László Krasznahorkai, Herscht 07769 (Florian Herscht’s Bach
Novel), translated from the Hungarian by Ottilie Mulzet, New Directions,
2024, 406 pp. (originally published in Budapest, 2021)
Introduction
Here is a pertinent citation from Dennis Overbye (NY
Times, 12/22/2024): “Everything that scientists have learned tells us that
the universe is dynamic, and so is our knowledge of it. Nothing lasts forever,
not even forever itself. Stars are born and they die, their ashes congeal in
new generations of flash and crash. And so the show goes, until the last,
biggest black hole gasps its last puff of subatomic vapor into the void.
“We don’t know what wonders await discovery back in the
first nanosecond of time or in the yawning eons yet ahead. We don’t know why
there is something instead of nothing at all. Or why God plays dice, as
Einstein put it as he mulled the randomness implicit in quantum mechanics, the
house rules of the subatomic realm.”
This book—coming late in the career of the world-renowned
Krasznahorkai—treats the approaching End of the World, featuring a worldwide
malaise that descends upon the earth in the year 2017 or thereabouts. Or, more
likely, the malaise has always been around, but we humans often prefer to
ignore the starkest truths. Lately, however, the state of the universe has been
expressing itself in ever more peremptory tones: look at me! The setting of the
novel is Thuringia, East Germany, and the action describes how everyday
denizens of a small town react to what shenanigans the universe has been up to
lately.
In the town of Kana, East Germany, lives our hero, Florian
Herscht, a naïve young man—gigantic in size and muscle power but gentle in
nature. As the novel opens, Florian, who appears to be somewhere on the autism spectrum,
has begun mulling over that same randomness implicit in quantum mechanics. Terrified
by the implications that physics presents, he sees a horrible calamity in the
offing, “a staggering presence, in his view, threatening the existence of the
country, indeed all of humanity.” As our narrative begins, Florian is writing
his first letter to Angela Merkel, Chancellor of the Federal Republic of
Germany. He reasons that not only is she percipient and politically savvy, but
she has also been trained as a physicist. She can deal with the crisis that
physics is all wrapped up in, and can bring the issue to the attention of the
Security Council at the United Nations.
The title of the novel, Herscht 07769 is taken from
the return address (last name and postal code) that Florian puts on his
envelopes. Only on p. 327 do we learn his full address: Ernst-Thälmann-Strasse
38, 07769 Kana. A check on the internet reveals that the street is named after the
German politician and leader of the Communist Party of Germany from 1925 to
1933. Arrested by the Gestapo, Thälmann was held in solitary confinement
for eleven years. On the personal orders of Hitler he was executed (shot) at
Buchenwald in 1944.
Part of the developing plot involves Florian’s continuous writing
of letters to Angela Merkel, to which, of course, he receives no reply. Early
on in the novel he undertakes a trip to Berlin, hoping to meet the Chancellor
in person, but this all ends in frustration. Time moves fast in the novel. By
p. 30 a year has passed since Florian sent his first letter to Angela Merkel,
and by p. 161 it has been almost two years since that first letter and almost a
year since the disappearance of his friend and mentor, the physics teacher Köhler
(more on him later).
At one point the naïve Florian thinks that Merkel might come
to him in Kana, arriving by train. He makes a sign with her name on it, goes to
meet the trains arriving from Jena, holds up his sign as the passengers
disembark. But Angela is never among them. This gives rise to a good deal of
mirth amongst the citizens of Kana, almost all of whom love the gullible and
childlike Florian.
An orphan attending a vocational school in a different town,
preparing for a career as a baker, Florian is initially brought to Kana by a
man described only as “the Boss.” This man becomes a kind of overbearing father
figure to him, commanding his every movement and employing him in his own
business, which involves the cleaning of graffiti from buildings. The name of
his company, ALLES WIRD REIN (All Will Be Clean), is a phrase that—expanded
from its literal meaning—has sinister implications: ethnic cleansing. For the Jew-hating
Boss is also the leader of a local neo-Nazi cell, and a major theme of the
novel involves the rise of right-wing politics in what was once a separate
country, East Germany.
A Novel Firmly Based
on German Realities
Herscht 07769 is a German novel, set in Germany and
populated entirely by German characters. Here we have the rather unusual
situation in which a writer from a different country and working in a different
language (Hungarian) convincingly and cogently presents personages and scenes
from a foreign setting. I can only presume that Krasznahorkai (hereinafter
abbreviated L.K.) spent considerable time researching his book in Thuringia. I
also presume that he speaks German well. The book is peppered with German words
and place names. Sometimes the translator leaves the original German word,
which, I suppose, is what L.K. did in his Hungarian original. Examples: Pfarramt
(the word for a parish office), Schloss (palace), Rosengarten
(rose garden). The names of characters are sometimes actual German words, e.g.,
Pförtner
(porter, who, by way of a joke, works as an actual porter, or gatekeeper, at
the Porcelain Factory).
The book is rife with facts relevant to the life of a German
citizen. Just one example, of many: Florian, along with a good many other
citizens of Kana, receives welfare checks known as “the Hartz IV benefits.”
Everything about the specifics of Florian’s journey to Berlin is related in
detail. He waits beside the dilapidated train station in Kana for more than an
hour “before the arrival of the earliest possible train from Orlamūnde.”
While waiting he is “worried he would end of missing the connection at Jena-Göschwitz
or in Halle.” These appear to be real connections in real places. L.K. as a
writer of fiction, of course, has the option of making up his facts, but
throughout this novel he anchors everything in reality. He does, of course,
deal with fictional characters, but I would not be surprised to learn that many
of them have prototypes in the town where he researched his book.
There is no town named Kana, described in the novel as
“nineteen miles from Jena,” but there is the town of Kahla, which seems to fit
almost exactly into the geography of the book. Look online, where you will see
Kahla described as located “on the river Saale, fourteen kilometers south of
Jena.” Many geographical features described in the book as associated with Kana
are, in fact, typical of Kahla. E.g. (1) The Salle; one of Florian’s favorite
places is on a bench, where he can watch the Saale River flow by. This is where
he ends up sitting in his final appearance in the book. (2) The Dohlenstein, a
mountain on the right bank of the Saale River; and the Leuchtenburg Castle that
towers above it. I repeat, apart from Kana, all other place names in the novel appear
to be real, and I suspect that all the names of the streets in Kana are actual
names of streets in Kahla. I checked online for Ernst-Thälmann-Strasse, the street
where Florian lives in Kana, and, sure enough, there is such a street in Kahla;
its postal code, 07768, is off one numeral from Florian’s.
