the blur
by Douglas Messerli
Peter Rosei Wein Metropolis, translated from the German by Geoffrey C. Howes as
Metropolis Vienna (Los Angeles,
Green Integer, 2009
I begin with this great masterwork of fiction because while reading a translation in manuscript of Peter Rosei’s far briefer Wien Metropolis (Metropolis Vienna), I was struck by how similar it is to von Doderer’s work—at least in method and incident. Wien Metropolis begins almost at the moment that The Demons closes, at the other end of World War II, as two Austrian Nazi soldiers, Oberkofler and Pandura, wait out the night in a Polish mansion into which they and their compatriots have forced their way, presumably to drink up the remaining wine. That evening, as the Russians advance toward the town, these two strike up a conversation, beginning a strangely close friendship, which ends in their sharing an apartment on Josefstädterstrasse after the war.
I
describe this relationship as “strange” only because, although the two are
outwardly heterosexual—with Pandura described as a “ladies’ man” and Oberkofler
developing a near sado-masochistic relationship with the beautiful Viktoria
Strnd—they function as a team, as a kind of semi-comic duo (Laurel and Hardy
spring immediately to mind) who run a local dancing and charm school for the
entrepreneurial Leito-merizky. One night, moreover, Pandura screaming out in
his sleep, is shaken awake by Oberkofler; Pandura, “still fully stupefied with
sleep,” flings an arm around his comrade, pulling him forcibly down to him as
the two engage in a kiss. Nothing more is made of this exceptional event;
however as the relationship between Oberkofler and Strnd continues, Pandura
threatens to move out; Oberkofler commits suicide by putting his head into an
oven filled with gas.
Suddenly the narration shifts to Kalgenfurt, the Carinthian capitol
city, the birthplace writers Robert Musil and Ingeborg Bachmann (whose own
father became a Nazi six years before Hitler’s invasion), where we encounter
another male couple, two young boys Alfred and Georg, both natural-born
leaders, whose stories make up the heart of Rosei’s fiction.
Like Oberkofler and Pandura, these boys grow up—Alfred, short and
broad-shouldered and Georg talk and lanky (in the Laurel and Hardy mold)—to
develop a deep friendship as they attend the university in Vienna, a friendship
which one day results in Alfred kissing his friend Georg upon the lips. Again,
nothing is made about this event, and the narrative of their lives continues as
if it has been of no importance. Alfred, we discover, is the child of Viktoria
Strnd; the backer of Oberkofler and Pandura’s dance school, Leitomerizky (now a
successful automobile dealer, with outlets eventually throughout the country)
is, so he announces in Strnd’s prensence, Alfred’s father. The Jewish
Leitomerizky and the Catholic Strnd had been deeply in love before the war, we
are told, and for some time after the Nazi Putsch
Leitomerizky successfully avoided capture; ultimately, however, he was sent to
the camps, returning to Vienna as a survivor. Strnd has, we discern, created a
real estate business which has sold Jewish property to numerous Nazis and
continues in her these nefarious connections after the war. Later, Strnd denies
Leitomerizky’s paternity.
I won’t describe all of the various interlinking stories and events this
fiction conveys; as the narrator admits, in Vienna everyone knows everyone, and
as in von Doderer’s fiction, Wein
Metropolis weaves numerous lives together in a way that while describing
everyday events reveals something far deeper. For we soon perceive that nearly
all the figures in this book—all in some sense “survivors”—seek in others a
kind of a love that is not always as sexual as it is based on inter-dependence.
Both Alfred and Georg, at various times in the book, romance the wealthy young,
sophisticated Klara Wohlbrück; neither of these young men seem actually to love her—each are slightly disgusted by
her endless laughter and chatter—yet each develop a near-desperate need to have
her near them. As Alfred breaks with Georg to travel abroad, Georg takes up
with another young man, Stepanik, with whom he develops a successful
advertising business. As that relationship, in turn, begins to wane, Stepanik
turns gambling each night with a new friend, the elder Leitomerizky. Numerous
other pairings appear and disappear, almost as in Schnitzler’s Hands Around or as in a grand Strauss
waltz. The dance, for these alternating couples, is just that, a patterned
performance that has little to do with emotional or sexual fulfillment.
