In the summer of 2024, Deep Vellum, a Dallas-based press, announced a program to bring out “badass avant-garde masterpieces that would otherwise not be translated or published.” Kicking things off would be a trio of postmodern thousand-plus-page magnum opuses: a Pynchonian quintet by the Catalan writer Miquel de Palol, a surreal and meditative trilogy by the Italian writer Antonio Moresco and a singular contemporary novel “like no other” by the German writer Michael Lentz, which was also to be the venture’s maiden publication.
Retaining its deutsche title, Lentz’s Schattenfroh was pitched as brethren with the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch and the films of Alejandro Jodorowsky, narrated by a prisoner held within a nightmarish panopticon constructed by his father, the novel’s titular figure. Art, history and horror would inform his story. “What if a schizophrenic municipal employee in provincial Germany attempted to write his own Bible?” the press release asked. “You’d get something like SCHATTENFROH.” Its English publication would help earn it a place among the “pantheon of the best works of world literature published in the past two decades”—and in so doing “cement the press’ reputation as the champion of maximalist literature in the Anglosphere.”
The hyperbolic ad copy reminded me of my days at New Directions, where I would also bullhorn the brilliance of foreign writers when critical attention had yet to come (I can recall shilling László Krasznahorkai as the “Hungarian master of the apocalypse” before his readership took off). Using copy to promote the press itself, however, was discouraged; our publications did that for us. But ND has also had nearly ninety years to build its brand; Deep Vellum is barely a teenager. In chucking this taboo, the press’s founder, Will Evans, had adopted the more self-promotional swagger of his press’s generation.
And Evans could walk his talk: in 2020 he acquired the venerated Dalkey Archive and teamed up with its steward Chad Post to release a handful of beefy offbeat texts to critical acclaim, like the surreal late-communism-themed Solenoid, by the Romanian novelist Mircea Cǎrtǎrescu, and a reissue of Marguerite Young’s 1965 American spiritual novel, Miss MacIntosh, My Darling. Evans had also onboarded two of the internet’s most popular comp-lit personalities to this new project: the translator Max Lawton, who would wrangle Schattenfroh into English, and the mononymous Andrei, whose blog The Untranslated had first brought Schattenfroh to Evans’s attention. Still, the obscurity of the writers behind these announced works didn’t put profitable odds in Deep Vellum’s favor. Though Moresco and Palol had previously been published in English translation, they enjoyed followings in America most optimistically described as cultish. Lentz was a complete unknown.
Following this announcement, Schattenfroh was unexpectedly catapulted to the hypegeist, with demands for physical galleys rising high enough for Deep Vellum to upload a form to vet potential reviewers. Among the lucky recipients was the art history scholar A.V. Marraccini, who launched a lively “Schattenblog” to detail her read. Others suspected puffery: the critic Federico Perelmuter name-checked the novel in a viral jeremiad against “brodernism,” his name for a culture of unchecked fetishism for maximalist literature. The stakes were raised for Schattenfroh to live up to what its publishers were hawking as “a seminal moment” for the novel form. Meanwhile, Marina Abramović and her partner photographed themselves hammering open a wooden box containing their VIP advance edition. I worked from a PDF.
●
A year after its announcement, Schattenfroh has now come out during a glowing season for postmodernism, alongside Thomas Pynchon’s sunset novel, Krasznahorkai’s Nobel win and the long-awaited publication of Helen DeWitt and Ilya Gridneff’s collaborative Your Name Here. Despite the federal funding cuts that delayed the novel’s publication and threatened numerous adventurous small presses, it’s an auspicious time for Deep Vellum to deliver the first of its promised tomes of badass avant-garde masterpieces. Schattenfroh easily lives up to the label: the novel is unquestionably the magnum opus of its author Michael Lentz, a writer and performer of several acclaimed postmodern works and compositions more modest in ambition. Set in the psycho-realm of his own mind, Schattenfroh is a phantasmic allegorical journey charted by autobiographical references, lexical machinations and visual legerdemain, along with a humanities department’s worth of allusions. Its variegated DNA appears as an index within the narrative, numbering well beyond a hundred works to include those by German-language writers (Kafka, Freud, Nietzsche, Hegel) and non (Lewis Carroll, Ray Bradbury, Dante Alighieri, Michel Foucault), as well as studies of Northern Renaissance painters, cryptography and code breaking, psychology and phenomenology, Gutenberg printing methods, uprisings in medieval Germany, and survivors and enablers of the Third Reich. Works of Judeo-Christian theology abound, with Kabbalistic mysticism being something of an obsession. Lentz also lists two treatises on Church law penned by his father, Hubert Lentz, and even one of his own books, Motherdying (Muttersterben), a eulogy for his mother that reads like a prose poem. Schattenfroh is included too—as being written by Schattenfroh.
