The German-language book autumn 2021 will be dominated by four women writers.

Highly successful, but also scrupulous, which is why their new works are eagerly awaited after a long break.

Jenny Erpenbeck's novel “Kairos” will be published in ten days;

six years have passed since its predecessor, “Gehen Ging Gegangen”.

Two weeks later, Sasha Marianna Salzmann's “Everything has to be wonderful” comes out, four years after “Besides yourself”, the acclaimed debut novel by this author.

And another month later, Julia Franck's “Worlds Apart” follows, a whole decade after “Back to Back”.

But today Eva Menasse kicks off this sequence of long-awaited books with “Dunkelblum”, her third novel.

The second, "Quasicrystals", was eight years ago.

Andreas Platthaus

Responsible editor for literature and literary life.

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It is the only highly comical book in this quartet, but at the same time - according to the title - it is a deeply darker story.

One that is located at the beginning of the epoch of 1989, and that also on the Hungarian-Austrian border, which became a place of longing that summer: with the influx of refugees from the GDR here and the temporary opening of the Iron Curtain for them, the collapse began of the Eastern Bloc.

But “Dunkelblum” is not a reversible novel.

Its theme goes back to the twentieth century.

"Now something has happened again"

In view of this, many feel uncanny in Dunkelblum, a small border town in Burgenland, including Mayor Koreny: “That is probably not important, but the daughter of Malnitz, the youngest one who went crazy, knows that she's always asking around about some ancient ones Stories that a museum wants to make or at least a private exhibition on her mother's property in Ehrenfeld. However, the barn just burned down. . . She told our Mrs. Balaskó that she was looking for dark-blooded war criminals, imagine that, war criminals, with us! The girl is in her early twenties, and young people used to be interested in something else, in dancing and flirting. . . ”There is a lot about this quote that is characteristic of the whole novel.

First, the orality of the style: "Dunkelblum" is a multi-vocal structure, a dozen main characters and a number of secondary characters are discussed in words and thoughts, and it is not uncommon for it to sound like the "Brenner" crime novels by Wolf Haas - Of course, because of the locally compelling Austrianzisms, a seven-page glossary ensures that they can be understood by the German public. But late in the novel there is also a deliberately placed homage to Haas, as his

signature sentence

"Now something has happened again" suddenly flashes in indirect speech.

Eva Menasse places herself with the tone and tone of her writing in a long specifically Austrian black and ironic tradition from Kraus and Musil to Doderer and Lernet-Holenia to Hans Lebert or Haas, and she also has the epic breath of these authors.

524 pages prove it.

Cross-border not only in a geographical sense

Then, in the passage just quoted, the contrast of the compatriot in Dunkelblum is addressed. Burgenland only came to Austria after the First World War, before it belonged to the Hungarian part of the empire, and this is where the family names Balaskó and Koreny come from. Malnitz, on the other hand, is of Slavic origin, and of course it also has German names in Dunkelblum: Rehberg or Reschen, for example. And green. But Antal Grün, the local grocer, is the only Jew who returned after the war. "We were fifty-one," said Antal, smiling and with his eyes closed, including an eighty-year-old rabbi and several children. And he told Doctor Sterkowitz about his night on the breakwater. ”The rest of this doctor practiced in the house of his Jewish predecessor.