The assignment to travel to Shanghai, half-way around the world, to retrieve the papers of an émigré composer of popular songs is more than the obsessive-compulsive Hans Frambach, archivist at the Bureau of Past Management, can manage. The idea of obligatory travel as a privilege that everyone should get excited about — “cattle cars!” Hans snaps when he is asked to fly economy class — is just one of the tenets of modern life that Iris Hanika satirizes in her novel Das Eigentliche, published in 2010. The book won the EU prize for literature that year; its English translation by Abigail Wender, The Bureau of Past Management, published in 2021, was selected as a Best Book of the Year by the Financial Times.
Hanika’s satire is comic and frightening. With the protagonist, Hans Frambach, we experience the solidarity of the humiliated. Such a fellowship Hans himself is not given to experience, except briefly. In his sparsely populated world are two adversaries — his boss Marschner and the administrative assistant at the Holocaust archive where he works — and a co-dependent friend or would-be lover, Graziela, who enjoys his emotional support as she weathers the vicissitudes of an affair with a more sexually forward, married man.
Another requirement of modern life, that one should listen to the news while making dinner, becomes a kind of torture in Hanika’s staging: “Put salami on bread. Or stand at the counter and chop vegetables into bite-sized pieces. Maybe beat two eggs in a little pan, sauté with butter. Listen to the radio. Follow the discussion on the nightly BBC World Service (to which every Tom, Dick, and Harry worldwide contributes an opinion on some highly topical subject). Has the United Nations failed, thereby worsening the terrible situation in Darfur? What’s happening to freedom of speech in China? What are Russia’s objectives? Has the Cold War resumed?” With his daily toil at the (fictional) Bureau of Past Management, processing papers and inputting data related to Holocaust survivors, Hans has sought to give himself a role that will enable him, personally, to account for the horrors of the past, and thereby to square his individual self with the history that produced him. In his evening relaxation, he again finds himself struggling to align his solitary self with world events, history in the present. While the need for the exchange — self with world — is consuming, the contents of the exchange are absurd.
In 1986, the conservative historian Emil Nolte, as part of an attempt to resuscitate German national identity, asserted that the Nazi genocide was equivalent, and a response, to what had occurred in Stalinist Russia. The ensuing debate, called the Historikerstreit, was carried out by leading historians, political scientists, and journalists in major German newspapers over the course of a year. Against Nolte, Jurgen Habermas insisted on the necessity of ongoing commemoration and remembrance of Nazi crimes as the obligation of every German citizen:
“Our own life is connected with this context of life in which Auschwitz was possible, not through contingent circumstances, but internally. Our way of life is connected with our parents’ and grandparents’ way of life through a web of family, local, political, and intellectual transmissions — through a historical milieu that has made us what we are today … Can one continue the traditions of German culture without taking over the historical liability for the way of life in which Auschwitz was possible? Can one be liable for the context of the origins of such crimes, with which one’s own existence is historically woven, in any other way than through common remembrance of that for which one cannot atone other than in a reflective, testing attitude toward one’s own, identity-endowing traditions?”
Hans Frambach would have been in his 20’s then, and it is in this spirit that he took the job at the Bureau of Past Management. When still caught up in its fervor, he met Graziela. They shared every aspect of their perceived ongoing guilt, their constant self-comparison to Auschwitz captives, those whom their grandparents to some extent had persecuted. In Graziela’s case at least, the connection is slight. “He knew, because they’d discussed it extensively, there were no real perpetrators in her family. (There hadn’t even been a Nazi Party member in her family).” Graziela’s grandfather at the age of 22 survived the battle of Stalingrad because a head injury led to his being evacuated and released from combat duty; nevertheless, Graziela sees him, and therefore herself, as obliquely implicated in the murder of the feminist psychoanalyst Sabina Spielrein and her two daughters. She and Hans “had discussed all of this, specifically how it could be endured and whether it could be borne.” At this early moment in the novel, the narcissistic melodrama of Graziela’s perceived connection to these famous crimes is funny. But by the end of the novel, laughter has gotten us nowhere.