Neo-Nazis in
Thuringia
Apparently much chagrined by the proliferation of right-wing
politics throughout Europe—in his home country of Hungary as well—L.K. presents
a novel in which the presence of neo-Nazis is a major theme. In fact, much of
the novel’s action revolves around the activities of the neo-Nazi cell led by
“the Boss” in Kana. These days Thuringia is known to be a hotbed of right-wing
activity. For the first time since WWII a far-right party, Alternative fūr
Deutschland, has been garnering large electoral support, not only in Thuringia,
but also in other parts of what was once East Germany, such as Saxony. Never
mentioned by name in L.K.’s novel, the AfD party has come out vehemently opposed
to Merkel’s opening of the borders (in 2015) to a million refugees from Syria,
Afghanistan, and other nations. The party’s popular chairman in Thuringia, Björn
Höcke,
has publicly denigrated the Holocaust memorial in Berlin, calling Germans “the
only people in the world who stuck up a monument of shame in the heart of their
capital.” This white-nationalist party calls for the “remigration” of refugees,
especially Muslims, supports the policies of Putin in Russia, and at times has
embraced antisemitism. Our disgraceful new American Vice President, Vance, has
recently come out in support of this party.
At various points in his novel L.K. alludes to the
activities of far-right groups in Thuringia. He mentions “how the Thuringia
Heimatschutz came to an end, what happened in Leuchtenburg and the Timo [sic,
should be Tino] Brandt case, what happened to the Hate-brothers, or
Wolfleben or Madley.” Tino Brandt, a neo-Nazi from Thuringia, became, at age
nineteen, an informant for Germany’s domestic intelligence service. From 1994
to 2001 he went on working as informant but used the money he was paid to
support neo-Nazi groups. L.K. skips over details of one of the most notorious
of scandals in Thuringia, that of the National Socialist Underground murders—the
Heimatschutz alluded to above—involving a crime spree by three persons, two
young men and one young woman, lasting from 2000 to 2007, in which eight ethnic
Turks and one Greek were killed. I take much of my information above from a
book review by Joshua Hammer: “Making Germany Hate Again,” in NYRB, Dec.
19, 2024.
The Bach theme appears early on, when the Bachhaus, a museum
in Eisenach, is desecrated by graffiti: the painting of a wolf head and the
word WE. The Boss is called to clean up the graffiti, and he takes with him his
assistant Florian to do the job. Here we learn a rather improbable fact about
the Boss: he is a lover of classical music, at least of Bach, whom he considers
“an empyrean presence sent from heaven, a prophet, a saint who . . . inscribed
into every single note the essence of the German spirit.” Even more improbably,
the Boss has founded a symphony orchestra in Kana, made up largely of amateur
musicians, and he is its unofficial conductor, rehearsing the group every
Saturday. He forces this cowed group to play Bach’s music, but they never get
it right. First violinist is Herr Feldmann, retired German and Latin teacher, who
would really prefer playing pop music, as would most of the other members of
the orchestra. When he learns of Florian’s obsession with quantum physics, the
Boss slaps him around a bit (an everyday occurrence) and tells him that “a real
Thuringian German gets involved with Bach and not with the universe.” Later in
the book Florian will, indeed, get involved with Bach.
Among Jewish characters in the book are Herr Feldmann, Herr
Ringer, and Herr Köhler. Ringer is a formidable presence, who fulminates
against the Nazis in Thuringia and in his home town Kana. The Boss fears him
and has plans to blow up his auto repair shop at some convenient time in the
future. Ringer blames the Nazis—and, in particular, the Boss—for the graffiti
attacks on Bach memorial sites. This is ironic, in light of the fact that the
Boss is incensed over the attacks, getting all the members of his cell involved
in efforts to catch the perpetrators. We do not learn much else about the
activities of the neo-Nazi cell, at least not until they attack a local gas
station and kill the husband and wife team from Brazil who work there (Rosario
and Nadir). This comes after one of the Nazis, Jūrgen, attempts to rape the
beautiful Nadir and is beaten up and detained by her husband. In an act of
revenge for Jürgen, who is arrested, the neo-Nazis blow up the station.
Later we are presented with a chilling scene, in which the only woman neo-Nazi,
Karin, recalls how her cell members once beat and tortured six children whom
they suspected of spray-painting graffiti. This is the only explicit example in
the book of the group’s brutality. The children, so it turns out, were
innocent.
Small Town Living
The most impressive thing about L.K.’s novel is his ability
to take us into a small town in Germany and show us the ordinary people living
there. The book has a multitude of characters, all German, and they pop up
sometimes in a paragraph that started out devoted to someone or something
entirely different. Some of them are left undeveloped, but a good many others
take on more and more flesh as they work their way through the book, ending up
as rounded, extremely well delineated, believable personages.
The first of these townspeople introduced are Jessica and
her husband Herr Volkenant, who run the local post office. They post Florian’s
letters to Angela Merkel, but advise him against writing them. Everyone else in
Kana—practically all of whom know and like the man-child Florian—has the same
advice for him. Midway through the novel (p. 210-11), when Florian brings one
more of his letters to the P.O., we have one of L.K.’s long looping sentences
describing the Volkenants at work, and, in the process, making living rounded
human beings of them, and, eventually, of others:
“he stood in front of the post office right at opening time,
and he was fairly anxious as to whether Jessica would have the right size of
envelope for his letter, but there was no point in being nervous because
Jessica did have it, we have everything here, she smiled at him proudly, and
once again when Florian handed her the envelope, she didn’t look at the address
but only tossed it onto the scale and said, one euro and fifty cents, then she
took the euro and fifty cents and said: it’s good to see you again, and already
she was calling the next person to the counter, because just then there were a
lot of people, the door could hardly be closed even though it was already
fairly cold outside, too cold for the door to stay open, so the line snaked off
to the left, Volkenant also came out to organize the queue, because this is a
post office, please don’t stand around in one big jumble, he said, stand a
little closer together and right behind one another, well, that’s it now, he
praised the waiting people who obediently formed a neater line, and he went
back to his office while Jessica continued to diligently stamp letters, she
counted change and issued receipts and took money or credit cards, I don’t know
what came over them, she looked at her husband uncomprehendingly when they were
finally able to put out the lunch break sign, and they went up to their
apartment for lunch, no holiday, nothing, and they start trooping in here like
an army, I’m telling you this seriously—she took a sandwich from the paper bag
and gave it to her husband, because they always had their sandwiches delivered
for lunch . . . old auntie Ingrid brought the sandwiches and the coffee for
them, auntie Ingrid who lived not too far away on Margarethenstrasse near the
Demokratieladen; [translates as “democracy shop,” whatever that is; note the
full stop here, URB] once, when the post office was being relocated to a new
building, and overhearing the Volkenants talking about how short their lunch
break was, auntie Ingrid had suggested, namely, she stepped forward with the
idea, that since she had nothing to do and was bored to death, she’d be more
than happy to bring whatever they wanted for lunch from the Hubert Bakery
downstairs, and that’s what happened, they all approved the idea, and ever since
then auntie Ingrid was like a clock to them, because, as Jessica put it, auntie
Ingrid was always on time, the clock didn’t strike noon above their heads, but
instead auntie Ingrid set the clock moving every noon, because she was the one
who, exactly at twelve noon, pressed down the door handle of the post office,
at first carefully unpacking the two plastic cups of coffee, then putting the
plastic bag on the counter, and taking out the two sandwiches, and all she
would say was Mahlzeit [enjoy your meal], and then she was gone, because
she knew there was no time for chitchat, although that realization filled her
with regret, because she could talk about something every day, there was always
something going on she wished to converse about, and, well, she couldn’t always
be bothering Frau Ringer in the library, although it would have been good to
talk to her, especially now with these explosions on her mind just like they
were on everyone’s, because that’s all you hear about nowadays, she told Frau
Ringer, when she had her library day, you hear about this and that, about how
they [the neo-Nazis] have their nest here in Kana, and all of our Thuringia is
full of potential terrists, she always said ‘potential terrists,’ and no one
ever corrected her, everyone always let auntie Ingrid say whatever she had to
say, for everyone knew how hard the solitude was for her to bear, my husband
died, she would swoop down on this or that unsuspecting tourist when they asked
her for directions, the poor thing has been gone for seventeen years now, ever
since then I’ve been on my own, and with these legs of mine” . . . etc., etc., etc.
