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Fans of psychological thrillers and horror movies know that terror often lurks in the halls of labyrinthine houses. We watch breathlessly as a little boy blunders through the dark halls of a deserted hotel on his Kettcar in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, we roam the brick-Gothic gloom of New York’s Dakota Building in Roman Polanski’s Rosemarie’s Baby. Norman Bates’ Victorian house on the dunes in Psycho has come to be seen as the virtual embodiment of the malevolent house. With their labyrinths of interchangeable corridors, their elevator shafts and subterranean mazes, high rises offer a broad stage for claustrophobic fantasies and catastrophically escalating events. Usually a sudden calamity brings together a small group of very different people who must fight to survive. As a rule, the end is bloody and the good guys emerge into the light of day purged by the ordeal.
The exact same pattern is used by the writer Georg Klein, born in 1953 in Augsburg, as the basis of his new novel The Sun is Shining on Us. On a bright, warm March day, four men and one woman meet in the cafeteria of a vacant, run-down high rise from the 1950s to wait for their boss. A mysterious old man whose name, Gabor Cziffra, has as exotic a ring as his accent, has summoned the five to this place, completely cut off from the outside world, to carry out a strange mission. Cziffra is the secret godfather of the so-called Salzhafen, an abandoned industrial area on the harbor of a North German city (presumably Hamburg and the neighborhood of St. Pauli). He entrusts the group with a mission. The building, due for demolition, occupies the site of a “Museum of World Miracles” which was destroyed in World War Two. They must find the “Sun”, an object with evident ritual significance.
In the course of the group’s explorations it emerges that the object is a planet disc similar to the Sky Disc of Nebra, once the gem of the museum’s collection. A considerable reward awaits the participants in the mission, and the subsequent developments are as bloody as is to be expected given the implacable rule: if one of them dies, the others get his share. The band wanders the dilapidated building day and night, eating long-expired cafeteria food, facing one obstacle after another as their numbers are rapidly decimated.
The first half of the novel describes the explorations of Bitter Lemon. Like his rivals, he owes his code name to his favorite drink. This Bitter Lemon turns out to be a completely unreliable narrator, drowsy and often slipping into paranoid fantasies. So Gabor Cziffra takes over the role of narrator in the second part of the novel; though hidden in a “trouble box” over the elevator, he monitors the situation and is equipped with plenty of ways to influence it.
Eventually this is revealed as a sophisticated experimental set-up which Cziffras has created; from his elevated position he creates obstacles, changes the rules and determines fates. The melodious name of this wealthy string-puller (perhaps inspired by movie director Geza von Cziffra) suggests that the architecture of the high rise, with its corridors, crannies, stories and maze of stairways, can be regarded as a cipher for the artfully constructed text itself. The building has eleven stories, while the novel has eleven chapters. The high rise and the destroyed buildings which it has replaced – aside from the museum, the site was also occupied by a movie theater – play the leading role, symbolizing the formal mixture of styles as well as the artifacts of German history buried beneath layers of rubble.
Georg Klein’s most ambitious yet readable novel to date plays with the genre conventions of horror novels and films and offers more than just an exciting plot. It is a virtuosic examination of the nature of fiction, the way in which a unique literary cosmos is created using props from a familiar reality and drawing from the so-called trash and trivial culture of movies, comics and light fiction. Klein is not the only contemporary German writer to make use of the artificially-induced confrontation between antiquity and modernity, already familiar from films ranging from Mad Max to Matrix.
Along with authors such as Henning Ahrens and Tobias O. Meissner, Klein pulls off a masterful fusion of genres with an utter disregard for the sacred borders between literary sophistication and skillful entertainment. At present there is hardly a single other German author capable of striking such impressive sparks from this combination. Each of Klein’s three previous novels picks up on a specific literary genre, using its pre-set structural patterns, role allocations and language with consummate ease while recombining them with bold artistic effect – making him something of a literary Quentin Tarantino. Just as Tarantino turns the rubbish of countless B-movies into highly sophisticated filmic confrontations with traditional genres, Georg Klein processes enormous quantities of literature, low and high alike, with inexhaustible inventiveness as to language and structure.
On the one hand, the reader is confronted with a horror scenario involving an unidentified murderer with a bludgeon, plenty of gore, the death of two participants, moldy corpses and explicit descriptions of bodily functions. At the same time, however, the architecture of the novel also includes comedic narrative planes, with narrator Bitter Lemon’s frequent references to his extensive collection of Disney comics. Gabor Cziffra, repeatedly referred to as “Uncle” and sternly fixated upon his “Nephew”, calls to mind the wealthy Dagobert – and not just due to the sound of his name; he has a safe as well.
But the book is more than an unconventional blend of horror and comedy. In this novel Georg Klein carries on his fictional expeditions into the heart of German history and the German culture of memory, quests exemplified earlier by Barbar Rosa (2003), a novel disguised as a detective story, and his more recent story collection with the programmatic title Von den Deutschen (Of the Germans, 2004). With his powerful language, the author laudably refuses to couch his test drills into the German self-image and the confrontation with the moral devastation of National Socialism and the reactionary Adenauer Era in dogmatic, stereotyping prose. Klein searches for signs of German culture and German barbarisms which go on influencing the present like a kind of leakage current. In The Sun is Shining on Us, the search for the ancient artifact only seems to be played for cheap thrills; what it actually exposes are the last testimonials to the air raids, the crimes of the SS and the National Socialist obsession with Aryanization. Georg Klein’s stature as a writer is due to his ability to vividly illustrate these things without having to explain them.
Oliver Jahn
March 2005
[Translated by Isabel Cole]
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