The repetition “in her family” in the two sentences quoted above contains the hint of a suggestion that the situation in Hans’s family was different. No more information is given, except in an abstractly conceived interlude, departing from the narrative, that seems spoken by characters in a Beckett play — one thinks of Huic and Clov inside ashcans — who work themselves from slapstick to spitting rage. We are confronted with a preposterous argument set as stage dialogue between characters labeled “A” and “B,” about how to describe the shape of the Swastika — in German, Hakenkreuz, the hooked cross. In section titles the symbol is envisioned sequentially as “The Hooked Crossroads” (Hakenkreuzung), “The Meat Hook” (Fleischerhaken), “The Hook and Eye” (Haken und Öse), and “Velcro” (Klettverschluss). “Proposal for the description of the Hooked Crossroads, section 1: suddenly the road makes a sharp bend.” In their analysis of what form this bend in the road can be said to take, A and B grow increasingly belligerent. Group A calls group B “Fascist pigs … deniers … perpetrators!” and group B calls group A “Communist cows … cry-babies … terrorists!” This could be the oedipal drama of an earlier moment in Germany’s history, Hans’s parents violently rejecting his grandparents; from Hans’s vantage in the early two-thousand-aughts the image of the Swastika is less damaging but nonetheless tenacious. The German word for Velcro, Kletteverschluss, derives from Klette, burr, a small, barbed, tightly clinging object. Any hook, no matter how tiny or synthetic, recalls the “hooked crossroads” to which Germany can never go back.
While this interlude may contain a trace of Hans’s family history, it could just as well refer to the two groups of Historiker who battled publicly over whether it was possible to relativize, to “get over,” the Holocaust. While Habermas’s statements are admirable, thrilling even, in the absolute commitment they require, the character of Hans could be considered to exemplify the emotional toll of such a commitment, were it taken literally by an average person, twenty years later.
The book’s surreal or absurdist passages express what Hans, in the strict confines of his real life, is incapable of expressing. In his mind, Hans imagines Marschner as a gigantic machine, a carnival ride — the yo-yo — much too large for the space he occupies, whose swings smash against the office walls. The floor of the hallway beyond the reception desk is imagined littered with Hans’s discarded forced smiles. Hanika conceives the strict confines of Hans’s real life, then explores his mental life with its brooding, its dissociation, its fantasies and transgressions, its dreams. Whereas in these passages his perspective is still in place, in others her writing then also pushes beyond the confines of his character, more generally, beyond the novelistic confines of character and situation, to express what has been banished from them.
Hans meets Graziela at a church where she will have to give a concert. In the course of the service, Hans takes a pamphlet from the pew: “The photos related to the idea on the wall outside, left to right, that a direct line could be drawn from Golgotha to Auschwitz to Hiroshima to the early 1960s, when the Berlin Wall was erected. The reverse side of the pamphlet explained that this was the course of history. We believe this wall is Cain’s inheritance … Certainly other names might have been recorded: one need only recall the martyred, the crucified, the Inquisition, the conquest of Mexico, the Thirty Years’ War, the bombings of Coventry and Dresden.” Hans utterly rejects this attempt at equating one evil to another, or equating “evil” in any conventional understanding of the word with politically enabled mass killing. He and Graziela leave the service and go back to his apartment. If the constant self-scrutiny of the culture of commemoration is intolerable, it is just as impossible to subsume the magnitude of these crimes into a moral system of guilt and repentance.
After they leave the church, following a page break comes a hallucinatory sequence spoken in the first person:
“Our last death-machine devoured people until it exploded. Now there is a hole in the world, a chasm where memories throng.
I slipped down among them. I’m stuck with the memories in this hole, this pit made by the world’s last death-machine when it gorged itself. I endure here. To this day, I don’t know what I’m waiting for.”
