Note to Self? Postmodern Criminality and (Feminist) Consciousness in Eva Rossmann's <em>Freudsche Verbrechen</em>

Abstract

This article analyzes the epistemological and ontological development of an ethical stance in Eva Rossmann’s detective novel Freudsche Verbrechen . Rossmann leads her sleuth into Austria’s Nazi past when it is revealed that events following the Anschluss are connected to a contemporary murder in Vienna’s Freud Museum. She thus places her novel in two traditions, detective fiction and writing about the Holocaust, whereby she pits the genre’s imperative to make known the unknown against the postwar crises of knowing and justice. In the novel’s explicit parallel between psychoanalysis and detection, its heroine must also self-consciously figure out who she is in order to solve the crime. Although Rossmann shares some postmodern concerns, she ultimately rejects identity politics as a stable foundation for value, and hence, ethics. Ultimately, as this article shows, the novel places faith in language and in creative human reason in the quest for knowledge and justice.