Only seventy-two pages into Schattenfroh, Michael Lentz’s bleak, confounding, and finally brilliant doorstopper of a novel, the story, which had just seemed to be getting off the ground, cuts short. The type gives way to facsimile pages covered with the handwritten names and ages of the more than 3,100 people who died in the Allied bombing of Düren, a town close to the western border of Germany. Part of an initiative code-named Operation Queen, the bombing lasted from 11:13 AM to 12:48 PM on November 16, 1944. Düren had a population of about 45,000. It was attacked, as Jörg Friedrich points out in his 2006 book The Fire: The Bombing of Germany, 1940–1945, with “4,600 high-explosive bombs and fifty thousand incendiaries,” meaning “at least one bomb was dropped for every person.”
The Allied assault was intended to destroy the supply lines running from Düren to Hürtgen Forest, where the German army was hunkered down. It resulted in civilian carnage and the wholesale destruction of the town. A photograph of the aftermath shows apartment buildings and churches in ruins, blackened trees, and streets strewn with rubble. Lentz’s ledger is alphabetical. It starts with the Abels family—“Abels Johann (46), Abels Margarethe (45), Abels Marie (16), Abels Peter (13)”—and goes on to list casualties ranging from adults in their seventies to toddlers and teens.
As you read through the list, you find yourself asking questions. Did Petronella Sartorius die with any of her four children in her arms? Did two-year-old Rolf Heinz Thal’s parents watch him burn to death or try to pry him out of the rubble? I have a newly immediate ability to imagine such scenarios after nearly two years of watching Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, about which it is impossible not to think when confronted with Lentz’s list of annihilated civilians—and those are the people who made it onto the list at all. “How many people,” wonders Nobody, the pointedly anonymous narrator of Schattenfroh, “simply disintegrated at 1700 degrees Celsius and no longer even have a name?”
For reasons that remain obscure, it is Nobody’s job to transcribe Düren’s “book of the dead,” a registry with a separate section for “the ‘in-from-out-of-town’” who perished in the bombing. This detail, at once tragic and comic, painfully human and stupidly bureaucratic, captures something essential about Schattenfroh, an extremely dark novel about the horrors of modern European history laced with the delirious, disconcerting humor of a Hieronymus Bosch painting. Bosch figures importantly in Schattenfroh, as do Bach, the German Peasants’ War, and the Kabbalah, to name just a few of Lentz’s preoccupations. But so does the intimate drama of father–son relationships: Lentz’s father, Hubert, was the Oberstadtdirektor, or city manager, of Düren from 1962 to 1986. He died in 2014, making him one of the thousands if not millions of people whose loss is mourned by the novel’s subtitle, A Requiem.
While Schattenfroh is a requiem, it is also a portrait of totalitarian dystopia. When it begins, Nobody is being held captive in a dark room by a sinister organization called the Frightbearing Society. Schattenfroh, which translates literally from the German as “Shadowglad,” is the name of Nobody’s jailer, a member and representative of the Frightbearing Society who seems to be, inter alia, God, the Devil, and the late Hubert Lentz. There is also Nobody’s mother and father, and a shifty character called (among other names) Mateo, who operates as an intermediary between Nobody and Schattenfroh. On behalf of the society, Schattenfroh oversees a process whereby Nobody’s thoughts are transformed into text via a “facemask and some kind of spectacles” set over Nobody’s head:
My centroscriptorium is remote controlled, as are my hands. The fingers move without my having agency over them. Sometimes the right hand seems to be writing as if it were holding a pen or a quill, scraping and encircling motions are carried out, then both hands become involved again, as if they were typing on a keyboard or drawing in the air. The motions correspond with what you see, think, and hear, says Schattenfroh.
What Nobody calls his “brainfluid-script” is projected, he says,
into my hands, from which Schattenfroh allows to be read that which I have thought and seen in the form of a book, as if the hands were giving instructions, or what I have thought heard seen is transmitted remotely via the spectacles to a device that writes everything down.
Nobody is not allowed to see the transcription of his thoughts, but we are: it is Schattenfroh, the very book we’re reading.