I cite this passage at length as a typical example of L.K.’s
narrative method, by way of which characters take on their fleshed-out
existence and become real to us. So real that we feel for them when fate steps
in—as so happens with the Volkenants and the Ringers, and many others late in
the book—to devastate their carefully cultivated ordinary, smalltown life. For
L.K. emphasizes again and again that nearly all the denizens of the town of Kana
want nothing more than to live out uneventful lives in calm and contentment,
but life’s path is riddled with huge pits into which we fall and wolves howling
outside our windows.
Such as well are Ilona and her husband, who run a buffet,
the Grillhäusel,
“Ilona was a saint in the eyes of the regulars, as soon as she spoke her wish
was fulfilled, Ilona was the star here, Hoffmann frequently said it good and
loud so that the person he was speaking about would also hear him, even if the
electricity were shut off, we’d still be able to see in her shining light, at
which everyone raised their glasses and they drank to her, they drank to Ilona,
they drank to this island of peace that was truly the only light in their
lives, and although they referred to Ilona as their queen, who of course did
not think that way at all, she was aware her customers loved the Grillhäusel,
but it was enough for her to know that her customers were satisfied, that was
her goal, the business went on, it didn’t bring in a lot, but it was enough to
survive in this great unemployment when she had arrived here all the way from
Transylvania to get married; . . .” Late in the book L.K. disposes of Ilona and
her husband in an almost offhand manner, not even devoting a separate scene to
their murder by the Nazi Karin. Our Krasznahorkai is not one to coddle his
characters.
First introduced as a nice librarian who is kind to Florian,
Frau Ringer is another character who is developed throughout the whole 400
pages of the book. She and her husband are featured in an episode when, while
out picnicking at Leuchtenburg Castle, they are attacked by a wolf, thereby
throwing the whole town into a frenzy. From this point on things go downhill
for both of the Ringers, who deserve a better fate than the one they are handed
near the end of the action. Immediately following this wolf attack comes more
dire news to exacerbate the already frazzled nerves of Kana: the Covid pandemic
of 2020. The leitmotif of the wolf—the return of wild wolves to Germany after
150 years of near extinction—runs throughout the novel.
As for auntie Ingrid, the lonely old lady who helps out the
Volkenants with their lunch, and who stops strangers and locals on the
street—including the ever kind and gentle Florian—to tell them her troubles,
she makes her first appearance on p. 65. There she is depicted in a discussion
with Frau Ringer at the library, on the topic of pork chops with potatoes,
topped off by a special brown sauce, much favored by Herr Ringer. Then she,
auntie Ingrid, does not show up again until the passage I’ve just cited (p.
210-12). Later on she is shown as blissfully ignorant of the anxiety pervading
the town, over the Covid pandemic, and the rumors about wolf attacks, mysterious
explosions, the desecration of Bach sites by graffiti, and the activities of
the local Nazis. For lack of anything else to do, auntie Ingrid decides to
start a movement in Kana, to see who can grow the best chrysanthemums: The
Auntie Ingrid Chrysanthemum Competition. Then, a hundred pages on into the
novel, auntie Ingrid shows up for the last time, discussing with the Volkenants
the impending retirement of Chancellor Merkel, opining that after how hard she
has worked for the Germans, Angela Merkel deserves some peaceful years, and
“she held her hands apart.” This gesture of weary relinquishment—the spreading
of one’s hands palms upward—appears over and over throughout Herscht 07769,
as if all of the characters were constantly repeating, “Well, what are you
going to do?” One page after expressing her sympathy for the retiring Merkel,
auntie Ingrid goes home, sits down in her favorite rocking chair, and rocks
herself off into the next world. We the readers love her by this point, feel
for her, and are sorry to see her go.
Another central character is Adrian Köhler, a local man much
respected by his fellow residents of Kana. Now in retirement from his job as
teacher of physics, he runs his own amateur weather station. He also offers an
evening class on quantum physics in an adult education program. He befriends
the main character Florian, who has attended his night class repeatedly. Köhler
tries to assure him that particle physics does not guarantee—as Florian has
surmised—the approaching end on all life on earth. The subplot revolving around
A.K. also includes a friend of his, Dr. Tietz, a psychiatrist who lives in the neighboring
town of Eisenberg. At one point A.K. suddenly disappears from his home, only to
reappear much later in the book. Where has he been and what has he been doing
for over a year? Florian assumes that he has been spirited away to the U.N. in
New York, where he works closely with those experts striving to avert the grand
apocalypse. No other explanation for his disappearance is offered, and this is
one of several events in the novel that are never clarified. L.K. likes to
leave some of his conundrums undisclosed and hazy.
Two neighbors of Köhler, Frau Burgmūller
and Frau Schneider are ladies who spend most of their time “peeking out the
window to see if something was going on out there.” They compete with one
another to establish who is privy to the best local gossip and provide a comic
backstory to all the action. They take great interest in the disappearance of
their neighbor, and rejoice in his return. But when A.K. begins going senile,
his friend Tietz takes him in, moves him to Eisenberg, and they are nonplussed
at this turn of events. Like most of the other townspeople who love placid Florian,
these two turn against him in the second half of the book, when he becomes a
fugitive from justice. Frau Burgmūller informs detectives from Erfurt
that Florian is a shady character and a disgrace to Kana.
A plethora of characters populate the pages of the novel,
and the author has a special facility for describing smalltown people and life.
