Eva Menasse, born 1970 in Vienna, initially worked as a journalist, in 2005 her debut novel, the family saga Vienna, appeared. She is the daughter of the footballer Hans Menasse, the author Robert Menasse is her brother. In 2019 she received the Ludwig Börne Prize
Friday: Ms. Menasse, in your new novel there is the dark secret of a war crime that everyone knows about but nobody speaks. Like in Rechnitz, where there was a massacre of Hungarian-Jewish forced laborers in the last days of the war. Is “Dunkelblum” a Rechnitz novel?
Eva Menasse: The historical research began, of course, at Rechnitz. But Rechnitz is only the most spectacular case of a whole series of such events that took place in Burgenland and Lower Austria in the last weeks of the Second World War. That electrified me. Today we count about 124 massacres in this area. Everyone is always talking about Rechnitz. But something broke out with brutal violence in the entire region when it was actually all over.
F : So not a Rechnitz novel?
EM : Dark flower is somehow already a Rechnitz novel, but again not. I fictionalized the entire landscape, the people, everything. It was about looking at the entire timeline since then. Because after a crime like that, it somehow goes on anyway. I wanted to know how the little people lived on after such an outbreak of violence – regardless of whether they were guilty of themselves or not. Today’s Rechnitzers would probably give a lot to ensure that someone finally finds this mass grave. History may not be coped with – an unfortunate word – but it has to be brought to some human conclusion. And in this case that would be finding the mass grave. Then this place would come to rest. The real Rechnitz stands there like a beacon in history. If you want to know what happens when you don’t speak, keep silent, hide everything and sweep it under the carpet, then it’s an impressive example.
F : Again and again you deal with dark historical chapters, for example in “The Holocaust in Court. The David Irving Trial ”. What do you like about it?
EM : The riddles that I cannot fathom. I do all of this because I want to find out something. With David Irving, I wanted to understand how a really highly intelligent person comes on such a trip. And I think I understand that he doesn’t believe any of this at all. I’m relatively sure he’s just playing a diabolical game. In my eyes he is more of a player character than a real Holocaust denier. But of course my dealing with these issues is also a family legacy. I can’t get this story out of me. Maybe I’m doing a family job by dealing with it.
F : “Everyone involved knows the whole truth together. That’s why you never really get them together again afterwards, ”says the novel. Does literature have the function of preserving historical truths and certainties – especially when there are hardly any contemporary witnesses?
EM : Literature always has the same function. It can tell stories that have ambivalences and cannot be clarified with simple moral categories. Everything that resonates can be written down here. Journalism in its narrative forms can do that too, but history cannot. But she doesn’t need that either, she wants the durable, the facts. But why people act this way and not differently, or why someone is lying or shutting up at that very moment – the human aspect of all actions, so to speak – is what literature can best tell. The staff in Dark flower is invented. Still, it is hopefully a real book – not about Rechnitz, but about Dunkelblum.
F : You wrote the sentence that art arises in the gap between chaos and control. How does that work when you write?
EM : The novel was already a lot of chaos because I didn’t know how to tell the story and how to organize it. But maybe that creates the atmospheric more, because I always only notice when I’m writing where things are going on and how I have to do it. I like control too. But that doesn’t help if you sit down at your desk in the morning and don’t know what to do next. The game is in the head, and there it goes back and forth. If I know what to do next, it’s craft and control. The difficult thing is the structure, and it always begins in a chaos that has to be sorted out.
F : “Here our country is still as it was for centuries. We can be proud of that, ”said a resident of Dunkelblum. Are you serious?
EM : It’s one of those empty phrases that people utter when the day is long. Dialogue is important to me and I try to let people speak as they speak. Only Austrians are likely to notice that different social classes are also depicted. There are the very simple people who speak a very broad dialect and there are those who are a little educated. They also speak a little differently.
F : How important is the distance to Austria and the socio-political conditions there when writing?
EM : Very important. Writing Austrian novels from here in Berlin is exactly the extent of Austria that I can endure. I can no longer imagine returning to Austria. Somehow the country has become too small for me and only from a distance can I mobilize something like a sense of home in me, which then lead to such a book. But I really enjoyed the Austriaticisms, immersing myself in the Austrian language.
