Documentation of literary Documentary Fiction

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[ המלצה מאת Incentives ]
While literature often claims to show how the family history of an individual inevitably determines his fate, Erich Hackl keeps to real events, which are tragic enough and which he supplements with the means available to him as a writer. The story of Familie Salzmann (The Salzmann Family) tells how the death of Juliana Salzmann in Ravensbrück concentration camp in 1944 casts a shadow over the life of subsequent generations. The book is thus another example of Hackl presenting a factual report in literary form.
'Erzählungen aus unserer Mitte' (Stories from our Midst) is the subtitle of this book and it refers to the youngest generation of the family, to the anti-Semitic mobbing, which Hanno Salzmann was exposed to in the 1990s while working in the offices of the Styrian Regional Health Insurance. His only ‘mistake’ was to tell a colleague, “My grandma died in a concentration camp.” Hackl’s stories begin with the end of the tragedy and then make a chronological jump. The story of Hanno, his grandparents, Hugo and Juliana, as well as that of his father stand in the foreground: Hugo is a committed communist, who recognizes early on the danger arising from the National Socialists. When Hitler comes into power, the young family flees from Germany to France, where they are arrested in 1938 after years full of hardship.
By means of historical documents, such as letters or the record of Hugo’s imprisonment, Hackl reconstructs the biographies of the Salzmanns. Those episodes, which cannot be attested, such as the meeting of Julianna and Hugo, are told in the subjunctive and portray a possible variant of the truth. Both the grandfather and Hanno’s father are shattered by the consequences of grandmother Juliana’s death: it becomes impossible for the grandfather to establish a relationship with his son, who suffers because of his father’s coldness. But Hanno Salzmann is not immune to the sad family fate: the leftovers of National Socialism show themselves from their most stupid side at his workplace in Graz.
What constitutes the art of Erich Hackl is not so much the already widely read description of post-Nazi society as the ability to create an in-depth representation of the emotional as well as historical factors, which determine a family’s fate.

Abbreviated review by Julia Zarbach, 27 October 2010.
English translation by Hillary Keel
Complete German version: http://www.literaturhaus.at/index.php?id=8297

[ מידע על ספרים ] Hackl, Erich : Familie Salzmann. (original language: Deutsch) Diogenes Verlag, Zürich, 2010 . ISBN: 9783257067583.