Darkenbloom — a reckoning with Austria’s 20th-century history

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free

Darkenbloom, Eva Menasse’s new novel (her first to be translated into English), is set in a fictional town of the same name on the eastern border of Austria. It’s a sleepy place, with a resident village idiot, an absentee feudal count and a bewilderingly large cast of other inhabitants. There is Rehberg, an amateur historian who is writing a chronicle of the town and runs the local tourist office. There’s Toni Malnitz, a winemaker, his glamorous wife Leonore and their four daughters. There are several inhabitants who have lived in the town forever, and may or may not be implicated in crimes committed during the Nazi era.

A more recent arrival is Dr Gellért, who at first the townsfolk take to be a tourist, but who has in fact come to Darkenbloom to investigate what happened there during the war. He is joined by another visitor who rides into town “as a stranger” because he wishes to “see things from an unbiased perspective”.

So far, so portentous. The novel is set in August 1989, during the lead-up to the fall of the Berlin Wall later that year, and all the repressed memories of 20th-century history loom large. Pretty soon it becomes clear that life in Darkenbloom is not as peaceful as it at first appears: a barn burns down in a local field while the volunteer fire brigade are drinking at a festival nearby; a group of students, there to repair graves at the Jewish cemetery, discover fresh antisemitic graffiti on one of the headstones; Flocke Malnitz, the youngest of Toni and Leonore’s children, goes missing.

Halfway through the novel, the remains of a body are discovered in a nearby meadow. They could belong to a victim from the Nazi era, or from some other, long-forgotten crime. No one is really sure, but the discovery does manage to precipitate a bit more narrative clarity.

In the first half of the novel the townsfolk can’t bear to name the country across the border, but after the body is disinterred, “Over There” is revealed to be Hungary. The “stranger” who rode into town in the novel’s opening pages turns out to be a man named Lowetz, who has returned to the family home in the village after the mysterious sudden death of his mother, Eszter.

Darkenbloom has been a huge hit in Austria, where it was published in 2021, and it is easy to see why: it is a big, sprawling book intent on confronting a nation with a history that it is still often unwilling to talk about openly. But it is also a frustratingly diffuse novel, the ambition of which isn’t always matched by the writing. This is not a problem of translation: Charlotte Collins’s rendering always feels precise and inventive.

The novel opens with a sweeping overview of the town. “In Darkenbloom,” we are told, “the walls have ears, the flowers in the gardens have eyes; they turn their heads this way and that so nothing escapes them, and the grass has whiskers that register every step.” This all feels plausible enough, but I can’t really picture grass having whiskers (although I can imagine it as being whisker-like). And how exactly are whiskers supposed to register steps?

The wilful opacity of the novel at the level of the sentence is made more frustrating by the fact that the narrator, who pops up now and then to set a scene or intervene more directly in the story, clearly knows much more about what’s going on in Darkenbloom than they ever let on. “People round here often didn’t finish their sentences,” we are told, at one point, “a good strategy for subjects like this: you indicated what you thought, but you hadn’t actually said anything.” But third-person narrators have no such constraints, leading you to wonder why they can’t, at least occasionally, just spell things out.

Darkenbloom by Eva Menasse, translated by Charlotte Collins Scribe £20, 480 pages

Join our online book group on Facebook at FT Books Café and subscribe to our podcast Life & Art wherever you listen

#Darkenbloom #reckoning #Austrias #20thcentury #history