FICTION: The Wedding in AuschwitzBy Erich Hackl, translated by Martin Chambers Serpent's Tail. 148pp. £7.99
THAT MOST conventional of public gestures, the wedding, acquires dark symbolism in a narrative yet again reiterating that the story of the death camps will never be fully told because it is too far-reaching. Its legacy lives on in the communal memory; all the agonies, the many brutalities, the legions of victims and their mourners. Above all there is the relentlessness of the ghosts. Gifted, perceptive Austrian writer Erich Hackl harks back to a strange little incident, a stage-managed wedding in Auschwitz, and explores how it reflects the complexities of the story that remains the dominant chapter of the 20th century, and perhaps of human history.
Writers continue to mine the material, the bottomless pit of war. So many novels have been written about it, so many individual stories have inspired it. Often these books have been regarded as important because their theme conferred an importance, yet they are not always artistically convincing. Many opportunistic novels have been celebrated for the wrong reasons. Hackl is different – this is a sophisticated, exhausting, provocative book which has been brilliantly served by a translator alert to all the nuances.
Hackl’s dauntingly forensic flair has again proven how well he interprets known facts and then thoughtfully places them within the arena of behaviour. In this book he has three narrators, one of whom – the presiding voice – is Marina, who was very involved with the players. Her sister Marga married the central character, Rudi Friemel. The other two are Rudi’s sons, who share a father but have never met each other. Their histories are linked, yet separate. Their contrasting viewpoints succeed in piecing together a portrait of the individual who fathered them. Rudi is many things, a romantic intent on liberating Austria from fascism, a ladies’ man, perhaps even a hero. The main thing is that he is real.
Hackl is an original; his approach to narrative is entirely his own. In 1987 he published his first novel, Aurora's Motive.It followed the experience of Hildegart, a girl who was the product of her mother's bizarrely idealistic determination. Aurora Rodriguez set out to have a child; she advertised for a man prepared to perform the biological necessity who would then disappear. Aurora, a single mother, raised the child as a prodigy; little Hildegart had mastered typing by the age of two, secured a university degree while still a teenager and went on to become a prominent journalist.
Aurora's Motiveis a black tale. For all her success, Hildegart, her mother's creation, also becomes her victim. All the girl seeks is death. The sheer deliberation of the telling leaves the reader shaken, such power and technical skill does Hackl exert over his material, over his reader. In ways he is looking to Truman Capote's methodology in the classic In Cold Blood(1966). Yet Hackl's book is far less documentary in style, it is more literary for all its tautness. Hildegart's story is a human tragedy in which the British writer HG Wells also had a walk-on part. And it all happened in Spain, culminating in a murder in 1933.
Spain also features, particularly with reference to the Spanish civil war, in The Wedding in Auschwitz. Some of the characters are Spanish, yet they too become involved in the political upheaval that not only tears Austria apart, it denies its existence, and then spills its evil across the rest of Europe. Hackl opens his tale through his main narrator, Marina. Her elder sister Marga was summoned to Auschwitz to marry her beloved Rudi.
Now in old age, looking back, Marina proves a resilient witness. “Tonight I’ll dream about Rudi Friemel. He’ll have a white face, as if made of wax, and his eyes will be wide open, as if he was frightened of death. He’ll be wearing thin, striped prisoner’s trousers, which hide the frostbite, and a white shirt embroidered with roses. A present, from whom? He will smile, as he always smiled. I will see the dimple in his chin. He will say: ‘All of them have forgotten me, women, friends, comrades.’” Her musings continue: “Strange, that I’ll dream about him. After so many years. It’s not bad to dream of the dead. But why didn’t he appear to me before?”
Within a couple of sentences Hackl has opened the door, you have no choice but to walk in. When Marina asks whether she should tell Rudi’s story, it is a rhetorical question. “I’m warning you,” she says, “there are only fragments of his life, and in my head they don’t add up to a clear picture. The years fly past, and when one looks back, it’s too late to separate imagination and reality. It would be better if you ask others about him. Although they won’t be able to tell you much either.” Marina emerges as an unforgettable presence. She remembers, she speculates. Another narrator, one of Rudi’s sons, recalls: “He was my father. I hardly knew him. The few memories have faded. But somewhere there must still be a shoe box lying around, it was passed on to me from my grandfather. There are letters and photos in it. Not many . . .” Slowly, on the strength of half-remembered facts, bits of papers, a chance recollection, Rudi stands directly before us as if in the camera’s eye. We know he fought in Spain, detaching himself from his Austrian wife and son, and then met Marga, the passive Spanish girl who would become the love of his life. It is Marga, the mother of his second son Edi, who travels to Auschwitz with the child, for the wedding that has been stage-managed by the Nazis.
There are other voices, but Marina dominates, with the sons also offering their respective versions of events, albeit versions limited to their own experiences. An imagined Rudi contributes to the telling of his story; it is he who remarks to his sister-in-law that he has been forgotten. It is he who announces, “All the dead rest in the restlessness of a perhaps unnecessary death . . . I regret nothing, or very little. I admit, however, I was too impetuous. It is not as if I believed I could outrun time . . . Nor did I believe that love would save me. Love and time either like one another or are deadly enemies, one cannot exist without the other . . . But time is always stronger than love.”
Along with the musings of ghosts, there is the stark image of wartime Vienna with no food; no heat; no hope. The various narrative voices serve as a chorus; there is the romance and there is the reality.
First published in Zurich in 2002, this first English-language edition of Hackl's gracefully measured, conversational and obliquely impressionistic retelling of a small human drama, is cause for celebration. It is but one of many hundreds of thousands, if not millions of tiny lives destroyed by a monstrous sequence of events that no one, to this day, can either justify or understand. There are echoes of Javier Cercas's wonderful Soldiers of Salamis(2001; English edition 2003) though Hackl's narrative technique is more subtle. He has shaped an eloquent monument to the memory of all who died as well as to those who were destroyed by the suffering and loss. Literary prizes are contentious bones, yet one of the finest and invariably most astutely judged is the British Independent'sForeign Fiction Award. Here is a worthy contender for that prize, and others.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of
The Irish Times