F : In your essay on compromise, you write that you have the impression that liberal societies have “become more uncompromising at all ends of the spectrum” in recent years – also due to digitization. Why is the compromise so out of fashion?
EM ; This has to do with the dogma of personalization. Everyone only accepts what is good for them. And that means that the sense of community has been lost. Nobody has to adapt anymore, which has led to a social neglect of prosperity, to a pronounced egoism, which of course contradicts any compromise. If you only encounter the world in a personalized way on the screen, then I no longer have to compromise with anyone. Then I can insult any cyclist who passes too close to me or even tear them off the bike. We are currently observing these tendencies of aggression everywhere.
F : They ask to talk about what troubles us. What is it that troubles you the most at the moment?
EM : This irreconcilability and the roaring at one another in our society. The mental brutality on the many social channels stunned me. The election campaign is also an imposition. In the end, we talked more about Baerbock plagiarism than about climate change. Or about the CDU’s responsibility that we are not much further with the conversion to climate-neutral technology. One should actually talk about it, but that is not happening. It’s all pretty unpleasant.
F : Debate is also irrelevant in the cultural sector.
EM : That’s right. The “Close everything up” campaign was one of those moments for me when I asked myself whether I was actually still right here. You don’t have to find satire good, but the accusation that artists are to blame for people to die because people may no longer wear masks because of satire is hysterical.
F : There are now publicists who are fleeing from Germany to Austria because of the culture of debate. Can you understand that?
EM : You mean Matthias Politycki. Have fun, I can only say. I’m already looking forward to his reports from the cozy, racist everyday life in Austria. The quality of life in Austria is very high, but you have to endure politics. Austria is increasingly becoming a banana republic. What is going on there politically is shameful.
F : Do you see yourself as a writer who was born in Vienna and lives in Berlin, or rather an Austrian or Berlin author?
EM : I think writing is influenced by your reading biography, the texts you grew up with. And from what I’ve read and where I come from linguistically, I’m certainly an Austrian author. And I will stay that way too.
F : Does an award like that of your compatriot Clemens J. Setz with the Büchner Prize trigger something in the Austrian author?
EM : Yes, I have to admit that there is a weird little national pride at this point – we can write well, we weird Ösis. I don’t have that at all in football, I always stick with Germany. But I was very pleased that Clemens Setz was awarded the Büchner Prize.
Interview ǀ “Actually it was all over” – Friday. By Arjun Sethi. Codelist, September 7, 2021.
Der Quernheim, November 8, 2021.
But behind the glamour, Nazi socialite Margit Batthyany hid a murderous dark side that would see her dubbed the 'Hostess from Hell'.
During the last days of the war in 1945, Gestapo leaders, Nazi soldiers and socialites descended on the Countess' grand 17th-century castle in the quiet Austrian village of Rechnitz to drink and dance into the night.
The war was coming to an end and Red Army troops were only 10 days away from the village, near the Austria-Hungary border, when the Countess decided to hold a party on the eve of Palm Sunday.
It would later be known as the Rechnitz massacre - a murderous party that would host one of the last horrific Nazi crimes against Jewish people.
A wealthy descendant from the German Thyssen family, the glamorous socialite was a Nazi supporter who lived a lavish lifestyle thanks to her rich industrialist family.
She went on to own horse farms from Kentucky to France and won three major horse racing titles, including the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe in 1972 with the filly, San San - even rubbing shoulders with the Queen.
But her roaring racing success in the years after the war concealed her previous affairs with Nazi lovers and sick "kill the Jew" parties.
On March 24, 1945, nearly 200 Jewish prisoners were said to have been executed purely for entertainment during the party at her castle, according to author David R.L Litchfield.
Those who were unable to work were stripped naked and shot by drunken guests, while those who remained alive were then told to bury the dead before also being gunned down.
Other sick atrocities were also said to have been carried out at the castle after Jews were reportedly brought there to build a wall that would hold back Russian forces.
One witness describes how the twisted Countess prefered to have a front-row seat to the sadistic killings and beatings.
Nazi Lovers
The socialite became Countess Batthyany in 1933 after marrying Count Ivan Batthyany of Hungary - rescuing him from bankruptcy.
She lived in her husband's castle while socialising with her Nazi lovers before the Count retired to his nearby estate to breed horses.
At the close of the Second World War, Jewish prisoners from nearby work camps were moved on before the arrival of Russian troops and 600 were housed in the cellars of her castle.
