Facing the Legacy of Mass Violence in Neoliberalism: On Denemarková and Jelinek

Current literatures from Central and Eastern Europe are marked by a boom of documentary fiction portraying involvement in twentieth-century mass violence and totalitarianisms. Radka Denemarková’s 2006 Peníze od Hitlera (Money from Hitler, 2009) and Elfriede Jelinek’s 2022 Angabe der Person (Indication/Ostentation of the Person) outline complicity with Nazi occupation, Stalinist terror, or other forms of mass violence among contemporaries and descendants. Since understanding the past serves requirements of the present, this boom prompts the question: why the interest in past complicities now? What the texts contribute to understanding the legacy of mass violence is that these acts are no punctual events, and that the present is implicated in the aftermaths of violence in ways that are prone to make commemoration complicit with it. Denemarková and Jelinek outline instances of the transmission and normalization of distinctions and terms used to justify mass violence and totalitarian terror across generations and ideological faultlines, into the neoliberal present. Both suggest that viewing different manifestations of violence as unrelated is a prominent form of denial that in fact fosters continuities that perpetuate violence. The article reads the literary texts in dialogue with social science approaches to the societal circulation of ideological language to demonstrate that key dynamics enabling continuities of justificatory discourse are a type of conformity with peer pressure and instrumentalization of ideological language for personal gain.