Sometimes it appears that he has an encyclopedic knowledge of this town in
Thuringia, throwing in details that only local residents could know. The
neo-Nazi sect led by the Boss is depicted repeatedly drinking beer together. At
one point they brag on how many different beer brands are brewed in Thuringia
(409), and L.K. provides the brand names of the most popular beers. Multitudes
of details about the characters help bring them alive. Herr Köhler
loves tomatoes on the vine. Jessica and her husband Volkenant get along well,
but she can’t stand the way he throws his dirty socks all over the place. We
are frequently treated to long descriptions of what people like to eat. Here is
Dr. Tietz, puzzled and chagrined over the disappearance of his best friend Köhler:
“I’m not hungry, the doctor pushed the plate away, listless,
even though it was his favorite meal, fried pork liver with potatoes, parsley,
and beetroot, he really liked this, although he kept this a secret from his
guests, because then the first course was always Zwiebeltiegel or something
like that, as the season permitted, then for the main course there would be
Tote Oma or Frikadelle, that kind of thing, or, if they were receiving more
distinguished guests, such as the pharmacist from Erfurt or the head
psychiatrist of the Helios Clinic, then they served oysters, shrimp cocktail,
or flounder roasted with vegetables, but never pork liver, only he could get
that, and only when it was the two of them alone, and this, too, was infrequent
because his wife looked after his health and allowed him to have pork liver
once every two weeks, sometimes once every three weeks, but no more than that:
there was a meat day, followed by three fish days, then a pasta day, well, and
then sometimes his favorite, fried pork liver garnished with a bit of ground
pepper, or—his secret favorite—boiled knuckle of pork with a glass of beer,
well, this he got really only very infrequently, maybe once every two months,
because his wife said: at your age, a person needs to look after his health,
and since you’re not willing to do so, I’ll tell you what to eat and when,
because if it were up to you, you’d eat meat every day and more meat, and maybe
some liver too, and it doesn’t work that way, my dear—unfortunately, the doctor
added to himself—however, his wife continued, . . .” [here we grade off into
more discussion about what could have happened to their friend Adrian (Köhler);
this continues for half a page more, but then we’re back into the issue of the
edibles]:
“but he had no appetite, the police interrogation in his
office had set his nerves on edge so much, but still liver was liver, and the
fragrance of the freshly ground pepper overcame the doctor’s resistance while
his wife just kept on talking, because she kept on going on about Adrian this
and Adrian that, and Adrian would show up . . . and he, Dr. Tietz, should calm
down already, and eat his lunch properly while the doctor gulped down one bite
after the other, the meal was tasting better and better, so that at the end he
asked for a small second helping, and his wife, in view of the extraordinary
circumstances, gave him a second helping, because the food would get cold if he
didn’t eat it, she had eaten her fill, so she gave him everything left in the
pot, and [note the abrupt transition to a completely different character in the
same sentence, typical of the style of the whole narrative, URB] otherwise the
Boss too was very fond of pork liver, even if he cooked pork liver very rarely
himself, he usually pan-fried it, or course for that you had to get up early,
because those louse-ridden hags [now we get the Boss’s words, not, however, in
quotations, since L.K. eschews quotation marks] were already standing there
when the shop opened, he growled at Florian sometimes, standing around in front
of the Netto even before it opened so they could pounce on the fresh pork
liver, because it was cheap, so that he had to talk to someone in deliveries,
if pork liver comes in, set aside two packages for me; you just call me, Boss,
and you stop by for them anytime, the unloader winked at him, usually this
happened on Fridays . . .” etc., etc., etc.
“If you’re a reader perhaps not interested in what a minor
character likes to eat, I’ll tell you anyway”—so the author L.K. seems to be
saying—“and I’ll make it interesting. And maybe you’ll be at least interested
in the fact that one of my main characters, the Boss, likes to eat the same
thing as Dr. Tietz, although he has to go to a bit of trouble to purchase that
same thing and he cooks it mostly in different ways.”
Other central characters are Herr Feldmann and his wife, the
deputy superintendent at the Hochhaus, where Florian lives (described only as
the Deputy), a local forest ranger who sells honey on the side, Frau Hopf, who
runs a small eatery with her husband, the main jokester who hangs out in the
IKS pub and at the Grillhäusel (Hoffmann), and many, many more. New characters slide
into the narrative unobtrusively in the middle of a sentence; then the author
develops them in further appearances throughout the book, until at the end we
have a multitude of highly rounded personages. L.K. treats some of them with
gentle irony, mocking their petty bourgeois ways, but seems on the whole to
feel affection for nearly all of his personages. He does, however, kill them
off without mercy (see above, Ilona). Four of the main characters die suddenly
near the end of the story: Herr Ringer (suicide by hanging), Herr Feldmann and
the Deputy (brain hemorrhages), and Jessica (traffic accident).
Sometimes it seems as if L.K. just can’t get enough of
sticking in new characters, even if he has to leave them undeveloped. Such a
man is Torsten, the school janitor, who steps into the action only a time or
two. Then there’s the dentist, Dr. Henneberg, who does not find purchase in the
novel until p. 375. So that the author simply does not have enough time and
space left to get him developed; we learn only that he hates his job, “this
goddamned life with these pliers and drills and excavators and spatulas and
root lifters and scissors, to hell with all that, sometimes it burst out of him
. . .”
May Day in Kana, and
the Lugubrious Schlagbaum
Krasznahorkai also has a facility for describing lovely
little set scenes, lyrical in nature, which reveal still more about how it
feels to live in a small German town. One of these depicts “the renowned May
Day celebrations in Kana,” always held in the Rosengarten. This year they are observed
in a somewhat subdued way, given Kana’s troubles with wolf attacks, the new
pandemic, neo-Nazis, explosions, even murders. The second half of the book
shows Kana, and apparently the rest of Germany, in a fearful state of disquiet.
Among the early arrivals in the Rosengarten is Frau Uta, proprietor
of the Herbstcafé, she who, in better times, had Florian to help her out by
serving ice cream. Today she is nonplussed by the empty benches and
tables. Her main concern is keeping her husband at some distance from the beer
stand, but she eventually relents, allows him to go off for his first stein,
calling after him, “only one glass!” She notes the arrival of other “local
celebrants of May Day,” who come by way of the underpass “that led here beneath
the rail tracks”: “at first smaller families, clearly finding their charges
somewhat hard to bear, but then the lonely, older people began to drift in, and
the married couples . . . “ beer flowed from the kegs,” and “the first
Bockwursts were being thrown onto the cooker.”
Next come the members of the “so-called Enlarged Kana
Symphony,” who climb up on the stage in their “lovely red uniforms.” They take
their seats and begin tuning up, “here and there the tuba or the trombone or
the saxophone honked, the musicians in the first string section mewled on their
violins.” Finally the tuning was done and “the first beats sounded at the
gesture of Herr Feldmann,” and the onlookers perked up, “steins were clinked
together, the first Rostbratwurst went down the hatch, of course with Bautz’ner
mustard, only with Bautz’ner” [note how L.K. is always aware of which of his
characters love pork liver, and what kind of gravy, or beer, or mustard the
citizens of Thuringia prefer]. Meanwhile, here by himself, the Deputy grumbles
that the right May Day atmosphere is missing, and the orchestra plays
“Yesterday,” because, “according to Herr Feldmann [first violinist and
orchestra conductor, who seems totally in charge now], this always went down
well, “the wind players veins bulging, stage fright clearly visible on all of
their faces, almost the exact same expression on the faces of the audience
watching them, as if each were waiting for the other to launch the May Day
celebrations with their inimitable atmosphere, but this inimitable atmosphere
did not begin for quite a while yet.” Missing from this event is the Boss, the
one-time unofficial conductor of the orchestra—in a shocking turn of events he has
been murdered about a hundred pages earlier. Also missing is Florian, who has
absconded from Kana and is now a fugitive from justice.