At the time, two senior Nazis were said to be vying for the attention of the Countess - her part-time lover and Gestapo official, Franz Podezin, and Hans Joachim Oldenburg, a Nazi commander.
It is thought one of the men came up with the sick game of 'shoot the Jew' to try and impress her.
According to an article by author David Litchfield [ The Independent, October 7, 2007, editor] , At midnight Podezin took the countess and 15 guests to the barn and invited them to "kill some Jews".
After the massacre, the revellers continued to party, leaving 18 prisoners to bury the bodies and dig their own graves before they were shot.
Writing in the Lit Hub, Sacha Batthyany, a niece of the Countess who knew her as "Aunt Margit", said his father described the woman as a "monster".
He admitted a "crime was committed" and she had a "couple of affairs with Nazis" - but he insisted she wouldn't have been "involved" in the massacre.
The bodies of the victims have never been discovered, but the search for the site of one of the Second World War's most gruesome Nazi massacres is now taking place in Rechnitz.
Hungarian surgeon, Gabor Vadasz, 85, is the last known living relative of those who were slaughtered at the sick party.
"My father and the other forced labourers were either hunted and shot in the head, or beaten to death," he said.
"Afterwards, the perpetrators went back to the castle to continue the party.
"Those men were tortured and killed at this place for fun. I have been waiting for 73 years and I am getting closer and closer to the end of my life."
Soon after the killings, two witnesses to the horrific crime were killed, and a house containing key documents about the atrocities was burned to the ground.
The Countess had already fled to Switzerland where she enjoyed a long life and reputation as a champion horse breeder.
Nowadays, only the ruins of the castle remain after it was set alight as the Red Army arrived but in the 1960s, the graves of 18 victims were found.
A monument to commemorate the atrocity was erected at the rear of a local park decades later in 1987.
Trenches, bunkers and relics have been uncovered, but the burial site of the victims remains a mystery.
To this day no one was ever prosecuted for the massacre after an investigation in 1945 lead to two suspects being killed.
Hostess from Hell. How evil Nazi ‘killer countess’ who met the Queen once shot 180 Jews for sick after-dinner party game. By Imogen Braddick. The U.S. Sun, September 9, 2021.
I glanced up and smiled at her. Only then did I look at the article she had torn out of the paper to show me. I was expecting something to do with the 19th century, elaborate period dresses maybe, or horses. Some bridge or other named after one of my forebears, an Àdám, Zsigmund or Ladislaus Batthyány; my surname is well known in Hungary. The Batthyánys had been counts, princes, bishops. One of them was prime minister of the country in 1849, another, Ladislaus Batthyány-Strattmann, was beatified in 2003 by Pope John Paul II for his services to Rome as a medical doctor. The family history can be followed back to the Turkish wars of the 14th century, although here in the West few people know the name, and why should they? They generally think it is Tamil, because the two letters ‘y’ in it suggest Sri Lanka. I get asked about it only during the Christmas holidays, when they show the trilogy of films about Sissi, the Empress Elisabeth of Austria, on TV at eleven in the morning, and the Empress, played by Romy Schneider, dances with a Count Batthyány who wears a baby-blue uniform and has a large amount of brilliantine on his hair.
So I expected something like that when I glanced at the newspaper, something harmless. Instead, I read the headline ‘The Hostess From Hell,’ which I didn’t understand, but I recognized the woman in the photograph at once. Aunt Margit. The story said that in March, 1945, she had taken part in the massacre of 180 Jews in the Austrian border town of Rechnitz. Apparently she had thrown a party, with dancing and drinking, and at midnight, for fun, the guests held pistols to the heads of naked Jews, men and women alike, and pulled the triggers.
“Thanks,” I said, putting the sheet of newsprint aside and returning to the cursor blinking on my screen. I still had two hours before handing in my piece about the Dutch sperm donor.
Aunt Margit? My great-aunt with the pointed tongue?