This byline is a wink to the devilry of Schattenfroh’s premise: the story of a narrator wrestling for control over his own narrative from the personal and metaphorical demons who threaten to usurp it, to include the novel we are reading. The book opens with him already in their possession, members of a so-called Frightbearing Society who oversee an infernal version of Düren, Lentz’s hometown. They are led by a mysterious figure named Mateo, the majordomo for the narrator’s father, the city’s chief administrator. Schattenfroh is the Society’s enforcer, its soul-sucking martinet: “Sanctify yourself to me!” Schattenfroh says to the narrator, an author surrogate for Lentz. “Your inner revelation … belongs to only me.” To retrieve it, Schattenfroh has bound the narrator to an apparatus that extracts his every thought, verbal interaction, visual stimulation, even his ingestions of force-fed text. The result will be a book, written in a language “to be used absolutely for understanding between humans.” To assure that the narrator will have no authorial claim to it, Schattenfroh deprives him of an identity by anointing him Nobody.
It’s a cruel situation and one, the narrator wryly comments in his opening lines, that he has entered by choice: “One calls this writing,” he says, “I have no paper, no pen, no typewriter, no computer. I am writing into my brainfluid. I must write that I am here voluntarily. And so I write: I am here voluntarily.” He commemorates Schattenfroh for bringing him “out of the slavehouse that exists in me” to serve the Society with “the whole of [his] heart and the whole of [his] soul.” Any alterations the narrator attempts are punishable by plague and or death. He’s agreed to these terms, yet his private thoughts, which go recorded without scrutiny, suggest otherwise:
To also say “I” as I gradually dissolve, frightens me, for that is precisely what the book is, it is the tune so wrongly summoned for by Schattenfroh that perturbs me; whether the individual has taken himself over with his project. Is he speaking in my name in here, “in private quiet,” is he already I?
What to make of Schattenfroh and its avatar is a cardinal intrigue, and a slippery one. There are in fact multiple versions of Schattenfroh: the one we are reading, the text the narrator is self-consciously generating and the book he’s being coerced into scribing. There are multiple versions of Schattenfroh too: he appears or is referenced variously as the narrator’s warden, the narrator’s father, Lucifer, the mayor of Düren, a Nazi who oversaw Düren during the Third Reich and an “allegorical agent” for the Society. The word itself eludes easy parsing. As noted in its front matter, “schattenfroh” translates roughly to “shadowglad” and is a germanely German surname that is otherwise given no concrete definition. It rings sinister when juxtaposed in the frontmatter to the related-sounding terms “schadenfreude” (damagejoy), enjoyment over a specific harm or misfortune suffered by another, and “schadenfroh” (damageglad), pleasure in the thought of other people’s sufferings writ large. The notion of suffering is key to the novel, particularly in a Christian context where salvation is only granted to those who submit themselves to Christ. Submitting to Schattenfroh gives the narrator’s self-imposed subjugation a sense of purpose and lends shadowglad a fitting connotation: welcomed agony.
Yet the narrator isn’t just dealing with his own suffering, but everyone’s. This may be why the book isn’t billed as a novel but as a requiem. It incorporates a fugue of voices from Düren’s past, lost to its history of conflict and catastrophe, lost to blind piousness or accusations of sin, lost to self-grandeur and delusion. The narrator’s task is record it all as a living open mic and compiler of absolute suffering. With this transcription, the Frightbearing Society plans to compose a “Book of Revelation” (also referred to as a “book of the dead”) that “administers society as a ruin” and will usher forth “a divine vision of the future.”
