Slovenian Poet and Austrian Writer: Maja Haderlap’s «Hybrid» Identity and Overcoming Post-Memory Trauma

The cоntemporary literature of the Slovene minority living in Austrian Carinthia is a special phenomenon that combines national and multicultural components, as well as bilingualism. A striking example of this is the work of M. Haderlap (b. 1961), who writes poetry in Slovenian and prose in German. Her German-language novel «Engel des Vergessens» («Angel pozabe», 2011) is about the collective trauma of the past experienced by the Slovenian population who participated in the anti-fascist resistance during the Second World War (physical extermination and deportation to concentration camps), had a wide resonance in the European German-speaking sociocultural space. The plot is based on the personal story of the writer’s grandmother and father, who went through the Gestapo and Ravensbrück. One of the ways to express his attitude to a tragic topic and at the same time overcome the consequences of the post-memory mechanism was the choice of language for the author. By creating a novel in the language of the national majority on a topic that is «inconvenient» for its speakers and painful for the national minority, Haderlap, firstly, makes an attempt to distance himself from personal experiences, and secondly, to attract the attention of the general Austrian public to historical injustice, to evoke fellow citizens an impulse to repentance. The hybrid identity of the writer, who perceives her bilingualism as an undeniable advantage of creative self-expression, reflects the real trends in the literary development of Europe: the monolingual paradigm is being replaced by a focus on poly-and heteroglossia.