*
When I was a child, we went to have lunch with Aunt Margit three times a year, always at the most expensive restaurant in Zürich. My father chain-smoked in our white Opel all the way, my mother combed my hair with a plastic comb. We called her Aunt Margit, never just Margit, as if “Aunt” were a title. She had married my father’s uncle, but the marriage was disastrous from the first. Margit was a billionaire from the German Thyssen family. She was tall, with a large torso and thin legs. In my memory she always wears a skirt suit with the jacket buttoned up to her throat, and silk scarves with horse patterns on them; her crocodile handbag is claret-colored with gold clasps, and when she talks about deer in the rutting season or cruising in the Aegean, she puts out the tip of her tongue like a lizard in the pauses between sentences. I sit as far away as possible from her. Aunt Margit hated children, and while I push chopped calves’ liver around my plate I keep looking at her. I want to see that tongue.
After her death we seldom mentioned her, and my memories of our lunches faded, until the day when I read the report in the paper about that little place in Austria. Rechnitz. About a party. About a massacre. About 180 Jews who had to strip naked before they were shot, so that their bodies would decompose more quickly. And Aunt Margit? She was at the center of it.
*
I phoned my father and asked him if he knew about the party. He said nothing for a while, and I heard him uncorking a bottle of wine. I saw him in my mind’s eye, sitting on the shabby old sofa that I like so much in his living-room in Budapest.
“Margit had a couple of affairs with Nazis, there was talk about that in the family.”
“It says in the paper that she threw a party, and the high point, as a kind of treat for dessert, was when 180 Jews were lured into a stable and guns were handed out to the guests, who were all dead drunk. They all joined in, Margit too. She’s described as the hostess from Hell. The English newspapers are calling her the ‘killer countess.’ And there’s a picture of her captioned: ‘Thyssen countess had 200 Jews shot at Nazi party.’”
“Nonsense. Yes, a crime was committed, but I think it’s unlikely that Margit was involved. She was a monster, but not capable of doing that.”
“How come Margit was a monster?”
*
Before I read that newspaper story about Rechnitz and Aunt Margit, I hadn’t been especially interested in my family’s history. I had little contact with it. If I had been born in Hungary it would have been different; there were places and monuments there with connections to my ancestors. However, I grew up not in Budapest but in a four-roomed apartment on the outskirts of the city of Zürich, and when I was eight we moved a hundred meters further away to a grey town house shaped like a Rubik’s cube, the puzzle that everyone played with back in the eighties. We had a ping-pong table in the garden, and a large American-style fridge that the previous occupants had left behind. It smelled so good when you opened the freezer compartment and put your head right in, past the frozen peas. I remember, even more vividly, the smell of the fuel station where we sometimes stopped on the way back from visiting friends of my parents. My two brothers and I used to sit squeezed together on the back seat, and I always hoped the tank would need filling. Then I would wind down the car window, close my eyes and breathe in through my nose. The petrol and the cool air, and all of us together in that car on the way home—I never felt safer in my life. And when we arrived I would pretend to be asleep, so that my father would carry me into my room, with his shirt still smelling of wine and cigarettes and summer. It was all part of my childhood.
Like whales who make for calm waters when they are about to give birth, my parents had withdrawn from the outside world to settle here. But unlike whales, who then return to the ocean depths, my parents remained stranded on the outskirts of the city.
Maybe they were hiding from their past. From their memories of Hungary, of the war, of flight and concealment.
Or possibly they simply wanted to begin again in this undefiled place. Rather than thinking back to earlier times, they wanted to make this dead-end spot their home. And it almost worked.
Switzerland is a good country for beginning again and shedding the burden of the past; there is nothing in it to remind you of Hitler or Stalin. The two totalitarian systems of the last century, National Socialism and Communism, the concentration camps and the gulag, are only chapters in school history books to the Swiss. There are hardly any memorials to the victims of wars, hardly any families, apart from those of immigrants, whose stories are interwoven with those atrocities. People don’t ask, “Grandpa, what did you do in the war?” No one in Switzerland was deported or gassed. There’s nothing that the Swiss have to “stomach,” there is nothing to “come out,” as the newspapers always say about revelations in other countries. There was no collective failure, there were no crises outside the world of banking. Switzerland has known only years of prosperity and security; the minds of the Swiss were at ease, particularly in my youth at the beginning of the nineties, when everything was even brighter than before, and people living in city suburbs would get on their bikes at weekends and cycle out to the lakes.
You might expect the color of such an idyll to rub off on its surroundings. You might expect such carefree attitudes to transfer themselves to a family’s fortunes. It isn’t always like that.
