It’s a Typical Small-Town Novel. Except for the Nazis

We cognize this benignant of novel. Reliable arsenic the seasons, its opening pages disclose a acquainted reality. A hovering, Godlike narrator looks down upon a European borderline municipality and begins to picture it. Since the caller is long—more than 4 100 and 50 pages—and its rubric is besides the town’s name, we expect a tiny satellite that volition beryllium intricately ample and tangled. The prose indispensable archetypal uncover the immovable furniture, past present the immovable inhabitants. This past place, doldrummed successful an eastbound country of Austria, has a mostly ruined castle, a cardinal edifice (the Tüffer), a mates of supermarkets, and a bid presumption that, 3 times successful the past century, has been demolished and rebuilt—each clip worse. Like galore European towns, it has a mazy aged quarter, with cobbled alleys and crowded streets, beside an uglier caller section. The inhabitants see a grocer, a question agent, a wide practitioner, a mayor. Then, successful August, 1989, 2 mysterious men arrive. The timepiece of crippled begins to tick.

But “Darkenbloom” (Scribe), a caller caller by the Austrian writer Eva Menasse—her second, aft “Vienna,” published 2 decades ago—is alien than this suggests. The strangeness begins with that Godlike narrator, who flicks a diabolical tail. This narrator has attitude. She tells us, for instance, that the castle (or astir of it: lone a operation remains) was pulled down aft the Second World War and that “someone indispensable person profited backmost then, due to the fact that idiosyncratic ever does.” The aged portion of Darkenbloom has winding streets and whitewashed houses; the newer fractional is “hideously functional, each alloy and silicone, practical, easy wiped clean, conscionable arsenic radical would person liked to beryllium themselves, backmost then, successful the play of reconstruction.” About this war: afterward, Darkenbloom’s inhabitants “just carried on, arsenic everyone did—the majority, anyway. As everyone did who wasn’t excluded from carrying on; due to the fact that they were dead, for example.” And these dead: similar galore Central European towns, Darkenbloom has a Jewish cemetery, neglected and overgrown. Why spell there? You wouldn’t rotation that cemetery without a sedate to visit, and for a stroll “the Catholic and Evangelical ones were bully enough.”

So the novel’s faux-innocent narrator is besides a knowing satirist, who sounds astatine times arsenic if she inactive lives successful Darkenbloom, and astatine different times arsenic if she got retired arsenic accelerated arsenic she could. Such existential doubleness is simply a basal explanation of irony, which wears 1 meaning arsenic its authoritative azygous portion hiding underneath it a meaning that mightiness beryllium its rebellious opposite. The Portuguese novelist José Saramago is simply a maestro of specified ironies, successful which a narrator’s bland clichés and platitudes bent successful the air, neither rather owned nor rather disavowed, waiting to beryllium ironized by the enactment of the novel. Nearer to Menasse’s home, the German novelist Walter Kempowski has utilized a wry, interrogative, omniscient dependable to analyse postwar German history, a constituent of presumption simultaneously adjacent and distant, possessive and judgmental. (Menasse’s sure-footed translator, Charlotte Collins, has besides translated Kempowski.) We mightiness telephone this an epic voice, good suited for claustral communities and agelong humanities perspectives—the effort of proximity, the fatigue of distance.

What mightiness a typical, sunstruck August midday consciousness similar successful Darkenbloom? Not a psyche connected the streets—everyone astatine enactment oregon astatine lunch, “eating dumplings and brains with eggs and thinking, arsenic they chewed, of thing astatine all.” One of the 2 arriving strangers, a antheral named Lowetz, who grew up here, has a sanction for this average, brain-eating yet brainless citizen: Homo robustus. (He longs for the quality of a much valiant resident, who mightiness merit the sanction Homo darkenbloomiensis.) Lowetz is returning aft the decease of his mother, who near a household location and belongings to sift through. Lowetz acceptable disconnected erstwhile young, settled successful Vienna, and dreads coming back. This provincial spot ever stokes his anger.

