ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the renewed significance of the events for Christoph Ransmayr's 1995 novel, The Dog King, in which, by contrast, war and torture have left conspicuous traces. It describes why The Dog King presents such a difficult case within Ransmayr's project and for post-postwar literature more generally. The proximity of The Dog King to a space and time recognizable as postwar Austria makes it a more provocative text than Ransmayr's previous literary work and goes some way towards explaining its ambivalent reception. Like the wild dog in Ambras's pack, The Dog King is 'narbenubersat', that is, marked by an excess of violence and its repetition. As Vitus Bering's move away from the smithy to the 'Hundehaus' signals a desire to escape the confines of the family, his fascination with the pack of dogs, with birds, and with machines is a further indication of his opposition to the mimetic, and identificatory logic of Sigmund Freud's oedipal model.
