Paranoia with a Pedigree

As a starting point, a brief outline of what trauma is and why this is relevant to literary studies will be extracted from the vast body of critical works on the topic (see e.g., Alexander et al.; Bronfen et al.; Buelens et al.; Kurtz; Leys). A basic definition was put forward, for instance, by Jean Laplanche and Jean- Bertrand Pontalis in their 1967 Vocabulaire de la Psychoanalyse, a decade and a half before the term PTSD (for “post-traumatic stress disorder”) came into common usage through American psychiatric discourse in the wake of the Vietnam War (Diedrich). Meanwhile, there is a certain antagonism between a Freudian/poststructuralist way of reading trauma, stemming mostly from literary studies (see Caruth et al.), and an alternative approach focusing on cultural trauma in the tradition of the social sciences (see e.g., Alexander et al.; Leys), with a few scholars such as the historian Dominic LaCapra situated somewhere in between.

Laplanche and Pontalis circumscribe trauma as “an event in the subject’s life defined by its intensity, by the subject’s incapacity to respond adequately to it, and by the upheaval and long-lasting effects that it brings about in the psychical organisation” (465).6 Statements by Roger Kurtz and Jeffrey Alexander may be combined to provide a more detailed definition based on Freud:

The psychoanalytical understanding of trauma defines it as an event so overwhelming, that it cannot be processed normally at the time of its occurrence, so that the memory is effectively blocked but returns to haunt the victim until it is appropriately confronted and dealt with. (Kurtz 3; see also LaCapra 41)

This approach places a model of unconscious emotional fears and cognitively distorting mechanisms of psychological defense between the external shattering event and the actor’s internal traumatic response. [ . . . ] In fact, truth goes underground, and accurate memory and responsible action are its victims. (Alexander 5)

Over the last three decades, and in particular under the influence of the worldwide reception of Holocaust testimonies, this psychoanalytically informed notion of trauma has provided the foundation for researchers in cultural studies who focus especially on the (im)possibility of an “adequate” representation of traumatic historical experiences (see esp. Weigel). In this context, a prominent role was played by the deconstructionist Yale School, and particularly by Cathy Caruth, whose books Trauma: Explorations in Memory (1995) and Unclaimed Experience (1996) made widely accepted yet often criticized claims (see Leys; Torremans; Weigel and Paul).

As a consequence, a whole subdiscipline would emerge in the 1990s and 2000s, which has become the dark sister of Memory Studies, as it were, with an extensive debate that has been fostered by scholars like Caruth, LaCapra, Geoffrey Hartmann, Shoshana Felman, Marianne Hirsch, Aleida Assmann, Sigrid Weigel, and many others. From their discourse, it is possible to extract some central features of trauma or post-traumatic stress disorder, respectively, that help us “to ‘read the wound’ with the aid of literature” (Hartmann 537);⁷ our criterion for inclusion thus being the extent to which such elements are generally compatible with a Freudian-based approach to cultural studies and also pertinent to our narrative analysis:

• The Nachträglichkeit — that is to say, “deferred action,” “afterwardness,” or “belatedness”—of trauma according to Freud (see esp. Laplanche and Pontalis 465–69; Leys 18ff.).⁸ Some researchers go as far as to deny that there is a specific traumatic event per se, proposing instead that such an incident is only psychically “constructed” in retrospect. As Andrew Barnaby explains, “there is something missing or misplaced in an experience that, while not necessarily traumatic in itself, will only later, by some activity of retrospection, become the focal point of mental disruption” (24; see also Laplanche and Pontalis 465–69).

• A trauma causes not only great emotional (di)stress; it also results in powerful repression mechanisms that limit its describability.⁹ Thus, as the consequence of unconscious psychical defense, the subject recalls the traumatizing experience only in distorted form, in “a language that defies, even as it claims, our understanding” (Caruth, Unclaimed Experience 4).¹⁰ This disturbed representation occurs by way of nightmares, flashbacks, obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) or, more generally, psychopathological symptoms that entail an “unwitting reenactment of the event” (Caruth, Unclaimed Experience 2) and restrict identity cohesion for the affiicted subject by causing a posttraumatic sense of disso- ciation. As Caruth notes:
There is a response, sometimes delayed, to an overwhelming event or events, which takes the form of repeated, intrusive hallucinations, dreams, thoughts or behaviors stemming from the event, along with numbing that may have begun during or after the experience and possibly also increased arousal to (and avoidance of) stimuli recalling the event. (Trauma: Explorations 4; see also Assmann 95 and Caruth, Unclaimed Experiences 4)¹¹

• A characteristic trait of this repetition compulsion (Wiederholungszwang) is that individuals do not possess their history. Rather, in Caruth’s words, “to be traumatised is [ . . . ] to be possessed by an image or event” (Trauma: Explorations 5, also 120ff.; see also Weigel).