Neither my father nor my mother really felt at home in Switzerland, that most comfortably padded of all European countries. They did learn to speak Swiss German, they went skiing, they bought a sandwich toaster when everyone was buying them, and in winter they ate raclette like everyone else, pouring melted cheese over potatoes, maybe adding a little extra paprika. But the fact is that they participated in the life of the country only when they had to. They exchanged civil greetings with their neighbors, but they would rather get to their car unseen by any acquaintances. In secret, Switzerland and the Swiss smiled at that, or so at least it seemed to me earlier. My parents weren’t bothered by the occasional xenophobic remarks of other inhabitants of Zürich—what a funny surname we had, we spoke German pretty well for foreigners, our rusty car didn’t really suit this city—because they knew that they were never going to put down roots there. As they saw Switzerland, it was never more than a toy country, life there wasn’t the genuine article, or at least not real life with its ups and downs, with its joy and grief. Because no one who had not at least lost a few relations in the war, who had not known what it was to see a foreign power, whether German or Russian, turn everything upside down, could truly claim to understand life. Suffering was the common currency. Idyllic happiness counted for nothing. The past was always more important than the future, old was always better than modern.
*
And so they probably dreamed of another life in their own way, in that little house on the outskirts of Zürich, a city without yesterdays from which my father soon moved.
Two years after the Iron Curtain came down, he packed his bags and went to Budapest. My mother also left Switzerland, and did not seem to feel that she was missing anything. I never bore her a grudge for that. All of a sudden they were both gone, but they had left me with a sense that I was living in the wrong country.
I stayed where I was, all the same, perhaps out of inertia; studied at university, because that was what everyone did, and became a journalist. Soon I was writing about armed gangs of kids in Liverpool, I slept in the caravan belonging to a high-ranking Ku Klux Klan member in Texas, I spent several days walking around the streets of a Zürich suburb to report on the case of a girl of thirteen who had been gang-raped, and I sat on the Dutch sperm donor’s sofa with a lesbian couple who wanted a child. I saw him give them a small container and a syringe, so that one of them could inject herself with his sperm. “I’m just going out to do a bit of shopping,” he called, already in the doorway. “Do you want anything? Cola? Crisps?” The women shook their heads, taken aback. Cola? It was a baby that they wanted.
Hungary might be my parents’ country, but what business of mine was that? I was in my early thirties, newly in love. The Second World War and a war crime involving the murder of 180 Jews couldn’t have been farther away. We had our own problems, I thought, immigration, disorientation, globalization, I wrote about such subjects: too much consumption, too much pornography, too many opportunities.
But after coming up against my family history on the morning when I recognized Aunt Margit in the newspaper article, I began to do some research. I wrote to members of our family in Vienna, Budapest and Munich. “Hello,” I began my letters. “We haven’t met, but we’re distant relations. Have you read what’s said to have happened? Do you know anything about it?” I got hold of files on Aunt Margit and her husband Ivan, my grandfather’s brother; I read books about the Thyssens, the history of Hungary; I spent whole days in archives in Berlin and Berne, Budapest and Graz; and I had many conversations with my father. Aunt Margit had set me traveling back into past history: because of her, I faced the story of my origins for the first time in my life.
It was the massacre of 180 Jews that brought me closer to my family.
From A Crime in the Family: A World War II Secret Buried in Silence—and My Search for the Truth by Sacha Batthyány. 2017.
Discovering My Family’s Murderous Nazi Past. By Sacha Batthyány. LitHub, November 1, 2017.
colleague waved a newspaper clipping in front of him. It was an investigative report entitled, “The Hostess from Hell,” published by a German daily.
So he started to read the piece. In March 1945, it said, just before the end of World War II, Margit held a large party in the town of Rechnitz on the Austrian-Hungarian border to fete her Nazi friends. She, the daughter and heiress of European baron and tycoon Heinrich Thyssen, and her friends drank and danced the night away.
At the height of the evening, just for fun, 12 of the guests boarded trucks or walked to a nearby field, where 180 Jewish slave laborers who had been building fortifications were assembled. They had already been forced to dig a large pit, strip, and get down on their knees. The guests took turns shooting them to death before returning to the party. The organizer of this operation was Margit’s lover Hans Joachim Oldenberg. Margit’s husband, Count Ivan Batthyany, Sacha’s grandfather’s brother, was also at the party.
