Losing the plot? The veteran as murderer in Bettina Balàka's Eisflüstern

Abstract

Bettina Balàka's decision to set her 2006 novel Eisflüstern in and immediately after the First World War marks it out as something of a rarity in a contemporary Austrian literary culture that has left the legacies of 1914–1918 more or less untouched. Celebrated by critics for its engaging and complex presentation of its protagonist's struggles with shell shock, the broadly positive reception of the novel was nevertheless tempered by concerns about its formal dalliances with the crime fiction genre, and the extent to which this distracted from, and even undermined, its central storyline of postwar recovery and rehabilitation. In this article I challenge the idea that the crime fiction elements woven through Eisflüstern are superfluous to the novel's thematic concerns. Arguing for a new reading of Eisflüstern that pushes the murderer, rather than the detective, centre stage, I demonstrate that the killer's desire to in some way ‘author’ a sense of narrative cohesion and closure manifests a complex and sophisticated response to the incoherence of his war experiences and sets up an effective counternarrative to the more familiar depictions of veteran trauma that otherwise dominate the novel.

Keywords:

• crime fiction
• contemporary Austrian fiction
• First World War veterans
• literary depictions of war trauma
• shell shock

Acknowledgement

I acknowledge postdoctoral funding from the Irish Research Council.

Notes

1 All translations from the German are my own.

2 Balàka explained how she came to develop an interest in the First World War in an interview with Schandor (2006: 16), citing news coverage of the recovery of the frozen corpses of three Austrian soldiers from a glacier in the Dolomites in 2004 as an immediate source of inspiration. It is hardly surprising then that ice, both actual and metaphorical, is a recurring motif in the novel.

3 Interestingly, the problem of settling on appropriate terminology to describe Eisflüstern would appear to be more acute in English than it is in the novel's original German. Despite the existence of the terms Detektivroman, the catch-all Kriminalroman (abbreviated as Krimi) is by far the more common expression and makes for a more natural default description than its English equivalent: the original reviewers of Eisflüstern apply it without any qualification. As Margaret-Anne Hutton points out in her survey of French crime fiction—‘do critics on both sides of the Channel mean the same thing when they refer to the roman noir?’—linguistic discrepancies in crime fiction terminology is an area ripe for further research (2013: 7).

4 Crouthamel links the decision to ban Robert Wiene's classic expressionist film The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari in 1920 to fears of copycat murders in an already fragile postwar environment (2009: 54). Kaes, meanwhile, suggests that Peter Lorre's sad-eyed child-killer in Fritz Lang's M (1930), surely one of the most famous murderers in film history, perfectly matches the description of the shell-shocked veteran ‘[who] cannot stop killing, even when the war is over’ (2009: 209), though there are no overt references to this in the final cut of the film.

5 Canonical Austrian playwright (1801–1862)

6 Kaes has convincingly argued that Wiene's The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari, in its rejection of objective reality and its embracing of a shattered visual grammar, ‘may be the ultimate film about war’ (2009: 44).

7 Beck's failure to remember—shocking and apparently inexplicable in one defined so often in the novel by his inability to escape memory—is itself deeply problematic and wide open to charges of implausibility. Does Balàka have her protagonist forget this crucial detail purely so as to puncture Lintschinger's creative designs, collapse his inner narrative and bring the novel to an (uneasy) close? Or is Beck's act of forgetting a deliberate statement in itself, a reminder, as Ricœur puts it, that ‘remembering is only possible on the basis of forgetting, and not the other way around’ (2004: 442)? In choosing to concentrate on the figure of the murderer here I have had to pass over this and over critical questions regarding trauma, memory and genre as thrown open by the story of the detective: I flag these here as worthy of further research.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Nóra de Buiteléir

Nóra de Buiteléir is a Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Languages, Literatures and Cultural Studies, Trinity College Dublin.