• A so-called cultural trauma — that is, a historical occurrence that causes an entire social collective of people to understand themselves to be traumatized — contributes not only to the disturbance but also to the creation of group identity. Alexander defines it as occurring “when members of a collectivity feel they have been subjected to a horrendous event that leaves indelible marks upon their group consciousness, marking their memories forever and changing their future identity in fundamental and irrevocable ways” (Alexander 1; see also Smelser 44). In the broader sense of “Nachträglichkeit” and with reference to Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, there is a connection to “invented traditions”—as, for instance, in the case of Serbian nationalists who see the Battle of Kosovo of 1389 as a scar upon the body politic that remains a defining mark on the nation right up to the present day. Thus, what is considered a cultural trauma is dependent in equal measure upon the perspective and power of the group in question.

• Finally, much has been written about the mode of traumatic representation. With reference to the points of disconnection, or fracture, between word and wound, Joshua Pedersen notes: “sometimes trauma marks narrative with gaps and silence,” while “metaphor mediates the relationship between reality and catastrophe” (102–3). Beyond this, Neil J. Smelser (45) identifies four types of psychological defense mechanisms to which the traumatized turn:
1. “to block the threatening intrusion” (that is, denial);
2. “to reverse the threatening intrusion into its opposite” (“to convert contempt into awe”);
3. “to shift the reference of the threatening intrusion” (e.g., projection);
4. “to insulate the threatening intrusion from its associative connections” (e.g., depersonalization).

In trying now to apply these outlined structures (or rather, anti-structures) of trauma(tization) to an analysis of Lernet-Holenia’s Der Graf Luna, one problematic point lies in the fact that this application focuses not on the psychical damage inflicted on the victim but rather on what is known as perpetrator or participant trauma (Rodi-Risberg 118; see also Giesen). This is an expansion of the trauma concept to include the guilt complex of those responsible for, or the bystanders of, the harm inflicted: a phenomenon that, while still less extensively researched in cultural studies and not without controversy, nevertheless finds widespread acceptance in present-day psychological practice.

There are obvious parallels between Der Graf Luna and Lernet-Holenia’s earlier Nazi-themed novel Der Graf von St. Germain. Both works have counts as title figures and deal with entrepreneurs, murder, and genealogy, in an action unfolding against the backdrop of the events of 1938. Both deal with the results of Austria’s annexation by Hitler’s Germany, the so-called Anschluss, even though the discourse of fate (see Ruthner) plays a much smaller role in Der Graf Luna than in Der Graf von Saint Germain where the main question was the extent to which one can change the course of history.

The plot of Der Graf Luna is embedded in a frame narrative involving a fictive “editor” presenting the account of another character—a literary device much favored by Lernet-Holenia. In this case, it is the Austrian ministry official Dr. Julius Gambs who carries out a fact-finding mission to establish the circumstances that have led to the disappearance of the novel’s protagonist in Rome. Gambs’s findings are the basis for the embedded third-person narrative of the life and familial history of that lead character:
Zu einer Zeit, in der alle Welt tut, als kämen die Menschen nicht von den unterschiedlichsten Vorfahren her, sondern als würden sie, durchaus gleichförmig, aus einer Fabrik geliefert, sollte es müßig scheinen, der Herkunft eines einzelnen, in unserem Fall Alexander Jessierskys, genauer nachzugehen. Soweit sie aber zu verfolgen ist, sei sie dennoch mitgeteilt, weil auch aus ihr, und nicht nur aus seiner Person, alle die erstaunlichen Unregelmäßigkeiten seines Charakters abzuleiten sein mögen. (17)

