Jelinek’s Rechnitz and Greenberg’s The Testament: Two Executions of One Massacre

Abstract

Jelinek’s Rechnitz and Greenberg’s The Testament: Two Executions of One Massacre Hartmut Heep On March 24, 1945, approximately one thousand Jewish forced labourers were transported ten miles from Köszeg in Hungary to the Austrian border town of Rechnitz. Nazi Germany had annexed Austria on March 11, 1938, and throughout World War II, thousands of Austrians fought alongside German soldiers. Soviet troops reached the outskirts of Vienna by April 3, 1945 and liberated the Austrian capital ten days later. The deported Hungarian Jews were supposed to fortify the southeast trench of Rechnitz, in order to impede the Red Army invasion. Severely weakened and malnourished, one hundred eighty of the male Jews were considered unfit to perform this manual labour. It was decided that they had to be eliminated. That same night of March 24, 1945, the Countess Margit Thyssen-Batthyány (1911–89), the mistress of the Nazi Hans Joachim Oldenburg, hosted a soirée at her castle in Rechnitz. The countess, the daughter of Heinrich Baron Thyssen-Bornemisza de Kászon, was born in the castle. In 1933, Margit married Count Ivan von Batthyány. Like the family Thyssen, the Batthyánys, whose noble roots can be traced back to the ninth century, are associated with power and money. The countess was known for her close ties to SS officers and Nazi collaborators. Among the invited regular officers was the local Nazi chief Franz Podezin, who handed out guns to the guests. The British journalist David Litchfield suggests that fourteen to sixteen of the guests murdered the one hundred eighty unfit Jews during the party. Eighteen Jews, who had been forced to bury the victims in a mass grave, were themselves killed the following day. The grave was never found, nor were the perpetrators. On March 29, 1945, Rechnitz surrendered to the Soviet Army without much resistance. Auschwitz had been liberated on January 27, 1945. The facts related to this event remain murky. Walter Manoschek, for instance, discovered inconsistencies between the official court files and the judgement of the [End Page 476] Austrian People’s Court. The German magazine Der Spiegel quotes the German antisemitism researchers Wolfgang Benz and Winfried Garscha of the Documentation Centre of Austrian Resistance. Both argue that the party guests did not participate in the murder. The one hundred eighty murdered Jews were too weak to work or march and therefore, according to official Nazi policy, “were murdered everywhere at the time” (Spiegel). Eventually, the South African journalist Steven Krawitz confirms Litchfield’s theory. Szilvia Pais-Horváth recaptures the research of the last descendant of a Rechnitz victim, the Hungarian surgeon Gábor Vadász. All sixteen attempts to find the mass grave have so far been unsuccessful. Pais-Horváth reports that “some of the prisoners were beaten to death; others were hunted down or shot in the head.” She also states, “prisoners from the castle cellar were ordered to dig graves. One of them told an organization helping those who had been deported in 1945–46 that they dug up nine L-shaped graves, two meters wide and two meters deep.” Franz Podezin, the alleged mastermind of the massacre, disappeared in 1945, Pais-Horváth assumes “with the help of the Baroness.” Margit Thyssen-Batthyány moved to Switzerland, where she died peacefully in 1989. This massacre has been the focus of several artistic productions. The film Totschweigen (1994), directed by Margarete Heinrich and Eduard Erne, is a documentary in search of the mass grave. Unable to find it, even though Heinrich and Erne participated in the search, the documentary shifts its focus to interviews with the local population. Katya Krylova calls Totschweigen “a powerful visual language for the repression of memory in Rechnitz” (70). The documentary leaves no doubt that the grave is a metaphor for a missing chapter in Austrian history. Elfriede Jelinek’s play Rechnitz (Der Würgeengel) (2008) presents a paradigm shift in the traditional Holocaust discussion. Neither the search for the grave nor the suffering of the Jewish victims takes centre stage. Her play intends to extort a confession from the local Austrian perpetrators, whose collective memory has gone missing just as much as the...