The image of Nobody strapped into a machine that extracts his mental “fluid” recalls the so-called breeders from George Miller’s 2015 film Mad Max: Fury Road—postpartum women who are masked and immobilized by a grotesque apparatus that wrings milk from their breasts, feeding it through tubes into massive watercooler jugs. As for the Frightbearing Society, it is modeled after the Fruchtbringende Gesellschaft, or Fruitbearing Society, a literary club founded in Weimar in 1617 by a group of Saxon nobles, whose aim was to standardize vernacular German and encourage its use by writers and scholars. The Frightbearing Society is similarly engaged in preserving
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the High German tongue in every way viable and possible, as well as being diligent in using the best pronunciation in speaking, in the purest and clearest kind in writing, and, if necessary, in rhyming.
(High German is a linguistic variant that developed in Germany’s central and southern highlands; it is the form of German used today, thanks in part to Martin Luther’s decision to translate the Bible into High German in 1534.)
Lentz’s society finds an obvious if unstated precedent beyond Germany as well, in Gulliver’s Travels. As Schattenfroh explains, the Frightbearing Society not only works to safeguard the beauties of High German; it takes as one of its governing principles the notion that “new words create a new world.” “Thus,” Schattenfroh says, “have we created new words. Our language is crystal clear. It is to be used absolutely for understanding between humans.” What is being expressed here is the ambition to create a universal language, a philosophical project much in vogue during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The Fruitbearing Society was part of this cultural movement, and it is organizations like it that Swift satirizes in Gulliver’s Travels, a scorching critique of the early modern and Enlightenment-era mania for progress smuggled inside an adventure story.
In that book, Gulliver finds himself in the city of Lagado, which houses a grand academy of scientists determined to push civilization forward by various extreme or crackpot methods. One of these scientists has invented a machine consisting of wooden blocks strung together by wire, on which are stuck pieces of paper covered with every word in the language “in their several moods, tenses, and declensions; but without any order.” The machine is manipulated by forty “lads” who, on command, turn its iron handles to move the words around. “The professor,” Gulliver tells us,
then commanded six-and-thirty of the lads, to read the several lines softly, as they appeared upon the frame; and where they found three or four words together that might make part of a sentence, they dictated to the four remaining boys, who were scribes. This work was repeated three or four times, and at every turn, the engine was so contrived, that the words shifted into new places, as the square bits of wood moved upside down.
“Six hours a day,” Gulliver continues, “the young students were employed in this labour; and the professor showed me several volumes in large folio, already collected, of broken sentences, which he intended to piece together, and out of those rich materials, to give the world a complete body of all arts and sciences.” That’s not to mention the scientist who wants “to shorten discourse by cutting polysyllables into one” or the scientist who wants to abolish words altogether and replace them with a bag of things, to be carried around and brought out in a kind of game of charades whenever a person wants to communicate.
Swift includes a drawing of the language machine in his book, and drawings, along with squiggles, sigils, photocopies of pages from other books, reproductions of paintings, and one all-black page feature prominently in Schattenfroh, underscoring Lentz’s interest in the origins of the experimental literary tradition. The all-black page is a nod to The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, which famously features one as well, and Lentz even copies the drawings of circuitous lines that Laurence Sterne included in that novel, his way of mapping the unpredictable and digressive movement of his plot.
For Sterne and Swift, the printed book was a fairly new technology whose physical qualities could be exploited for metafictional purposes, drawing attention to both the novel’s artifice and its existence as a thing in the world. Lentz, by contrast, writes from deep within the digital era, a moment when the book is all but obsolete. The situation that Nobody finds himself in—his private thoughts siphoned out of his head and transformed into material for someone else to read—is an image of data collection of the sort to which we’re unwittingly subjected whenever we go online. What’s more, our everyday encounters with cookies, eye-tracking technology, device fingerprinting, and so on are merely recent iterations of the economic development model called extractivism, a model that relies on the removal and export of natural resources from some environment with minimal processing costs. Like Swift’s professors, who are trying to squeeze “sunbeams out of cucumbers” or reverse engineer food from shit, Schattenfroh is an emblem of just this sort of plunder. Instead of lusting after gold like the conquistadors of the New World, he is—like engineers training an AI model on human behavior—after consciousness itself.
