Heart Flesh Degeneration. A Novel By Ludwig Laher

In 1940 the Nazi Storm Troopers set up a Work Education Camp in St. Pantaleon near Salzburg and then, after its overhasty closure in 1941, a Gypsy Detention Center. Hundreds of arbitrarily incarcerated prisoners are tortured there, some murdered. The Camp Doctor is the parish doctor who has been called in specially. For a long time he records some harmless cause of death or other (the "heart flesh degeneration" of a Gypsy woman is, however, not his invention). But one day he calls in the State Attorney's Office. The files relating to the ensuing investigation are extant and form the basis for Ludwig Laher's literary work. It makes use – in a sometimes chilling way – of the language and logic of the murderers, but at the same time introduces a collective narrator and lets him follow the horrific events once again from the 1940s point of view, and then again from today's viewpoint. Laher also pursues the perpetrators into the resurrected Austria, and unfolds the later court proceedings: The judges are mild; in 1955 the principal perpetrator profits from the amnesty to mark the tenth anniversary of the founding of the Second Republic. The reader, who is drawn into the midst of events, may well feel his heart miss a beat when he witnesses how quickly the incursion of bestial conditions into the everyday life of the Austrian provinces becomes normality, and how quickly everything can be forgotten. Translated by Susan Tebbutt