It was the first time that Batthyany, then 34, had heard about this incident. He was shocked. “Let’s set aside that it was my aunt,” said Batthyany, who visited Israel last week as a guest of the Jerusalem Book Fair. “It’s just an incredible, brutal story of this night. I mean, I know there are hundreds and thousands of other [violent stories] from the war — I don’t want to compare, but if you read what happened that night it is just unbelievable.”
In the article in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, the writer, David Litchfield, describes the party as a celebration of death. Killing for dessert. “I was in shock. I was shocked and surprised that I had never heard of this. And I had studied history, I knew more than the average person, but I’d never heard about this massacre or about Rechnitz, or about my family’s connection to any kind of story connected to the Holocaust.
“I remember that I had to finish a stupid assignment I was working on but all I was thinking was that I couldn’t wait to talk to my father.
“This area between Budapest and Vienna is where my family comes from, where my family owned land and castles and stuff. I remember asking him, ‘Did you ever hear of Rechnitz?’ And he said, ‘Yes, of course.’ Then I asked him, ‘Did you know about the massacre?’ and he said, ‘Yeah, yeah. I knew about it. I heard about it, of course, I’m not stupid.’ So I asked, ‘Did you know that Margit was at the party that night when it happened?’ And he replied, ‘Yes, everyone knew it.’
“So I wasn’t talking as logically as I am now, but I said more or less, ‘So you knew A and you knew B, but you never made the connection?’ And he said no. I asked him why not and he said, ‘I don’t know why not.’
And it was this moment that was the starting point of all the emotional stuff about not drawing the connection. Why not? Who has the power to decide not to ask? He said he never thought about it. He never thought there was a connection between the people in the castle and what happened there. Everyone knew that [Margit] had affairs with Nazis, she was a German who was very much into the Nazi regime and she had affairs, but no one ever wanted to ask the questions.”
Personal
upheaval
These questions led to the appearance a decade later of “A Crime in the Family,” the fascinating book that Batthyany wrote about the incident, originally in German, and translated into English by Anthea Bell. Batthyany set out that morning in April 2007 on an in-depth search.
With the caution of a sapper dismantling a bomb, he peeled away the historical details he needed to expose. The fact that he was asking questions of his aristocratic family, the fact that he was uncovering the layers of this embarrassing history demanded a great deal of courage. It was also a personal upheaval: How was he connected to this history? How had it shaped his life, his personality, and his image?
Everything is integrated in the book from several points of view. It’s not just the story of that sickening night. Batthyany also explores the connection between his grandmother, Marita, and an Argentinean woman named Agnes Mandel, a Jewish refugee from the village in which the two grew up, one as the daughter of the local nobleman and the other as the daughter of village Jews who were murdered.
He also tells the story of his grandfather, who was imprisoned for a decade in Siberia and came out a shadow of a man; of how his paternal grandparents fled with his father, then a teenager, from Soviet-occupied Hungary to the home of the wealthy Countess Margit. And he examines the family pathology, the pathology of men who were eternally grateful to Margit and who preferred never to ask any questions.
The Batthyanys were European aristocrats who lost most of their property under the Soviet occupation but who had obviously been important. Batthyany says that when he visited Hungary, his name jolted the hotel staff, who treated him with great respect and sent champagne and fruit to his room.
Growing up in Switzerland he was regarded as the slightly strange son of immigrants (“I have a difficult name and people thought I was from India”) and had no clue that somewhere there were streets, castles, parks and even a chocolate cake bearing the family’s name. He also had no knowledge of the dozens of Batthyany descendants who held periodic family gatherings in Austria or Hungary.
But what Batthyany saw in that German newspaper report changed everything. He responded like a journalist, getting his editor to agree to give him time off to investigate. He began reading and searching in archives and also began to question distant relatives whom he had never met. When some of the cousins told him about a family gathering that was to take place, he announced that he was coming and that he planned to discuss the story.
In his book he describes the meeting: A few dozen Batthyanys, eating sandwiches and drinking coffee from elegant cups, none of them too thrilled to discuss the matter. “After a while it became really nasty,” he says. “One of the old uncles said, ‘What if it’s all not true’ and ‘Who owns the media’ and about vested interests and all this anti-Semitic stuff. Elfriede Jelinek, an Austrian playwright, wrote a play about the story, and they were talking about her and it became nasty.”