Alexander Jessiersky is an Alt-Österreicher of half-aristocratic East-European, mainly Polish, heritage and the owner of a transport and shipping firm, who, even after Austria’s absorption into the Third Reich, continues to show little interest in the outside world, in his business, or in politics. His managers, however — at least, as he alleges — are eager to acquire properties needed to expand the firm. Unfortunately, their legal owner, Count Luna, does not want to sell (37–38). In retaliation, he is denounced by Jessiersky’s employees to the Nazi authorities — a business ploy that in those days was as common as it was nasty. In the novel, these events are described as follows:
Es war damals wiederum eine jener Zeiten, zu denen einem alles und jedes wegkommen konnte, wenn nur behauptet ward, daß es zum Vorteil der Allgemeinheit [ . . . ] gebraucht werde. Unglücklicherweise aber verkaufte Luna die Grundstücke dennoch nicht. Man wies ihm also seine Zugehörigkeit zu gewissen Kreisen mit monarchistischen Tendenzen nach und setzte ihn fest. Als es so weit gekommen war, erwachte Jessiersky aus seiner Gleichgültigkeit. Aber da war es schon zu spät. Luna, der im Gefängnis auf der Roßauerlände saß, mußte die Grundstücke hergeben, und Jessiersky, obwohl er sie nun natürlich nicht mehr nehmen wollte, mußte sie dennoch nehmen. Damit wäre eigentlich der Zweck der Übung erreicht gewesen. Doch begann die Geheime Staatspolizei, sich jetzt erst recht mit dem Monarchismus Lunas zu befassen, konfiszierte nicht nur den Kaufpreis für die Grundstücke, sondern auch sein übriges Vermögen, und schickte ihn in das Zwangsarbeitslager Mauthausen. (38–39)

All this makes Jessiersky’s transgression something akin to a “sin of omission” (“Unterlassungssünde”; see Barrière 170), but it is also immediately clear that some details have been glossed over. This coincides with the above-mentioned tendency to retroactive distortion of the traumatizing event by way of psychical repression mechanisms, a process that Laplanche and Pontalis describe concisely:
It is not lived experience in general that undergoes a deferred revision but, specifically, whatever it has been impossible in the first instance to incorporate fully into a meaningful context. The traumatic event is the epitome of such unassimilated experience. (112)

As mentioned, such a self-censoring process in the narrative also could have occurred out of Lernet-Holenia’s consideration for a reading public’s expectations of light fiction. Der Graf Luna, however, in addition to following a nightmarish logic of being haunted by a guilt complex, is also a trauma narrative in that it nolens volens depicts the repression and dissociation of the traumatic event in the traumatized memory in a way that corresponds to the psychical defense mechanisms described above.¹² There are several indications for such a reading, revealing a self-censorship that is both the author’s as well as the protagonist’s — or the point at which the trauma of the fictive individual coincides with, and reflects the actual trauma of, the historical Austrian collective.

First, the narrator avoids using the term concentration camp (“KZ”) and speaks instead of forced labor (“Zwangsarbeitslager”); the word Konzentrationslager surfaces only once, on page 172. This is in line with Lernet-Holenia’s broader characterization of the Third Reich as an imperial “slaveholder” that works its victims to death.¹³ Yet the portrayal of the work Luna must do at the Ebensee facility, a satellite of the Mauthausen contentration camp, is factually incorrect. The novel tells of the harrowing salt-mining process that allegedly claims so many slave laborers’ lives (57) — possibly including Luna’s: “Dort förderte man Salz auf eine Weise, die für diejenigen, welche es zu fördern hatten, höchst unbehaglich war; und die Verluste unter den Zwangsarbeitern waren hoch” (57). However, this is a literary construction of false memory, since there is no mention of the fact that in historical reality, the Ebensee concentration camp had nothing to do with mining. Instead, after the “evacuation” of Peenemünde in 1943, the inmates worked on the construction of Wernher von Braun’s V-2 rockets deep in the former mine shafts (see Freund, Das KZ Ebensee): a fact of which Lernet-Holenia, who had a summer villa in nearby St. Wolfgang, was very likely aware.

