Digging up the Past: Space, Time, and Memory in Josef Haslinger’s 'Fiona und Ferdinand'

Josef Haslinger’s story "Fiona und Ferdinand" (2006) revolves around a disclosed secret in its narrator’s childhood hometown, which implicates two (deceased) village elders in a decades-old rape and murder mystery long blamed on two anonymous “Russian soldiers.” The discovery of two partial skeletons locked in a bedroom trunk awakens the narrator’s memory: years before as a child, he unearthed the same skeletons after first spying a finger bone buried in a stream. The identification of the bones is central in determining the perpetrators of the rape/murder, but no one -- and in particular the narrator’s mother -- seems interested in hearing the testimony of the crime’s lone eyewitness, now an aged woman. Instead, the revelation evokes a collective effort to willfully impede any investigation into the truth, presumably as a means to maintain the town’s dual pretenses of order and respectability. "Fiona und Ferdinand" emphasizes Haslinger’s preoccupation with the Austrian failure to confront its own past, specifically via families as fundamental units of transmission and memory. In this analysis of the text, I explore Haslinger’s treatment of space, time, and memory in several ways. First, I examine how his notion of “officially sanctioned memory” intersects with a landscape that contains past and present alike. Second, I discuss how bodies, either the violated female body or the rotted skeletons Fiona and Ferdinand, are emblems that raise discussions of space, gender, and memory. Last, I consider collective memory and how it enables processes of forgetting. The reluctance to “dig up the past” is thematized in "Fiona und Ferdinand" using devices common throughout Haslinger’s oeuvre, and this paper will analyze the story through the lens of Haslinger-as-archaeologist, exploring how families, and the memories they possess, are both the key to truth and the foil to its revelation.