Darkenbloom by Eva Menasse review – Holocaust secrets unearthed
In the small Austrian town of Darkenbloom, near the Hungarian border, tempers are flaring at a public meeting. The mayor gives a speech; the vintner explodes in protest. Some cheer, while others bang on tables. The vintner declares that he is tired of deception. “Scratch the surface with your fingernail anywhere in Darkenbloom,” he shouts, “and you uncover some new abomination!” He is right, and not just about dodgy council dealings. Darkenbloom is a town of nasty, close-held secrets: a place where it is dangerous, sometimes even fatal, to expose the truth.
Unearthing, digging up and truth-hunting run through Darkenbloom, the latest novel by the Berlin-based Austrian author Eva Menasse. Originally trained as a journalist, Menasse published a book of reportage on David Irving’s trial for Holocaust denial before turning to fiction with her 2005 novel Vienna, which explores her part-Jewish family’s 20th century. She has since established herself as a progressive public intellectual, speaking out against antisemitism and, more recently, Germany’s unqualified support for the military actions of Israel. In Darkenbloom, she fictionalises the story of Rechnitz, a town in Austria where a massacre of at least 180 Jewish-Hungarian forced labourers took place in early 1945 – and where the elder townsfolk enforced a conspiracy of silence that lasted into the 2000s. Many key facts, including the location of most of the bodies, remain unknown.
Darkenbloom uses the historical case of Rechnitz to investigate the nature of guilt and remembrance, repression and confession, public memory and public amnesia more broadly. The novel opens in 1989, with refugees from communist East Germany gathering at the Hungarian border. Darkenbloom, as we encounter it, is frozen in time: its townsfolk are jammed-up, suspicious, self-absorbed. There are occasional references to those “very old, very nasty stories”, but everyday life goes on: the old Nazi leader remains a cornerstone of the community.
Narration roams between characters, whose chunks of worldview and life story form a panorama of the town’s haunted present
Yet the conspiracy of silence begins to buckle. Some students have arrived to restore the old Jewish cemetery; a mysterious American visitor has been asking questions about the past; an unrepentant old Nazi seems determined to stop the laying of water pipes in one particular meadow; and the unflappable young activist Flocke has begun calling for historical transparency. Some of the townsfolk close ranks and dig in; others can feel themselves opening up. Young Lowetz, an ad man who had moved away to Vienna but returned after the death of his mother, wakes very slowly from his lethargy: “He shouldn’t have emerged from his lair, certainly not to go up to the Rotenstein meadow,” he thinks. “Grubbing in the dirt, poking around in graves! It wasn’t good for you … But something had happened up there – a vague memory kept drifting through his mind, something he couldn’t put his finger on. Rotenstein meadow. End of the war, probably. Had his father told him about it?”
Menasse is, above all else, an astute observer of human psychology. Her novel’s narration roams between characters, whose chunks of worldview and life story form a panorama of the town’s haunted present alongside moments where the author-narrator addresses the reader with direct commentary on the Darkenbloomers or reflections on the nature of memory itself. Unattributed lines of folk wisdom appear in italics, a self-propagating chorus of compliant forgetting (“You don’t want to get involved in anything, not after all we’ve lived through”). As Darkenbloom’s history is excavated, piece by unsettling piece, each resident makes their own decision on whether to cooperate in exposing the past. The local women, in particular, are finely drawn as they suffer everyday misogyny and sexual abuse, but also retain their agency – including choosing selfish complicity. Menasse can be stringent towards her characters, but never inhumane or incurious. Each one is complicated and real. Those who have worked to repress the secret are damaged by the effort.
Rechnitz was not the only massacre of its kind to take place in the war’s final years; it certainly isn’t the only skeleton in Austria’s collective-memory closet. In Menasse’s thoughtful hands, the invented town of Darkenbloom is not a cipher for one specific historical event, but rather a stage to explore more universal concerns. Strikingly, Menasse never describes the massacre itself. It would be easy for her to solve the mystery for us, but what we experience instead is a slow-burning thriller rooted not in the crime, but its aftermath. Here, 1945 represents no “zero hour” for an enlightened society: the prejudice, cruelty, antisemitism and violence of the Nazi era continue after the war, with many perpetrators and collaborators flourishing. The historical case, too, never gets closed. More central than historical revelations is the commitment to search for them – and the sorts of different social bonds that this might make possible. As the young activist Flocke says: “This is where we’re from; we can’t do anything about it, except do things better.” After all, every project of remembrance is – explicitly or otherwise – a project of making the future.
• Darkenbloom by Eva Menasse, translated by Charlotte Collins, is published by Scribe (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
