Somewhere in Austria’s Burgenland, the territory pressed hard up against the border with Hungary, the town of Darkenbloom is starting to reckon with its past. It’s 1989 and the Iron Curtain is starting to come down. Any day now, Eastern Germans, Hungarians, Czechs, and others are expected to pour across the border into Austria. Then, a body is discovered in a field where it has lain since the end of World War II. A group of students arrives in town to clean up the old Jewish cemetery. There’s also someone sending around postcards accusing elderly Darkenbloomers of lying. And this is only a fraction of what’s going on in Eva Menasse’s Darkenbloom. This book is translated with a strong British accent by Charlotte Collins. Very little German is left in the book, which is kind of a shame because a lot of this book could be summed up with the amazing German word Vergangenheitsbewältigung.
You know those rural towns that feel very uncomfortable to outsiders? Darkenbloom is one of those places. The residents aren’t actively sinister (with a few notable exceptions). Rather, it seems like the kind of place that would never let anyone forget that they came from somewhere else, where groups of people stop talking when a newcomer turns up, where secrets are kept to the death. And what secrets they are! By hopping from resident to resident, Menasse spills a lot of tea about what some Darkenbloomers were up to between 1938 and 1945. Old Ferbenz retains the loyalty of a group of elderly men who definitely committed crimes against humanity. Several residents live in houses that were stolen from their Jewish owners before the Jews were “sent” out of the town. Frau Reschen, for one, still has the keys to the town’s only hotel and is holding on to a fiction that she’s kept them for safekeeping.
Two characters—a young man named Lowetz and an older resident, Rehberg, who is working on a history of Darkenbloom—are caught in the middle of a lot of these events. Rehberg’s research has led him to believe that much of what he was sure about the town may have been exaggerated, or even a lie. Lowetz, who was born well after the war, is surprised to learn that his mother was helping Rehberg learn the truth about what happened in Darkenbloom during the war. These two characters are torn in multiple directions. They ask us what we might do if we learned that our neighbors had murdered and stolen from the victims of Nazi hatred. How do we begin to change a narrative that an entire community has been telling itself for decades? Even though the old guard is in its dotage, a few of them are still spry enough to do more than just loudly threaten people when it seems like their secrets might come to light.
Like I wrote above, this review is really just a small part of what Menasse packs into Darkenbloom. There are so many characters and so many plots and subplots that it was hard to know what to pay attention to and what was included to develop characters or establish a sense of place. Some readers might struggle with the sprawl of this book. Readers should also know that Darkenbloom simply ends; it doesn’t conclude. My theory is that Menasse resists simplifying anything so that this book evokes a feeling of being caught in the middle of things, of being overwhelmed by events. This is historical fiction that hews more closely to the historical rather than the fiction side of things. This quality is one of the reasons I enjoyed Darkenbloom as much as I did. This novel lets us eavesdrop on an entire town that’s become enveloped in several different controversies all at once. Unlike the Darkenbloomers, we readers get to learn all the secrets, even the ones that have been dead and buried for years.
I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via Edelweiss, for review consideration.