This section conveys the magnitude of the horror, which Hans insists cannot be subsumed, which, he says to Graziela rather lamely in the next chapter, needs to be “contemplated,” not “commemorated.” The interlude presents what Hans cannot articulate: that contemplation occurs not from the safety of well-designed monuments but from inside the smoking pit. It requires experiencing the damage. “Beneath the crime’s meaninglessness lies the realization that everything is meaningless,” he says to Graziela. She replies, “Hans, that sounds a little adolescent.”
Opposed to this death-machine is the life-machine that brought forth Hans and continues to drive him. At low moments, he feels reduced to his bodily processes. At other times he takes comfort in adding up the numbers of letters in words and dividing them by three. “‘Gra-zie-la’s che-eks’ pleased him because it was fifteen letters, his favorite number of letters, and when he divided it by three, he got five. That was orderly, workable, and could be no other way: fifteen divided by three equals five, five times three equals fifteen — a won-der-ful thing.” When Graziela expresses her grief at her lover Joachim’s abandonment,
“[Hans] slid deeper into his chair, drawing his coat up to cover himself. Saf-ety.
Ref-uge.
“Maybe you were mistaken,” he said, immediately wishing he hadn’t. Wro-ng m-
ove. Hea-rta-che. No wonder she couldn’t stop weeping.”
Dividing by three allows Hans a cognitive function that is separate from any knowledge of guilt, failure, or futility. As a compulsive, dissociative act it gives him a moment of success. The very smallness of this operation — one might say, the smallness of its meaninglessness — when compared with the machinations of history and their outcomes, lends it moral value. At the same time, it is significant that Hans takes pleasure in mathematical oddness as opposed to evenness, as if it were evidence of incommensurability, the one thing of which he is sure.
For Hans’s author, the life-machine of writing reveals itself in quotation. Lively jingles occupy her mind, animating the pages of this desolate book in spite of themselves. Hanika quotes Hölderlin, Schiller, T. S. Eliot, and Wilhelm Müller to name a few, plus Aretha Franklin and any number of popular songs, into which her own verses merge. Set on a page by itself, on two occasions, is a verse that mimics a pastoral folk song:
Auschwitz lives in every song,
every flower, every tree.
Auschwitz lives in every song,
every German, including me.
Fiderallala, fiderallala, fideralla lala la.
The regenerative powers of nature, conventionally called upon to bring an end to mourning, in this case are powerless to erase Auschwitz, which seems to have introduced a genetic modification. The altered flowers keep coming back, just as the songs keep singing themselves, their melodies absorbing new lyrics or continuing to echo ancient sounds through the ages in defiance of sense. In the book’s final section, as Hans is breaking down, the narrative also slips into song:
There he sat down,
crossed his legs with a moan,
watched the folks go round,
and ate his ice cream alone.
And tandaradei,
he thought, as the crowd strolled by …
“Tandaradei,” another non-signifying cluster of syllables, derives from the Middle High German lyric “Unter der Linden,” which describes the crumpled grass in a bower after a lovers’ tryst. When Habermas called for the scrutinizing of “one’s own identity-endowing traditions” in order to question to what extent they may have prepared for Nazism, he was particularly aiming at the vaunted German romantic tradition, which scholars on the right were seeking to reclaim. If “tandaradei” refers to Hans’s renewed loss of Graziela after their night of tenderness, it also traces his “identity-endowing traditions” to a time before modern history. How far back do we have to go?
The idea of rewriting old songs has an overtly political valence at an earlier point in the book. At the end of a night waiting for Graziela to call, Hans listens to the radio’s nightly closing song, Berthold Brecht’s Kinderlied, which was Brecht’s proposed revision of Germany’s national anthem (formerly containing the phrase “Deutschland über Alles”) in 1950. The stunning humility and pacifism expressed in these verses alone is a reason for any American reader to read this book, in their inversion of anything we could conceive as an “anthem.” If Hans’s character presents the mental illness of a national psyche, we would do well to consider what is our equivalent. Abigail Wender’s translation gives us this opportunity.
[Published by Voland & Quist on October 1, 2021, 159 pages, $7.99 Kindle]