She wrote it as a response to her discovery of the Mühlviertler Hasenjagd ("rabbit hunt of the Mühlviertel region"), a massacre on 2 February 1945 at the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp in Upper Austria.

In the Mühlviertler Hasenjagd, the civilian inhabitants of the Mühlviertel hunted down and killed almost 500 prisoners, including men, women and children, who escaped from Special Barracks Number 20.

February Shadows tells the story of this hunt, and its repercussions, through the eyes of a young Austrian girl named Hilde.

The following day, Mr. Funk, a friend of her late husband, appears at her door and pressures Hilde to join the Retiree's Union.

She remembers her daughter asking what party Anton had belonged to during the period of National Socialism; Hilde recalled him being part of the Hitler Youth.

Hilde is angry at her daughter for forcing her to relive her past experiences; her childhood was full of poverty, loneliness, and shame.

The dancers trigger another memory from her childhood: she sees her father kicking her mother on the dance floor and she runs out to help.

As they enter the village, Hilde recalls working hard in the fields to harvest the crop left behind by farmers to have enough food for their large family.

She remembers Fritzi, a member of her apartment-style household, bringing eggs and bacon on Sundays from the farmers and how she had felt proud carrying the basket into the kitchen.

Back in the present, Erika is stunned by the horrific story and deeply regrets forcing her mother to relive the event.

The novel closes with the image of the mother and daughter driving away from the Mühlviertel, with Hilde at the wheel and her foot on the gas pedal.

The entire narration is told through first person stream of consciousness, and the plot builds through the unearthing of new memories as they emerge in Hilde's mind.

The manner of the flashbacks and the inner comments Hilde makes about each informs the reader that she wishes to repress the horrific memories of 2 February 1945.

'"[4] Not only through omission does she feel regret for the massacre, but she holds herself personally responsible for the deaths of the escaped prisoner and of her favorite brother, Hannes.

[5] Critic Donna Hoffmeister describes Hilde's psychology as coerced, shaped by the patriarchal fascist belief system of the time.

This personal type of fascism aided in the rally of Austrian youth to support the Nazi cause during the Mühlviertler Hasenjagd.

In the end she chose Germany's — her family life was too weak and dysfunctional to stand up to the beliefs instilled by the state and the only morals she was aware of were state-taught.

Hilde resented the constant feeling of being excluded, thinking her husband and daughter were purposefully leaving her out of conversations because she was less educated than they were.

In German, the word refers to a specific type of shadow only cast in February due to the position of the earth and sun at that time of the year.

[14] Using the idea of shadows, a major theme that received considerable notice by the academic public was the literal liberation of the young female voice during the Hasenjagd and, consequently, during the war.

Through Reichart's book, the Austrian readers could feel they were making a positive and progressive movement in history by becoming aware of the tragedy of the war, and accepting their place and major faults in it.

The use of fragmented sentences allows the reader to understand Hilde's inability and refusal to connect one idea to another as she attempts to repress memories.

Reichart often places periods in the middle of sentences, creating sharp and abrupt stops to ideas, as if Hilde is trying to smother her own thoughts.

[18] The overall effect of Reichart's literary techniques indicate Hilde's estrangement of painful memories, her obsession with guilt and self-loathing, her inability to resolve anxiety, and the inadequacy of words to capture her feelings.

[21] Similar to Franz Kafka, Reichart employs alternating run-on and fragmented sentences to display the emotions of her character, and also creates a poignant plot by using ambiguous words which could potentially possess multiple meanings in the text.

[22] Like Ödön von Horváth, Reichart has the ability to uproot and publicly display difficult events through dramatized means.

[23] Her use of key themes and phrases which represent innate emotional processes can also be seen in the writings of one of her famous contemporaries, Thomas Bernhard.

Ariadne Press in Riverside, California, published the English version and Georg Eisler designed the cover art.

[25] The afterword of the novel was written by Christa Wolf, a famous German literary critic and writer known for such works as Der geteilte Himmel (Divided Heaven, 1963), Kindheitsmuster (Patterns of Childhood, 1976), and Was bleibt (What Remains, 1990).

At a time when Austria was starting to take on responsibility for its nonaction during World War II, February Shadows threw light on problems of the past.