On July 31, 1914, Germany presented the Tsarist Empire with an ultimatum. The Russian mobilization must be stopped immediately, otherwise the German Reich would also call for arms. Raphaela Edelbauer’s new novel takes place in the last hours before the catastrophe. For one day and one night she follows three young people on their foray through Vienna. The main character Hans, a farm hand from Tyrol, is swept into town by the spirit of optimism of the July crisis. In a newspaper he saw an advertisement from a psychoanalyst who he now hopes will heal a disease that has been tormenting him all his life. He thinks he can read minds.
Adam, descendant of an old officer’s family, is also struck with a supernatural gift. He has visions of historical battles. Plastic memories of long dead soldiers torment and fascinate him at the same time. And then there was Klara. She fought her way up from the poorest of backgrounds, is involved with the suffragettes, loves women and is writing her doctoral thesis in mathematics.
The three meet in the practice of psychoanalyst Helene Cheresch, who researches collective dreams. From all corners of the country, her colleagues send reports of patients visiting the same place while they sleep. Night after night they find themselves locked in the houses of a small village. All obsessed with the desire to break out of their prisons, they are irresistibly drawn to a chandelier in the village mansion. But every attempt at rapprochement fails. Klara is the only sleeper who can move freely in the village, a fortune that puts her life in danger during the day.
Edelbauer has already received the Austrian Book Prize for her novel “Dave”.
Even with her first two novels, Raphaela Edelbauer played with genre conventions in an entertaining and self-confident manner. Born in Vienna in 1990, she received the Austrian Book Prize for “Dave”, the predecessor. “The Incommensurables” is a cleverly composed mixture of historical novel, crime thriller and sociological investigation. The analyst’s research project, like the novel, deals with the question of how people find each other, how they synchronize their dreams and nightmares, their fears and desires. And starting from how it could happen that in a few weeks the peoples of Europe agreed to send millions of their sons to the battlefields.
“They were sleepwalkers,” it says at one point. This refers to the three nervous bohemians who, intoxicated and exhausted, are climbing out of a drug cave deep in the sewers back into the sunlight. However, one immediately thinks of Christopher Clark’s book “The Sleepwalkers”, which traced the path to the First World War.
The historian’s thesis: None of the powers involved wanted the war, but the leading politicians interpreted the situation in such a way that they saw no way of preventing it. Everyone seemed to have their own hands tied, and no one saw themselves as responsible. A dynamic of escalation seized them and further narrowed the repertoire of political measures.
The author relates this thesis to a foot soldier who is only too willing to limit their own judgment and sacrifice their self-determination to concepts such as people, emperor and fatherland. The enlightenment drowns in cheers!. Of course, this view of the beginning of the war is not new. The recordings of fanatical volunteers should not be missing from any review of the world war. Edelbauer also dutifully puts in the sentence, which is indispensable in this context, that one is already at home again for Christmas.
This novel is nonetheless stimulating, because Edelbauer’s enthusiasm for the war is just one variant among many, in which the desire for confirmation is expressed. The supernatural that Adam and Hans suspect in themselves, as well as the friendship of the sad heroes, which Hans appears as the greatest experience after a night of sleep in saloons, bars and coffee houses, are examples of powers that promise the individual over their own outgrow stupid existence.
Last but not least, the author presents an atmospheric Vienna novel. The old city has grown too slowly for all the people to whom it promises happiness. There are too many people, there is too much longing in the narrow streets. Edelbauer’s Vienna is a beehive of passions, beliefs and ideologies, a hidden object of life plans that long for peace even more than their realization, for channeling their excessive energy in commitment to a cause.
“Finally, one was no longer oneself. One was finally Austrian or even German-Austrian, and for a long time one would not stop being that.” On the last pages, the ultimatum has expired, the people gather again in masses on the streets to soon meet the enemy. The big city gave birth to the individual, but it shouldn’t see it grow up.
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