Relatively few Austrian authors have delved into Austria’s Nazi legacy and even fewer women writers have addressed the theme. In her debut novel February Shadows, for which she was awarded the Austrian prize for literature in 1993, Elisabeth Reichart makes her own distinctive contribution to the literature of ‘Vergangenheitsbewältigung’ (‘coming to terms with the past’) by focusing on the way in which women too bear responsibility for having supported Nazism through their complicity and silence.

In this very moving story the daughter-figure, a writer with a strong political conscience, attempts a reconciliation with her mother through her book project, thereby confronting taboos and overcoming the estrangement between them. By writing her mother’s life story this daughter wants to make up for her previous neglect and pay tribute to her mother. Good intentions, however, turn sour, for the mother begins to resent the fact she is being used as an object of critical interest. She does not welcome the intrusions into her personal recollections and the uncovering of certain well-kept secrets.

The title February Shadows refers firstly to the bloody manhunt of the 2nd of February 1945 when the rural population of the area around the Austrian concentration camp Mauthausen brutally killed hundreds of fugitive Russian officers; secondly, the mother, Hilde, is haunted by dark shadows because she cannot forgive herself for betraying her brother, Hannes, who hid one of the fugitives but — once his action had been discovered — hung himself. The shadows, then, symbolise Hilde’s guilt-ridden conscience.

Reichart cleverly interweaves history and fiction, the political and the personal, past and present by depicting a mother-daughter relationship fraught with problems and tensions. Not only does she draw attention to the personal guilt as experienced by the mother as well as the collective guilt of Austrian society, which the daughter recognises, but she also highlights the conflict between two generations in their differing attitudes towards moral responsibility and civil courage. Reichart does not point an accusatory finger but, via the mother’s weak character, reveals the price of voluntary amnesia, so that when the mother does, eventually, share her burden, she passes on to her daughter both the guilt and sense of shame. The reader is left to speculate about how the daughter will cope with the revelation.

‘Why should I think about my childhood? I learned after all from the time I was little the only way to survive is to forget...

Forget Hannes. Forget the cold February.

At first because of the command of the adults. Forget what you have heard. What you have seen. Forget it! But soon it was no longer necessary to shout this command into her. Soon this command of all the other people became her own. Soon she would pass on this command to others.’ p31