/2016
Release date: 08/16/2016