Crippled identity, suppressed cultural memory

Abstract

This paper analyses Engel des Vergessens by Maja Haderlap, an autobiographical narrative on formation in a traumatized Slovene family in Carinthia. In the family narrative spanning over three generations the political and national conflicts are presented on intimate and emotional level to reveal the supressed cultural memory of the Slovene minority, particularly its original trauma, the resistance to Nazism, by which the sliding into social and cultural second-class status and extinction began. By means of exceptional sensitivity, palpability, and poetic language, a sign of faithfulness and pride of the oppressed ones, the author has succeeded to present the peripheral Slovene culture as central to contemporary intercultural dialogue between the co-existing nations.

Keywords

• cultural memory, Slovene minority in Austria, autobiographic novel, family narrative, crippled identity, Maja Haderlap