For that “inimitable atmosphere,” of May Day to set in it
takes time, and beer. “Somehow the first sip of the third stein always brought
about the miracle: the men’s gazes cleared up, the conversation no longer
seemed as if gagged and stuttering, but suddenly came to life, laughter was
heard to the left, then to the right, and within minutes the crowd was buzzing
like a beehive, Hoffmann seemed in particularly good spirits, walking back and
forth among the tables, a wide grin on his face as he greeted anyone he could
chat with . . .” On plays the symphony, until it takes a short intermission. By
now the beer has done its work and the crowd beings singing “a dear little
ditty from the old times,” Wenn Mutti früh zur Arbeit geht (When
Momma Goes Early to Work).
For three pages the dreary unease that hangs over Kana, and
Thuringia, and all of Germany seems to have been dispelled. That is, until the
railway crossing gate (Schlagbaum) puts the quietus on the celebration.
The singers “sat hunched over, banging their steins on the table, by the end
they were yelling, so that nobody could complain about the atmosphere, and
there were no complaints until the early afternoon, and the railroad crossing
proved to be the only reason for the sudden silence of the celebratory crowd .
. . they’d heard it thousands and thousands of times, as, twenty-five or thirty
meters to the left of the tunnel, the mechanism that signaled approaching
trains began ringing with its own peculiar timbre, of course, from here below,
in the Rosengarten, they couldn’t see it, they only heard it, but they knew
what was going to happen: namely that the rail-crossing gate would creak
enormously and lower, and the wait would begin for the train, and they too now
began waiting for the train coming from the north or the south, either from Jena
or Saafeld . . . they waited and waited, two minutes went by, three minutes,
five minutes, nothing happened, the orchestra stopped playing and came down
from the stage, but the revelers were still waiting for the train, although
they waited in vain, because no train arrived either from the south or the
north, and what happened next was merely what always happened these days:
“the rail-crossing gate, after eight or ten minutes, as if
it too had been waiting in vain for something to arrive, began to rise with a
somewhat sadder creaking than before, well, and that was the end of May Day,
people struggled to their feet, and they slowly began walking to the underpass
. . .” on their way home. For me the sad performance—slowly down, then slowly
back up—of the creaking railway gate is, perhaps, the climax of the whole
novel, emblematic of the sorry state of Thuringia, and perhaps all of Germany (and,
maybe, of the whole world?) in the year 2020—or even worse, in 2025. The
universe is in a mess, and the trains we expect to come, bringing aid and
succor, do not arrive. Thirty-five pages later, while police are combing the
town for Florian, he sits calmly watching the operations of a different
rail-crossing gate across town, which performs the same creaking and sorrowful
movements: slowly down until reaching a stop; then stopping, waiting . . . then
giving up on the train and slowly working its way back up.
The Apocalyptic Theme
Herscht 07769 features a series of events in the town
of Kana that leave the nerves of the locals in tatters. Nearly all of the
smalltown characters want nothing more than to be left alone to live out their
quotidian, petty bourgeois lives, but life has other ideas. The main plotline,
driving the action of the book, concerns the activities of neo-Nazis in East
Germany. But from the beginning of his novel it is clear that L.K. has in mind
not just the dire socio-political scene in Thuringia and Germany, but also the
even more dire metaphysical state of the world as a whole.
The epigraph of the novel is this: “Hope is a mistake.” In
an interview the author has explained that this is not to be construed as a
pessimistic take on human life. The point, maybe, being that the universe came
about by way of a blunder or mistake, and hoping for humanity is caught up as
well in the consequences of that mistake. Florian Herscht first learns about
quantum theory when he attends evening classes in adult education, conducted by
a retired teacher of physics, Adrian Köhler. In his apparently autistic way
of thinking, Florian tries to grasp what he hears, but settles on a simplistic
interpretation of the complex facts. For him it is as if God was mixing
thunderbolts, playing around one day—for lack on anything constructive to
do—and He accidentally pounded together two of the wrong thunderbolts and then the
universe went ‘Big Bang.’
Puzzling out what Herr Köhler was trying to say, Florian
reasons that “this meant that the entire universe rested upon the inexplicable
fact that in a closed vacuum, in addition to every one billion particles of
matter, one billion antiparticles also arise, and when matter and antimatter
meet they extinguish each other, but then suddenly they don’t, because after
that one billion and first particle, the one billion and first antiparticle
does not arise, and so this one material particle remains in existence, or
directly it brings existence into life: as abundance, as surplus, as excess, as
a mistake, and the entire universe exists because of this, only because of
this, namely without it, the universe never would have existed . . .”
One problem for Florian is Köhler’s assertion that so far
science has not been able to explain a lot of this. Jumbled up in Florian’s
head are several points from the lectures. For example: “Herr Köhler
had explained that the process within a closed vacuum begins in such a way that
within nothing and out of nothing suddenly there will be something, or rather:
this event begins, which is fully impossible, nonetheless it begins with the
simultaneous birth of those one billion particles of matter and those one
billion antiparticles that immediately extinguish each other such that a photon
is released . . .”
The citations above are taken from the first five pages of
the book, but on p. 15 we learn that, faced with this “special vacuum in which
from nothing there will be something,” Herr Köhler has “ceased his own
inquiries into quantum physics . . . turned away from quantum physics because
it could not be reconciled with common sense.” In his lectures he emphasizes the
wonderful world of elementary particles, while in the back of his mind he
mulls over “the horrific world of elementary particles.” In his retirement Köhler
has turned to something less esoteric and more practical; he has begun running
his own amateur meteorological station. He has “fallen in love with meteorology,”
since it is nothing like quantum theory, “where acceptance of the absurd was a
basic requirement.”
Meanwhile, Florian has interpreted what he learned at the
lectures to predict the imminent destruction of the whole universe. Köhler
tries to reassure him, telling him to go back to being a baker, a profession
for which he was trained in vocational school. “Why not stick with what you
studied?” Surely “one day the quantum physicists will figure things out, only
we won’t live to see the day.” Woebegone Florian tells Köhler “that he would never be
the same as he was before, because he never could have thought that the world,
under the danger of a redoubtable fact, would be laid open to a destruction
that could occur at any moment . . . if, in fact, everything teeters on this
knife edge of destruction, then it must have been this way when we came into
being as well . . .” Florian’s misgivings lead Köhler to ponder over things
that he had never questioned before, especially the fact that “physics did not
know the answers to the most essential and fundamental questions.”
