The nice thing about institutional novels is that you can mentally move into them while reading them. This applies to the Institut Benjamenta in Robert Walser’s “Jakob von Gunten”, where prospective servants are formed into “lovely, spherical zeros”, or novels such as “Scarred Hearts” by M. Blecher and “Der Zauberberg” by Thomas Mann.
Mann’s protagonist Hans Castorp feels a little “fear of horrible impressions” when he appears at the Davos sanatorium for pulmonary patients for the first breakfast. The sensitive Mieczysław Wojnicz has a similar experience in Olga Tokarczuk’s new novel “Empusion”, a neologism of Symposium and Empusa, a female horror figure from Greek mythology.
The text happily refers to the “Magic Mountain”, which was also set on the eve of the First World War, in order to counteract it. In the fall of 1913, Wojnicz, a student of sewerage construction technology with a lung condition, traveled from Lemberg to the climatic health resort of Görbersdorf. Since Poland was divided into three at the time, Wojnicz drove it from the part of his fatherland that belonged to Austria-Hungary to Prussian Silesia. The admissions interview, to be held in German, with the bold doctor Dr. Semperweiß is a strain on him, as is reading the unfamiliar Gothic script.
Strange state of mind
Olga Tokarczuk, winner of the 2019 Nobel Prize in Literature, comes from Sulechów in Lower Silesia and has a keen interest in the binational history of the region: With “EE” she wrote a novel about the spiritualist Erna Eltzner, who caused a sensation in Wrocław around 1900. Now the 61-year-old dissects the eerie events in Görbersdorf with her rhapsodic style and gesture, which always extends far into history and mysticism, about which it is said: “You fall into a strange state of mind here.”
Görbersdorf (Sokołowsko) was the model for the much more famous sanatorium in Davos. Despite the lack of a cemetery, death is omnipresent there: the day after Wojnicz’s arrival at the “Gästehaus für Herren”, the wife of Opitz, the owner of the pension, lies dead on the table – she hanged herself. Unmoved, the guests speculate about their motive while eating. They agree that “a woman’s action cannot be regarded as an act that has been carried out in full consciousness”, because, according to Privy Councilor Frommer: “Woman psychology has proven that women are subject and object at the same time, so their decisions can can only be regarded as conscious to a limited extent…”
The misogynistic wisdom that Olga Tokarczuk gleefully puts into the mouths of her debaters comes from great minds such as Ovid, Plato, Jean-Paul Sartre and Otto Weininger, as explained in the appendix. Ghosts is the central keyword for “Empusion”: The events surrounding Mieczysław Wojnicz, the Berlin art history student Thilo von Hahn, the socialist August August and his Catholic-conservative opponent Longinus Lukas are described by a diffuse narrative instance in the plural, the “female beings”. .
Silesian horror story
They stay under doorsteps or in the attic, but mostly in the surrounding forest. A kind of ritual murder always takes place there in November, which deeply disturbs the gentlemen while enjoying the liqueur “Schwarmerei”. Should witches burned in the Middle Ages or the “Tuntschis” take revenge on their tormentors? These are sex dolls that Köhler forms out of moss in the forest.
Only the sensitive among men feel the plight of nature, which Tokarczuk stereotypically equates with the female: the seriously ill student Thilo, whose fever curve miraculously adapts to the line of the mountain peaks, as does Wojnicz. He feels attracted to the suicide Opitz and her clothes and never shows himself naked: an apparently gender-fluid character in a genre-fluid novel.
The lungs are really real
In this way, the author contrasts the scientific discourses of classic modernity with the supernatural. Luckily she doesn’t drift into the esoteric, as she usually likes to do, most recently in the monumental saga “Die Jakobsbücher”.
With her Silesian horror story, Olga Tokarczuk brilliantly and highly entertainingly refuted the crude theses of her novel characters, who are not so yesterday in Poland. Last but not least, “Empusion” owes its shine to Tokarczuk’s proven translators Lisa Palmes and Lothar Quinkenstein.
With words like “blumerant” or “radiant shower” they call up a bygone era. For German readers, however, the historical discourse is likely to be far more interesting than the gender discourse. This is how Mieczysław Wojnicz formulated the glowing Polish longing for independence during the dismissal interview: “My lungs are real, but my nationality is no longer so. (She) has probably belonged to the realm of mythology for a long time.” In 1918 that finally changed.
