Dorothee Elmiger Die Holländerinnen
[The Dutch Women]

For years she wasn’t able to write the book, Dorothee Elmiger told me at our first meeting in Berlin shortly before she won the German Book Prize in Frankfurt. The material just wouldn’t gel, the composition didn’t seem coherent. Then she hit upon the idea of the theater troupe and the narrator – an author like Dorothee Elmiger – and managed to bring the material together using a framework story. During a poetics lecture the fictional author recounts the unfolding chain of events forming the heart of the novel – the vanished Dutch women, the unhinged theater director who reenacts the fate of these two Dutch students in a Central American jungle, and all the other stories, lives and occurrences in this multiple-award-winning adventure novel based on a true story.

In 2014, two young Dutch women disappear without a trace in the jungle of Panama. Weeks later their skeletal remains are recovered. The real-life case is still a mystery. Two cell phones were found, revealing a strange photo documentation of the last days in the lives of these students. On April 1 the two young women can be seen giving a thumbs-up at the beginning of their jungle trek. The photo was taken by another tourist. The next sign of life was not until seven days later. On April 8, in the middle of the night, someone suddenly took ninety photos – mostly of vegetation, here and there a strand of hair protruding into the lens of the camera, a plastic bag hanging from a branch. Were these young women trying to send a signal? Were they documenting something? Were they even still alive? The case has puzzled the Panamanian authorities and private detectives around the world until this very day. It serves as the starting point for Dorothee Elmiger’s exploration, which, like her previous book “Out of the Sugar Factory,” combines essay, fiction and documentation into a thrilling and above all thought-provoking story.

Of course, Dorothee Elmiger doesn’t know either what happened in the jungle of Panama. No one knows. But, like all good novels premised on a philosophical investigation, “The Dutch Women” [Die Holländerinnen] is built on the allure of an indefinable inkling. Elmiger further develops the material into a fictional research journal sometimes reminiscent of the documentary horror movie The Blair Witch Project from the 1990s. Then she lets everything converge on the question of the dark side of human nature, ultimately culminating in the aesthetic endeavor of wanting to turn reality into art, or at least recalling the attempts of other famous artists who tried to transform life into art. Not a few artists grappling with the subject of “genius and madness” have had their characters stumble through such tropical settings: Joseph Conrad and Francis Ford Coppola, Werner Herzog, Klaus Kinski and Christoph Schlingensief come to mind. They all discovered at the loci of their artistic creation, more clearly than anywhere else, the “erratic, groundless nature of the world.” Werner Herzog, too, invoked it, using it to hone his concept of “ecstatic truth” which emerges when certain physical and psychological boundaries are crossed – for example, on the movie set with a deranged Klaus Kinski, who raged like a force of nature during the filming of the cult classics Aguirre and Fitzcarraldo, as we know from Herzog’s documentary My Best Fiend. Elmiger even has Kinski speak the legendary lines of conquistador Aguirre: “If I, Aguirre, want the birds to drop dead from the trees then the birds will drop dead from the trees.”

The book has its moments of comedy – when a histrionic “theater maker” calls for an all-encompassing art that “crams” it all in, but also when a fictitious French writer on a trip through the Amazon lectures her indigenous lover about the shame of affluence. Trapenard held forth in a long discourse, the novel tells us, about the “European insight or impression” that a huge guilt has been incurred and that everything is based on reprehensible premises and practices – “sneakers, Immanuel Kant, the invention of the airplane, compassion and our electronic devices, the categories and systems of science, indeed the entire Western exploration of the world.” Nothing, the novel goes on, has delivered on its promises.

The fortunate thing about this novel is that it can’t deliver on anything because it doesn’t promise anything. Every quote it contains, every idea and every figure, every motif, every corny joke unleashes a convivial storm of association. The eerie momentousness of violence and femicide we know from the works of Roberto Bolaño and David Lynch is palpable between the lines. Likewise Max Frisch and his Homo Faber, whose protagonist is overwhelmed by the Venezuelan jungle and (unwittingly) commits incest with his daughter, which brings to mind Ingeborg Bachmann and her difficult relationship with the Swiss author. Dorothee Elmiger herself is Swiss, though resident in New York for some years now. At one point in “The Dutch Women” we read that life is about seeing “entanglements, connections, the synchronous and seemingly random.” This novel not only sees them; it acts them out – together with the reader. This is why it’s consistently written in the subjunctive mood, demonstrating the uncertainty of any attempt at story-telling.