In one of the narrative strands of Eva Menasse’s novel “Dunkelblum”, a group of students traveled to the fictional village of Dunkelblum in Burgenland, Austria, in 1989 to rehabilitate the local Jewish cemetery. One night the cemetery is desecrated and the graves are smeared with anti-Semitic slogans. Mayor Koreny is certain: “A youthful folly, an open-minded class, something whose consequences could certainly not have been considered and not intended. Certainly not! The people here are not like that!”
They are. Because Dunkelblum is a cipher for the village of Rechnitz not far from the Hungarian border. Until shortly before the end of the Second World War, a castle was owned by Countess Margit Batthyány-Thyssen, heiress of the assets of the Thyssen Group. Before Palm Sunday 1945, local SS men and their collaborators celebrated a party as guests of the Countess. Part of this amusement was a massacre of around 200 Jewish forced laborers. After the mass murder, the perpetrators continued to celebrate.
A comprehensive investigation of this crime failed horribly: two witnesses were murdered, others remained silent forever. The two main people responsible went abroad with the help of the countess, who herself lived in Switzerland, where she died in 1989.
Apparently she wants to show that even today crime can quickly become an “open class”
Menasse tells of the defense against this past, the continued complicity through the “thunderous silence of the dark” and the poisoning of the present. Their focus is the social network, the mesh of which obscures what happened on the night of March 24, 1945. As for the event itself, she refuses to describe it.
In an interview, Menasse stated that she was not only concerned with the village of Rechnitz, but also with all the other places in the area where massacres had occurred at the same time. The compression in a single place serves the monumental task, To write “a paradigmatic human history as it happens again and again”.
At best, paradigmatic human histories offer lessons for the present. A first could be hidden behind the question of whether “paradigmatic human history” is a fitting description of a mass murder that was committed in a particular historical constellation. Apparently Menasse wants to show that the now, at least the Austrian now, is still determined by a way of dealing with the past, which makes crime the result of an “open class”. This is how the right-wing extremist FPÖ politician Heinz-Christian Strache spoke when the Ibiza video documented his willingness to corruption in 2019.
Decentralized storytelling has been tried and tested in American television series over the past few decades
This fact is known, and also that the elucidation of many details of the murder of European Jews has been systematically prevented. Since the 1990s, the Rechnitz case has been the subject of various documentaries, including a play by Elfriede Jelinek and a non-fiction book by Sacha Batthyany, Margit Batthyány-Thyssen’s great-nephew. No less common, especially in Austrian literature, are novels that deal with the idiocy of country life with an emphasis on speechlessness with regard to one’s own entanglement in National Socialism. They are a life theme of the Büchner Prize winner Josef Winkler, more recent copies come from Raphaela Edelbauer (“Das Fluid Land”, 2019) or Helena Adler (“Die Infante wears the head on the left”, 2020). So why do the whole thing all over again, and why in the form of a novel that indulges in pleasant Austrianism and digressions into the life of mostly bigoted villagers?
On a formal level, Menasse is primarily interested in decentralized narration, as has been tried and tested in the great American television series of the last two decades. The short chapters of the novel usually focus on a character whose entanglement in the history of the place becomes vivid through her relationships with her neighbors. We meet Eszter Lowetz’s son, who returns to Dunkelblum from the big city after the death of his mother, looks at the village with the eye of the urban ignoramus, but learns to see with the help of a bright young local. Lowetz’s rather happy exile is mirrored in that of the Jewish returnees Alexander Gellért, who, still under the name Goldblum, hid with Lowetz’s mother during the last days of the war. The hobby historian Rehberg (actually a travel agency owner), the cruel butcher Horka (involved in the massacre and then disappeared), his oily patron Dr. Alois Ferbenz, the Malnitz organic farmers, a Jewish shopkeeper by the name of Antal Grün and the former victim of bullying “patched Schurl”, who once wanted to break the silence of the town and was punished by his neighbors.
