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4.36 AVERAGE
4.36 AVERAGE
This is a tough and uncompromising book. At times, reading it and feeling nauseous, I wanted to shout please stop, I can't take any more. It affected me more than all the history books and primary sources from ww2 I'd read and studied.
Trieste is documentary fiction, its fictional part, a story of a woman from Gorizia attempting to find her son, stollen as a baby in 1945, is interwoven with photographs, testimonies and other documentary evidence about the group of SS officers who occupied the territory around Gorizia between 1943 and 1945 and their crimes, including testimonies from the Holocaust survivors, as well as testimonies of many other people taken as babies or small children by the Nazis in the territories they occupied. Often blond and blue eyed, the children were supposed to have been brought up in the Third Reich ideology. How do you cope when in your 50s or 60s you suddenly find out not only that you were adopted but also that one of your biological parents participated in genocide?
"The truth is absolutely simple. Our fathers were criminals and murderers, so screw those platitudes about the banalities of evil. There are no justifications, there is no valid relativization, there is no excuse."
Or, do you avoid the past and just get on with your life?
"It is incomprehensible that the children, the grandchildren, mostly asked no questions, that they still do not ask."
If you do ask questions, do you also ask for forgiveness, for absolution?
"In fact, we have no faith because it is faith we do not believe in."
And going back several decades, what of those who lived through Nazi occupation?
"For most people, for the obedient and the silent, for those on the sidelines, for the bystanders, life becomes a small, packed suitcase that is never opened, an overnight bag slipped under the bed, baggage going nowhere, in which everything is neatly folded - days, tears, deaths, little pleasures, spreading the stench of mould."
"For sixty years now these blind observers have been pounding their chests and shouting, We are innocent because we didn't know!, and with the onset of new wars and new troubles, new observers crop up, armies of young and powerful bystanders are born, blindfolded, feeding on their innocence, on their indestructible compatibility, these yes-men, these enablers of evil."
And here is the crux of it. This is why I think Daša Drndić's book is so important. In a world where right wing politics, nationalism and populism are on a rise, we must not ignore this history.
Recently, in another excellent book, Robert Macfarlane's Underland, he wrote about walking in the region not far from Gorizia and finding a sinkhole, a mass grave site where trees around the sinkhole were gouged with swastikas, some old, some recent, he thinks of it as a site of horror but to some, it is still a site of pilgrimage.
Drndić has a lot to say about history:
"History, an ornate lady who does not die easily, dresses again and again in new costumes, but keeps telling the same story. History as Dracula, History as the Vampire, the vampiric fate of history, History the Bloodsucker, that great mistress of humanity."
In another chapter, the main character, Haya Tedeschi, meets a Swiss mathematician who at the age of 16, together with other volunteers took blankets, soup and coffee to meet one of the transport trains. Leaving aside the supposed neutrality of Switzerland, what really made me shudder and think of history repeating itself is this:
"I wanted the people to get free, but I didn't want them to get out here, with us, like when you look at animals at the ZOO, you feel sorry for them for being in the cages, but you don't want them to get out right where you are, they should be free in some wild place, you think"
I'm sad that I hadn't heard of Daša Drndić until not long before she died last year and I'll certainly read more of her books.
Trieste is documentary fiction, its fictional part, a story of a woman from Gorizia attempting to find her son, stollen as a baby in 1945, is interwoven with photographs, testimonies and other documentary evidence about the group of SS officers who occupied the territory around Gorizia between 1943 and 1945 and their crimes, including testimonies from the Holocaust survivors, as well as testimonies of many other people taken as babies or small children by the Nazis in the territories they occupied. Often blond and blue eyed, the children were supposed to have been brought up in the Third Reich ideology. How do you cope when in your 50s or 60s you suddenly find out not only that you were adopted but also that one of your biological parents participated in genocide?
"The truth is absolutely simple. Our fathers were criminals and murderers, so screw those platitudes about the banalities of evil. There are no justifications, there is no valid relativization, there is no excuse."
Or, do you avoid the past and just get on with your life?
"It is incomprehensible that the children, the grandchildren, mostly asked no questions, that they still do not ask."
