In eva rossmann’s detective novel, Freudsche Verbrechen (Freudian Crimes), the unconscious—or what we don’t know we don’t know— intrudes unexpectedly upon everyday reality. As Mira Valensky, freelance “Lifestyle Journalistin” (5) and amateur sleuth, investigates the murder of a young woman in Vienna’s Freud Museum, she uncovers connections between this contemporary crime and the theft of Jewish property after the Anschluss in 1938. The past, like the unconscious, is not only symbolically present in Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic theory, but literally present in the contemporary reality of the novel—that is, Vienna in the late 1990s—nearly one hundred years after the publication of Freud’s seminal work, The Interpretation of Dreams. This novel, through its clever intertwining of history (Geschichte) and personal life stories (Geschichten), asks whether the repressed predictably returns and thus, as Slavoj Žižek would assert, “the letter always arrives at its destination.”

Valensky’s quest to find out what happened to the young woman brings to light a piece of Austria’s Nazi past and contemporary responsibility toward that past. The novel, like Rossmann’s protagonist, questions the possibility of finding out the truth, bringing criminals to justice, and thus restoring the possibility of ethical relationships against the background of such contemporary and historical crimes. Rossmann creates a detective fiction fit for these complex historical tensions: Freud, a pioneer of postmodern suspicion, becomes the muse of a new kind of detective work, one that revises and updates his relevance in contemporary Austrian society but ultimately eschews the radical epistemological skepticism of “metaphysical” ways of detecting.