Florian assumes that Germany’s leader, Angela Merkel, a
physicist herself, is the perfect one to approach with his fears for the
universe. She can perhaps convene a special session of the Security Council of
the United Nations, where experts can discuss how “the relativity of time and
space and so-called events would sooner or later lead to the inevitable
disappearance of reality.” The apocalyptic danger, as viewed through Florian’s
eyes, is treated, and amplified at several other points in the novel. On his
way to Berlin, hoping to meet personally with the Chancellor, Florian cogitates
over what he will tell her: “inasmuch as it is true that something arises from
nothing, it can also occur that after the emergence from nothing of one billion
antiparticles along with one billion particles, the one surplus material
particle does not appear as it presumably occurred during the Big Bang . . .
but that instead, due to a diabolical breaking of symmetry in the usually
balanced emergence of particles and antiparticles, there could suddenly arise,
in one horrific moment, one surplus antiparticle, and while the one
billion particles and one billion antiparticles are busy annihilating each
other, and the well-known one billion photons are floating away, the remaining
single surplus antiparticle could be creating a new reality, an anti-universe,
the lethal mirror image of reality . . .”
In Florian’s mind the essential problem lies in the fact
that God, or Somebody made a mistake right at the beginning: “the world arose
by sheer contingency, and that sheer contingency could just as easily take it
back.” As for quantum physics and the consolations of science, there is
certainly no consolation that “for the deepest, the most important, the most
fundamental questions there were no answers and there would never be any
answers.” Elementary particle physics would never be able to come up with the
answers “simply because particle physics was always placing barriers before its
own self, barriers it could never overcome, because these barriers ensued from
the system of human logic, and at that point thought became, as it were,
entangled in its own self . . .”
This notion of human reason tangled up in its own self
suggests the philosophical concept of the antinomy (not mentioned in the
novel). There are many classic examples. Take this one. Draw a square and write
the following words within the square: “All sentences written within this
square are false.” So you are attempting to express a truth, but since your
truth is written within the square, then it too must be false. Logic entangled
within its own self. Words stuck in perpetual hiccups, with the implication
that if we must express our logic in potentially treacherous words, that logic
must always be potentially flawed.
The sudden disappearance of Köhler from his home in Kana is
never explained. He is gone for over a year, then suddenly reappears. Florian
assumes that world leaders have heeded his warnings and have taken Köhler
off to the U.N., or to some scholarly conference, where they can pick his mind
over the intricacies of quantum physics. Another explanation, more than
dubious, could be that the physicist in Köhler gets caught up in the
paradoxical mess that quantum physics has produced: he, a surplus antiparticle,
or a photon, is spirited away into a different dimension. When he returns he is
a changed man; soon he descends into dementia and dies at the end of the book.
As for the apocalyptic theme of Herscht 07769, it haunts the entire
narrative, making the malaise that envelops the denizens of Kana not just a
logical, quotidian malaise, but a metaphysical conundrum.
One problem for me, and, surely, for countless other readers
of the novel: we are not physicists, so we lack the basis for determining just
how valid is the argument presented against quantum physics. Or to what extent
the way elementary particle physics is presented in the novel has validity. I
would like to see a review of this novel written by someone who is an excerpt
on precisely this topic. The Bach theme of the novel suggests different
problems, but in some ways its problems resemble those to which the apocalyptic
theme gives rise.
The Bach Theme
Love of Bach apparently developed early in L.K.’s life and
works. One example: his novel published thirty-six years ago, in 1989, The
Melancholy of Resistance, contains an early adumbration of the Bach theme.
Quite possibly the author’s decision to live and research a novel in Thuringia
was based on the historical importance of Bach in this region. Johan Sebastian
Bach’s prominence in Herscht 07769 is established early on, when the
Boss and his assistant Florian—who work as graffiti removers—learn that the Bachhaus
in Eisenach has been desecrated. Two large graffiti, depicting a wolf’s head
and the word WE had been spray-painted on either side of the entrance gate to
the museum. In trying to explain how this could have happened, the museum guard
“held his two hands apart,” one more gesture of resigned helplessness. Arch
patriot that he is, the Boss is outraged by this act, since he views the music
of Bach as heaven-sent, the embodiment of the spirit of Germany. Soon he has
his Nazi cell working to prevent further incidences of spray-painting and
trying to apprehend the perpetrators. This continues throughout the action of
much of the novel, as further desecrations of Bach sites occur around
Thuringia.
The Boss has put together a small group of amateur
musicians, who gather for rehearsals every Saturday. While they prefer playing
pop tunes, he forces Bach upon them. In prospect is a big concert of classical
music, the inaugural event of this new Kana Symphony, but since they never can
quite get Bach down right, this concert must be continually postponed. The
Boss’ neo-Nazi cohort is equally unreceptive to the music of Bach, and even
when he is murdered 250 pages into the novel, the Boss is not treated to any
Bach music at his funeral. Nazis attend from all over Germany, even from a few
other European countries, to honor this firm adherent of right-wing fascism,
but the music played, ironically, is “Yesterday,” by the Beatles. We are not
told who selected the musical pieces to be played, but surely this is the work
of Herr Feldmann, first violinist and retired Latin and German teacher.
Feldmann is a Jew, but there is no indication that he deliberately picks for
the funeral music that the Boss hated. Rather, Feldmann loves the Beatles and
probably assumes that it is a great honor to have “Yesterday” played at one’s
funeral.
Later on the Bach theme of the novel plays itself out most
prominently in connection with the fortunes of the main protagonist, Florian
Herscht. The Boss has been forcing Florian, whom he has made into a sort of
stepson, to attend the Saturday rehearsals, in hopes that the naïve young man
will pick up an appreciation of Bach’s music—even though the orchestra plays
Bach badly at these rehearsals. Eventually, somehow miraculously—this comes
some one hundred pages into the book—Florian does begin to appreciate listening
to Bach on his laptop: “and not only the Brandenburg Concertos, but other
pieces as well, for example the great Passions, he was immediately entranced,
and he himself didn’t understand why, at the beginning of the beginning, he
hadn’t listened to the Boss when he said that every secret of life is in Johan
Sebastian . . .”
Soon he has begun immersing himself in the cantatas and
feels that “the messages were getting through to him, that’s what he called
them—messages—the sounds and the ensemble of sounds, although he did not want
to decipher them, moreover, his immediate impression was that these messages
had no meaning, they were beautiful in and of themselves, they were wondrous in
and of themselves, they merely were, he did not wish to translate them, and
there was no need, because they were not transmitting something, they only were
what they were . . .” Soon he is considering “going to Leipzig and listening to
a Bach performance in the Thomaskirche.”
Florian begins sensing that the music of Bach contains
instructions in the event of a catastrophe, but he does not know the exact
contents of the instructions. In one of his letters to Angela Merkel he decides
to let her in on what he has learned about Bach, “before Bach he’d been deaf,
and after Bach he became deaf to everything else, he admitted that he had no
need of any kind of music which was not composed by Johann Sebastian Bach, for
him this encounter had granted him an experience that seizes a person in the
presence of greatness and he had been seized by Bach, seized by genius . . .
for him Bach was not even music but heaven itself, and he was certain that the
Chancellor would understand this . . . he was not a religious person . . . when
he was brought here to Kana as an adult, there was no chance to get close to
any religion, but now he had gotten close to Bach . . . and what was necessary
now was for the Chancellor to clearly understand the necessity of involving
Bach in the negotiations which, he presumed, were taking place, although as of
yet behind closed doors . . . and how did he know that the universe was much
more capacious . . . than what the human mind accepted as extant? well, from
him!!! it was precisely Bach who had shown him, it was Bach who could show
anyone . . .”
