Bücher von Josef Winkler

Nach einem längeren Aufenthalt in Wien zog sich Josef Winkler im Jahre 1981 auf einen Bauernhof in Kärnten zurück, um seinen Roman Muttersprache zu beenden. Dort fand er Quartier bei der Familie der Bergbäuerin Njetotschka Wassiljewna Iljaschenko, einer im März 1943 von Hitlers Schergen verschleppten Ukrainerin ¿ die ihm über ein Jahr lang ihre Lebensgeschichte erzählte. Die Bäuerin berichtet dem Autor vom Leben ihrer verzweifelt um die Existenz der Familie ringenden Mutter am Ufer des Dnjepr und von ihrer eigenen Kindheit während der Zeit der Kollektivierung und Hungersnot (Holodomor) im Dorf Dobenka, das später vom Stausee von Krementschug überflutet wurde. Sie erzählt von ihrer gewaltsamen Verschleppung aus der Ukraine zur Zwangsarbeit nach Kärnten, und sie berichtet von ihrem ersten Jahr auf dem Kärntner Bergbauernhof. Der Band erscheint mit einem Nachwort von Josef Winklers französischem Übersetzer Bernard Banoun sowie erstmals mit Briefen, die Hapka Davidowna Iljaschenko aus der Ukraine an ihre Tochter Njetotschka in Kärnten schrieb.

In 1979, Josef Winkler appeared on the literary horizon as if from nowhere, collecting numerous honors and the praise of the most prominent critical voices in Germany and Austria. Throughout the 1980s, he chronicled the malevolence, dissipation, and unregenerate Nazism endemic to Austrian village life in an increasingly trenchant and hallucinatory series of novels. At the decade's end, fearing the silence that always lurks over the writer's shoulder, he abandoned the Hell of Austria for Rome: not to flee, but to come closer to the darkness. There, he passes his days and nights among the junkies, rent boys, gypsies, and transsexuals who congregate around Stazione Termini and Piazza dei Cinquecento, as well as in the graveyards and churches, where his blasphemous reveries render the most hallowed rituals obscene. Traveling south to Naples and Palermo, he writes down his nightmares and recollections and all that he sees and reads, engaged, like Rimbaud, in a rational derangement of the senses, but one whose aim is a ruthless condemnation of church and state and the misery they sow in the lives of the downtrodden. Equal parts memoir, dream journal, and scandal sheet, the novel is, in the author's words, a cage drawn around the horror. Writing here is an act of commemoration and redemption, a gathering of the bones of the forgotten dead and those outcast and spit on by society, their consecration in art, and their final repatriation to the book's titular graveyard.

In the years before the Second World War, a man throws a statue of the crucified Christ over a waterfall. Later, in Hitler's trenches, he loses his arms to an enemy grenade. The blasphemer, screaming in agony, presided over by Satan, who pours a cup of gall into his open mouth, is portrayed amid the flames of Hell in a painting by the parish priest that is mounted on a calvary where the two streets in the cross-shaped village meet. Thus begins When the Time Comes, Josef Winkler's chronicle of life in rural Austria written in the form of a necrology, tracing the benighted destiny of a community through its suicides and the tragic deaths that befall it, punctuated by the invocation of the bone-cooker whose viscous brew is painted on the faces of the work horses and the haunting stanzas of Baudelaire's "Litanies of Satan." In a hypnotic, incantatory prose reminiscent at times of Homer, at times of the Catholic liturgy, at times of the naming of the generations in the book of Genesis, When the Time Comes is a ruthless dissection of the pastoral novel, laying bare the corruption that lies in its heart. Writing in the vein of his compatriots Peter Handke, and Elfriede Jelinek, but perhaps going further in his relentlessness and aesthetic radicalism, Josef Winkler is one of the most significant European authors working today.