The plottier thread of Schattenfroh follows this mission and reveals Mateo’s conniving plan to overthrow the father and preach the gospel of Schattenfroh as Düren’s insidious savior. Though he’s directing its composition, Mateo is also working to convince the father that his son has been writing the book for the purpose of “fomenting a conspiracy,” and later sentences the narrator to death for false prophecy. Books catalyze most of the novel’s many pivots: Mateo weaponizes the “capricious thoughts” of fiction to ensnare the father using the black page from Tristram Shandy, and a reading of Michael Kolhaas serves as a memory aid for the narrator to remember his soul and his name: Michael. “Capricious thoughts are that which bring me onto the right path,” says the narrator, recognizing the power of literature. His father’s library becomes the narrator’s “Arcanum,” a sanctuary where he can find God in writing outside the Bible. Finding photo albums and copies of Motherdying in this sanctuary, however, also draws the narrator into the novel’s other—and more moving—primary strand: the Freudian odyssey into family and identity that he must undertake if he is to find salvation.
●
The Lentz family did not live in Düren (nor was Michael yet born) on November 16, 1944, when, commencing at 3:23 p.m. and lasting 21 minutes, a Royal Air Force fleet of 474 bomber planes dropped more than 150,000 incendiary and explosive bombs on the city, then an important manufacturing center. Nearly all of its buildings were destroyed; over three thousand of its denizens were killed. Those who fled left behind a town that already had a long history of destruction. Razed in the sixteenth-century Guelders Wars, wiped out by outbreaks of plague and caught in the crossfire during the Thirty Years’ War, sacked by marauding French troops as it recovered and damaged by an earthquake a century later, the city’s rebuilding after the Second World War would be its fifth.
In an early scene, Mateo forces the narrator to consume a 75-page handwritten list of the people who perished in the air raid. There’s a deeper symbolism here than a diet of casualties: Michael is inheriting the city’s trauma, just as his father did before him. Hubert Lentz was an expert in Catholic canon code employed as a lawyer by the state government of North Rhine-Westphalia when the city council of Düren selected him to become its administrative manager, the city’s highest unelected position. Düren was a heavily conservative Catholic town—its central cathedral St. Anna was said to house the head of Mary’s mother—and in Hubert the council may have seen an ideal shepherd to lead it. Postwar tensions between formerly pro-Reich German Protestants open to secularism and persecuted yet not innocent German Catholics pushing for more religious authority had lingered; these disagreements over how West Germany should be run appear in Schattenfroh when the narrator’s father, disgusted by the national government, speaks of his intent to build Düren into “an institution of order, an institution one must teach how to behave properly”—his own family among them.
Düren is exemplary, for Lentz, of Catholic Germany’s long history of incorporating suffering and authority into its identity. He has written disparagingly of the city elsewhere, calling it “a dump” that should have been left to “rot away.” In this novel, too, he is withering. The same month that his father assumed his administrative position, the city commemorated the bombing’s eighteenth anniversary with a sculpture of a flame over a fountain of water commissioned from, of all people, a former Nazi architect. When the narrator encounters it in his wanderings of the city, he calls it, with unmistakable acidity, “the angel-visaged flame sculpture of an artist with God-given talent, but about whose past one had briefly forgotten to ask.” Beyond the city, Lentz also contends with a more vexed form of Catholic disregard, relating the story of the narrator’s paternal grandfather, who was briefly imprisoned and starved by the Gestapo. Yet while working as a denazification commissioner after the war, his grandfather hid evidence that would have incriminated local ex-Nazis and supporters, particularly the “good Catholic Prüm merchants and civil servants”—becoming, in the end, not so distant from the Church that “forgot the Third Reich very quickly and not only after it had already become history.”
Many postwar West German writers have wrestled with the incomprehensible atrocity that’s been their burden to bear. Lentz accepts this guilt too, but what sets him apart is his anger. He directs it most forcefully at conservative Germans like those on Düren’s city council, so committed to their repressive ethics that they risk repeating what brought about their annihilation in the first place—their dependence on authoritative figures for their own salvation. Everything, Lentz stresses, even this very book, is borne from this heritage. It’s why, until he begins to question his circumstances, the narrator is a willing participant in the creation of Schattenfroh. “The goal of art is compassio,” he observes, “taking part in and being part of the sufferings of Christ. Art is thus an eternally arcane theology. However, it’s not yet settled whether it’s a positive or negative one. The drasticness of the representation is tied to the notion of salvation.” And furthermore, he wonders, as his doubts deepen, “what justification would pain have if Jesus never existed?”
