EVA MENASSE Darkenbloom. Reviewed by Ann Skea

In Austrian writer Eva Menasse’s new novel, the residents of a small border town are shaken when uncomfortable truths from the past come to light.

Darkenbloom is a fictitious small town on the Austrian–Hungarian border: ‘A region where great spiritual, national, and cultural differences have repeatedly collided.’ The year is 1989. In September, the border between the two countries has been opened; in November, the Berlin Wall falls.

Rehberg has become Darkenbloom’s travel agent and has decided that there is now potential for attracting tourists to the town. It had, for centuries, been a feudal state, and although it is now situated in a republic and the descendents of the count choose to live elsewhere and rarely return, when they do the locals still dutifully turn out to line the main street, the children weave wreaths of flowers, and the old women dress in their hundred-year-old traditional costumes. Sadly, there had been a catastrophic fire in the castle during the Russian occupation, but the tower survived, there are centuries-old rustic streets with their picturesque small houses, and there is the plague pillar, although the two saints’ ‘sensitive noses had been eroded by wind and rain so they looked like affronted sphinxes’.

Rehberg has started to research the town’s more recent history, but he soon discovers that ‘the memories of individuals can only be trusted so far; most people only remember what suits them, what casts them in a better light, or spares their feelings’. And, as the narrator tells us,

that is precisely the problem with the truth. The whole truth, as the name implies, is the collective knowledge of all those involved. Which is why you can never really piece it together again afterwards. Because some of those who possessed a part of it will already be dead. Or they’re lying, or their memories are bad … That was how it was in Darkenbloom.

Rehberg is not the only one who has begun to be interested in Darkenbloom’s history. Flocke Malnitz, the young primary-school teacher, is keen to discover more about the recent past and has shocked a council meeting by interjecting ‘a stupid remark that exposed the frazzled state of the mayor’s nerves’:

something about a border museum, something special that no one else has but us. Us, in collaboration with people from Over There, everything in both languages – there were links, we’d just have to dig them up …

‘Over There’ is the way Darkenbloom people habitually refer to Hungary, whose border is so close, and where Soviet control has just ended.

Two apparent strangers, too, have just arrived in Darkenbloom. One, Dr Alexander Gellert, seems to be a tourist and has taken a room in Hotel Tuffer, but, curiously, he seems to know some of the locals. The other, Lowetz (who had not been born in Darkenbloom, but had lived there as a child and had ‘got out as soon as he could’ and ‘had intended never to return’) has come to sell his mother’s house after her unexpected death. His mother was from Over There, ‘but over the decades she had skilfully succeeded in making people forget it’. She, too, had been researching local history.

She had not been ill, nor was she especially old, yet, as expressed in the unintentional witticism produced with some effort by her inconsolable neighbour Fritz – the injury he had received as an infant made him difficult to understand, but the Lowetz family were attuned to his guttural stammer – she still ‘woke up dead one morning’.

Flocke also discovers that a group of students of contemporary history ‘who regard themselves as left-wing, fighters against Austria’s historical amnesia’, have dedicated three weeks of their summer holidays to the restoration of the overgrown and neglected Jewish cemetery, which has ‘vanished from people’s consciousness’.

All this is upsetting the people of Darkenbloom, who do not want their history to be dug up. Nobody talks about the war, curtains twitch, people watch each other, ‘the walls have ears, the flowers in the gardens have eyes … and the grass has whiskers that register every step’. There are many dark secrets. Some of its men had belonged to the Hitler Youth and still meet in the Hotel Tuffer to discuss the old days; Flocke’s mother, Leonore, who married into Darkenbloom, calls it a town ‘full of Nazis, liars, and drunkards’; Dr Alois Ferbenz, one of the most important men in the Darkenbloom, boasts that he once met Adolf Hitler and still speaks admiringly of his blue eyes and his ‘artist’s hands’. Other residents know something about a party that had been held in the castle before it burned down, and the rumours of young men with guns heading for the border wall to deal with the forced labour ‘vermin’ who were building it.

Darkenbloom, too, like other Austrian towns, had expelled its Jews, and had become the first to raise the white flag signalling to the Nazi invaders that (as was written in the paper):

Darkenbloom is free of Jews! The town that for centuries was infamous for its more than one hundred resident Jews is now completely Jew-free! Most have already been deprived of citizenship, because they left the territory of the Reich.

Other things, like the violence and rape that occurred during the five years of Russian occupation at the end of the war in 1945, are not spoken of, although their effects still linger – as in the episodic madness of Agnes Kalmar, and the sad lives of the unmarried Stipsits women – Mother Stipsits and her daughter, who all the old folk know was ‘a memento from a Russian soldier’.

All this suggests that Eva Menasse’s Darkenbloom is not an easy book to read, but she distances the horrors by creating characters that hold your interest; by the ironic, dark wit of her narrator; and by exploiting the hidden secrets and the conspiracies that arise after Leonore Malnitz’s barn mysteriously burns down, a corpse is dug up in a border field, Lowentz’s mother’s history notes go missing, and Flocke suddenly disappears.

Darkenbloom becomes a mystery story that you keep reading partly because you slowly get to know the people, their mixed loyalties, and how they struggle – or, in a few cases, thrive – in the constantly changing landscape of war, but also because you want the mysteries to be resolved. You begin to understand, too, this society’s need for historical amnesia.

That the town of Darkenbloom is, as Menasse says in an interview, a fictitious version of the Austrian–Hungarian border town of Rechnitz, where some of the atrocities she has built into her story did take place during World War II, is horrifying. So, too, when the current European territorial war is constantly in the news, are the final words in this book:

This is not the end of the story.

Eva Menasse Darkenbloom translated by Charlotte Collins Scribe Publications 2025 PB 480pp $36.99

Dr Ann Skea is a freelance reviewer, writer and an independent scholar of the work of Ted Hughes. She is author of Ted Hughes: The Poetic Quest (UNE 1994, and currently available for free download here). Her work is internationally published and her Ted Hughes webpages (ann.skea.com) are archived by the British Library.

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Tags: 1989 in Europe, Austria, Austrian writers, border towns, end of the Soviet Union, Eva | Menasse, Hungary, memory, uncomfortable truths, World War II