The second and most conspicuous absence in Jessiersky’s perspective concerns the Holocaust. While Luna’s foreign-sounding Romanic name might invite today’s reader to assume he could have been a Sephardic Jew (a Spaniole), he is presented here simply as a Spaniard. On the one hand, this circumspectly avoids overt reference to the Holocaust; on the other, it is also historically in line with the demography of the Ebensee camp, where until 1945 mainly non-Jewish Spanish Republicans, dissident Italians, and French inmates were held (see Freund, Die Toten von Ebensee). Yet the choice of name for Jessiersky’s fantastic foe might also be explained by the mere fact that “Graf Luna” is the name of the villain in Verdi’s Il Trovatore (1853), which was frequently staged in Vienna in the postwar years.¹⁴ The opera’s Luna unknowingly becomes the antagonist of his own half-brother, whereas Lernet-Holenia’s mysterious haunter, who allegedly starts harassing Jessiersky after the war, seems to be a split-off part of the protagonist’s personality rather than a real person. This operatic ploy is very telling of Lernet-Holenia’s writing: By assigning a clearly Jewish identity to his antagonist, he would clearly have risked reminding his audience all too explicitly of the excesses of the so-called “Aryanization,” that is, the state-conducted theft of Jewish property in 1938 (see Bauer 147ff.), and thus alienating them.¹⁵ Alert readers can nevertheless see those distortions, which are the effect of a guilt trauma and which can — and must — be read in the context of the moon symbolism also evoked by Count Luna’s name:
[ . . . ] dem Monde entgeht man weder, noch entgeht man ihm nicht; und diese Ungewißheit ist nicht nur das Wesen des Mondes selbst, sondern auch alles dessen, was unter dem Monde ist. Denn er ist das Sinnbild der Täuschung schlechthin, das Zeichen der Unsicherheit, unter dem wir stehen. (221)

The pseudo-astrological symbolism here is not so much a political allegory of imminent doom as it is in Mars im Widder (Ruthner, “Erzählte Zwischen- Reiche”) but rather a trope of traumatic deception and uncertainty, thus also a metaphor for the problematic mode of narration. As Jean-Jacques Pollet has already pointed out, the novel has an unreliable narrator whose machintions destabilize the trustworthiness of the whole narrative world. The embedded account of Jessiersky’s ordeal shows Jambs committing what Gerard Genette would term the “paralepsis” of being able to provide information beyond his grasp or knowledge as a figure, for example with his account of the protagonist’s thoughts or his description of the sensations occurring in Jessiersky’s expiring mind while dying (219–40). On the other hand, it is also the aforementioned retrospective process of a traumatic re-interpretation (“Nachträglichkeit”) of the main occurrences — what Mayer describes as the protagonist’s ex-post construction of reality (167)—that occurs, as it were, under the ambiguity of the moon.

Thus, as readers progress through the text, they see ever more clearly that the fantastic plot is the result of a system of delusions (“Wahnsystem”; see Mayer 168) by which Jessiersky suppresses his obvious feelings of guilt toward Luna. In this context, the passage in which the protagonist is shown to deplore “Umfärbung” (215) as the process of a self-serving “recoloring” of events in a meliorating, euphemistic way might also be understood in a metaliterary sense as an allusion to the narrative’s own distortions — and thus as the novel’s own process of Traum(a)arbeit. The protagonist himself, however, never clearly comprehends the true nature of Luna’s hauntings — namely that they are all in his head:
Alexander Jessierksy verfluchte die Neigung der Welt, alle Dinge wenn schon nicht von Grund auf zu entstellen, so doch wenigstens nach Geschmack und Bedürfnis umzufärben. Zwar war bisher auch er selbst für derlei Umfärbungen gewesen. Nun aber war er nicht mehr dafür. (215)

Convinced that he is being stalked and chased by Count Luna, who has allegedly survived the camp into postwar Austria, the protagonist exhibits a persecution complex that is the pathological result of his bad conscience. Here, too, the effect of trauma can be seen to be playing an essential role in the way the narrative censors — and falsifies — events. Jessiersky’s paranoia amounts, after all, to a reversal of guilt (Mayer 169): The supposed victim pursues the perpetrator, a Spaniard stalking an Austrianized Pole — a veritable Stellvertreterkrieg, a war by proxy. Much as Victor Frankenstein chases his legendary monster, Jessiersky must follow his adversary through Europe in order to put an end to this living ghost — and in doing so, he sinks ever deeper into his paranoia, killing two innocent people (one of whom happens to be his wife’s lover; 122–32), and ultimately following Count Luna — quite literally — into the realm of the dead.

