#RivetingReviews: Caroline Wyatt reviews DARKENBLOOM by Eva Menasse
Darkenbloom, a fictional Austrian border town true to its Gothic name, has the timbre of a fable or a fairy tale by the Brothers Grimm. A story in which nothing is as it first seems, where the tempting gingerbread houses conceal a deep well of darkness that may prove lethal to curious children, and where, as the opening sentence has it, the walls have ears, the flowers in the gardens have eyes … and the grass has whiskers that register every step.
This tale begins in 1989, just as the Iron Curtain is beginning to fall, and the prejudices and decades-long certainties that have distinguished the people of Darkenbloom from the lesser people of “Over There”, the Hungarians beyond the nearby Cold War border, are about to start to crack.
The families who have dwelled for generations in this claustrophobic place, as Eva Menasse’s omniscient narrator slowly reveals, have buried many secrets inside their unreliable memories, or in the cold shade of the nearby forest, or beneath the bright grass of the meadows that can be seen from the chiaroscuro of the old town’s higgledy-piggledy streets.
Secrets that unwillingly start working their way towards the surface when a stranger comes to town asking questions about the past, and a group of youngsters from the city turns up to tend the neglected Jewish graveyard that most townspeople had forgotten existed, so overgrown is it beneath a tangle of thorny brambles that for decades have kept remembrance at bay.
The Jewish family graves of those who died during the years of the Austro-Hungarian Empire had waited patiently for many decades while the townspeople’s memories continued in their enchanted sleep. Darkenbloom had long attracted little outside attention until a body is discovered in the meadow, and the town is subjected to wider scrutiny.
For more than forty years, except for Agnes, driven to insanity by her memories, and Antal Grün the shopkeeper, the now elderly men and women of Darkenbloom who had lived through the war appear to have entirely forgotten what had happened to their Jewish neighbours – even though in many cases their sudden disappearance had resulted in the more fortunate people of the town equally suddenly becoming lifelong custodians of an unearned house, a hotel, a factory or even an orchard.
Uncomfortable questions about the past are also being asked by a local travel agent, Rehberg, who wants to start a museum of local history, and young Flocke, the daughter of Leonore who was once the town beauty. They’re joined in their quest by Lowetz, who has returned to his parents’ house in Darkenbloom after his mother’s sudden death. All three have a quality deemed dangerous in the town: curiosity.
Over 460 or so pages, the Austrian writer (born in Vienna, living in Berlin) weaves a powerful and unsettling spell as she introduces us to the warp and weft of two or three generations of Darkenbloom families, and the events that begin to reveal what they may or may not have done during the Second World War, with the town a synecdoche for the whole of Austria in Menasse’s ambitious quest for answers about her country’s past. She is well-known in the German-speaking world, and deserves a wider readership here too.
After the Anschluss – the annexation of Austria into the German Reich – the people of Darkenbloom rush to welcome their Nazi masters, and vie to be the first in their region to fly the white flag that will declare the town “free of Jews.”
Later on, much of Darkenbloom is just as quick to welcome or do business with their vulgar new Russian masters (interested in wrist-watches, rape and looting) when they drive out the Nazis. Few of those Darkenbloomers who collaborated in atrocities during the war are ever prosecuted; instead some of the worst perpetrators are rewarded with power and influence by the Russians, who also find them willing and able collaborators.
In between the years of war, hunger and upheaval, the sun shines, autumn falls and winter blows in, and by the end of 1989, East Germans begin to mass at the border “Over There” as the Iron Curtain topples.
Throughout all this, as people do, the families of Darkenbloom work, intermarry, argue, drink too much at their Stammtisch (the regulars’ table), have children and grandchildren, and forget the past. Only rarely is memory awakened or spoken of, and then only unwillingly. The truth is patchy, unreliable, revealed piecemeal in extremis, if at all. The bad sometimes do good, and the good do bad things too. Those in possession of curiosity about the past are all too rare.
This long and absorbing novel, beautifully translated from the German by Charlotte Collins, ultimately lays bare many of Darkenbloom’s skeletons, both literal and metaphorical.
But what Eva Menasse’s characters can never quite admit or reveal, even to themselves, is the why. And it is above all the “why?” that the youngsters from the city are seeking to discover and document as their efforts in the overgrown cemetery begin to reveal the centuries of Jewish life in Darkenbloom that was so suddenly extinguished.
Why do ordinary humans, who can do so much good, so often choose to do evil, or at least decide to look the other way, even when trying to scrub the bloodstains from a husband’s or son’s army uniform after a night of massacre in the forest?
As Menasse writes in conclusion: this is not the end of the story.
Reviewed by Caroline Wyatt
DARKENBLOOM
Written by Eva Menasse
Translated from the German by Charlotte Collins
Published by Scribe UK (2024)
December 2024 #RivetingReviews titles are available to buy from bookshop.org.
Caroline Wyatt is an Australian-born English journalist. She has worked at BBC News for over thirty years, holding correspondent posts in Paris, Berlin and in religious affairs and defence. She is a presenter on BBC Radio.
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