Valerie Fritsch
Guilt, Silence, Pain

Grandfather and his deeds during the Second World War lead to trauma that threatens to overwhelm the subsequent generations in Valerie Fritsch’s family novel. Only a trip to the deserted steppes of Kazakhstan breaks the chains of the past.

By Marit Borcherding

© Suhrkamp What is it with this family? Even as a young child, Alma had noticed that her father, mother, and grandparents behave as if they were acting in a play in front of dissonantly thrown-together scenery. A play dominated by silence, the unsaid, lies, and fears and in which there’s no applause for anyone. All Alma sees are “tired marionettes, with black marks on their hearts, performing for their very lives, always bending but never allowed to take a bow”. Left alone with her discomfort at the phoniness and equipped with sensitive powers of observation, Alma soon realizes what is actually directing this ghostly performance: the war. Its terror propagated in the genes of the children and children’s children until it also determines the images in Alma’s dreams: “Arsenic dreams, arsonist dreams, war dreams. The sky darkened by aerial bombs and darkened by birds.” Alma realises that she can only find out what inherited components her self consists of by questioning, questioning, questioning. “She only knew one thing: She wanted to break the silence instead of keeping it.”

Captive In memory

It’s the grandfather whose silence dominates family life. Valerie Fritsch changes the narrative perspective and now portrays him and his thoughts. As a captive of his wartime memories, he looked “at the people who ran, ablaze like torches, from the houses, sank to the ground and went out, and saw a lighter in his hand.” It is a horrific effect and the cause is apparently detached from it. It’s as if even in his innermost heart the grandfather cannot admit to the momentousness of his devastating deed. In spite or because of this, it pursues him.
 
Herzklappen von Johnson & Johnson (Heart Valves by Johnson & Johnson) is not the first and only novel about the silence of the perpetrator generation; and the persistence of war trauma has also been the subject of quite a few books. But on just 170 pages, the Bachmann award winner and photographer Valerie Fritsch manages to portray her characters’ interwoven suffering with rare forcefulness and depth of focus by turning their thoughts, psyches, and dreams inside out in strong, almost stilted images. The characters are not constituted by what is said – this novel contains no direct dialogue – but by means of thoughts, feelings, and the resulting actions.

no pain at all

Alma continues her attempts to free herself and visits her grandmother, an eccentrically delicate, classily dressed lady. She lives with Alma’s grandfather in a “house like a mason jar that had preserved even the remotest years; a vessel for the old pain”. She conjures up the past for Alma in her stories of a slowly disappearing life. And at the same time, in the present, Alma finds Friedrich – her great, late-in-life love, who will soon be Emil’s father. To the parents’ dismay, they learn that Emil cannot feel any physical pain. This makes him a quite at-risk antipode of his ancestor: “Grandfather and Emil faced one another as mirrored figures of time, a young and an old face, full of spare parts inside, screws that held them together, and a false heart.” A triumph of medical technology ensures the physical survival of both, but does not drive out the family demons.

Liberation through movement

Not until the grandparents die can the constellation be moved out of its rut. Valerie Fritsch sends Alma, Friedrich, and Emil on an uncertain journey to the origin of the family trauma, to the place where the silence began. The destination is Kazakhstan, where grandfather was a prisoner of war. The seemingly endless journey there is a series of many beguiling, fantastic pictures, like a dream journey just before awakening. What do they find at the end? Nothing: The camp had been removed, not a trace remains of the war. Alma had hoped that she could get closer to her grandparents “if she could only stand on the same bit of earth, and she failed, first with a shrug of her shoulders, and then with a loud laugh”. The laugh doesn’t undo anything, doesn’t gloss over anything, and yet can be understood as liberation and a turn to the present.