This reversal of the perpetrator-victim relation accords almost perfectly with what Smelser has written about “displacement and projection” in the post-traumatic state: “If extreme enough, these reactions crystallize into a firmly established paranoia that defies considerations of empirical reality”
(52). Caruth speaks of “the often uncontrolled, repetitive appearance of hallucinations and other intrusive phenomena” (Unclaimed Experience 59). Thus, with his recurring notion that Count Luna is menacingly stalking him, Jessiersky might be seen to be transferring the repetition compulsion (Wiederholungszwang) that the trauma phantasmagorically imposes upon the afflicted into paranoid action. In doing so, he renders himself a prisoner of the endless loop of an incompletely — in fact wrongly — remembered history (120ff., 165ff.), with no prospects of therapy but only of death — unless the readership lays Jessiersky on their own couch, to conclude Luna to be what Leys (295–96) would call the “dissociated second self ” of the protagonist.

The Luna character also enabled Lernet-Holenia to connect the individual guilt complex with national trauma. In Jessiersky’s hatred for the count, the text depicts not only the moral guilt of the so-called bystanders from 1938 onwards but also the collective perpetrator-victim reversal that occurred in Austrian cultural memory during the postwar era: the aversion and aggression that Shoah survivors often encountered when merely their existence seemed to offend their non-Jewish fellow citizens as living reminders of their guilt.¹⁶ It was not until the “commemorative year” of 1988 that Thomas Bernhard, in his Heldenplatz drama, so scandalously depicted exactly this experience of Jewish Austrians.

A final example of the narrative “dream and trauma work” in Lernet- Holenia’s novel occurs in its closing episodes in Rome. There, the city is the site of one of Lernet-Holenia’s typical in-between spaces between life and death, echoing the Ebensee camp. The choice of a liminal¹⁷ setting also offers what might be seen as the narrative creation of a subterranean link between the hecatombs of the Third Reich and the catacombs of the early Christian era. It is no coincidence that Luna is supposed to be hunted down here, of all places, in a nightmarish sequence in which the chronotope of the necropolis is evoked, full of self-fulfilling horrors in the dying light of Jessiersky’s lamp, as hunger, thirst, and disorientation ultimately destroy the last remnants of his sanity.

The question remains whether Jessiersky’s hallucinated return to his deceitful or useless ancestors (see Mayer 171ff.) at the end of the novel, in which servants pick up the prodigal son and then, as if he were paralyzed, help him into bed (232–40), really bears any conciliation:
Auf dem Bock des Schlittens saßen zwei Leute in Pelzmänteln. Der eine von ihnen sprang sogleich und lief auf Jessiersky zu; und als er sah, daß Jessiersky ohne Mantel war, zog er sich, noch Laufen, den Pelz aus, dann hängte er ihn Jessiersky um die Schultern. (232) [...] Da trat Alexander Jessiersky ins Zimmer, die Bediensteten kleideten ihn aus und brachten ihn zu Bette und als er im Bett lag, fiel er gleich in Schlaf und verlor, endlich, das Bewußtsein – (240)

Are the Roman catacombs here to be seen as a refuge, a sheltering, protecting space, in addition to being a burial site, and thus as the possible source of all Christian genealogies to which every life and every narration returns? Or is this underworld meant to evoke the Holy Roman Empire of the Austrian past as a realm of the dead? Or is all that merely the delusion of an expiring mind’s delirium? In a last reflection, the narrator contemplates:
Denn wahrscheinlich gibt es eine solche Art von Verstorbensein ja doch nicht, man bildet sich’s bloß ein, es ist nur — wie der magere Priester gesagt hätte — poetischer ausgestattet als das wirkliche, ordinäre Verstorbensein. (238)

