This past spring, I finally read a book that had been staring at me from the shelf, Mike Rapport’s 1848: Year of Revolution (Basic Books, 2008), a survey of pan-European political turmoil with a timely aura. From Paris to Milan to Berlin to Kraków to Budapest, insurrections toppled royal regimes as the rising mercantile class saw its chance to grab power. When first grasping that Abraham Lincoln and Karl Marx were contemporaries, one may feel a chill; their mid-century presences represent the clashing efforts to define the shape of the new nation-state. In 1848 and the years following, constitutions were written and civil rights recognized across Europe. But the new nationalisms disregarded the claims of many ethnic groups, causing feuds that continue to this day. Moderates prevailed in most states, installing parliamentary bodies that varied in their enfranchisement of every class, while radicals demanded social reform.
In Hungary, the Habsburg monarchy of Vienna managed to defuse the Hungarian Revolution of 1848 with the help of 200,000 troops sent in by Russia’s Tsar Nicholas I. The poet, novelist and literary historian Gábor Schein writes, “From the dissolution of the Hapsburg Empire [in 1918] up until 1989 – except for three short years (1945-47) – conditions in Hungary were dictatorial. The mental reflexes that enabled the birth of Viktor Orbán’s regime as a response to twenty years of disappointments and setbacks after the ‘regime change’ of 1989, and which assure its survival today, have their roots in the powerlessness of previous generations.” And so today in post-Soviet eastern Europe, Hungary is running its own show – but as Schein explains in his indispensable 2021 essay “Into Another Channel? Literature and Politics in Hungary,” Orbán is exploiting a past “in which the Hungarian nation, maintaining its independence and isolation, always plays the role of victim.” Orbán and his party, Fidesz, dominate all major media, and have used law-making bodies to change voting laws and redesignate voting districts. Immigrants are unwelcome. Foreign owners have been pushed out of banking, tourism, agriculture and other key industries. NGOs are harassed with regulations. Books are banned, gender rights suppressed. In another essay, “My Gate,” he says, “Hungary is inexorably sinking into its own lies, many centuries old. Arrogant ineptitude and feudal archetypes. And now has even become indifferent to its own self-destruction. When a country is governed for so long by corruption operating below the level of reason, the majority sees no other solution than to sink to the ethos of an apathetic, corruption-shaped mass. I am ashamed.”
The recent banning of foreign business owners simply repeats a dark Hungarian habit. As Götz Aly states in his new book, Europe Against the Jews, 1880-1945 (Metropolitan Books, 2022), “in 1920, Jews represented barely 6 percent of the Hungarian population but 51 percent of lawyers, 39 percent of engineers and chemists, 34 percent of journalists, and around 50 percent of doctors.” The Hungarians didn’t need the inspiration of Hitler’s fascism to enact their own racial laws; they were quite capable on their own. By 1939, Prime Minister Pal Teleki was saying, “No government can be in doubt that property and land should make their way into Hungarian hands, safe hands, and not the hands of those who aren’t connected with the land by any family tradition.” Over 564,000 Hungarian Jews died between 1941 and 1945.
Schein’s essay was translated by Ottilie Mulzet who now delivers his 2009 novel Autobiographies of an Angel for anglophones. The narrator is an angel who had lived the lives – and now revives the voices — of two characters separated by two centuries of grim and tragic history. First, there is Johann Klarfeld, born in 1723, whose picaresque adventures find him traveling through Germany, first fighting for the German army and then the French army. Ultimately, he winds up in The Hague, working as a painter’s assistant and falls in love with his daughter. She has a secret. The second voiced character is a Hungarian girl, Berta Józsa, born in 1943. The angel speaks in its own voice: “I live in that ruinous interstice caused by the spillage of times, of which most people know only the two shores: yesterday and today, life and death; in vain are they without possessions on this earth. I, however, recognize neither one … Everything is now.” In this way, Schein establishes his tone: mordant, candid, disillusioned but undeterred. The timelessness isn’t angelic; it underscores the unabating cruelty and futility of humans as the stories unfold.
Where Johann’s story embodies Europe’s continental turmoil, elusive attempts at attaining political stability, and endemic anti-Semitism, Berta’s narrative lingers on her harsh childhood and familial brutality. Her father, a police officer, had participated in her town’s round-up of Jews whose possessions were scavenged by the townspeople. Her father found a small bundle containing fabric which her mother turned into a sweater. While Autobiographies of an Angel indicts Hungary’s persecution of Jews, Berta indicates that Hungarians, impoverished at their core, suffer for their benightedness. About her mother, unfulfilled: “And what else could she have chosen as a territory for struggle than my upbringing, where she could feel herself a priori to be victorious?” And the father: “… my childhood … a struggle revolving around my father, who, in the era of uniforms, flags, and marching, had been invested by two alternating state powers with the emblems of manliness and violence, such emblems as could only be gained from the hand of the state.”
