Narrative Counterparts

Gebürtig, Robert Schindel's novel about the lives of second-generation Austrians in the early 1980s, is marked by a radically heterogeneous narrativity and an almost obsessive concentration on problems of signification and referential representation. The novel's complex, multilayered, decentralized narrative structure, its overabundant significatory synapses, and its dense, often paradoxical poetic language contribute to an exercise in reading that, in its refusal to grant the reader clarity, closure, or narrative certainty, mirrors the confused and impotent struggle of its characters with the presence of the Holocaust past in an Austrian society that, in effect, abdicates responsibility for its perpetration of the Holocaust. The problematic role of the Holocaust in the contemporary relations between Austrian Jews and non-Jews is brought to the fore by the novel's three main narrative strands, two of which occur on the same main narrative level and are linked together by common characters. The first narrative, told largely from the perspective of the second-generation Jewish twin brothers Danny and Alexander (Sascha) Demant, depicts the love affairs and often adversarial relationships between various Jewish and non-Jewish members of the contemporary Viennese intellectual scene. The second strand narrates a crisis experienced by a member of “another second generation” (Alan L. Berger and Naomi Berger, 1), Konrad Sachs, the German son of a high-ranking Nazi. The third narrative functions as a novel within a novel, written by Emanuel Katz, an acquaintance of Danny's and the son of a Holocaust survivor.