The Wind Knows My Name

Content Warning: This section of the guide discusses mass violence, antisemitic discrimination, and hate crimes.

Two critical events that occur in the novel’s past, Kristallnacht and the El Mozote Massacre, each play a role in the development of the novel’s plotlines and themes. Kristallnacht, or Crystal Night, occurred in November 1938 across Nazi-occupied territories, including Austria. The novel describes the night’s events as they affect the Adlers in Vienna. Kristallnacht was an organized riot carried out by Nazi party members, Hitler Youth, and paramilitary organizations to vandalize, brutalize, and displace members of the Jewish communities. Storefronts and homes were broken into and destroyed, and people were attacked in the streets, as the novel describes. Although Kristallnacht was a single event, it followed more than a decade of growing oppression against Jews living in Germany. After World War I, which ended in 1918 with a crushing defeat for Germany, many Germans sought groups and organizations to blame for their subsequent economic downturn, and Jews became scapegoats. With the appointment of Adolf Hitler as Chancellor in 1933, tensions within Germany rose, and the German military began threatening and attacking neighboring countries. Austria thus came under German occupation, and, by 1938, when Kristallnacht occurred, many German people had either been indoctrinated into the Nazi party’s antisemitism or become complacent about the hate crimes perpetrated by Nazi groups.

More than 40 years after Kristallnacht, in December 1981, the massacre of El Mozote took place in the village of El Mozote, El Salvador, under somewhat similar circumstances. Just as Vienna wasn’t part of the broader Nazi party, El Mozote was known for its neutral stance regarding the conflicts between the right-wing government of El Salvador at the time and the left-wing guerilla groups that sought to overthrow that government. The Atlacatl Battalion, which attacked El Mozote, intended to scare the residents away from left-wing ideologies, essentially attempting to prevent more guerilla groups from forming. This battalion had been trained by the US Army, and their vested interest was in fighting guerillas, though El Mozote had no guerillas. The soldiers separated men and women, torturing and killing men after interrogating them, and sexually assaulting and killing women and children. Although the Salvadoran government denied the extent of the crimes that soldiers committed during the incident, both the El Mozote Massacre and Kristallnacht were among the most well-documented atrocities of their times, allowing a wider, global audience to learn of the oppression occurring in both Germany in the 1930s-1940s, and in El Salvador in the 1980s.