Even as the narrator finds liberation in challenging the lessons of his upbringing, the book’s tragedy is that his father, myopic in his devotion to the Word, never will. If Düren is a model of lessons not learned, the father is the prototypical authoritarian: not a neo-Nazi, but a figure who nonetheless puts order before love and is thus incapable of acceptance. What he really wants is for Michael to be his successor, but he is too conceited to anticipate his downfall and, when he reemerges later in the novel as an older, powerless man called Philipp II., still too proud to admit to being misled. As he fades in hospice, the father realizes his son will never inherit his legacy and admonishes Michael for writing lies about him in his “Society Book,” and being “deceived by the devil.” Michael remains conflicted over whether to forgive him. “Father, beloved Father,” he says after Philipp II. passes. “No text wishes to arise. You were a good father. That’s what I think, but I don’t quite believe it, so I don’t say it.”
The novel’s rawest passages, however, are those that concern his mother, whose unhappy final days informed the ruminative, fragmented autobiographical vignettes of Motherdying, the account Lentz wrote of her death in 2001. Schattenfroh, written after Hubert’s death in 2014, can be read as a corresponding paternal work, so it’s little surprise the mother appears to the narrator as a continuation of that same tragic figure—a troubled parent; a forlorn wife; a broken woman—coming first in gutting memories of her misery and then in disturbing visitations as a spirit unrelieved of her suffering, a series of chambers through which the narrator must pass. “Her sorrow shall never come to an end,” says the narrator as he observes her gaze at a crucified Jesus that resembles Michael. “Resurrection is not an option for her.”
Once the narrator realizes that his father’s compassion toward his mother is stunted—his decision to marry her rather than be ordained a priest never ceased to shame him—the narrator becomes the one who must, he tells himself, “lead your mother’s soul into the hereafter.” This means for him a kind of ego-death to release the spirit of the woman who had once been his mother, so that she might be reincarnated as a child with the possibilities of life renewed. What’s most challenging about Schattenfroh, and most marvelous, lies here, in recognizing this slow shift from an exhaustive exploration of the self to an act of mercy.
●
It’s their verbal pyrotechnics and intimidating erudition that make enormous, experimental texts like Schattenfroh so marketable as “badass” literature: they turn novels into performance art. Lentz is no stranger to the stage, his other notable profession being a kind of free jazz Kurt Schwitters who uses voice and saxophone to compose manic sound poems. This background might have inspired Schattenfroh’s maximalism, where the only breaks are paragraph indents and where sentences can be washed out with verbal discordance. That may be enough for the readers who picked Schattenfroh up out of the desire to have their brains half-nelsoned by its formidability, and framing thousand-page postmodern literature as some kind of extreme sport has turned out to be an effective allure.
And it’s true that at this level the novel offers many rewards. In interviews, Lentz has professed Samuel Beckett and Gertrude Stein as influences, and the narrator’s macabre situation and loopy German-flecked diction are spot-on pantomimes of the former and latter’s respective absurdist theater and stream-of-conscious anti-plays. Passages overlap, erase, repeat, glitch, plagiarize, veer off into babbling Lucky-like monologues and bat around whimsically between English and German. The result is often deeply and blackly funny, the satire pitched to a cackle. The puns are innumerable, and references are deployed like easter eggs: the novel’s 1,001 pages and Nobody protagonist are nods to The Arabian Nights and The Odyssey, while the father’s Philipp II. alias points to a counterreformation Spanish king, and the Frightbearing Society is a play on the Fruitbearing Society, a seventeenth-century association committed to the promotion of High German.
But what will draw readers to Schattenfroh in the years to come is the intention behind the grandiosity, the vision amid the chaos. “Germans primarily consist of the recollections of others,” Lentz writes, “a Mass of Incorporation” where “each act of dying is a murder that is avenged by a birth.” The same could be said of Schattenfroh—an impassioned, ruthless argument for rebellion against the Catholic Germanic order Lentz finds so intolerable, and a startlingly personal argument for literature as a source of redemption. It kills the past in order to avenge it with the birth of something new. Finally he has found a kind of suffering worth living for: the labor of creation.
