February Shadows (German: Februarschatten) is a 1984 historical novel by award-winning Austrian author Elisabeth Reichart. She wrote it as a response to her discovery of the Mühlviertler Hasenjagd ("rabbit hunt of the Mühlviertel region"), a massacre on 2 February 1945 at the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp in Upper Austria. In the Mühlviertler Hasenjagd, the civilian inhabitants of the Mühlviertel hunted down and killed almost 500 prisoners, including men, women and children, who escaped from Special Barracks Number 20.
February Shadows tells the story of this hunt, and its repercussions, through the eyes of a young Austrian girl named Hilde. The story combines real time narrative and flashbacks: the adult Hilde recounts the story to her adult daughter, Erica. In an inner monologue, Hilde struggles with her traumatic past and scarred present. Erica's insistent questions force her mother to confront her own suppressed memories of the event.
The narrative use of fragmented sentences and stream of consciousness does not conform to the rules of traditional grammar or sentence structure. These methods encourage the reader to better understand the psyche and experiences of the protagonist. The timing of the publication is significant: during the 1980s, Austria's younger generation was trying to come to grips with their country's Nazi past. The story of a February hidden in shadows—February Shadows—forces the readers, most of whom would be Austrians, to relieve the experience of that February and thus remember a past that most Austrians wanted to suppress. In this way, it is both a culturally revealing and politically charged story.
Background
The massacre
The Mühlviertler Hasenjagd took place on 2 February 1945. An estimated 500 prisoners escaped from Special Barracks Number 20 of the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp. The prisoners in these barracks were considered to be intellectual Soviet officers held for fear of revolt against the National Socialists of Germany. When the alarm in nearby Mühlviertel sounded, all citizens were instructed by members of the Austrian National Socialist Party (who were under the jurisdiction of the Nazi Party) to hunt down the escaped prisoners despite their age or gender. A large massacre took place in which nearly all of the prisoners were captured and murdered by either Nazi officers or the civilians themselves. There were only seventeen known survivors.Reichart p. 142
Reichart never learned of the event until her grandmother conveyed it to her as an adult. Her shock at the hidden, unspoken tragedy initially compelled her to begin research about the Mühlviertler Hasenjagd. At this time, the Austrian government had developed renewed interest in Austria's role during World War II while Reichart had begun to explore the controversy of Austria's complicity in the Nazi era atrocities.
Plot
The story begins with Hilde, an elderly woman, awaking in the middle of the night to the sound of her telephone ringing. Upon answering she discovers that her husband, Anton, who was staying at a nursing facility for a severe illness, has died. His death triggers feelings of loneliness and abandonment along with painful memories of the death of her older brother, Hannes, who died during World War II, sending Hilde into a state of panic and despair.
Each day Hilde visits Anton's grave mentally talking to him as if he is still alive. One evening, as she is returning home, Hilde discovers that a black cat seems to be following her. The cat causes her to remember two distinct experiences from her past. The first is a memory from when she was a small child and had attempted to hide a stray cat in her bedroom. Her family was very poor and could not afford a pet, but she saved her table scraps for it anyway. One day as she was coming home, her father met her drunk in the doorway. After telling her he had snapped the cat's neck, he beat her harshly with a fly swatter. This first memory seeped into the second: her daughter, Erika, begging to keep a stray cat she had found. Anton had granted her wish, but the cat ruined the neighbors' gardens and Hilde was forced to drown it in the river.
The following day, Mr. Funk, a friend of her late husband, appears at her door and pressures Hilde to join the Retiree's Union. She joins because Anton had been a member of the Austrian Socialist Party and he would have approved of her socializing with other members. Hilde assures Mr. Funk that she will attend the next evening social. Mr. Funk's visit forces another memory to resurface. She remembers her daughter asking what party Anton had belonged to during the period of National Socialism; Hilde recalled him being part of the Hitler Youth. The reader also discovers that Hilde's brother, Hannes, was killed by the Nazi Party. Erika's insolence upsets Hilde greatly.
Soon after, Erika calls her mother, stating that she will be coming to visit. Erika also grieves her father's death. Hilde becomes impatient with Erika, hinting at the contradictory nature of their relationship. Hilde wants to be with her daughter, yet she feels as if her daughter is a total stranger. Erika acts boldly and actively pursues her career as a writer. Hilde believes the only reason Erika wishes to come home is to get information for her book, which is true. Hilde is angry at her daughter for forcing her to relive her past experiences; her childhood was full of poverty, loneliness, and shame. Anton had been her way out of the past, and she only wants to move forward.