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Tortuous though it may be, Tristram Shandy does have a plot—Schattenfroh, less so. The novel is a largely psychological journey, following Nobody as he goes on a tour of German history by seeming to leap into famous paintings (by Bosch, Titian, and the twentieth-century artist Werner Tübke) and then narrating them from inside out. In interviews, Lentz—who is an avant-garde musician and poet in addition to being a novelist—has said that he took his protagonist’s name from the one Odysseus gives to the Cyclops Polyphemus right before he stabs him in the eye, so that Polyphemus is ridiculed as he runs around telling his fellow monsters that “Nobody” has attacked him.
Nobody is also a stock character from medieval and Renaissance popular culture. A 1507 broadside by Jörg Schan shows Nobody traipsing through a landscape of broken pots and pans, and an accompanying poem describes how household servants blame all their mishaps on him. Nobody wears spectacles and a helmet with one wing, his mouth pierced by a padlock that keeps it shut, his hand reaching up to grab a scroll that floats above his head and reads “Nobody I am called, for what everybody does, I am blamed.” It’s possible this image is a source for the much better known Elck, a drawing made by Pieter Bruegel the Elder around 1558, which features Elck, or “Everyman,” similarly attired and surrounded by toppled pots and pans as well as dice, cards, and a chessboard, symbols of life’s more vapid pursuits.
It seems hardly a stretch to link this image to Lentz’s narrator, a bespectacled and silenced “golem of golems” picking his way through a tableau of human wreckage. Nobody wants to see what lies within and behind images, to see if “art,” which “wants to embellish everything,” can truly represent immense anguish. Ground zero for this inquiry is a wooden carving of Christ that Nobody describes finding in his parents’ room. “I am disappointed,” he admits, “to have found no trace of the flagellation upon his wooden back.” This discovery is flanked by pages of detailed explanation of what happens to a person when he’s crucified, how “the pericardium fills up with blood serum and threatens to crush the heart” while “simultaneously, the Crucified One dries up on the inside. The heart wishes to pump that which can no longer be pumped, the cells thirst, the body hangs there until it becomes limp.”
What if, Nobody wonders, you whipped Jesus in front of a symphony orchestra, if the most prolifically aestheticized act of torture in world history—that is, the Passion of Christ—were accompanied by, oh, say, “the fourth version of the St. John Passion by Johann Sebastian Bach”? The philosopher and statesman Edmund Burke offered one answer to this question when, in his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), he observed that if you walked into a crowded theater where the audience was watching the best performance of the best play anyone had ever seen and announced that a criminal was going to be executed down the street, everyone would run outside to catch the hanging. People want what is real; they sense, as Lentz suggests, that life cannot be given “definitive form in a work of art,” and neither can death. This is partly owing to art’s tendency to focus on the individual, obscuring the way life is lived collectively, not as a hero’s journey but as a ramshackle parade of Nobodies, “ants who are as a collective through the individual who is naught.”
It may be that no painter has better rendered the meaningless but no less miserable condition of the ant-like creatures we call human beings than Hieronymus Bosch, several of whose canvases make appearances in Schattenfroh. At one point Nobody’s memories seem to take up residence in Bosch’s The Extraction of the Stone of Madness (1501–1505), sometimes known as The Cure of Folly, in which a tubby, slack-jawed man is shown having his scalp split open with a knife wielded by a sober-looking doctor who wears an upside-down funnel on his head. Finding himself “in the foreground of the painting” with his parents, Nobody projects his father onto the man undergoing this fantastic procedure:
He would like to have his head examined, something needs to be removed, thus did we engage a doctor in a floor-length robe on our way, he wears an inverted funnel on his head and a wide girdle with a clay jug hanging from its golden clasp: “Meester shnijt die keye ras/Myne name Is lubbert das.”
