The Politics of Fiction in Dark Times - a Conversation with Eva Menasse

24.03.2025 - 24.03.2026

John Berger writes in Ways of Seeing, that ‘[t]he past is never there waiting to be discovered, to be recognized for exactly what it is. History always constitutes the relation between a present and its past’. Such a claim is appropriate to the world of Eva Menasse’s Darkenbloom, the title of which refers to a small town in east Austrian hinterlands, near the Hungarian border (a place usually referred to as ‘over there’). Darkenbloom (or Dunkleblum in the original German) is a place where the present’s relation to the past is obscured by silence and subtext. This is not to say that the past never happened (whatever the citizens of Darkenbloom might wish), but that the way it shapes and serves the present is not set. And it is amid the discovery of ‘old bones’ in an arable field during an exploration for water resources that Darkenbloom’s past is forced, tibia and all, into the present.

               Menasse came to the University of Brighton to give a reading and participate in a Q&A with Mark Devenny, Professor of Critical Theory. Questions came both from Prof. Devenny and the audience, and were wide in scope, though the most pressing concerned Austria’s participation in the holocaust and the reception of the novel in Austria. Why was it an appropriate moment to reflect? Given that the novel’s main narrative is set in 1989, with movements back to the war and its immediate aftermath with the arrival of the Red Army, Menasse commented that in 2025, almost as much time has passed between now and 1989 as between 1944 and 1989. What was significant was the fact Menasse thought that the habits of mind she represents in Darkenbloom, wilful amnesia, awkwardness and silence, are still a force in Austrian society today. The past has yet to be concluded.

Another question came about a more formal aspect of the novel, which was the inclusion of a long dramatis personae page at the start. This was included at the behest of the publisher to help orientate the reader in navigating the stories of 16 characters, which does not even include the many characters from the wartime period, such as the sociopathic Nazi police chief, Horka. Menasse’s instincts were against such direction, as she explained she wanted readers to feel that, like passing people in the street, there was a more fluid way in which you become familiar with characters - or even fail to become - which is itself reflective of living in a small town. One audience member who was familiar with Darkenbloom commented that she did not use the dramatis personae page for this reason, and the discussion itself highlighted for me, as a novelist, how the texture of narrative movement and line-to-line prose often functions to give readers a ‘virtual’ kind of experience that is akin to the experience of characters. In this case, the sheer number of narrative arcs, people and events leaves a reader in the position of a citizen: listening, catching a suggestion, attending to one event and not another, speculating, forgetting. 

               In some ways these points reflect an ongoing question central to the CAPONEU project: what constitutes the political in the novel? While it’s fairly clear that some novels have a capital ‘P’ politics in terms of subject matter or a stance we might induce from an implied author, our understanding of the political must undoubtedly go beyond this to consider literary affect, for without this, a novel would be little different from a report or a statement of belief. While Menasse’s Darkenbloom has a capital ‘P’, it’s great strength is for me in its texture, a texture that simulates the shift of generations, memory and morality that underpins a present relation to the past which is still waiting to be discovered, and out of which political consciousness inevitably emerges. 

Dr Craig Jordan-Baker