'Murderer's House' - University of Victoria

Reich” opposes fascism, but who eventually becomes a member of the cultural elite who
remained aesthetically “in the clouds” while atrocities were being committed (Schneider
19-21); and Brigitte Schwaiger‟s Lange Abwesenheit (Long Absence, 1980), which
analyses the narrator‟s ambivalent feelings about her father, following his death. As a
child, the narrator sought her father‟s attention and approval while resenting his
elusiveness and his prejudiced and racist attitudes. She examines her relationship with
her father in order to understand certain aspects of her own personality, particularly the
aspects affecting her relationship with her lover. Thus, the exploration of her experience
with her father becomes a process of self-discovery in which she gains insight into the
forces of her own behaviour (Wigmore 93).
The authors of these Väterromane frequently demonstrated ambivalent feelings
towards the father figures depicted in their narratives, who were often both perpetrators
and victims during the Nazi regime. As Kaes maintains, the authors “remember their
fathers with a mixture of sympathy and revulsion, love and rejection; they mourn them,
but still condemn them as Nazis” (141).
While many female authors‟ autobiographical retrospectives of the late 1970s and
early 1980 focused on their relationships to their fathers, some works thematized the
mother-daughter relationship. With the emergence of the second women‟s movement in
the early 1970s, some female authors of the post-war generation rebelled against the role
models their mothers embodied and reinforced (Gerstenberger 336). Examples of some
works of the period, which deal with the mother-daughter conflicts are the following:
Karin Struck‟s Die Mutter (The Mother, 1975), which protests against the objectification
of the female body and its reproductive functions; Helga Novak‟s Die Eisheiligen (The
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