In the summer of 2024, Deep Vellum, a Dallas-based press, announced a program to bring out “badass avant-garde masterpieces that would otherwise not be translated or published.” Kicking things off would be a trio of postmodern thousand-plus-page magnum opuses: a Pynchonian quintet by the Catalan writer Miquel de Palol, a surreal and meditative trilogy by the Italian writer Antonio Moresco and a singular contemporary novel “like no other” by the German writer Michael Lentz, which was also to be the venture’s maiden publication.
Retaining its deutsche title, Lentz’s Schattenfroh was pitched as brethren with the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch and the films of Alejandro Jodorowsky, narrated by a prisoner held within a nightmarish panopticon constructed by his father, the novel’s titular figure. Art, history and horror would inform his story. “What if a schizophrenic municipal employee in provincial Germany attempted to write his own Bible?” the press release asked. “You’d get something like SCHATTENFROH.” Its English publication would help earn it a place among the “pantheon of the best works of world literature published in the past two decades”—and in so doing “cement the press’ reputation as the champion of maximalist literature in the Anglosphere.”
The hyperbolic ad copy reminded me of my days at New Directions, where I would also bullhorn the brilliance of foreign writers when critical attention had yet to come (I can recall shilling László Krasznahorkai as the “Hungarian master of the apocalypse” before his readership took off). Using copy to promote the press itself, however, was discouraged; our publications did that for us. But ND has also had nearly ninety years to build its brand; Deep Vellum is barely a teenager. In chucking this taboo, the press’s founder, Will Evans, had adopted the more self-promotional swagger of his press’s generation.
And Evans could walk his talk: in 2020 he acquired the venerated Dalkey Archive and teamed up with its steward Chad Post to release a handful of beefy offbeat texts to critical acclaim, like the surreal late-communism-themed Solenoid, by the Romanian novelist Mircea Cǎrtǎrescu, and a reissue of Marguerite Young’s 1965 American spiritual novel, Miss MacIntosh, My Darling. Evans had also onboarded two of the internet’s most popular comp-lit personalities to this new project: the translator Max Lawton, who would wrangle Schattenfroh into English, and the mononymous Andrei, whose blog The Untranslated had first brought Schattenfroh to Evans’s attention. Still, the obscurity of the writers behind these announced works didn’t put profitable odds in Deep Vellum’s favor. Though Moresco and Palol had previously been published in English translation, they enjoyed followings in America most optimistically described as cultish. Lentz was a complete unknown.
Following this announcement, Schattenfroh was unexpectedly catapulted to the hypegeist, with demands for physical galleys rising high enough for Deep Vellum to upload a form to vet potential reviewers. Among the lucky recipients was the art history scholar A.V. Marraccini, who launched a lively “Schattenblog” to detail her read. Others suspected puffery: the critic Federico Perelmuter name-checked the novel in a viral jeremiad against “brodernism,” his name for a culture of unchecked fetishism for maximalist literature. The stakes were raised for Schattenfroh to live up to what its publishers were hawking as “a seminal moment” for the novel form. Meanwhile, Marina Abramović and her partner photographed themselves hammering open a wooden box containing their VIP advance edition. I worked from a PDF.
●
A year after its announcement, Schattenfroh has now come out during a glowing season for postmodernism, alongside Thomas Pynchon’s sunset novel, Krasznahorkai’s Nobel win and the long-awaited publication of Helen DeWitt and Ilya Gridneff’s collaborative Your Name Here. Despite the federal funding cuts that delayed the novel’s publication and threatened numerous adventurous small presses, it’s an auspicious time for Deep Vellum to deliver the first of its promised tomes of badass avant-garde masterpieces. Schattenfroh easily lives up to the label: the novel is unquestionably the magnum opus of its author Michael Lentz, a writer and performer of several acclaimed postmodern works and compositions more modest in ambition. Set in the psycho-realm of his own mind, Schattenfroh is a phantasmic allegorical journey charted by autobiographical references, lexical machinations and visual legerdemain, along with a humanities department’s worth of allusions. Its variegated DNA appears as an index within the narrative, numbering well beyond a hundred works to include those by German-language writers (Kafka, Freud, Nietzsche, Hegel) and non (Lewis Carroll, Ray Bradbury, Dante Alighieri, Michel Foucault), as well as studies of Northern Renaissance painters, cryptography and code breaking, psychology and phenomenology, Gutenberg printing methods, uprisings in medieval Germany, and survivors and enablers of the Third Reich. Works of Judeo-Christian theology abound, with Kabbalistic mysticism being something of an obsession. Lentz also lists two treatises on Church law penned by his father, Hubert Lentz, and even one of his own books, Motherdying (Muttersterben), a eulogy for his mother that reads like a prose poem. Schattenfroh is included too—as being written by Schattenfroh.
