Gretel and the Great War
by Adam Erlich Sachs
2024
Gretel and the Great War is a mosaic novel, a series of tales that are halfway between chapters and short stories. The conceit is that a mute young woman was found wandering the streets of Vienna in 1919, in the aftermath of the war and the flu, that she was checked into an asylum, and that soon afterward, letters started arriving for her from a different asylum, letters from her father, telling her bedtime stories.
Each story tells the tale of a different person, identified only by their profession. There are 26 stories, each associated with a letter of the alphabet, which matches the name of the job, and each is written so that that letter or sound will show up much more than normal. At first, it doesn't seem like the stories have any connection, but soon the characters start to reappear and intersect. It becomes clear they're all part of the same social world, and the stories are being told in roughly chronological order. Almost every story involves someone getting sent to the Sanitarium of Dr Krakauer, where they presumably meet Gretel's father and relate their tale to him.
In true fairy tale fashion, the stories are dark but often funny, told in a manner that's playful and irreverent, but that also references any crude subject matter using polite terminology. Most of the stories involve adults caring for children - or rather, adults who have responsibility for children. They are often, in fact, quite un-caring, or else worse, they are too interested, in ways that seem sinister no matter how obliquely Gretel's father describes the nature of their interest. And as is so often the case with fairy tales, there's a moral here. The Vienna described in these tales is a sick society, where people hold outrageous, inflexible ideals, and are eager to commit acts of cruelty to achieve them. It's no wonder they go to war, and after the war, they seem even harsher and more cruel, xenophobic and antisemitic.
Each story tells the tale of a different person, identified only by their profession. There are 26 stories, each associated with a letter of the alphabet, which matches the name of the job, and each is written so that that letter or sound will show up much more than normal. At first, it doesn't seem like the stories have any connection, but soon the characters start to reappear and intersect. It becomes clear they're all part of the same social world, and the stories are being told in roughly chronological order. Almost every story involves someone getting sent to the Sanitarium of Dr Krakauer, where they presumably meet Gretel's father and relate their tale to him.
In true fairy tale fashion, the stories are dark but often funny, told in a manner that's playful and irreverent, but that also references any crude subject matter using polite terminology. Most of the stories involve adults caring for children - or rather, adults who have responsibility for children. They are often, in fact, quite un-caring, or else worse, they are too interested, in ways that seem sinister no matter how obliquely Gretel's father describes the nature of their interest. And as is so often the case with fairy tales, there's a moral here. The Vienna described in these tales is a sick society, where people hold outrageous, inflexible ideals, and are eager to commit acts of cruelty to achieve them. It's no wonder they go to war, and after the war, they seem even harsher and more cruel, xenophobic and antisemitic.
An architect aspires to design the simplest possible building facade, one that somehow traumatizes the viewer. A ballet choreographer invents a new dance step he claims is more natural than any other, and his wife dies trying to dance it. A choir master performs surgeries on the boys in his choir in his quest for the purest possible sound. He's inspired (rather than warned off) by a woman who tells him about the 'bad things' her own choir master father used to do to her and her brothers. A playwright demands such intense lighting for his play that it burns the theater down. A Serbian man wants revenge for feeling snubbed and disrespected by the ethnically German majority. Over and over people's obsessions cross paths with the theater, the concert hall, the Duke and Duchess, and their beloved youngest daughter. (Also, just about every adult in the book wants to fuck, and only rarely with their actual spouse.)
Gretel's mother first appears in the M story, and like many of the people we meet, she reappears later. She's a singer and aspiring actress who abandons her husband and daughter in favor of her art. Gretel herself appears in a few of the later stories too, although I don't think we find out quite why she can no longer speak. Several of the characters seem to similar to each other, and since none of them have names, it can be a little hard to keep track of them, to tell who's the same person back again, and who merely has a backstory that mirrors some of the details of somebody else's. A good portion of the book consists of stories within stories as well, tales told by character in a chapter that might be as important, or even more so, than the main story of the chapter.
The silly, obsessive behavior of the characters, the playful sing-song narrative voice, the word games being played with letters and sounds, all of it acts like the spoonful of sugar to help wash down the realization that these people are insane, that their society, Europe generally, but also Austria-Hungary specifically, had gone mad, that they prioritized ideas over people, that their determination to implement forms of radical simplicity and purity regardless of who got trampled or smashed to achieve it was bound to lead to disaster. Such, at least, is author Adam Erlich Sachs's diagnosis. Nothing quite covers up the underlying bitterness though, especially when I read this while watching my own country succumb to leaders who seem gleeful to inflict human suffering, which they claim will make America 'simpler' or 'purer,' but which will probably only make us smaller, meaner, poorer, with a government that's unable to help anyone who needs it, that functions solely to persecute. In the book, the Great War, when it arrives, seems almost like just another cockamamie scheme writ large, only different because this time it entangles absolutely everyone instead of just a few.
In setting, Gretel and the Great War is like a neighbor to Berlin or Children are Civilians Too, although it's organized quite differently than either of them. The playful language in "Gretel," the use of the alphabet and bedtime story as structuring devices makes it unlike other mosaic novels, but oddly similar to Rebecca Brown's The Dogs: A Modern Bestiary, which also uses those devices to leaven some very dark subject matter.
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