It quickly becomes apparent that each of the characters living in this post-World
War II Vienna are seeking some sort of meaning in their lives, grasping at
get-rich quick schemes and attaching themselves to other beings in order to
fill their emptiness. As the older generation have already lost their
way—Viktoria turning to alcohol and Leitomerizky to, at first, women, then to
late-night partying, and finally to the Bible—the younger figures desperately
try to carve out meaningful lives through vague political alliances (Alfred is
fascinated by the German Baader-Meinhof Group, and, on his own, plots the death
of a wealthy lawyer whose villa reminds him of the Wohlbrük villa back in
Vienna—which, if he actually had joined political left, could be the subject of
an entirely different essay) or social connections (Georg marries Klara, moving
to a reconstructed villa with her and his mother); yet these couplings with
individuals or organizations provide only ephemeral happiness. Like her mother,
who later in her life retreats from her family by seeking out sexual partners
each night on the Vienna boulevards, Klara retreats from Georg into her sick
bed, finding a sexual outlet with her new friend and confidant, Professor
Frodl. In the end nearly all the active players in Wien Metropolis are left alone in a kind of hazy vision of reality
that Rossei describes effectively throughout the fiction in the pattern of
Viennese sunlight dappling the trees, a pattern that blurs perception.
Rosei’s Vienna is not at all the black and white Expressionist-like
world of Carol Reed’s film, The Third Man,
a world reminding everyone—characters and viewers both—of that great city’s
monstrous acts and the culture’s fall from grace. Instead, Rosei’s
figures—caught up in a society of avoidance—pick up existence as if the War had
not occurred, attempting to ignore or outrun their terrible past in a rush for
money and success. Even in their achievements, however, they discover they have
no lives, that their beautifully reconstructed city—as the novelist who
drunkenly intrudes upon one of Klara’s salons argues—is “nothing but a
playground of stupidity and beastliness, of beastliness and stupidity, where
nothing but baseness ever prevails, or at best the ridiculous.” Too often, as
in the murder by Alfred’s father (the only father he knew as a child) of a
nearby neighbor and in Pandura’s violence against nonviolent protesters, that
beast they attempt to hide terrifyingly reveals itself.
By fiction’s end, the reader comes to recognize that the two incidents
of kissing I described at the beginning of this essay are emblems of an
impossible search for innocent love, a child-like love, perhaps even a kind of
narcissistic self-love that is not permitted for these Viennese survivors. Even
the healthy working class passion between Johann and Maria Oberth ends in a
cancerous-induced fog of forgetfulness.
Metropolitan Vienna is a culture doomed to death by the past and its
refusal to accept responsibility for its acts. Like the frieze on the corner of
Oberkofler and Pandura’s apartment, depicting “an oversized male head with the
flowing beard of a prophet,” lips sealed, eyes wide-open in a blind stare,
these figures of post-war Vienna are souls that have lost track of themselves
in their “joy-crazed adaptation to existence.”
Rosei has brilliantly picked up were von Doderer’s fiction ended, only
to reveal that nothing much has changed, except what once was a world of
self-made men is now a society of men and women who create identity, like
drowning beings, by grabbing on to anything or anyone they can.
For all that, we still feel for Rosei’s drowning damned, allow them to
grab onto us through our distant imaginations, suffering some sorrow for (in
the case of Oberkofler, Strnd, Leiotneizky, Fau Wolbrück, and Alfred) their
deaths and disappearances and sympathizing for (in the examples of Klara, Maria
and Georg) their meaningless lives—even as we fear the tenacity of their empty
aspirations. If, as one of Rosei’s characters argues, the Holocaust is the most
important event of the 20th Century, what might we fear and image
for the century in which we now live?
Los Angeles, January 16, 2007
Reprinted
from The New Review of Literature, V,
no. 2 (Spring 2008)