Berta recalls her youth as “this wretchedness lacking words” – and like the story-telling angel, Schein believes that the powerless can defy power. He conceives of his writing as “an experiment for the rehabilitation of truth … It is the entirety of my freedom that I can make visible.” In revivifying the truth-telling past, he dispenses with sweeping historical scenarios and bears down on small episodes and fragments of memory which express the force of the compulsion to tell. But Schein offers no hope; adversity and disillusionment, he implies, are inevitable. The particularity of an historical moment – the decrees, dispossessions, killings – carry less weight in his fiction than what Mulzet has noted as “the intangible and indecipherable signs that constitute the oxygen of any given epoch which we continue to breathe in, as it sustains or alternately poisons us, with at best a partial, fleeting awareness.” The angel says that telling this tale is necessary “so that I wouldn’t become completely lost in this labyrinth.” Even so, Schein’s prose, proceeding with a formal fleetness, actually lets us get lost in the “bile-flavored, poisonous brine” of such revelatory moments that come one after the other in this defiantly unrelenting novel.
[Published by Yale University Press on July 5, 2022, 224 pages, $26.00 hardcover]
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Livia and Alessia Schepp were six-years old in 2011 when their father, Mathias Schepp, drove away with them from Saint Sulpice in Switzerland to spend a weekend together. Five days later in Italy, Mathias threw himself in front of an oncoming train. The twins were never found. The La Repubblica columnist and sometime-novelist Concita De Gregorio revives their case in The Missing Word, a narrative comprising letters and reflections, most of which have been written and spoken by the girls’ now 48-year old mother, Irina Lucidi. There are two main elements to De Gregorio’s agenda – first, to portray the unabating distress of Irina, even as she comes across as affectionate to and appreciative of those such as her grandmother and a new lover, Luis – and second, to indict the paternalistic (read: Germanic) Swiss authorities for gaslighting her and, per Irina, botching the investigation.
Irina writes to the twins’ former teacher to recoup some of their artwork; regulations get in the way. Attempting to forestall the shelving of the multi-year investigation, she writes to a senior prosecutor to spell out the aspects of the case that have been ignored. There are also older items including a letter to the couple’s marital counselor who, Irina more than implies, had been biased against her. It had even been suggested in the police record that she had some responsibility for Mathias’ suicide. These desperate letters are interspersed with warmhearted, animated letters to her relatives and friends, intended, I think, to display the buoyancy of her spirit and to dispel any notion that she is an habitually aggrieved person. She creates a list of 32 things representing “what makes me happy.” She is blameless. Mathias, however, who at first seemed “kind, polite, attentive … always jovial,” devolved into a details-obsessed tyrant who showed “a total absence of compassion.”
Knowing in advance that her audience will embrace Irina’s outraged victimhood and preserved liveliness, De Gregorio proceeds to fill in the blanks. With a mission determined before a word is written (“based on a true story”), she pursues her unmissable agenda in language that rarely rises above the diaristic. The best moments arrive when Irina ruminates on certain facts. In the passage below, “Dolores” is the twins’ ex-nanny, regarded as Mathias’ confederate:
“I was scared from the start. Of course I was. When I walked into the dark empty house and found their stuffed toys and pajamas on their beds. The girls’ car seats were in the other car at my place. Mathias would never have taken Alessia and Livia in the car without strapped them into their car seats in the back. Never ever. It was an article of faith. My heart leapt into my throat. I called Dolores right away, she was the first person I called. Where are Alesia and Livia? I don’t know, Ma’am, was all she said.”
Michael Hofmann, interviewed in Asymptote Journal, noted, “Not everything deserves to be translated. Not everything should be translated. Not everything is served by being translated.” I don’t mean to suggest that Clarissa Botsford shouldn’t have rendered this novel for anglophones. Infant abductions, child sex trafficking, and online enticement result each year in thousands of missing kids. In my state, Massachusetts, there were 928 cases in 2021 (mostly attributed to runaways and wandering). To produce a novel on the topic is an entirely benign gesture, and the social justice aspect of The Missing Word may be worth the price of admission for many of us. But the novel functions mechanically and its language is often banal. Still, when Irina’s anger flares, you can feel the heat.
The German language is famous for its resourceful compound nouns, seemingly able to describe whatever phenomenon its speakers may observe. The “missing word” in De Gregorio’s novel is the not-yet-devised term for a person experiencing the particular loss experienced by Irina – and the narrative’s singular purpose is to provide what official Swiss culture isn’t compelled to offer.
[Published by Europa Editions on July 5, 2022, 131 pages, $21.00 paperback]