‘An Austrian Fate’: Trauma, Repression and War in Adrian Goiginger's Der Fuchs (2022)

ABSTRACT This article examines one of the highest‐grossing films in recent years in Austria, Der Fuchs (Adrian Goiginger, 2022), which focuses on the friendship of the protagonist, a Wehrmacht soldier, with an abandoned fox cub, but in the process elides more than four years of the soldier's wartime experience. The film narrative is based on the true story of the director's great‐grandfather, which has subsequently also been published as a biography by the director and Walter Müller ( Franz: Die Geschichte meines Urgroßvaters , 2024). Applying a methodology of close reading and drawing on Andrew Webber's psychoanalytically informed attentiveness to ellipses and gaps in the diegesis as symptoms of repression, I trace the blind spots and incomplete depiction of the protagonist's involvement in the Nazi war machine in Goiginger's film. Ultimately, it will be shown that the film's narrative gaps draw attention precisely to what they purport to hide, namely Austria's involvement in Nazi crimes and the country's ongoing troubled confrontation with this legacy.