Hanna's sleeping dogs (novel)

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Hanna's Sleeping Dogs is a novel by the Austrian writer Elisabeth Escher from 2010; A revised new edition appeared in 2018.

content

Based on the life story of three women, the novel "Hanna's Sleeping Dogs" spans around half a century.

The main plot takes place in the 1960s, the childhood years of the girl Hanna. However, several chapters also lead back to the time of National Socialism . This makes the ambivalent situation of the small-town post-war population understandable: Victims live next door to the perpetrators, the shadows of the past still weigh heavily on people.

Hanna grows up as a family with her parents, her two brothers and her Jewish grandmother, who went blind during the Nazi era, in a small Austrian town. Grandmother and mother only escaped deportation by the Nazis with a lot of luck ; Hanna herself experiences decades later - meanwhile having become a teacher - the explosive problems of unsuccessful integration and destructive prejudices.

In the novel, which is divided into 25 episodes, it becomes clear right from the start that a dark family secret is hidden behind what seems to be an idyll: When the girl Hanna and her blind grandmother walk hand in hand on the usual walk to the church along the railway tracks, one hears the approach of a train . The grandmother froze, the memories of those countless trains that not so long ago transported people of Jewish descent to the death-bringing concentration camps are overwhelming. Hanna, who has a very close relationship with her grandmother, can only calm the old woman down by assuring her that the trains have windows and you can see the people inside.

The role of the Catholic Church also played an important role in these post-war years and especially in Hanna's family: the father's brother, a Catholic priest, often came to visit with his chaplain. Even in close family circles, the situation remains formal and shaped by respect for the church dignitaries. These authoritarian structures of the post-war years continue in the school sector, where Hanna is also exposed to black pedagogy and psychological violence. Your elementary school teacher, formerly an active National Socialist, continues to “educate” the children, and especially Hanna, according to their mental attitude.

The chapters “The Collection” and “ Rassenlehre ” bring the concentrated cruelty and misanthropy of the Nazi era to the surface in flashbacks . In the episode “The Pickup”, Hanna's grandmother witnesses a terrible scene from her window, which could also have been for her and her daughters: A car pulls up in front of her door in the middle of the night, two men jump out and ring the bell at the house opposite young woman awake. Your little child starts crying loudly. The men order her to come downstairs with her child immediately. Then they push them into the car and deport them.

Hanna's mother is the protagonist in the “Racial Teaching” chapter, at the time she was a student at the vocational school where she was being trained as a home economics teacher. She can only attend this school because her courageous class teacher, risking her life, entered the girl as “Aryan” in the class catalog, knowing full well that she could not provide evidence of Aryan status. Now one day a ministerial official comes to visit to give a lecture on “racial purity” to the girls. Bizarrely, he selects Hanna's mother as the “object to be exhibited” for a thoroughbred Aryan woman.

In other chapters that take place during the war years, Hanna's grandmother and mother are constantly afraid of being discovered. After completing her training, Hanna's mother is unable to take up the teaching profession. She finds a job in a bank, but the price is high. The bank manager uses her sexual services, it is impossible to refuse them.

All of these events have traumatized the people affected and left them speechless in some cases. The girl Hanna, however, does not want to be spared by keeping quiet, she wants clarity, and the grandmother finally confronts her with the full extent of the facts before she dies. And only dealing with the past finally enables Hanna to step out of the dark shadows and start a liberated life.

expenditure

filming

The book was filmed in 2015 by director Andreas Gruber and was released in theaters in April 2016. The film received the rating worth seeing.

The main actors are Hannelore Elsner , Franziska Weisz , Nike Seitz , Rainer Egger , Christian Wolff and Johannes Silberschneider .

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Hanna's sleeping dogs. Retrieved March 7, 2020 .
  2. ↑ Elisabeth Rathenböck, Kronen Zeitung, film on TV, “The film has something doubly tragic for me”, August 18 , 2019