Those two lines are actually written at the top and bottom of Bosch’s painting. Lubbert Das, the figure with whom Nobody identifies his father, is a character from Dutch literature whose name translates as “castrated badger.”
This is a fine way to troll one’s dead father, especially if he was as brutal and authoritarian a figure as Nobody makes Schattenfroh out to be. Lentz is exploiting the proto-psychoanalytic phantasmagorias of Bosch for a private purpose, namely reviving—and not just taking revenge on—the parent whom Nobody, like Lentz, sees everywhere. Michel Foucault once said that Bosch’s paintings were “a series of moral lessons” demonstrating “the monstrous contents of the human heart,” and in Schattenfroh they become a way to externalize the author’s Oedipal turmoil. A jaunt into Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights (1490–1500), with its pig in a nun’s habit that, Nobody says, “wants to kiss me,” turns into a vision of Nobody’s mother in her kitchen, reading a book “about her death.” Father throws Nobody off a cliff and into Werner Tübke’s Early Bourgeois Revolution in Germany, a painting Tübke worked on between 1976 and 1987 as part of a public monument commissioned by the East German government. Looking up from the ground, Nobody spots
Father upon a hillock…. He seems to have our provisions, which I was carrying in a rucksack, he devours one slice of apple after another, he also eats the smoked-and-salted-meat sandwiches with great aplomb, then he opens the thermos flask with the coffee, pours himself one, shuts the flask once more, then sticks it into the rucksack, out of which he also takes a plastic bottle of water, which he unscrews and puts to his mouth…. The more he consumes, the younger he looks, if, by the time I get to him, he has exhausted all of our provisions, I shall be the father and he shall be the son. Then I might scold him, I might think up a nice punishment, harass him, but not without showing him that I love him.
No matter where you turn, the family romance is inescapable. It is there in the story of Jesus, the son of the father who became his son, and in paintings of the Crucifixion, where that same father allows his son to be tortured and killed as a way of showing his love for us. It is even there in a giant panorama of German history commissioned by the GDR, peopled by hundreds if not thousands of nameless figures quite literally dying to overthrow their masters.
It’s easy to praise Lentz’s ambition while sidelining his artistry. Schattenfroh is extremely long and prodigiously learned, with scenes—and even sentences—that veer from one century to another, and with a taste for literary and art historical in-jokes that might try the patience of even the most erudite reader. All the more impressive, then, is Max Lawton’s translation, which renders Lentz’s flinty though extravagant German into English sentences that are clear, nimble, and frankly full of beans, capturing the propulsive energy of the original text without sacrificing its difficulty. Lawton has made good choices, such as leaving a series of anagrams made from the word “Schattenfroh” untranslated. These anagrams, which first appear in pieces as “inscriptions upon Father’s face” and look “as if they were program-opening passwords,” serve a climactic purpose as the novel draws to a close, suggesting that Schattenfroh’s precious High German has managed to persist within the book’s new English version. Though German words like Nachtfrost (nightfrost) and Schafott (scaffold) are presented as passwords, they also act as viruses, infiltrating the translation and suggesting that German, like the printed book or the ghost of one’s father, might still have some life left in it.
On that note: in May of this year the Trump administration ordered the National Endowment for the Arts to terminate or rescind hundreds of grants to cultural institutions, including over $1.2 million of funding to publishers like Deep Vellum, the Texas-based house that put out Schattenfroh in English and cultivates a strong list of modern literature in translation. According to a statement on the Deep Vellum website, the $20,000 the publishers had initially been awarded was earmarked, among other things, for paying translators. The blow could have been, and may still be, fatal to a small house like this one, or to any of the others (Nightboat, Milkweed, Red Hen, the list goes on) that rely on government money to stay afloat. For now, though, there’s been a partial reprieve. Johns Hopkins University has volunteered to fund the publication, by Deep Vellum, of one work in translation annually. Schattenfroh is the first. The requiem—for big books, for difficult books, for books in other languages, for books, full stop—may have begun, but the curtain has yet to fall.