This byline is a wink to the devilry of Schattenfroh’s premise: the story of a narrator wrestling for control over his own narrative from the personal and metaphorical demons who threaten to usurp it, to include the novel we are reading. The book opens with him already in their possession, members of a so-called Frightbearing Society who oversee an infernal version of Düren, Lentz’s hometown. They are led by a mysterious figure named Mateo, the majordomo for the narrator’s father, the city’s chief administrator. Schattenfroh is the Society’s enforcer, its soul-sucking martinet: “Sanctify yourself to me!” Schattenfroh says to the narrator, an author surrogate for Lentz. “Your inner revelation … belongs to only me.” To retrieve it, Schattenfroh has bound the narrator to an apparatus that extracts his every thought, verbal interaction, visual stimulation, even his ingestions of force-fed text. The result will be a book, written in a language “to be used absolutely for understanding between humans.” To assure that the narrator will have no authorial claim to it, Schattenfroh deprives him of an identity by anointing him Nobody.
It’s a cruel situation and one, the narrator wryly comments in his opening lines, that he has entered by choice: “One calls this writing,” he says, “I have no paper, no pen, no typewriter, no computer. I am writing into my brainfluid. I must write that I am here voluntarily. And so I write: I am here voluntarily.” He commemorates Schattenfroh for bringing him “out of the slavehouse that exists in me” to serve the Society with “the whole of [his] heart and the whole of [his] soul.” Any alterations the narrator attempts are punishable by plague and or death. He’s agreed to these terms, yet his private thoughts, which go recorded without scrutiny, suggest otherwise:
What to make of Schattenfroh and its avatar is a cardinal intrigue, and a slippery one. There are in fact multiple versions of Schattenfroh: the one we are reading, the text the narrator is self-consciously generating and the book he’s being coerced into scribing. There are multiple versions of Schattenfroh too: he appears or is referenced variously as the narrator’s warden, the narrator’s father, Lucifer, the mayor of Düren, a Nazi who oversaw Düren during the Third Reich and an “allegorical agent” for the Society. The word itself eludes easy parsing. As noted in its front matter, “schattenfroh” translates roughly to “shadowglad” and is a germanely German surname that is otherwise given no concrete definition. It rings sinister when juxtaposed in the frontmatter to the related-sounding terms “schadenfreude” (damagejoy), enjoyment over a specific harm or misfortune suffered by another, and “schadenfroh” (damageglad), pleasure in the thought of other people’s sufferings writ large. The notion of suffering is key to the novel, particularly in a Christian context where salvation is only granted to those who submit themselves to Christ. Submitting to Schattenfroh gives the narrator’s self-imposed subjugation a sense of purpose and lends shadowglad a fitting connotation: welcomed agony.
Yet the narrator isn’t just dealing with his own suffering, but everyone’s. This may be why the book isn’t billed as a novel but as a requiem. It incorporates a fugue of voices from Düren’s past, lost to its history of conflict and catastrophe, lost to blind piousness or accusations of sin, lost to self-grandeur and delusion. The narrator’s task is record it all as a living open mic and compiler of absolute suffering. With this transcription, the Frightbearing Society plans to compose a “Book of Revelation” (also referred to as a “book of the dead”) that “administers society as a ruin” and will usher forth “a divine vision of the future.”
