“The field” (Lass dich heimgeigen Vater, oder Den Tod ins Herz mir schreibe), by Josef Winkler, translated from German (Austria) and postponed by Bernard Banoun, Verdier, 220 p., €20.50.
All of Josef Winkler’s work is a true work of the past. Born in 1953, in the Austrian Alps, author of twenty novels, including Das Wilde Karnten (“Wild Carinthia”, 1995, untranslated), Requiem for a father EITHER The Ukrainian (Verdier, 2013 and 2022), this son of peasants established himself as one of the most powerful voices in Austrian literature, traveling over and over again the same acres of memories of his childhood in Carinthia: Kamering, his hometown. “in the shape of a cross”the family farm, a violent father, a mute mother, a former SS uncle, the ritual of masses and harvests, the fumes of incense and fetid silences. In this new story, The fieldWritten after a macabre discovery, Josef Winkler exhumes the corpse of history, buried in guilty silences. And it goes deeper and deeper into the land of its origins.
It all begins with the reading of a work by the historian Johannes Sachslehner about the great Nazi criminal Odilo Globocnik, responsible for Aktion Reinhard which, between March 1942 and October 1943, caused the death of more than one and a half million Jews in Poland. To his great horror, Josef Winkler discovers that the“mass murderer” It has been located since May 1945 in a communal meadow, very close to the family farm. Also originally from Carinthia, Globocnik returned at the end of the war to hide in the countryside. Captured by the British, he committed suicide by biting into a cyanide capsule hidden between his teeth. The local priest refused to bury the“exterminator of Jews” In their own cemetery they had dug a hole and buried the body, leaving no trace. Ten years later, a “Incorrigible admirer of Hitler” He had searched for Globocnik’s bones to bury him, but to no avail. HE “Rotten skeleton of bloodthirsty Nazi” That’s why he stayed there, in this field where the entire Winkler family, father, mother and children, harvested wheat for bread and oats for the animals.
Horrified by this discovery, Josef Winkler, for several months, was unable to swallow or write anything. A lot “black kitchen” of his childhood was, therefore, contaminated by “great circulation of the blood of history.” The field It reads like a long plea to the father, to this tate (in German, a children’s word for “father”) who remained silent: ” Gentle tate ! Wicked tate ! Why, why did you hide it, why did you keep it a secret? » It is no coincidence that this year Josef Winkler received the Franz Kafka Prize. The writer himself declared it on this occasion: “I reread The letter to the father [de Kafka] to be able to write this book. »
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