If you do ask questions, do you also ask for forgiveness, for absolution?
"In fact, we have no faith because it is faith we do not believe in."
And going back several decades, what of those who lived through Nazi occupation?
"For most people, for the obedient and the silent, for those on the sidelines, for the bystanders, life becomes a small, packed suitcase that is never opened, an overnight bag slipped under the bed, baggage going nowhere, in which everything is neatly folded - days, tears, deaths, little pleasures, spreading the stench of mould."
"For sixty years now these blind observers have been pounding their chests and shouting, We are innocent because we didn't know!, and with the onset of new wars and new troubles, new observers crop up, armies of young and powerful bystanders are born, blindfolded, feeding on their innocence, on their indestructible compatibility, these yes-men, these enablers of evil."
And here is the crux of it. This is why I think Daša Drndić's book is so important. In a world where right wing politics, nationalism and populism are on a rise, we must not ignore this history.
Recently, in another excellent book, Robert Macfarlane's Underland, he wrote about walking in the region not far from Gorizia and finding a sinkhole, a mass grave site where trees around the sinkhole were gouged with swastikas, some old, some recent, he thinks of it as a site of horror but to some, it is still a site of pilgrimage.
Drndić has a lot to say about history:
"History, an ornate lady who does not die easily, dresses again and again in new costumes, but keeps telling the same story. History as Dracula, History as the Vampire, the vampiric fate of history, History the Bloodsucker, that great mistress of humanity."
In another chapter, the main character, Haya Tedeschi, meets a Swiss mathematician who at the age of 16, together with other volunteers took blankets, soup and coffee to meet one of the transport trains. Leaving aside the supposed neutrality of Switzerland, what really made me shudder and think of history repeating itself is this:
"I wanted the people to get free, but I didn't want them to get out here, with us, like when you look at animals at the ZOO, you feel sorry for them for being in the cages, but you don't want them to get out right where you are, they should be free in some wild place, you think"
I'm sad that I hadn't heard of Daša Drndić until not long before she died last year and I'll certainly read more of her books.
For sixty-two years she has been waiting.
She sits rocks by a tall window in a room on the third floor of an Austro Hungarian building in the old Gloriza .The rocking chair is old and, as she rocks, it whimpers.
[...]
Foul breath fills the room (whose? whose?) fills the room, rising to a raging torrent and she knows she must arrange the pebbles around her grave stone, now, just in case, in case he doesn’t come, in case he does, after she has been expecting him for sixty-two years.
This is the 4th of Daša Drndić's 5 novels available in English translation (5 of her last 6 published in Croatian) which I have read, and as well as an excellent book in its own right, what is striking is how well the novels blend together, including intertextual elements, to form one overall impressive and powerful work.
Trieste, translated by Ellen Elias-Bursać from the original Sonnenschein, opens in 2006 with the 83 year-old Haya Tedeschi waiting in her room in the town of Gorizia (in the area of Trieste) on the Italian-Slovenian border - waiting for the son who was snatched from her, as a baby, in 1944.
The book has been reviewed extensively elsewhere, and I have reviewed Drndić's other translated novels extensively (see below), but I will just focus here on how she so cleverly combines archival fact with fictional characters and intertextual references to produce something unique.
Haya Tedeschi's early life and her family history, in the first third of the novel, set in the turbulent first decades of the 20th Century, are based (with permission) of the real-life Fulvia Schiff - see https://www.amazon.co.uk/Trieste-True-Story-Frank-Gent-ebook/dp/B007MEWA7S.
But Fulvia Schiff married an allied soldier and settled in the UK, whereas Drndić has Haya instead meet a German soldier and become pregnant with his child:
A thirty year old German in a uniform comes into her tobacco shop. Oh, he is handsome as a doll. The German already has the polish nickname Lalka, but at this point, when she first sees the dashing German, Haya knows nothing of that, the dashing german tells her later, I am no Lalka, you are my Lalka.
