“In Dunkelblum the walls have ears, the flowers in the gardens have eyes, they turn their heads to make sure they don’t miss anything, and the grass registers every step with its whiskers.” The novel opens with this beautiful sentence Dunkelblum is silent by the Austrian writer Eva Menasse (1970). In the prototypical town of Dunkelblum, the original inhabitants know everything about each other, but silence is the norm. They prefer not to talk about the horrors that took place there during the Second World War.
In her fascinating novel, Menasse exposes Austria’s ambivalent approach to the war past. The country was the first, on March 13, 1938, to be annexed by Nazi Germany. The anschluss happened without bloodshed and with the approval of most. After the fall of Hitler, many tried to clean their streets by presenting themselves as victims or persecuted of the Nazi system. Old Nazis picked up the thread of their lives again and that is how the ‘roaring silence’ began.
Dunkelblum is silent is based on a true history. Just before the end of the Second World War, several hundred Jews were murdered in Rechnitz, located on the border between Austria and Hungary. They were employed there to build the Süd-Ostwall, a defensive wall to stop the advancing Red Army. The horrifying act was committed by local Nazi leaders who were celebrating in the local castle.
Besides this killing spree, the fictional Dunkelblum has other blemishes on its blazon. It managed to beat the neighboring village of Stoßimhimmel in 1938 by being the first ‘judenfrei’. By order of the Gestapo, 87 Jews, minus the Jewish doctor, had to leave the village. Even after the war, a few murders still take place that remain unexplained.
Loaded past
That fraught past is being unearthed in all sorts of ways. The novel is set in the late summer of 1989, a few months after the Iron Curtain opened between Hungary and Austria. A strange traveler arrives in Dunkelblum to unravel the secrets of his past. A group of Viennese students are busy renovating the Jewish cemetery in Dunkelblum and come across a skeleton. And Rehberg, owner of a travel agency, is busy rewriting the city chronicle and has plans to establish a local history museum. Meanwhile, the group of East German refugees on the border with Hungary is growing. The Dunkelblumers are initially suspicious of this group, but take them generously when they discover that the German embassy covers all costs and they can earn some extra money.
In 1989, 44 years after the murder of the Hungarian Jews, Dunkelblum changes from a ‘hard-learn Nazi and murderer’s nest’ into a refugee haven. There is no higher plan behind this, but everyone is acting ‘in the flow and breath of history’. In the background there is a conflict about water management: some of the inhabitants want to join the water board, while farmer Faludi is leading the fight to maintain independence. “Dunkelblum’s water for Dunkelblum!” is his battle cry. Opportunism and self-interest are once again rampant.
Menasse wrote an exceptionally fine work in terms of form and writing style. She does not follow a chronological line, but piece by piece unfolds the map of Dunkelblum and its inhabitants: from the grocer to the doctor, from the mayor to the secretly gay owner of the travel agency, from the secretary of the city council to the all-knowing barmaid. Information about their background and experiences is scattered throughout the book. It’s like looking at Dunkelblum again and again from a different spatial and temporal perspective.
In an interview in The watchword Menasse described her book as ‘a three-dimensional space you move into and in which everything is interwoven’. It requires the necessary effort from the reader: he almost has to hold pen and paper next to it, draw a map, in order to understand how everything is connected with everything. But if you persevere, you will be richly rewarded: the three-dimensional shape makes you want to start over immediately when you close the book to discover new threads.
Striking sentences and speaking names
The language – well translated into Dutch by Annemarie Vlaming – is also very fine: Menasse produces one striking sentence after another about the unreliability of historiography and the multiple manifestations of evil. She uses time-honoured stylistic devices such as ‘speaking names’, where the names of characters and places tell something about their character.
This gives the novel something universal: Dunkelblum is representative of other small communities and characters like Georg Horka and Alois Ferbenz are prototypical for the bad guys of their time. They have committed the most brutal crimes, but can simply continue their lives after the war: Horka registers as persecuted by the Nazi regime and Ferbenz starts a men’s fashion store in Graz after his release. Both return to Dunkelblum years later. Intriguing is the passage in which Ferbenz reveals himself on Austrian television as someone who still raves about Hitler and takes anti-Semitic views. In the talk shows, the guests argue over whether the old man should have been protected from himself.
Dunkelblum is silent is a timeless morality sketch: there is nothing unique about the way the inhabitants behave on the waves of history. At the same time, Menasseh inexorably reckons with the way in which Austria disguises its war past. Certain matters will always remain unclear. As Menasseh aptly puts it at the end of the book, as a variation on the opening sentence: ‘Although the heads of the flowers turn diligently in all directions and the walls prick up their grey, crumbling ears, they only absorb, they don’t let go of anything.’
Eva Menasseh: Dunkelblum is silent. Translated from the German by Annemarie Vlaming. Atlas Contact; 528 pages; € 24.99.
