Published on October 3, 2024 at 8:28 p.m. / Modified on October 3, 2024 at 9:08 p.m.
The field, which gives its title to this novel by Josef Winkler, the eleventh to be translated into French, is that of origins: those of evil which will nourish silence and taboo, but also and above all those of the work. This field is that of Pâtis-aux-Porcs, a communal meadow located in Kamering, in Carinthia, Josef Winkler’s native village. The Austrian author, now aged 71, discovered only a few years ago that in this field, used by several farmers including his father, one of the worst Nazi criminals, Odilo Globocnik, had been buried.
Thus, this field cultivated by the father nourished the child Winkler. “You wanted with the contaminated milk of Pâtis-aux-Porcs, in the circulation of the blood of History, to produce our cheese and the butter that we were obliged to eat,” writes the author to his tate – “father” in dialect –, “so that the contaminated butter and the contaminated cheese can also be passed on to the next generation and the next one again”. At the same time as this original secret contaminated the family and beyond, it nourished the work of Josef Winkler, without him even being aware of it. It is indeed disturbing to note how everything was already written for the novelist that Josef Winkler would become, contained in his childhood.
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