Like a Mafia movie
He recalls that the deeper he dug, the more intense the reactions became, to the point that relatives warned him to stop. “They called me like in a Mafia movie – no joke, anonymous calls saying ‘your name doesn’t matter, I’m just telling you to stop.’” At that family gathering an uncle of his with whom he’d actually been quite close said, ‘Don’t play with the name of our family. You have no idea what could happen.’”
But Batthyany continued his search, travelling to Rechnitz three times, the first time as a tourist. “Then I talked to the mayor; the mayor was nice. I even spoke to a woman who was at the party that night, who has since died. She told me that not only was my aunt there, but also her husband, Ivan, who is directly my family. My father and Ivan were friendly.
“It took months. I was working at a magazine then and my boss at the time allowed me to focus on this, but after some weeks I realized that this was going to be different than any other investigative piece I’d done.”
Batthyany’s initial research resulted in a magazine feature, but the topic gave him no rest. Though it was only one night in the history of a family that ostensibly felt distant enough from the event to be able to suppress it, Batthyany was tormented. He continued to work, married and had a family. Today he and his wife and three children live in Washington, where he is a correspondent for the Germany daily Süddeutsche Zeitung and other publications. But what he thought would end with a magazine article continued to haunt him.
When the Soviets occupied Hungary, tens of thousands of people, including his father and grandfather, fled. But unlike others, who ended up in a Red Cross refugee camp, their journey ended when the rich aunt sent a private chauffeur to pick them up and bring them to a castle near the Italian-Swiss border. Their first meal was an elegant dinner with glasses of sherry.
Aunt Margit employed Batthyany’s grandfather in one of her factories, completely financed his father’s education and, as he later understood, was the dominant matriarchal figure in the family.
“I couldn’t let it go,” he says. “I knew what I had to know, but I wasn’t done. I understood that this was my family and the questions didn’t stop. The title of the book in German is exactly the question that intrigued me then: ‘What Does it Have to do With Me?’ I realized this was the question I was interested in, but I had no idea how to approach it and answer.”
The answer he found was complex. Batthyany started to see a psychoanalyst, and the insights he derived from the conversations with him appear in the book. There are also sections of a diary his grandmother wrote and diligently edited in the last years of her life. The grandmother talks about the Mandels, the parents of Agnes who ended up in Argentina. Batthyany found Agnes and her daughters and formed a close relationship with them based on a shared fate and shared insights.
He also traveled with his family to Siberia to trace his grandfather’s life in the gulag and to understand what happened to him during that decade no one ever spoke about.
The picture that emerges from the book is well-rounded, moving from the personal to the historic, as it emerges that the victim and the criminal are part of the same family. Batthyany’s obsession with the past, with what happened and who was involved, seems at times like a mirror image of what so preoccupies Israelis, a desire to dig deeply and to decipher the present through people who are long lost.
Batthyany writes on the last page of the book about the similarity between him and the children and grandchildren of Agnes, again like a mirror image. He says that Agnes and the daughters and even the children of the daughters “always went to Hungary to this little tiny village in the middle of nowhere.”
He recalls: “There’s really nothing there. And they always went there to – I don’t know, to look for something or just to be there, and it was always surprising to me that even the generation afterwards, is still kind of haunted and interested in their roots.”
He says that while he studied history and psychology in university, even as a journalist he never, or hardly ever did stories on Hungary or World War II. “Before [2007] I wasn’t that interested in my family’s history. I knew just that the name is a very important name in Hungary.
“It was out of the blue,” he says that he became interested, “and I really think it probably has to do with my character,” he reflects.
“But I think [the lack of interest in history] also has to do with Switzerland. I really do think that Switzerland, although it’s in the midst of everything, is some kind of historic vacuum. There’s nothing that makes it think about what happened. There are no monuments, for example. When you’re in Hungary, even the tiniest village has three, four, five monuments in the center of the village. For example, one is for the victims of the Holocaust, the other is for the victims of Stalin’s gulags, and they are still fighting about which one is higher. That’s Hungary.
“So the only thing connected to all of these things and all these dark chapters of our history is in school, when you have your teacher – but it’s all in theory, not something you share on an emotional level.”
