Adam Ehrlich Sachs described his debut novel Inherited Disorders: Stories, Parables, and Problems by saying, "This book is just kind of Jewish jokes. It's a collection of Jewish jokes when I thought I was writing literature or something like that." His second novel, The Organs of Sense, focused on the philosophical wanderings of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, inventor of calculus among other contributions to mathematics and science. As with his debut, Sachs's third novel, Gretel and the Great War, structures a collection of short tales into a millieu of early twentieth century Vienna that turn out to be much more than just a bunch of jokes. While the basis for his previous work may be grounded in historical facts, the stories that Sachs tells rely less on archival scholarship than the kind of fictive world-building more commonly associated with science fiction. Gretel is no different.
Even without knowing anything about Vienna around the time of the First World War, Gretel and the Great War is an easy enough premise to follow. A prologue introduces a sanatorium patient who claims to be the father of Gretel, a young woman who cannot (or chooses not to) speak for herself. The father sends bedtime stories to his daughter for 26 days, then stops. The stories appear in alphabetical order starting with "The Architect" and end with "The Zionist." Their logic is precise but arcane. The characters of the stories are linked by theme and plot. And while their setting may be rooted in history events, the stories told to Gretel are anything but. One leading neurologist posits that Gretel isn't capable of producing or understanding language, but when evidence of her upbringing suggests a childhood full of language and learned pursuits, the experts are further baffled.
Gretel reads like the best of Italo Calvino's pseudo-magical literary puzzles replete with the kind of intrigue often attributed to authors like Jesse Ball and László Krasznahorkai. Like those authors, reading Sachs can feel like getting lost in a machination set by a master architect. This kind of reading experience will be as appealing for those who embrace its ambiguity as it will be unappealing to others who come away feeling tricked or confused. At its heart, Gretel and the Great War is cultural criticism embedded in a folkloric tale disguised as a bedtime story presented as a mystery.
With the absurd confidence of rationalist thinkers like Spinoza and Descartes, Sachs delivers conclusions in perfectly ordered form, regardless of how upsetting their implied consequences may be. A brave obstetrician is ostracized by his peers in the medical community for his honesty with the royal matriarch. A father has his daughter committed to the Sanatorium Dr. Krakauer and declared morally insane for exposing his elaborate plot to kill his wife. A group of lawyers and professionals who killed a toymaker when they were boys deny their repressed collective memories, causing one of them to kill themselves out of guilt. Contradictions and hypocrisy aren't simply tolerated though, they are necessary for the functioning of a society that refuses to examine itself critically.
Despite any parallels between the Vienna that Sachs has created and the one created by historians of the period, proper nouns are omitted to leave room for the fiction. There's no mention of psychoanalytic theorists like Freud, Jung, and Adler, nor the music of Mahler and Strauss the Younger that would have been prevalent even as the sun was setting on the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Kafka would have still been writing from Prague. Even the very short chapter devoted to "The Zionist" foreshadows an impending leadup to another imperialist wave without mentioning names like Theodor Herzl, the Balfour Declaration, the Ottoman Empire, or any of the nation states created after the First World War.
Without evoking the connotations of such weighty proper nouns, the themes of antisemitism and ethno-religious tension that defined the late-stage Austro-Hungarian Empire point to a kind of collective madness where no one can be blamed and everyone is at fault. Speaking from her sanatorium bed, one narrator warns, "Even the sanest individual will sound mad if obliged to tell a strange-enough tale." The only way to survive, it seems, is to remain silent. But this is a dangerous proposition, one that Sachs appears to be warning against with every increasingly bizarre cross-sectional view of the society he has constructed. Silence has always been equated with the passive violence of complacency. Stories like the ones Sachs presents here ask what kind of conditions must exist as a precursor to greater societal evils.
Included in these prerequisite conditions is the role of language. In the section titled "The Father," a student-led movement's attempts to revive language by "removing its encrustations and digging up everything dead and redundant in it, whatever sagged or had no meaning any more, and then redraping what remained over the structure of reality and pulling it as taut as possible" contrast with a monastery across the street that serves as "... a constant reminder of what happens to language when it retreats into a sanctuary and renounces its duty to the world. The duty to describe the world as it is." Neither approach gets it quite right. It's another example of the impossible dilemmas that Sachs builds with such precision. And though Gretel's ultimate fate remains unknown, the interwoven allegorical fictions that surround her circumstances amount to something far greater than any tidy logical conclusion ever could. If it weren't for the well-documented horrors of Naziism that follow, Gretel's story could read closer to a Grimm-like fairy tale. Instead, this bedtime story is a warning to anyone who chooses to remain asleep.
FICTION
Gretel and the Great War
By Adam Ehrlich Sachs
FSG Originals
Published June 11, 2024
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