For the historical argument presented by the novel, it is important that the story takes place in 1989, the year in which the much-acclaimed “end of the story” did not set in, but at least the specifically Austrian perspective on the amalgamation did changed from geographical and collective psychological situation. Many borders with the Eastern bloc opened up, and for Menasse this is actually how the Second World War ended. The historical burden has to be carried by a lonely Saxon named Reinhold, who fled the GDR via Hungary and now ends up in the Nazi reprocessing plant in Dunkelblum through no fault of his own.
She tries to deal with her characters “collaboratively”, says Menasse
A plan drawn by Nikolaus Heidelbach shows on the flyer of the book that there is a plague column in the center. Like all streets in the village run towards this pillar, the lives of the characters always run towards the silent violence of the place during the Second World War. Sometimes the novel gets lost in the attention to detail, some motifs of the narrative are dissolved down to the last: If a steel helmet of unexplained origin appears on page 106, it has to appear again 107 pages later – and clearly point out everything that is waiting to be clarified . But a novel cannot fix history, and the more a plot tries to interweave all the frayed ends of reality, the less it appears as what Menasse is striving for: a representative view of complex relationships.
The narrator’s voice is profiled on the very first page: From the very top, she glimpses into the “dolls houses” of a “model town”. The Dunkelblumer can be happy that Menasse takes the perspective of the dear God, whose relationship to accomplices and know-how of the anti-Semitic war crimes is about the same as that of a puppeteer in a puppet theater. The magazine profile said Menasse, she objected to fictional characters “arrogantly prescribing from the knowledge of historical seminars that they shouldn’t have been Nazis at the time”. Rather, she tries to deal with these characters “collaboratively”.
In fact, while reading, it is uncomfortable to witness the denunciation of characters in a novel by authors. But it is no less uncomfortable to take part in Menasse’s collaboration. As much as one can welcome the fact that she is directed against historical self-righteousness and tries to draft complex résumés, it does not necessarily turn out to be complex characters. Because in each individual case their passing is more or less clear from the beginning, the characters learn more and more about the events of 1945, but do not experience any transformative gain in knowledge. With every turn of the storytelling, the story continues to roll out. This creates surface, but no psychological or historical depth.
In particular, the will to create a seductive linguistic surface through dialect or dialectically colored grammar urgently needs a counterbalance in the thoughts of the characters, which must consist of more than wanting to have nothing to do with war crimes out of opportunism. Otherwise, the collaborative approach that Menasse claims for himself remains primarily the need for a cozy get-together with those who, as she says, “were not all obdurate, mean and Nazis in their hearts”. And if they do, they quickly hops in the idyllic world of the novel.
Eva Menasse: Dark flower. Novel. Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 2021. 528 pages, 25 euros.
The novel was greeted as a “stroke of genius” shortly after its publication. However, it can hardly be viewed beyond the literary ethics that Menasse has explicitly pursued for several years. Their program is primarily directed against what they do 2018 in her speech at the opening of the International Literature Festival referred to in Berlin as the “pseudo-correct inquisition”. “I will never write gender equitably”, did it elsewhere, “I will always write unfairly, subjectively, stubbornly and according to my own style. Sexists and racists may continue to appear in my texts, otherwise the literary image of the world would be embellished.” In her speech she further explained that thirty years ago, especially in Austria, phrases such as “fell through the grate” were used without worrying about the infamous proximity to gas chambers and incinerators Eighties possible without any problems. ” This is how Menasse now proceeds in her novel, although the archive, which is less well-maintained and uses politically unconcerned language, is always an occasion to update it.
When working with sources in historical research, it is inevitable to use such language. The framework and the classification of the author make her distance clear. In literary texts, a narrator can use figurative speech, indirect speech and irony to mark her relationship to the portrayed. Eva Menasse does the same. The only question would be whether other forms than that of linguistic-psychological collaboration with the characters would not be more suitable for creating an unadorned picture of the world. Why should alienation be less able to do this, what about the means of the grotesque, the suspense?
Anyone who, like Menasse, gusto criticizes the under-complex modes of argumentation of both a right wing who is seen as a mere dumb and a left wing described as morally pissed off, is likely to have more confidence in his poetics than to process the so-called reality into a model railway landscape that is true to the original.