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Robert Menasse
Die Vertreibung aus der Hölle
(Banished from Hell)
Suhrkamp Verlag, July 2001, 494pp. When a book is described as a 'historical novel', the reader can generally know what lies in store: a tale which, however wide-ranging the author's imagination, none the less contains itself within a well-defined period of time. Here however is a work which spectacularly breaks that mould: it moves between two eras and more than two countries, starting in sixteenth-century Portugal, passing from there to Holland and England, then jumping to Vienna both before and after the second world war. And the theme? Nothing less than a meditation on anti-Semitism - and, for good measure, in a memorable subplot, a reminder of how the persecuted can become persecutors in their turn. A tremendous intensity drives this novel from start to finish. The opening sequence, describing a pompous religious procession, staged by the Inquisition to bury a crucified cat, shows the bigotry of that time; a row at a party in post-war Vienna, where four former classmates have met to celebrate the quarter-century since they left school, reflects equally the secular passions of today. Light relief, in this same Vienna, is supplied by the escapades of one of the characters in the city's sleazier bars, while intriguing at quite another level (and time) are the scenes in England to which the seventeenth-century hero goes in an effort to persuade Oliver Cromwell to end his nation's exclusion of the Jews. While there his son, who has accompanied him, dies, and becomes the first Jew to be buried in England since the thirteenth century. Nor is Cromwell the only historical character of the period to be portrayed. Living in Amsterdam, that bastion of tolerance, and taught by the hero Manasseh, is the soon-to-be-famous Jewish philosopher Spinoza.
Teeming with allusion and stimulation, assured in its portrayal of lively and well-drawn characters, unsparing in its descriptions of privations and persecutions and neat in its manipulation of its two main narrative threads, this novel has what so many lack nowadays - an impressive breadth of view.
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