He says most Swiss children do not ask their parents and grandparents what they did during the war. “You don’t ask because there wasn’t much,” he says. Basically, he observes, life in Switzerland doesn’t demand any confrontation with your past, or any past at all.
He recalls that his first readers were friends or journalists from Switzerland. While they liked his writing, they would also write things like ‘I don’t really understand this thing with the past,’ he says. In Switzerland, this connection with the past is considered odd, he says.
"I think I’m a bit jealous."
Batthyany laughs and says: “I was scared because I thought I shouldn’t have done it.
“But then the book was received entirely differently in Hungary, Germany and Austria [than in Switzerland]. You always carry the past with you, it’s what you are. There are those who don’t want to be aware, but if you feel the burden of the past you will see the connection to the present, to who you are.”
This article was originally published in July 2017.
My Aunt Had a Dinner Party, and Then She Took Her Guests to Kill 180 Jews. By Gili Izikovich. Haaretz April 21, 2020.
Historians
dispute the claim by a British journalist that Nazi fanatics attending a party
near the Austro-Hungarian border in March 1945 killed 200 Hungarian Jews as an
"additional entertainment" laid on by the hosts. The massacre did
happen, though, and the circumstances surrounding it remain unclear.
A row
has broken out among historians about one of the most spectacular Nazi crimes
committed in Austria. On the night of March 24 to March 25, 1945, some 200
Hungarian Jews were murdered in the Austrian town of Rechnitz near the
Austro-Hungarian border. The bodies of the victims still haven't been found.
The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper last week published an essay by British journalist David Litchfield in which he claims that several guests at a party held by Countess Margit von Batthyany, born Thyssen-Bornemisza, in Schloss Rechnitz castle were offered the chance to murder the Jews as an "additional entertainment" laid on by local Nazi party chief Franz Podezin. The guests accepted the offer, Litchfield wrote.
But several historians are now disputing Litchfield's version of events. Berlin-based anti-Semitism researcher Wolfgang Benz says Litchfield is spreading "murmurings and hearsay."
Winfried Garscha of the respected Documentation Centre of Austrian Resistance: "It was indisputably a mass murder but it didn't arise from a party whim. People incapable of marching were murdered everywhere at the time."
Garscha said that according to documents from an official investigation into the case after the war, the victims were among thousands of Hungarian Jews who were forced to work on the "Southeast Wall" fortifications along the Austro-Hungarian border from autumn 1944 onwards.
On March 24 a train brought 600 of these forced laborers from the town of Köszeg in neighboring Hungary to the town of Burg in the Burgenland region of Austria. Some 30 percent of them were sick and weak and were transported to Rechnitz where they arrived in the early evening.
Meanwhile the countess was making the final arrangements for her "followers' festival" which started at 9 p.m. The advancing Soviet Red Army was close to Rechnitz. It wasn't unusual for Nazi officials to hold raucous parties before the impending defeat.
The killing of the Hungarian Jews in Rechnitz had already been decided before the party began, according to the investigation by public prosecutors after 1945 which cited testimony from one of the accused men.
In addition, the driver who was to take the victims to their execution had been ordered for 9 p.m. At 10 p.m. other forced laborers were taken to dig mass graves. Across the German Reich, Jewish prisoners were being driven westwards by their captors who were fleeing Soviet forces. Those incapable of carrying on were killed. The killings at Rechnitz fit in with that pattern.
When the preparations for the executions had been made, at around 11 p.m., local Nazi party chief Podezin gathered a group of loyal Nazis who were at the party and ordered them to drive with him to a barn and kill the Jewish prisoners, according to the investigators. His orders were carried out.
Litchfield's version can only be explained by speculation that those accused of the massacre were lying when they said Podezin had ordered them to commit the atrocity -- by way of covering up the alleged connection to the party. Podezin disappeared in 1945 -- presumably with the help of the countess. The bodies of the victims were apparently buried by 18 other Jewish prisoners who were themselves murdered the following evening.
The case has been a political issue in Austria for decades because many Rechnitz residents boycotted the investigation. One withness was even murdered in 1946, and other witnesses died in mysterious accidents. In the meantime a commemorative society called Refugius has been established in Rechnitz. Its head, Paul Gulda, suspects that Litchfield wanted to attract attention with his sensational version of events.
Mass Murder as Party Entertainment? Der Spiegel International, October 22, 2007.
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