Hilde attends the Retiree's Union social pretending to be happy. She watches the dancers on the dance floor and mourns the absence of her husband. The dancers trigger another memory from her childhood: she sees her father kicking her mother on the dance floor and she runs out to help. Soon, both Hilde and her mother are being beaten on the ground, her father will not let them comfort each other. The only person she can turn to is her brother, Hannes, who comforts her. The memory is too painful for Hilde and she leaves the social immediately.
Erika arrives the next day and announces that they will take a trip to the village so she can obtain more information for her book. (The reader must assume that the village is in the Mühlviertel.) Hilde does not wish to go, yet does not want to be excluded. As they enter the village, Hilde recalls working hard in the fields to harvest the crop left behind by farmers to have enough food for their large family. She remembers the hunger pangs and how her father could not find work. She remembers Fritzi, a member of her apartment-style household, bringing eggs and bacon on Sundays from the farmers and how she had felt proud carrying the basket into the kitchen. She had wanted her mother to be more proud of her than she was of her older and prettier sister, Monika.
Hilde sees the lifeless and leafless pear tree in the village. She refers to it as the "February Tree", the tree on which Hannes was hanged. She remembers a Nazi in a black uniform telling her at school that her brother was dead. She remembers running through the snow and losing one wooden shoe in an attempt to save him. She remembers discovering he truly was dead and lying in the snow, hoping for her own death. Hilde and Erika visit her old house and she recalls beatings; they then visit the pond where she is reminded of the many loads of laundry she was forced to wash with her mother. She begrudged the freedom of her brothers who were not forced to do work, her oldest sister, Renate, who lived with their grandparents, and her delicate sister, Monika, who was never asked to manage hard labor. They walk down the lane to the old school lined with apple trees; she recalls the rough feeling of cobblestones on her sore feet and the bitter taste of the small apples. She evades a certain barn on the lane and avoids looking out into the distance towards the area which was once the site of Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp.
Upon returning to their hotel room, Hilde reflects on her daughter. Her inner thoughts display envy toward Erika's privilege of being educated and her ability to choose her career. Hilde reveals that she had always wanted to be a nurse, however her dreams of a nursing career were shattered the day her village was bombed during air raids. She had watched her brother Stephen die as she was swallowed by mounds of earth. The raid had made her weak and incapable of dealing with trauma later in her life.
During their stay in the Mühlviertel, Erika is able to extract information about the fateful day in February that Hilde had been pushing from her memory for many years. Hilde relays that in the middle of the night she and her siblings were awakened by the sound of sirens. Her parents and the other tenants of her home were forced to stand for a roll call in which Pesendorfer, the Nazi authority in their house, told the tenants that many Russian convicts had escaped from the nearby concentration camp. He explained that it was their duty to Germany to find and kill each one of these convicts. Hilde, being a young girl, is told to stay at the house. However, she is worried about protecting her brother Hannes, who, like her other brothers, is forced to search for prisoners, and sneaks away to find him.
In her search for her brother, Hilde comes across the barn near her schoolhouse. She enters it, only to find Pesendorfer, her neighbor Mrs. Emmerich, and her brother Walter all violently killing prisoners. She runs home and finds Hannes, who informs her that he has hidden a prisoner in his wardrobe and that she must remain silent about it.
The next morning the villagers attend church to commemorate Candlemas. The hunters seek purification and are urged by their pastor to side with Germany and continue the search for the prisoners. At this insistence Hilde finds herself telling Hannes' secret to her mother. The story is vague about how this information is relayed to Pesendorfer, but, he finds and kills the prisoner, then takes Hannes away to beat him for his misconduct. Hilde recalls cleaning the blood from her brother's face after the beating. The following day, she finds that Hannes has been hanged for his actions. Her guilt in the causation of two deaths is evident through her narration.
Back in the present, Erika is stunned by the horrific story and deeply regrets forcing her mother to relive the event. The novel closes with the image of the mother and daughter driving away from the Mühlviertel, with Hilde at the wheel and her foot on the gas pedal.Reichart, Elisabeth. February Shadows Ariadne Press, Riverside (1989) pp. 1-141
Major themes
Psychological effects of Mühlviertler Hasenjagd February Shadows can be categorized as a psychological novel. The entire narration is told through first person stream of consciousness, and the plot builds through the unearthing of new memories as they emerge in Hilde's mind. The story is told in a mix of past and present and the narration switches fluidly back and forth between the two. The manner of the flashbacks and the inner comments Hilde makes about each informs the reader that she wishes to repress the horrific memories of 2 February 1945. Hilde constantly reminds herself to forget the past as if her survival and sanity depended on doing so.Wolf, Christa. February Shadows, "Afterword" Ariadne Press, Riverside (1989) p. 143