Mara Kogoj

Vennemann’s first novel, Close to Jedenew, a radical literary take on an anti-Semitic pogrom, was hailed as »the most beautiful sad story« (DIE ZEIT) and »the best literary text by an under-30-year-old to appear in recent years« (Süddeutsche Zeitung).

Kevin Vennemann’s second novel Mara Kogoj continues where his first left off. How and with what results is history interpreted, repressed, remembered or forgotten?

As part of an Austrian study, together with his colleague Mara Kogoj, Tone Lebonja logs what the inhabitants of Klagenfurt wish to relate about their attitude to their homeland and to the state. One of the interviewees is Ludwig Pflügler, 60, who describes himself as a journalist, a man with a criminal record, a German nationalist, an ardent lover of his homeland. His interpretation of the history of Carinthia, his slurs on the Slovenian minority defy impartial recording; his view of the partisan war at the end of the Second World War in particular affects his two listeners more directly than they are initially prepared to admit. But convinced that he will still be able to repress the things that once drove him, a Slovenian, out of his home town, Lebonja holds his tongue. Pflügler dominates, prevaricates, claims a superior right to interpret things. Until Mara Kogoj takes matters into her own hands and starts to report in her own right – about the things »that really matter to her and to everybody and always should have mattered«, about the other version of history.