Engel des Vergessens by Maja Haderlap

Abstract

Willis Barnstone Café de l’aube à Paris / Dawn Café in Paris Sheep Meadow Press This bilingual poetry collection captures the nostalgic feelings of love and everyday life. First written in French, Barnstone then translated his compilation into English. He has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry four times. Akira Arai A Caring Man Vertical A striking debut and winner of the prestigious Golden Elephant Award, this riveting novel weaves a tale of mystery, intrigue, and misplaced devotion. Arai explores the political tensions of world terrorism and investigative journalism in this thriller centered on modern Japanese society. Nota Bene hires an inexpensive contractor to paint a few rooms in his house. Luke, the head contractor, is strict with his two illegal Mexican employees, constantly berating them and allowing them to take their lunch break only when he’s on-site. The narrator , already feeling self-conscious about being a successful Latino who hires Mexican painters because they’re cheap, sees this treatment as demeaning. Why should there be a social hierarchy, the narrator thinks, based on which side of a border you were born on? In the collection’s opening story, “please, thank you,” a father of two grown children is in the hospital after having a stroke. As he goes through the arduous process of physical and speech therapy, the narrator begins to feel discouraged about how the simplest of tasks—showering, bending your leg—has become a difficult chore. While resting in his bed, the narrator is asked for advice by one of the janitors, a Mexican immigrant who was verbally attacked by a white woman while shopping. The narrator , uncertain as to what to say, suggests that she move on. “Why dwell on that ugliness?” he says, in many ways reflecting how he feels about his rehab. For Gilb, the personal and the political are intertwined—there is no aspect of Latino life that doesn’t involve politics. Armando Celayo Norwich, United Kingdom Maja Haderlap. Engel des Vergessens . Göttingen. Wallstein. 2011. isbn 9783835309531 Engel des Vergessens is a first novel by a Slovenian-Austrian author from the southeastern corner 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 at 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. It 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. march–april 2012 | 67 reviews The title of Engel des Vergessens (Angels of forgetting) refers to pictures of two guardian angels that the Catholic mother of the childnarrator 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...