The 2nd stranger, different returnee, is much obscure. He takes a country astatine the Hotel Tüffer and ambles about, playing the portion of an elderly, genial tourist. No 1 catches his name. Almost 2 100 pages spell by earlier his past emerges. He’s Sascha Goldman, lad of a section schoolmaster, raised present until helium was eighteen, erstwhile a announcement appeared astatine the municipality hall, accompanied by a database of names: “By bid of the Gestapo you are hereby informed that you indispensable permission the municipality of Darkenbloom by 30 May 1938 astatine the latest. Sign beneath to corroborate that you person noted these instructions.” Sascha and his begetter were connected the list. Sascha, who present goes by a antithetic sanction and lives successful Boston, whitethorn person returned to hunt for his father’s remains; helium is besides searching for grounds of a wide grave.

Scores of European towns carnivore breached postwar histories, and successful 1989 that past was inactive felt arsenic a palpable sediment. From clip to time, fields and forests had yielded up unexploded ordnance, adjacent the nameless dead. Against this shadowed backdrop, definite dubious citizens preferred to shade their ain histories. But however bash you unrecorded successful a municipality steeped successful near-universal amnesia, wherever astir everyone chews dumplings and brains, rather deliberately reasoning of “nothing astatine all”? Menasse’s caller has, arsenic 1 of its epigraphs, a enactment from Robert Musil: “Historical is that which 1 would not bash oneself.” The full publication mightiness unfold nether that motto. By this measure, Darkenbloom teems with willfully unhistorical souls who, erstwhile pressed to callback their warfare years, negociate to person been elsewhere: past was what idiosyncratic other was doing.

Homo robustus is outwardly placid but nervously awaits the infinitesimal erstwhile past mightiness request its due—as it does present and then, particularly successful novels similar this one. Patiently, sardonically, Menasse shifts betwixt contiguous and past, teasing retired the long, obscured threads of her characters’ lives from her immense tapestry. Take Zierbusch, a section designer and a erstwhile Hitler Youth member, who abetted a wide execution successful the wood arsenic the warfare closed, yet escaped charges. “Even now,” we’re told, “if the doorbell rang precocious astatine nighttime oregon aboriginal successful the morning, helium was acrophobic that, each these years later, they had travel to get him.”

Or instrumentality Resi Reschen, apprenticed astatine fourteen to the Hotel Tüffer, wherever she caught the owners’ attraction and thrived arsenic an employee. Then the warfare hit, and “soon the Tüffers were gone, young and old, with their apparel and hats and coats and boots,” ne'er to return. (The Tüffers were a Jewish family.) Resi falls successful with the close crowd, marries an antisemite, and yet takes implicit moving the edifice herself, ne'er letting connected “how overmuch she feared the Tüffers’ return.”

In the summertime of 1989, the municipality is successful an uproar—the 2 returnees are poking around, but the existent occupation is that a radical of long-haired students has arrived from Vienna, authorized to reconstruct the Jewish cemetery. Graves volition beryllium righted, brambles cleared. The aged gates basal open, letting townsfolk drift in. All this excavation unnerves the locals. The politician is powerless—the order’s from above, the wealth from elsewhere. So it’s free, astatine least: “No, it’s not costing america anything. Yes, of course, it’s existent that the fiftieth day twelvemonth is yet over. But our chancellor besides said that we shouldn’t retrieve Austria’s annexation lone connected the memorial time itself; that remembrance should beryllium thing that endures. The cardinal said so, too. Or was it adjacent the president?” Menasse lets these words basal without comment; readers volition enactment for themselves however speech of Jewish remembrance glides into Austrian remembrance—and self-pity. Elsewhere successful the caller she mentions that Austria’s President successful 1989 was Kurt Waldheim, the slippery ex-Nazi whose wartime relation successful Yugoslav and Greek atrocities had surfaced 4 years earlier.

Darkenbloom has its ain Waldheim problem. At the war’s end, “wagonloads of half-starved, ragged creatures” rolled successful from Budapest to physique the South-East Wall, meant to beryllium the past large defence against a righteously vengeful, breathingly adjacent Red Army. (Two of these workers were Sascha and his father.) In fact, Soviet tanks soon crushed the wall, and townspeople pilfered the workers’ scant rations. One nighttime arsenic the warfare guttered out, portion a chaotic enactment was held astatine the Darkenbloom castle, the starving workers were taken into the woods and changeable by S.S. soldiers. Local Hitler Youth teens drove them to the tract and dug the graves. (Zierbusch was among them.) The students’ enactment successful the Jewish cemetery risks rousing this grim past, and astir Darkenbloom residents privation nary portion of specified investigations. They’d alternatively deliberation of nothing.

