Susanne Röckel - Vera

"Topografie der Erinnerung" is a collection of the brilliant essayist's most striking speeches and articles. They deal with topics as diverse as the massacre of Reichnitz in the last weeks of the war; so-called "Reibepartien" (scrub groups) where Jews were humiliated and forced to scrub the street; the myth of Galicia; Poland and Ukraine's postwar history; or Pollack's own family's entanglement with the Nazis. His investigations are always astute and critical, they are always aimed at keeping memory alive and against false claims of innocence. Time and again he asks the key question of memory politics: How can and must we deal with these memories today?

Seit jener Party der vielversprechenden Jeunesse dorée ist nichts mehr, wie es war in dem eleganten Villenviertel bei Helsinki: Familien zerbrechen, Karrieren enden, und ein düsteres Schweigen liegt über der einst so heiteren Idylle am See. Unerbittlich legt Fagerholm frei, was sich in dieser Nacht ereignet hat: Der charmante Gastgeber Nathan, Gusten und deren zwei Freunde haben das Mädchen Sascha im Keller eingeschlossen, sie stundenlang gequält und vergewaltigt. Und auch wenn Schweigegeld bezahlt und Geständnisse abgelegt werden, kann nichts mehr heil werden, weil es keine Sprache gibt für das, was geschehen ist. Das muss auch Gusten erfahren, als er nach Jahren auf der Suche nach seiner großen Jugendliebe Emmy zurückkehrt …

Pollack’s book The Age of Shame gathers essays and articles by a passionate campaigner for democracy and an open society. This volume offers a careful selection of texts from recent years, including gripping reports from Eastern European countries such as Ukraine, Belarus and the Republic of Moldova, but also calls for resistance and moving essays against forgetting the Holocaust. In these works, Pollack returns again and again to confront his own family’s difficult history. During his final years, already marked by illness, he wrote very personal works of observation from his beloved garden in the Austrian region of Burgenland: tales of apple trees, seasons and wildlife of all kinds, published here for the first time.