Helmut Krausser: Eros
“Basically, in my novels I did the same as Alexander had done, I on paper, he in the wildlife enclosure that was society. Every person eventually became a character and the power I, as author, had over my fictional world was comparable to that Alexander had over the real world.”
Alexander von Brücken is dying. Controlling to the end, the millionaire employs the services of a well known, but unnamed, author to record the sad story of an obsessive one-sided love affair that has dominated his life. The author spends eight days listening to his subject’s lifelong confession about how he rivalled the Stasi in his secret surveillance of Sophie, forcing fate to look kindly on his beloved. The author stands to make a princely sum for his efforts, with the sole stipulation that the novel must not be published until after von Brücken’s death.
In a narrative spanning more than 40 years of German history, from the Second World War to the fall of Communism, we encounter two very different lives. One is characterised by capitalist principles—aesthetics, power and wealth and maintaining the status quo, the other by Marxist-Leninist politics and the struggle for revolution. In this way Alexander and Sophie represent West Germany’s internal struggle during the decade between the late 60s to the late 70s and the broader polarity between East and West Germany.
On the surface the von Brücken family is picture perfect; young Alexander, his twin sisters, his stoic but delicate mother and his exacting father live in the ‘Ice Palace’ and want for nothing. But it is a house where aestheticism and the national interest take pride of place and affection is sorely lacking. So it not surprising that when Alexander first meets Sophie, the daughter of one of his father’s factory workers, during an air raid, that he falls madly (emphasis on the mad) in love. Like an ant in amber, Alexander becomes frozen forever more in this moment in time.
From their first kiss it is clear that the motivations of the two characters are very different. Sensing his admiration, Sophie uses the situation to her family’s economic advantage and demands 50 Marks to lock lips with Alexander. He happily pays the sum, unaware that he is starting what will become a lifelong pattern of trying to buy his happiness.
War eventually separates the pair and both lose their parents along the way. After five years apart, his determination to find her increases. When he turns 21 he deposes his father’s treacherous business manager and enlists the former manager’s son Lukian to help him set up a team to find Sophie, in an all-consuming project that will become his life’s work.
After finally locating her, the long-awaited reunion is a disaster that sets the tone for all their subsequent encounters. Von Brücken repels Sophie with his ill-conceived attempts at trying to buy her affections. Their meeting highlights how differently they interpreted their fleeting encounter and what it represents for each of them now. For Sophie the kiss was meaningless and is simply a reminder of a painful past she is anxious to forget. For von Brücken it was the highlight of a dark and lonely past and a memory he will treasure forever, a possible allegory for the differing views about Germany’s role in the Second World War.
When she makes it clear she will not be bought, he resolves to help her secretly and spends the rest of his life watching her and ‘helping’ her, usually at a safe distance. Far from the knight in shining armour, it is ultimately his search for meaning and excitement, rather than altruism that motivates him. Sophie’s increasing involvement in socialist politics allows him a glimpse into an unknown and exciting world and occasionally he allows himself to be seduced by it. “I decided to change my life for good. A life dictated by money is just high-class slavery… but ultimately he is unwilling to relinquish his trappings. “This was my thinking at that moment. Childishly simpleminded.” Living vicariously through Sophie and Lukian, his man on the ground, distracts him from the shortcomings of his own life and allows him to choose an alternate reality tinged with political intrigue and espionage.
Even in his early fantasies about Sophie he never incorporated himself into the narrative. “I was always on the outside looking in, content with quiet contemplation”. In this way his sets himself up as the perpetual voyeur rather than a principal actor in the story and so it is perhaps not surprising that after hearing the account of his life we know more about that object of his affection than we do about him.
Sophie is also looking for meaning through the pursuit of leftist politics, the group spirit and the fight against the self-centred establishment that von Brücken personifies. An interesting exchange between the two central characters, when von Brücken poses as taxi driver Boris, shows that it is in the struggle between capitalism and socialist politics that meaning can be found.
The author for hire in the novel is wary of short changing his own ethics and at one point questions his complicity in the all out invasion of another’s privacy. “Perhaps the idea that the material I was working on would be turned into a novel had smoothed too many of my scruples as I overstepped several ethical marks.” The rich recluse invites the author, and therefore, us as readers, to judge his acts. “What I want you to tell me is: was what I did reprehensible”. Indeed Eros has a touch of Peter Weir’s the Truman Show about it, with von Brücken as omnipresent eye documenting and controlling the events in his unsuspecting subject’s life. This begs the question of whether Helmut Krausser, like Weir, also questions the reader’s part in the intrusion.
When von Brücken dies and the author publishes the book he receives an interesting letter from one of the magnate’s estranged relatives, which questions the truth of his account. This knowledge, together with von Brücken’s constant directives about how the author might like to alter certain events or characters to his advantage highlight that one person’s truth is another’s fiction, in history and in life.
While the book operates successfully at an allegorical level, the story itself begins to wear as thin as the love between Sophie and Alexander, around the halfway mark. Hammering home the saying that love is blindness, our anti-hero’s obsession, which is only based on a fleeting kiss, begins to border on the ridiculous not to mention the creepy. Eros, the god of love was said to “unstring the limbs and subdue both mind and sensible thought in the breasts of all gods and all men."(Hesiod, Theogony, 120-2). The book clearly illustrates that love doesn’t discriminate, unfortunately for the reader the book’s distant, one-dimensional narrator presents as a pathetic and unlikeable caricature of a controlling, rich, crazed old man who realises that “happiness is not unconnected with self delusion.” His doctor hits the head on the nail at one point suggesting that you can trick the brain into being in love through autosuggestion. “It’s a natural defence mechanism of the brain against loneliness and emotional deprivation.”
The Book
Krausser, Helmut: Eros / translated by Rebecca Morrison – Europa Editions, 2008. - 352 pages
ISBN: 978-1933372518
Original title: Eros (German)