This German soldier is based on (without permission) and indeed essentially is the real-life SS officer Kurt Franz (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_Franz), who rose from a cook at the Sonnerstein euthansia camp to commandant at Treblinka. His nickname Lalka - baby face - wholly inappropriate for his sadistic behaviour (http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/revolt/berliner.html) - in 1965 he was found guilty of collective murder of at least 300,000 people, and 35 counts of murder involving at least 139 people. The real-life Franz did spend time in the area of Trieste and Gorizia after the Treblinka camp was dismantled although is not known to have fathered a child with a local.
In the novel, Franz abandons his pregnant, Jewish, lover, but when she gives birth her child is snatched. She 62 years later, as the novel opens, finds that the boy was taken into the Lebensborn program (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lebensborn) and eventually placed with a German foster family.
Drndić has this boy be the photographer who accompanied the real-life journalist Niklas Frank when he interviewed in 1982 the author Drndić has acknowledged as her most important influence, the great Thomas Bernhard (https://www.thomasbernhard.org/interviews/1982intnf.shtml for translated extracts from the real-life interview)
This interview took place in Gmunden where Thomas Bernhard lived in his renovated farmhouse, close to Schloss Oberweis (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schloss_Oberweis) which, during the war, was renamed Alpenland - the base of the Lebensborn organisation.
And the real-life Frank (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niklas_Frank) himself was to realise over time that his beloved father Hans Frank (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Frank) who died when he was 7, was actually a Nazi war criminal, executed at Nuremburg.
In this novel, The son's adoptive parents are also closely acquainted with Isabella Fischer from the twin novellas Doppelgänger (published earlier than Trieste in the original Croatian), having acquired some of her confiscated property, and indeed they are the people who send her the chocolates she receives each year in the earlier book.
And Haya herself reappears in the later novel Belladonna, where Andreas Ban reads this novel, meets Haya Tedeschi, and later meets the English translator Ellen Elias-Bursać.
Stunning. 4.5 stars.
Bibliography.
Daša Drndić's last 6 works of fiction were:
Doppelgänger (2002), translated into English as Doppelgänger ( 2018) by Celia Hawkesworth and SD Curtis
My review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2673417580
Shortlisted for 2019 Republic of Consciousness Prize
Leica Format (2003), translated into English as Leica Format (2015) by Celia Hawkesworth
Sonnenschein (2007), translated into English as Trieste (2012) by Ellen Elias-Bursać
Shortlisted for 2013 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize
April u Berlinu (2009), as yet untranslated
Belladonna (2012), translated into English as Belladonna 2017, by Celia Hawkesworth
My review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2338018537
Winner 2018 Warwick Prize for Women in Translation Prize and was shortlisted for the 2018 EBRD Literature Prize and 2018 Oxford Weidenfeld Prize
E.E.G (2016), translated into English as E.E.G. (2018), by Celia Hawkesworth
My review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2689942293
She sits rocks by a tall window in a room on the third floor of an Austro Hungarian building in the old Gloriza .The rocking chair is old and, as she rocks, it whimpers.
[...]
Foul breath fills the room (whose? whose?) fills the room, rising to a raging torrent and she knows she must arrange the pebbles around her grave stone, now, just in case, in case he doesn’t come, in case he does, after she has been expecting him for sixty-two years.
This is the 4th of Daša Drndić's 5 novels available in English translation (5 of her last 6 published in Croatian) which I have read, and as well as an excellent book in its own right, what is striking is how well the novels blend together, including intertextual elements, to form one overall impressive and powerful work.
Trieste, translated by Ellen Elias-Bursać from the original Sonnenschein, opens in 2006 with the 83 year-old Haya Tedeschi waiting in her room in the town of Gorizia (in the area of Trieste) on the Italian-Slovenian border - waiting for the son who was snatched from her, as a baby, in 1944.
The book has been reviewed extensively elsewhere, and I have reviewed Drndić's other translated novels extensively (see below), but I will just focus here on how she so cleverly combines archival fact with fictional characters and intertextual references to produce something unique.
Haya Tedeschi's early life and her family history, in the first third of the novel, set in the turbulent first decades of the 20th Century, are based (with permission) of the real-life Fulvia Schiff - see https://www.amazon.co.uk/Trieste-True-Story-Frank-Gent-ebook/dp/B007MEWA7S.
