Angelika Klüssendorf
Witching hours

A woman kills her husband with an axe. Out of sympathy or because she cannot put up with him anymore? He lives on as a ghost, observing life in his village.

By Holger Moos

© Piper Walter has a brain tumour; his death is imminent. He and his wife Hilde live in an east German village. Walter believed in socialism and was a loser of German reunification: “You’ve crumbled away like the village,“ it says at one point.

He used to be a difficult man - grumpy, vicious, rageful all his life. But his illness changes all that. All of a sudden, he becomes friendly and mild-mannered. Hilde is perplexed. Is that really her husband? She sees her own life as unfulfilled. She would have liked to become a writer. But all she is left with is admiration for the neighbourhood writer who leads a free life with an attractive lover, referred to only as “the drummer”. Hilde would have liked to lead such a life herself.

Hilde is invited to celebrate the New Year with this writer. A few hours before, she kills her husband with an axe. Then she goes to the New Year’s party, dances into the early hours of the morning and then disappears from the village. That is the oppressive, but perfunctory opening of Angelika Klüssendorf’s new novel Vierunddreißigster September. (The Thirty-Fourth of September).

A singular panopticum

Later, dead Walter, with many other ghosts, including that of his mother-in-law, whose telling name is Gerda Engel, wanders around his village, musing about himself, his wife and his observations. We readers, too, like biblical angels, stand by the alcoholic Heinrich, also known as “Schlucki”, one-legged Hans, widowed barkeeper Branka, the neglected Skater Girl, manic-depressive “Bipolarchen“, illiterate “Eisenalex”, trans woman Gabriela with her tortoise Coco, the writer and various other sad figures. The whole scene is a singular village panopticum – a kind of closed society.

While not omniscient, narrator Walter is at least knowledgeable, due to his other-worldly, impartial, sometimes indiscrete situation. However, Walther, like the other ghosts, is limited. They cannot go beyond their familiar territory. The ghost of a woman referred to only as “the mad woman“ lucidly grasps her fate: “Now at last I know what hell is - being buried in the village one wanted to leave.“

Rain with nothing to fall on

Each chapter brings a change of perspective. Sometimes the viewpoint is from the afterlife into this life; then the story is told of villagers’ everyday life. Klüssendorf paints this collage-like tableau of villagers and ghosts, with characters both individual and typified.

The writer makes statements fraught with meaning, as writers tend to do, such as “Life is just an interruption, a short intermezzo between the void before and the void after.“ What does a person’s absence mean? “Just rain with nothing to fall on,“ could be the answer of this unusual, eminently readable novel. That’s a far cry from comfort. In the afterlife, too, people are eternally inconsolable.