In the fall of 1992, for the first time after 1945, Peter Härtling visited the city of his childhood, Olomouc, in Moravia. He wanted to retrace once more the footsteps of his father, who for several years worked as a lawyer in Olomouc and whose memory Härtling particularly grappled with in his book “Nachgetragene Liebe” (“Love in the Aftermath,” 1980). Once again Härtling is forced to revise his image of his father; once again he learns – an experience that is central to his writing – that memory isn’t something given and static, but rather that the past reveals itself to us anew with each new phase in our lives. But Härtling now turns his attention, his interest, to another person in addition to his father: namely, the latter’s Czech secretary, fragments of whose life Härtling found out about after the end of the Nazi era. Apparently, this woman, because she had worked for a German and was seen as a collaborator, was ostracized for the rest of her life. This is where Härtling’s novella begins. Despite being rooted in the truth, it is a fictional account, compelled to invent in order to grasp this woman’s reality. Härtling calls her Bozena Koska. Bozena is forced to face the fact that, after the liberation of Czechoslovakia, she no longer belongs. First, her boss, “Herr Doktor,” is said to have been a Nazi; and now that the Communists are in power, beginning in 1948, he is considered a fascist. For Bozena, he remains a person who, in defiance of the Nazi directives, helped everyone, whether they were German, Czech or Jewish. Bozena is interrogated, defends herself, is punished and ostracized. That is when she begins to write letters to her “Herr Doktor,” in which she tells him things she doesn’t dare say otherwise. It’s only much later that she discovers that she has been addressing her letters to a dead man. Delicately, precisely and with great linguistic intensity, through Bozena, Peter Härtling traces the fate of a woman whose life was crushed by the violence of history, which time and again condemns innocent people to finding themselves on the wrong side.