This ambiguity would be a typical finish for a Lernet-Holenia novel. In Der Graf Luna, however, it appears as if the power of genealogy — the main authority of old imperial Europe — can no longer completely dispel the terrors of National Socialism and the guilty participation of the scion and heir of that lineage (and it should be stated that Luna has a long pedigree as well, which is even linked with Jessiersky’s; 50ff., 86ff., 170ff.). The novel can thus be read as a fantastic allegory of how the true (Habsburg?) empire was gambled away by negligent bystanders like Jessiersky. For this problematic protagonist — a lunatic, or at least a liar — there is no way out, except death. He is lost, and his delusional return to his dubious Slavic ancestors — the bankrupts, wastrels, spies, and social climbers¹⁸ from whom he actually had cut himself loose — is not really a happy ending, particularly as they greet him as one of their own. With this, the “undead” lingering effects of the Habsburg monarchy in the interwar years become rather tainted and consigned to the cemetery of history. All of this — and especially the central motif of the post-traumatic guilt complex that turns the dubious antihero into the perpetrator he already was, pursuing the actual victim — makes this mysterious novel, appearing in the year of 1955, when a “liberated” Austria so readily bought into the Lebenslüge of its Nazi “victimhood” (see Botz), a text remarkably — and unsettlingly — at odds with its times.

In closing, it might be noted that the novel’s prescience does not dispel its literary weaknesses. Der Graf Luna is akin to other works by Lernet-Holenia in being as much confection as substance, as the thin spots in its plot are often glossed over with enlightening set-piece excursions likely to strike today’s readers as Wikipedia style. This is the case when the narrator recapitulates the history of the catacombs (188–206) or when he sticks to extensive genealogy, regardless that a family’s past ceases to be a tenable comfort in the era of the isolated rump Austria’s descent into fascism, especially for those who were regarded as non-“Aryan”.

Genealogy, however, also occurs in another, symbolic, form in the novel’s intertextuality. As well as being somehow subcutaneously related to its predecessor, Der Graf von Saint Germain, Der Graf Luna also resonates with Meister des Jüngsten Tages (1923). This is a major novel by Lernet-Holenia’s friend — and role model — Leo Perutz (1882–1957), which makes a lethal guilt complex, albeit one arising from drug intoxication and not from Nazism, its major theme. Yet the intertextual reference is evident when Lernet-Holenia’s novel refers to Cardinal Chigi (214), whose name matches that of Perutz’s apocalyptic painter, which also serves to emphasize the narrative of trauma and false recollection.

But it is more than just the plot of Lernet-Holenia’s novel that anticipates historical developments leading to the struggle for Vergangenheitsbewältigung so prominent in Austrian postwar literature later on. One passage strikes as remarkably familiar in its wording:
Denn es war zwar möglich, daß andere Leute, zum Beispiel wirkliche Spediteure, insbesondere dann, wenn sie Fries hießen, ihre Frauen, von denen sie betrogen worden waren, in der Tat bloß hinauswarfen, und oft genug, wie gesagt, rafften sie sich nicht einmal dazu auf. Er jedoch, Jessiersky, der eben kein wirklicher Spediteur war, hatte seine Frau zwar nicht hinausgeworfen, dafür aber ihren Liebhaber erschlagen, und weil er ihn, wie er glaubte, mit vollem Recht erschlagen hatte, so empfand er auch keine Gewissensbisse, ihn erschlagen zu haben. (126; emphasis in the original)

These sentences read as if Lernet-Holenia, who is readily consigned to the ranks of popular-fiction writers, had experimentally anticipated by ten years the style of Thomas Bernhard, who made the controversial literary treatment of the Nazi past his trademark starting in the mid-1960s. That resonance is not easily explained, given the fact that the two authors are not exactly considered kindred spirits with regard to the contents of their works or their personalities, even though each in his own way somehow played the role of rebellious conservative and agent provocateur in the Austrian literature of his day (and both were visitors to St. Wolfgang and Hilde Spiel’s literarischer Salon there). It is a matter of some doubt however that, like Luna and Jessiersky, the two would get along well in the literary afterlife — even though they are not as far apart as is generally presumed. A hidden pathway leads from Lernet-Holenia’s realm of the dead to the narrative self-destruct mechanisms of Bernhard’s texts, which also came into being in the threatening shadow that the crimes of the Third Reich continue to cast upon Austria’s Second Republic: Graf Luna keeps haunting us.