“Ist es nicht ein finsterer Wald, in den wir gerieten?”. Waldgänge und Waldgänger in Maja Haderlaps Roman «Engel des Vergessens»

Abstract

This essay examines the literary portrait of the forested Southern Carinthian border region as a place of Austrian Slowenian historical experience and cultural memory in Maja Haderlap’s novel Engel des Vergessens. The autobiographical and documentary novel published in 2011 asks what it means to live on in a landscape contaminated by historical violence. At issue here is the novel’s representation of individual and collective Austrian Slowenian history in its depiction of the narrator’s forest walks as a child and the Carinthian Slowenian par­tisans’ life in the woods.