DER MÖRDER ABER LEBTE UNTER UNS, NICHT WENIGER ALS BEREIT, SICH ERGREIFEN ZU LASSEN“. HANS LEBERTS ROMAN „DIE WOLFSHAUT“
“BUT THE MURDERER LIVED AMONG US, NO LESS THAN WILLING TO BE CAUGHT.” HANS LEBERT'S NOVEL “THE WOLF'S SKIN”

Summary/Abstract: This article offers an analytical overview of Hans Lebert's anti-homeland novel "The Wolf's Skin" and, within the framework of the thematic analysis, explains how Hans Lebert concretizes the abstract concepts of collective guilt, individual complicity and the repressed National Socialist past in the fictitious village community in Schweigen through sensory language. The article sheds light on the concept of collective guilt and individual complicity based on a theoretical basis, which also enables the distinction between the concepts of guilt and thus forms the analytical basis for the observation of the village community in Schweigen. It is a novel that was published for the first time in 1960 not in Austria but by the Hamburg ClaassenVerlag and for which Lebert was awarded the Austrian State Prize for Literature in 1962. The plot of the novel takes place from November 1952 to February 1953 in the fictional village of Schweigen. A 46-year-old sailor, Johann Unfreund, returns to this village after a long absence because his father has committed suicide and he knows nothing will be the same as it was before the war. He encounters a village community that, just like him, believed that it had survived the war and its various consequences. There he meets the photographer Maletta, in whom he recognizes his negative alter ego and who is also an outsider in the village. Shortly after Unfreund's arrival, mysterious deaths occur that attract the attention of the outsider Unfreund. The suspicious brick kiln, which is located south of the village, then becomes not only the starting point for the sailor to solve the war crimes, but also the repository of collective guilt.

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