By this point Bach has become a kind of deity for Florian,
and in this, his most recent letter to Angela Merkel, he presents Bach as a
solution to the looming catastrophe instigated by quantum theory. The
Chancellor must listen to Bach, and the Security Council of the U.N. must
listen to Bach, and Bach’s music must be played incessantly “on every
television station, every radio broadcast, in every school, every department
store and sports stadium . . . for this dear Earth, and everything that we
think about it and the universe that surrounds us, is perhaps but a mere misunderstanding
. . .” In a word Bach must become “something like the air” all around us, the
universe has come into existence by mistake, and all of our apprehensions are
but misapprehensions, and Bach, and only Bach, can rectify the malaise in which
the human race has become enveloped.
In the latter pages of the novel, after Florian has become a
fugitive from justice, after he has begun living like a wild animal, he can no
longer keep his laptop charged, but he has no need of it, because Bach’s music
is now in his ears and head perpetually, even in his sleep. Bach has become for
him “a personal state of being, namely, he was no longer hearing Bach,
he was inside Bach . . .” Now he realizes “that the remedy for the Last
Judgment perhaps did not lie in science or the politics it had given rise to,
but that the remedy lay wholly and singularly in Johan Sebastian Bach, the path
to Bach led through the structures of his works, and these structures were
perfect, and therefore if the structures were perfect, then the themes built
upon them were also perfect, then the harmonics embodying these themes were
also perfect, and if the harmonics embodying these themes were perfect, then
every single note was perfect . . .” etc.
So goes the Bach theme in the novel, which presents a kind
of intuitive answer to the theme of the apocalyptic. As if the only answer we
have to the conundrum of the whole universe being mired in an irrevocable
mistake is to steep ourselves in artistic genius, which somehow, intuitively,
can guide us through the maelstrom. As mentioned above, there are several
problems inherent in making Bach’s music such an important structural element
of the novel. For one, most readers—such as me—have little background in
listening to the music of Bach and immersing ourselves in that music. To really
appreciate the Bach theme in the novel you have to be a musician; and you have
to know Bach well. This limits the readership of the novel radically. Or,
rather, limits the number of readers who can truly grasp and appreciate the
novel.
Another issue: when an author lends music such importance in
his novel, he is somehow trapped by the medium in which he works: words on
pages of a book. Here is a possible comparison. What if someone wrote a novel
about Claude Monet, featuring his life and all his artistic works? The book
might contain detailed descriptions in words of what Monet’s impressionistic
paintings look like. But if the reader cannot actually view and contemplate the
paintings themselves, think of how much is missing from the book. Even if the
author includes reproductions of the paintings as illustrations in the book,
these illustrations are a meagre substitute for the actual paintings
themselves. For the Bach theme to be presented validly and fully, we need an
audiobook, and in that audiobook, the musical pieces mentioned must be played.
I wonder if L.K. has considered this issue in commissioning audiobooks of his latest
novel, to be read in any number of languages.
Sagging
Verisimilitude
L.K. is a master at writing rounded, believable, sympathetic
characters. He is a bit less successful in showing us what the bad guys, the neo-Nazis
are like, and he has a few problems putting together an action narrative. The
leader of the Nazis and Florian’s mentor, known only as “the Boss,” is
something of an enigma. His right-wing views ring true, but so much else about
him does not. Why, e.g., would he decide, in effect, to adopt this young,
semi-retarded youth and bring him to live in Kana? What kind of background does
the Boss come out of? We don’t know. We know literally nothing about his past,
nothing of his parents or siblings, and we wonder why he has no family
attachments. I also find it highly improbable that this man, a deeply flawed
right-wing thug, has founded and now leads the local Kana amateur orchestra.
When the Ringers—the Boss’s most vehement enemies in
Kana—are attacked by a wolf while on a picnic, the Boss is one of the first to
hear the news. He rushes home for a weapon, drives to the scene of the attack
at the Leuchtenburg Castle, and shoots the wolf. Given time and space
restrictions, this appears to have been an impossible act. Later on one of the
most shocking events in the novel occurs when the neo-Nazis bomb the local gas
station, killing Rosario and Nadir, who run the station. Improbably, the Boss
decides to record this act on a cell phone, although the most savvy of the
Nazis (and the only woman) Karin tries to stop him. Why would he do something
so stupid as to provide the police evidence of his own crime?
Even more improbably, the Boss entrusts this cell phone,
containing the incriminating videos, to the naïve Florian. Not likely. Even
almost impossible. At some point the Boss would have realized he never should
have made the videos, and he would have destroyed this evidence. The fact of
the existence of these videos drives subsequent developments in the plot. The
ingenuous Florian eventually watches the videos on the cell phone, and this so
shocks him that he takes on an entirely novel, murderous personality. In sum, the
most important events in the second half of the novel are predicated on facts
that are almost entirely lacking in verisimilitude.
As for Karin, she is portrayed as highly intelligent and
cunning, but we never learn much about her. Why and how did she become a Nazi?
Does she have any education, any factors in her past that lead her to adopt
such a life? We don’t know. L.K. tells us more about such minor characters as
auntie Ingrid, and he makes minor characters more rounded than any of the
members of the Nazi cell. It appears as if the author, who finds the Nazi
characters repellant, is reluctant to get into their heads and lives, the way
he does with so many of the locals featured in the book.
The main protagonist, Florian Herscht, is one in a long line
of literary characters who are kind, gentle, extremely naïve, sexless, even a
bit retarded. Everyone in Kana loves Florian, and with good reason. In the
first half of the book he is depicted as a gentle giant, always prepared to
lend a hand to the locals. One of his main confidants, Frau Ringer, opines that
“for him sexuality was shameful, that it was subjugation, a lack of
transcendence with regard to nature from which everyone must try to liberate
themselves.” This sounds more like the views of Frau Ringer than those of
Florian, who would not have pondered this deeply into the issue. He is simply
afraid of sex and women.
In the last third of the book Florian becomes obsessed with
Bach, which is, I suppose, possible. But he also turns into a vicious killer,
which is much less believable. When he discovers the videos of the bombing on
the cell phone that the Boss has entrusted to him, Florian seems to snap. His
whole personality changes, and he begins a series of murders by killing a man
who has been almost a father to him, the Boss. The rest of the book describes Florian
on the lam, avoiding the police, while carrying out still more murders—in an
attempt to eliminate the entire neo-Nazi contingent from Kana. In a rather
skewed plot development, Karin also is out to murder her former cohorts—who
have fled Kana to other cities—apparently to eliminate all possible evidence of
the crime they committed together. Toward the final pages of the book all the
neo-Nazis from Kana dead except Karin. She and Florian are back in Kana,
hunting each other down.