The plottier thread of Schattenfroh follows this mission and reveals Mateo’s conniving plan to overthrow the father and preach the gospel of Schattenfroh as Düren’s insidious savior. Though he’s directing its composition, Mateo is also working to convince the father that his son has been writing the book for the purpose of “fomenting a conspiracy,” and later sentences the narrator to death for false prophecy. Books catalyze most of the novel’s many pivots: Mateo weaponizes the “capricious thoughts” of fiction to ensnare the father using the black page from Tristram Shandy, and a reading of Michael Kolhaas serves as a memory aid for the narrator to remember his soul and his name: Michael. “Capricious thoughts are that which bring me onto the right path,” says the narrator, recognizing the power of literature. His father’s library becomes the narrator’s “Arcanum,” a sanctuary where he can find God in writing outside the Bible. Finding photo albums and copies of Motherdying in this sanctuary, however, also draws the narrator into the novel’s other—and more moving—primary strand: the Freudian odyssey into family and identity that he must undertake if he is to find salvation.
●
The Lentz family did not live in Düren (nor was Michael yet born) on November 16, 1944, when, commencing at 3:23 p.m. and lasting 21 minutes, a Royal Air Force fleet of 474 bomber planes dropped more than 150,000 incendiary and explosive bombs on the city, then an important manufacturing center. Nearly all of its buildings were destroyed; over three thousand of its denizens were killed. Those who fled left behind a town that already had a long history of destruction. Razed in the sixteenth-century Guelders Wars, wiped out by outbreaks of plague and caught in the crossfire during the Thirty Years’ War, sacked by marauding French troops as it recovered and damaged by an earthquake a century later, the city’s rebuilding after the Second World War would be its fifth.
In an early scene, Mateo forces the narrator to consume a 75-page handwritten list of the people who perished in the air raid. There’s a deeper symbolism here than a diet of casualties: Michael is inheriting the city’s trauma, just as his father did before him. Hubert Lentz was an expert in Catholic canon code employed as a lawyer by the state government of North Rhine-Westphalia when the city council of Düren selected him to become its administrative manager, the city’s highest unelected position. Düren was a heavily conservative Catholic town—its central cathedral St. Anna was said to house the head of Mary’s mother—and in Hubert the council may have seen an ideal shepherd to lead it. Postwar tensions between formerly pro-Reich German Protestants open to secularism and persecuted yet not innocent German Catholics pushing for more religious authority had lingered; these disagreements over how West Germany should be run appear in Schattenfroh when the narrator’s father, disgusted by the national government, speaks of his intent to build Düren into “an institution of order, an institution one must teach how to behave properly”—his own family among them.
Düren is exemplary, for Lentz, of Catholic Germany’s long history of incorporating suffering and authority into its identity. He has written disparagingly of the city elsewhere, calling it “a dump” that should have been left to “rot away.” In this novel, too, he is withering. The same month that his father assumed his administrative position, the city commemorated the bombing’s eighteenth anniversary with a sculpture of a flame over a fountain of water commissioned from, of all people, a former Nazi architect. When the narrator encounters it in his wanderings of the city, he calls it, with unmistakable acidity, “the angel-visaged flame sculpture of an artist with God-given talent, but about whose past one had briefly forgotten to ask.” Beyond the city, Lentz also contends with a more vexed form of Catholic disregard, relating the story of the narrator’s paternal grandfather, who was briefly imprisoned and starved by the Gestapo. Yet while working as a denazification commissioner after the war, his grandfather hid evidence that would have incriminated local ex-Nazis and supporters, particularly the “good Catholic Prüm merchants and civil servants”—becoming, in the end, not so distant from the Church that “forgot the Third Reich very quickly and not only after it had already become history.”
Many postwar West German writers have wrestled with the incomprehensible atrocity that’s been their burden to bear. Lentz accepts this guilt too, but what sets him apart is his anger. He directs it most forcefully at conservative Germans like those on Düren’s city council, so committed to their repressive ethics that they risk repeating what brought about their annihilation in the first place—their dependence on authoritative figures for their own salvation. Everything, Lentz stresses, even this very book, is borne from this heritage. It’s why, until he begins to question his circumstances, the narrator is a willing participant in the creation of Schattenfroh. “The goal of art is compassio,” he observes, “taking part in and being part of the sufferings of Christ. Art is thus an eternally arcane theology. However, it’s not yet settled whether it’s a positive or negative one. The drasticness of the representation is tied to the notion of salvation.” And furthermore, he wonders, as his doubts deepen, “what justification would pain have if Jesus never existed?”