Menasse’s fictional Darkenbloom is based connected Rechnitz, a existent colony successful southeastern Austria adjacent the Hungarian border. In March, 1945, arsenic the warfare staggered to a close, immoderate 2 100 Hungarian Jewish forced laborers were executed adjacent Rechnitz. Like the novel’s victims, they’d toiled connected the South-East Wall. In 2007, the British writer David Litchfield wrote successful the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung that guests astatine a shot astatine Schloss Rechnitz were invited to sprout Jews for sport—a assertion disputed by historians, who bash not quality that the massacre took place. With the Red Army closing in, specified gatherings, expressions of a hopeless gaiety, a fin d’une époque efflorescence, weren’t rare. Nor were executions of prisoners and forced laborers, marched to a authorities of collapse. These killings doubled arsenic screen for warfare crimes and a brutal shrug: what other to bash with those formed arsenic quality refuse? The Austrian Nobel laureate Elfriede Jelinek wrote a play successful 2008 astir the event, “Rechnitz: The Exterminating Angel.” In her acknowledgments, Menasse informs america that she borrowed sentences from Martin Pollack’s “Kontaminierte Landschaften” (“Tainted Landscapes”), a publication partially astir the Rechnitz horror.

Menasse hews to the wide humanities frame, but her caller justifies itself, arsenic novels must, by doing what lone fabrication can. One could reason that “Darkenbloom” is excessively prosecutorial, and that nary of Menasse’s characters particularly astonishment the reader. Greed, avarice, racism, and plain quality weakness harvest up close wherever you’d expect, successful predictable doses. It’s nary daze that provincial Austrians of 1989—Kurt Waldheim’s subjects, truthful to speak—would strategize successful each imaginable mode to hide the shameful past or, failing that, dilute idiosyncratic guilt successful corporate motivation haggling.

But it is Menasse’s style—which is to say, the mode she uses her narrator—that makes the lawsuit for her heavy and archetypal reimagining of history. This teasing, searching, playful, scathing voice, fractional wrong the assemblage and fractional extracurricular it, sometimes arsenic bland arsenic crockery and different times arsenic crisp arsenic death, recounts past arsenic nary liable historiographer could. The novel’s scornful powerfulness is bound up with the mode it enacts and embodies its funny push-pull of recognition and recoil, affiliation and disgust. Yet this doesn’t rather seizure the book’s elusive tone, since the narrator’s recognition with Darkenbloom is truthful highly ironized, portion her recoil from Darkenbloom is astatine the aforesaid clip truthful knowing, astir world-weary. Her caller whitethorn beryllium acceptable successful 1989, but it’s precise overmuch a substance of the twenty-first century, a papers of cynical hindsight. This cynicism, though bleakly unsparing, saves the enactment from sentimentality oregon the unearned melodrama of inherited Holocaust legend. Instead, 1 has the consciousness of a benignant of irritated prosaicism connected behalf of the author, arsenic if Menasse, successful a distinguished Austrian tradition, were angrily quarrelling with her ain countryfolk. As a result, contempt its dense history, “Darkenbloom” doesn’t work similar immoderate overdetermined humanities “Nazi novel”; it reads similar a satirical, intemperate, gossipy small-town novel, into which Nazi past conscionable happens to person dropped.

If I were to prime 1 of Menasse’s galore threads arsenic an example, it mightiness beryllium the tale—told successful a brief, cleanable chapter—of however the town’s prewar physician, Dr. Bernstein, was edged retired of Darkenbloom. In 1938, 2 antisemitic thugs showed up astatine Bernstein’s location with the predictable ultimatum: clip to go. These “two crooks” had been Bernstein’s patients since they were kids. With nary Gentile doc yet successful place, Bernstein packs his bags and instruments and takes Room 22 astatine the Hotel Tüffer. For 10 weeks, helium continues to work—peering down throats, tapping knees, dosing digitalis for creaky hearts. Meanwhile, Darkenbloom, successful a hasty and mistaken boast, hoists achromatic flags to advertise that it is Jew-free—“beating its rival, the much bourgeois Kirschenstein, by a fewer hours,” our sly narrator remarks. Yet the townsfolk alternatively similar seeing their aged doc successful his caller digs: “As acold arsenic galore Darkenbloomers were concerned, it could each conscionable person stayed that way; they were utilized to and trusted him, and it adjacent felt alternatively elegant, going to sojourn the doc astatine the hotel.” ♦