The novel presents certain mystifications that are never
cleared up. We have already mentioned the disappearance of Köhler
and his reappearance over a year later, an event never explained. A central
question of the first half of the book involves who is responsible for the
spray-paintings of graffiti at the Bach sites. Both the neo-Nazi cell led by
the Boss and the local police try their best to stop the desecrations and catch
the perps, but they are all unsuccessful. Then, late in the book, Florian—who
is a fugitive, living in the wild—returns to the Bachhaus in Eisenach, “with
its Bach statue in front of the entrance.” Here, again rather improbably,
Florian catches, with very little effort, the fifteen-year-old boy who has been
doing the spray-painting. The boy explains why the graffiti always consists of
a wolf’s head and the word WE. He was supposed to paint the words WE ARE COMING
but never had time to finish more than the first word. Who are the WE who pay
the boy to spray the graffiti? Apparently some secret lovers and defenders of
wolves, but the whole business of who is behind the spray paintings—and why
Bach sites are selected as targets—is left vague.
Late in the book, as one more spring arrives, a sort of
guardian angel figure, an enormous golden eagle, begins accompanying Florian as
he journeys around, looking for more Nazis to murder. When Karin comes back
into the picture, intent on killing Florian, the eagle attacks her twice. The
second time she manages to shoot the bird and kill it. Who sent this bird into
the plot and exactly why only L.K. knows for sure, but like several other
plotlines in the book, the appearance of the eagle is gratuitous.
One Long Sentence
Critics have made much of the sui generis structure of Herscht
07769, which is written in one long loop of a sentence, devoid of paragraph
breaks and containing only one full stop; this period comes on the last page of
the book, p. 406. Such a structure reminded me of another novel that is
considered a “difficult read,” Austerlitz, by W.G. Sebald. Here is what
I wrote about that book in a review:
The Novel of User-Unfriendly
“I’ve seldom encountered a novel made deliberately so
difficult to read . . . The relentless narrative plods on inexorably, providing
no breaks for separate chapters, seldom even for paragraphs. The reader is
forced to swim through the choppy waters of the dense prose, finding no
purchase for a temporary rest. Only the occasional em-dash intrudes into the
incessant flow of words, and you grab onto it when you can, resting there
briefly and tenuously before breast-stroking off again, through lengthy
sentences with whitecaps rife with detail. Help, help, somebody throw me a life
preserver!
“There is a certain deliberate ‘Germanness’ in the way the
whole novel is written, as if the author wishes his very narrative style to
embody the way Germans have to have things thoroughly catalogued. Later on,
when we come to the heart of the story—the tale of the Holocaust—attention to
petty detail is a constant: emphasis on the German “mania for order and
purity,” descriptions of how the Germans plundered the personal belongings of
the Jews they arrested, made endless listings of all the household items, how
they kept detailed accounts of all activities in the concentration camps, how
efficiently and ruthlessly they murdered innocent people, crossing them off
their lists, one by one.
“A page full of dialogue is faster and easier to read than a
page crammed with narrative. Most novels use direct speech to give the reader a
break from long narrative descriptions. Not this one. How about throwing in a
bit of humor, to ease the strain? Nope. You won’t find a good laugh in the
whole of Austerlitz. What is the point of making the reading of a
book so unaccommodating for the reader? I can only assume that since the
subject matter concerns man’s inhumanity to man, Sebald wants to get a feel for
this subject into the very narrative style of the book. Austerlitz lives a life
of agony, the Jews suffered unspeakable things, so here, reader, in your face:
here’s a touch of how oppressive life can feel.” [full review of Austerlitz
is available on my blog, U.R. Bowie on Russian Literature, and on the
website for Dactyl Review]
There’s that oppressive malaise swathing the whole of Austerlitz,
spooking its style, and L.K.’s novel Herscht 07769 also concerns itself
with an unease that has descended on East Germany, and all of Germany, and even
all of the universe. So is the malaise expressed in the style of the book, in
the way the author chooses to tell it in that one long sentence? Is the style
of L.K.’s novel similar to that of Sebald in Austerlitz? Not really. I’ve
recently read an earlier novel by L.K., The Melancholy of Resistance
(first published in 1989, when the author was thirty-five). While it does use
periods, the book frowns upon using paragraphs and direct speech, piling up
words in dense glomps that pack full every page. For the reader this novel
presents a hard slog, much more difficult reading than Herscht 07769,
and the darkness of its tone, its pessimism is truly oppressive.
Now seventy-one, L.K seems to have mellowed out a bit as he
enters old age. The one long sentence presents little difficulties to the
reader. L.K.’s latest novel is written in a style easy to read. Although there
are no breaks for paragraphs, there are convenient places for new paragraphs to
begin. Despite the subject matter, the style is not made deliberately
oppressive. Then again, the idea of the one long sentence, devoid of full
stops, is little more than a gimmick. Notwithstanding the absence of that one
punctuation mark, the period, there are plenty of full stops in the narrative,
indicated by semicolons, exclamation points, question marks, etc.
Although there are no chapters indicated, in the front
matter of the book, right before page one there is a page titled “Rainbow
Strands.” There are thirteen of these, which suggests that the book has
thirteen chapters. They are indicated without capitalization. E.g., the first
of these is “within nothing out of nothing;” the second is “from somewhere to
somewhere.” The titles of these “rainbow strands” suggest themes in the novel,
but those themes don’t appear to be directly expressed each time under the given
title. Sometimes, but not always, the titles come directly out of elsewhere in
the text. Here is an example: “he [Florian] had no need for any kind of music
not composed by Johann Sebastian Bach, for him this encounter had granted him
an experience that seizes a person in the presence of greatness and he had been
seized by Bach, seized by genius . . .” This cited passage comes on p. 206,
under the “rainbow strand” chapter titled “he served big scoops” (Ch. 8), which
begins on p. 203. But when we get to p. 222, we come to the next chapter (or
rainbow strand), Ch. 9, and its title is taken from the passage just quoted: “in
the presence of greatness.” As for “he served big scoops,” this chapter title
is taken from another direct quotation in the text (p. 199), describing how
Florian sometimes helped out Frau Uta at the Herbstcafé “at the peak of ice-cream
season,” serving ice cream to children. What is the point of playing this kind
of game with the “rainbow strands” and the uncapitalized titles? I’m not sure
there is a point, although some percipient critic (not me) may suggest how this
sort of thing enhances the narrative structure of the novel or elucidates
certain themes.
At times L.K. just seems to be having fun with his little
mystifications (see some of these discussed above). Unlike Sebald when he wrote
Austerlitz, the narrator of Herscht 07769 apparently enjoyed
writing his book, which is leavened throughout with light humor. Near the end
of the novel he throws in one more joke of an incident: so it turns out, Angela
Merkel finally has answered Florian’s many letters to her. Her letter, however,
arrives at the Kana P.O. when Florian is not in town to receive it, having gone
renegade, fled Kana, and begun committing murders. Jessica is not there either,
having died tragically in a traffic accident, and her husband, Herr Volkenant,
in his grief is barely functioning. Therefore, there is no one among the
characters to open and read that letter, and only L.K. can know for sure what
the Chancellor had to say. Merkel is in retirement these days, no longer
preoccupied with matters of the state. Maybe someone could write to her and ask
her to reveal what advice she had for Florian in her letter.
