Already on the first page it starts: The politician who is described there, who knows how to appear “close to the people at a rally, charming at a gala dinner and cosmopolitan in front of company board members”, is that Jörg Haider? Parallels between the politician who brought about the rise of the FPÖ in the 1980s and is considered a pioneer of right-wing populism in Europe and the character Ulli Popp in the novel are evident. But facets of Donald Trump, Viktor Orbán and Matteo Salvini also shine through. The main character, August Becker, also seems to be a literary conglomerate made up of several well-known press photographers. Similarities to illustrious PR consultants can be seen in the figure of Flo Maus, the Chancellor’s employee.
In the new novel by Doron Rabinovici there are frequent references to current politics and the media as well as borrowings from real people. That is what makes this book so appealing, the allusions to which readers who are familiar with developments in Austria will certainly be able to recognize and decipher more clearly than others. It is also about “government contracts and shares in local publicly owned companies” that are promised to an unscrupulous businessman who obviously comes from Russia – references to the Ibiza affair are obvious. A new online tabloid medium also plays a role – one was recently founded in Austria.
But Rabinovici is not just about Austria. His novel is more than the literary compression of daily politics in his home country. The historian and publicist aims at the fundamental level. This novel is about the power of images, about the relationship between politics and the media. That’s why the title “The Attitude” is aptly ambiguous, because it not only aims at the photographer’s work, but also at his attitude. Rabinovici knows how to embed the big issues of populism and freedom of the press in an action that is very much anchored in the here and now. He shows the dangers, the tipping points in public and private discourse. Ultimately, it is about tolerance and enlightenment as well as the continued existence of liberal democracy.
Doron Rabinovici: The setting. Novel. Suhrkamp Verlag, Berlin 2022,224 pages, 24 euros.
The character Popp is a rhetorically adept, authoritarian politician who sets out to transform mood into voices, to channel dissatisfaction into a protest movement. “Our movement is an uprising of the common people.” He doesn’t need a program, it’s enough to be against “those up there,” against the evil “elites” and the “lying press,” which is attacked: “We only say what the mainstream doesn’t dare to talk about.” Here, what is being discussed about measures against the Corona measures is negotiated in literary form.
The social media and chat messages play a big role, which also add to the dynamics of the plot. This fast-paced, highly political novel fits the age of Instagram. The author deals with the effect of images in the media – in the traditional ones and those that are described as social.
The central point is a photo that Becker takes of Popp, which supposedly disfigures the politician when he taps the beer: “His face slipped, his eyes wide open, his eyes stared, his mouth twisted with effort,” is how photographer Becker describes his Admission. For him, the politician looks “like a murderer,” “like a colossus, a monster, a brute.” His client, the magazine Forum, does not want to print the picture for fear that the motif will be perceived as interference in the final phase of the election campaign.
A little more subtlety and linguistic sophistication would have done the novel good
Becker finally sells it to Popp – convinced that he can’t do anything with this picture, which shows him in this shot. But the populist uses it as a motif for his poster campaign, true to the motto: attract attention at all costs. The photographer is branded a traitor in the left-liberal scene. A shitstorm broke out on social media. Becker is accused of being “the Leni Riefenstahl of our time”.
Then the novel takes rapid turns again, the pace of the action pulls along. But at the same time it is becoming increasingly clear that many depictions are too clichéd and the dialogues are too simplistic, too trying and too constructed: the debates between August Becker and his son, which are supposed to be typical generational dialogues, or the description and reception of foreigners or Austrians with a migration background. And then a love story.
A little more subtlety and linguistic sophistication would have done the novel good, because the message is more than clear from the first page. Rabinovici has presented a snappy snapshot of the present that exposes political mechanisms in literary form.