Post 4: Eat the Book
23 March 2025 // Pages 137-151“If killing has thus become so easy the disposal of a tree that disturbs one’s view, society must be a Versailles where nothing individual comes into view, the whole eludes the sensible gaze, the gaze being empty if killing has therefore become Putting-Things-Back-in-Order.” – p.143
So goes the unnamed postwar German city where our narrator’s basement cell sits, below the vast and complex administrative headquarters and dwellings of his powerful father, whose papers, it suggests, put things back in order in the necessary way so that people can live. They play Bach and Bruckner at the anniversary of the city’s near-total destruction, which is a very German thing to do, picking Bach and Bruckner for this, but also starting on page 144 describing the (actual) German regulation against naming your child Jesus. I grew up in Miami, a place where every second boy child seemed to be named Jesus, pronounced He-zuz instead of the Anglophone Jesus. Jesus Hernandez was in your second grade class; you saw Jesus Gonzalez park his 1996 Toyota Corolla and pick up a sandwich at Publix in Coral Gables.
My grandfather incidentally convinced my grandmother on my father’s side to move to Miami, Florida when he was stationed there during World War II. Miami still feels very new—the community colleges that were tropical brutalist edifices looming over everything, the local style of McMansions in my childhood which was called “Tuscan” but had scant to do with Tuscany. Neither of my grandfathers incidentally bombed any German cities personally. My mother’s father was sent, of all places, to Texas, to work on intelligence because he was a literal card carrying communist, which you’d think would mean the government would want him to fight fascists in person, but who knows. He was blacklisted by HUAC after the war.
I give you all this information not because it’s in Schattenfroh, but because it determines the strange vector on which Schattenfroh and I meet tonight. The sentence on page 143, the easy killing seen by the killers as lopping down a mere tree or putting things back in order, the way in which evil becomes, infamously, banal, cannot help but remind me of Gaza. The bombardments have restarted; Israel has broken the ceasefire they never intended to keep. Hundreds of people will die tonight, many of them children. The logic here to Israelis is simple: they are just putting things back in order, culling the foliage—they even call it “trimming the grass”. The new suburbs of Miami, Florida where I grew up with people named Jesus, my new suburb, was mostly a nice liberal Jewish suburb where we told ourselves the usual lies about the kibbutzim as socialist models and sort of brushed the brutal colonialism part under the rug, except for that one uncle who always brought it up at the “next year year in Jersualem” part of Passover.
The Shoah is the cruel mirror of Gaza in ways we’re just starting to talk about as much as we should in public. It’s also the background high-wire hum behind Schattenfroh, as with any postwar assessment of Germanness. Record-keeping, killing as machine. The other side of the postwar ruins are the book, everyone who was left over after the 20th’s century’s primary apocalypse. The apocalypse is on the table in these pages directly. On page 149-150, the narrator’s father, in both a parody and a somehow entirely accurate rendition of the modern German administrative state, has his secretaries eat the papers. The lines they utter as they do so are paraphrases of the Book of Revelations. There is a famous Dürer woodcut of John of Patmos, whom the angel tells to eat a book to foresee the apocalypse in the Book of Revelations.
Seven seals, seven plagues, the scales that weigh the souls for their goodness—we already had a plague, most of us behind our laptops alone, and there is a week left of flour in Gaza--none is being allowed in, as fires sear through temporary tents. And when the eleventh secretary eats her portion of administrative papers she says “And I took the little book out of the angel’s hand, and it was in my mouth sweet as honey: and as soon as I had eaten it my belly was bitter.” The narrator’s father builds the modern world by ordering it with these documents, then destroyed or consumed, transfigured into the stark lines of the Dürer that seem to move and break windows and screens. The postwar in Schattenfroh is a process of putting the lights back on the apparatus of the human soul by cranking some immortal word engine the reader hasn’t seen yet.
I’d like to think by the time the public gets the book, in mid August, there would be a copy in German or English or Arabic, in Gaza too, once famous for its bookstores. I type this knowing there probably won’t. I see too much in this novel of true things. It makes my belly bitter.
-- A.V. Marraccini
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