Even as the narrator finds liberation in challenging the lessons of his upbringing, the book’s tragedy is that his father, myopic in his devotion to the Word, never will. If Düren is a model of lessons not learned, the father is the prototypical authoritarian: not a neo-Nazi, but a figure who nonetheless puts order before love and is thus incapable of acceptance. What he really wants is for Michael to be his successor, but he is too conceited to anticipate his downfall and, when he reemerges later in the novel as an older, powerless man called Philipp II., still too proud to admit to being misled. As he fades in hospice, the father realizes his son will never inherit his legacy and admonishes Michael for writing lies about him in his “Society Book,” and being “deceived by the devil.” Michael remains conflicted over whether to forgive him. “Father, beloved Father,” he says after Philipp II. passes. “No text wishes to arise. You were a good father. That’s what I think, but I don’t quite believe it, so I don’t say it.”
The novel’s rawest passages, however, are those that concern his mother, whose unhappy final days informed the ruminative, fragmented autobiographical vignettes of Motherdying, the account Lentz wrote of her death in 2001. Schattenfroh, written after Hubert’s death in 2014, can be read as a corresponding paternal work, so it’s little surprise the mother appears to the narrator as a continuation of that same tragic figure—a troubled parent; a forlorn wife; a broken woman—coming first in gutting memories of her misery and then in disturbing visitations as a spirit unrelieved of her suffering, a series of chambers through which the narrator must pass. “Her sorrow shall never come to an end,” says the narrator as he observes her gaze at a crucified Jesus that resembles Michael. “Resurrection is not an option for her.”
Once the narrator realizes that his father’s compassion toward his mother is stunted—his decision to marry her rather than be ordained a priest never ceased to shame him—the narrator becomes the one who must, he tells himself, “lead your mother’s soul into the hereafter.” This means for him a kind of ego-death to release the spirit of the woman who had once been his mother, so that she might be reincarnated as a child with the possibilities of life renewed. What’s most challenging about Schattenfroh, and most marvelous, lies here, in recognizing this slow shift from an exhaustive exploration of the self to an act of mercy.
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It’s their verbal pyrotechnics and intimidating erudition that make enormous, experimental texts like Schattenfroh so marketable as “badass” literature: they turn novels into performance art. Lentz is no stranger to the stage, his other notable profession being a kind of free jazz Kurt Schwitters who uses voice and saxophone to compose manic sound poems. This background might have inspired Schattenfroh’s maximalism, where the only breaks are paragraph indents and where sentences can be washed out with verbal discordance. That may be enough for the readers who picked Schattenfroh up out of the desire to have their brains half-nelsoned by its formidability, and framing thousand-page postmodern literature as some kind of extreme sport has turned out to be an effective allure.
And it’s true that at this level the novel offers many rewards. In interviews, Lentz has professed Samuel Beckett and Gertrude Stein as influences, and the narrator’s macabre situation and loopy German-flecked diction are spot-on pantomimes of the former and latter’s respective absurdist theater and stream-of-conscious anti-plays. Passages overlap, erase, repeat, glitch, plagiarize, veer off into babbling Lucky-like monologues and bat around whimsically between English and German. The result is often deeply and blackly funny, the satire pitched to a cackle. The puns are innumerable, and references are deployed like easter eggs: the novel’s 1,001 pages and Nobody protagonist are nods to The Arabian Nights and The Odyssey, while the father’s Philipp II. alias points to a counterreformation Spanish king, and the Frightbearing Society is a play on the Fruitbearing Society, a seventeenth-century association committed to the promotion of High German.
But what will draw readers to Schattenfroh in the years to come is the intention behind the grandiosity, the vision amid the chaos. “Germans primarily consist of the recollections of others,” Lentz writes, “a Mass of Incorporation” where “each act of dying is a murder that is avenged by a birth.” The same could be said of Schattenfroh—an impassioned, ruthless argument for rebellion against the Catholic Germanic order Lentz finds so intolerable, and a startlingly personal argument for literature as a source of redemption. It kills the past in order to avenge it with the birth of something new. Finally he has found a kind of suffering worth living for: the labor of creation.
If you liked this essay, you’ll love reading The Point in print.