But Fulvia Schiff married an allied soldier and settled in the UK, whereas Drndić has Haya instead meet a German soldier and become pregnant with his child:
A thirty year old German in a uniform comes into her tobacco shop. Oh, he is handsome as a doll. The German already has the polish nickname Lalka, but at this point, when she first sees the dashing German, Haya knows nothing of that, the dashing german tells her later, I am no Lalka, you are my Lalka.
This German soldier is based on (without permission) and indeed essentially is the real-life SS officer Kurt Franz (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_Franz), who rose from a cook at the Sonnerstein euthansia camp to commandant at Treblinka. His nickname Lalka - baby face - wholly inappropriate for his sadistic behaviour (http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/revolt/berliner.html) - in 1965 he was found guilty of collective murder of at least 300,000 people, and 35 counts of murder involving at least 139 people. The real-life Franz did spend time in the area of Trieste and Gorizia after the Treblinka camp was dismantled although is not known to have fathered a child with a local.
In the novel, Franz abandons his pregnant, Jewish, lover, but when she gives birth her child is snatched. She 62 years later, as the novel opens, finds that the boy was taken into the Lebensborn program (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lebensborn) and eventually placed with a German foster family.
Drndić has this boy be the photographer who accompanied the real-life journalist Niklas Frank when he interviewed in 1982 the author Drndić has acknowledged as her most important influence, the great Thomas Bernhard (https://www.thomasbernhard.org/interviews/1982intnf.shtml for translated extracts from the real-life interview)
This interview took place in Gmunden where Thomas Bernhard lived in his renovated farmhouse, close to Schloss Oberweis (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schloss_Oberweis) which, during the war, was renamed Alpenland - the base of the Lebensborn organisation.
And the real-life Frank (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niklas_Frank) himself was to realise over time that his beloved father Hans Frank (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Frank) who died when he was 7, was actually a Nazi war criminal, executed at Nuremburg.
In this novel, The son's adoptive parents are also closely acquainted with Isabella Fischer from the twin novellas Doppelgänger (published earlier than Trieste in the original Croatian), having acquired some of her confiscated property, and indeed they are the people who send her the chocolates she receives each year in the earlier book.
And Haya herself reappears in the later novel Belladonna, where Andreas Ban reads this novel, meets Haya Tedeschi, and later meets the English translator Ellen Elias-Bursać.
Stunning. 4.5 stars.
Bibliography.
Daša Drndić's last 6 works of fiction were:
Doppelgänger (2002), translated into English as Doppelgänger ( 2018) by Celia Hawkesworth and SD Curtis
My review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2673417580
Shortlisted for 2019 Republic of Consciousness Prize
Leica Format (2003), translated into English as Leica Format (2015) by Celia Hawkesworth
Sonnenschein (2007), translated into English as Trieste (2012) by Ellen Elias-Bursać
Shortlisted for 2013 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize
April u Berlinu (2009), as yet untranslated
Belladonna (2012), translated into English as Belladonna 2017, by Celia Hawkesworth
My review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2338018537
Winner 2018 Warwick Prize for Women in Translation Prize and was shortlisted for the 2018 EBRD Literature Prize and 2018 Oxford Weidenfeld Prize
E.E.G (2016), translated into English as E.E.G. (2018), by Celia Hawkesworth
My review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2689942293
This is the first time I am reading Dasa Drndic and I am unaware if this Trieste is her signature writing style or if she made special accommodation here. Trieste was a difficult book to read and is even harder to review and rate. There is as much history (a.k.a non-ficiton) elements here as much as there is story telling. Its not a new concept, not at all, but tonally Drndic toes the line very brashly. Its fascinating how easily she switches between history and present, and perhaps the writing style has something to do with it. Its also successful in making readers uncomfortable while reading Nazi atrocities.
An interesting read, no doubt, but I struggled with getting along with narration. My bemoaning is limited, unsurprisingly, to the writing style than the content.
An interesting read, no doubt, but I struggled with getting along with narration. My bemoaning is limited, unsurprisingly, to the writing style than the content.