Schattendorf as border history
Burgenland, Ödenburg/Sopron, multilingual life, routes, territorial change, and veterans’ networks.
Austrian context and the 2027 centenary
The books came first. The forum is one possible consequence.
Schattendorf 2027 is a proposed bilingual scholarly and public-history project arising from the novels’ questions about the Interval, the record, legal judgment, public language, literature, and commemoration.
What the forum is not
The novels are not promotional material for a conference.
No institution, venue, archive, publisher, or conference organizer is represented as committed unless a future public announcement says so.
Not a condition of readingA critic may request the books without proposing a paper or joining a forum.
Not a claim of documentary sovereigntyThe novels may provoke questions but cannot certify historical findings.
Not a compulsory interpretationParticipants may reject the Companion’s formal, political, or literary arguments.
Not a completed programIt is a developing proposal seeking scholars, sources, hosts, and institutional partners.
Working title
Schattendorf 100: From Memory to Method
The Interval, the record, and the uses and limits of historical fiction.
The event and the case
Victims, defendants, weapons, witnesses, legal questions, jury arithmetic, acquittal, and exoneration.
The six-month Interval
Funeral, stoppage, elections, May Day, rent, bread, prices, work, organizations, and ordinary civil time.
Press grammars
Accusation, procedure, solidarity, order, inversion, regional circulation, and internal variation.
Class, status, and political belonging
Workers, salaried employees, veterans, humiliation, status loss, and inherited social identities.
Historical fiction and documentary ethics
What fiction may reconstruct, what it must identify as invented, and how haunting can expose uncertainty.
From 1927 to 1933–34
Authoritarian closure, leader-form, state grammar, and competing claims to Austria.
Centenary practice
Archives, exhibitions, teaching, translation, public discussion, correction, and unresolved evidence.
How the novels fit
A common text and methodological provocation.
The sequence asks how an incomplete archive becomes public narrative; who may reconstruct it; how legal closure diverges from moral judgment; and how official grammar can preserve an event while deleting agency.
Check the record
Dates, sources, newspaper variants, legal distinctions, routes, institutions, and uncertainty.
Test the transformation
Ghosts, family, voice, object, music, paint, and counter-history without invented evidence disguised as fact.
Keep correction possible
Named cuts, visible provenance, participation, disagreement, and no manufactured reconciliation.
The centenary timeline
The Interval is not a blank between anniversaries.
The chronology remains readable without animation or JavaScript and does not turn the months between January and July into an inevitable march.
Schattendorf shootings
Deaths, wounds, routes, weapons, gatherings, and first public grammars enter the record.
Mourning and collective response
Funerals, stoppages, solidarity, household loss, and the first tests of leadership.
Burgenland election
The young border province measures itself through parties and institutions.
Demands tested by rooms and bread
Public language meets material provision, organization, access, and leadership.
Trial and acquittal
Legal questions, individual responsibility, jury arithmetic, and the distinction between acquittal and exoneration.
Palace of Justice fire
The accumulated pressure of the Interval becomes catastrophic without becoming inevitable.
Parliamentary rupture and civil conflict
Procedure, emergency, coercion, organization, and legitimacy enter a new relation.
Centenary as method
Archives, teaching, public memory, and literature are asked to preserve provenance, correction, disagreement, and unresolved evidence.