ABSTRACT
The era of National Socialism and the injustices and atrocities committed during that phase of Austrian history are a recurrent theme in Elisabeth Reichart’s fiction. In two earlier works from the 1980s, Februarschatten (1984) and Komm über den See (1988), she dealt with questions of guilt and the legacy of the past in the lives of individual women who continued to be directly affected by events of the Second World War long after it had ended. The subject matter of Februarschatten was based on an actual historical incident at Mauthausen concentration camp in 1944, when Russian prisoners of war escaped, only to be pursued and murdered by members of the local population. In representing the problematic nature of the past in relation to her own contemporaries, something shown especially clearly in Nachtmar, Elisabeth Reichart reveals that she still regards the Nazi past as a pervasive and controversial issue.
