Cherrypicker | Literature
Being and delusion

In the third part of his trilogy of novels about the Austrian province, Reinhard Kaiser-Mühlecker also paints a gloomy picture of interpersonal relationships.

By Holger Moos

Reinhard Kaiser-Mühlecker is a farmer and writer. He also likes to read a lot. In an interview with 3sat, he says that these are the three "states of being" in which he feels most comfortable, otherwise he is usually out of place. His characters, on the other hand, generally don't find a state of being in which they feel even a little comfortable. While someone like Wilhelm Genazino wrote with a mixture of melancholy and comedy about the "overall strangeness of life", Kaiser-Mühlecker's human existence is bathed in a consistently gloomy and threatening light. In his works, man is man's wolf, and even animals are not safe from the sudden violence of so-called homo sapiens.

Kaiser-Mühlecker's new novel Brennende Felder (Burning Fields) is the third part of a trilogy about a farming family in the Austrian province, where not only the motorway cutting through the idyll, but also the Nazi past is always present in the background. In Fremde Seele, dunkler Wald (2016), the two brothers Alexander and Jakob take centre stage. Wilderer (2022) is told from Jakob's perspective. In the new novel, Kaiser-Mühlecker shifts the focus to half-sister Luisa. The latent malice that prevails in the family and the seemingly inevitable and irresolvable conflicts are omnipresent in all three novels.

Incestuous desire

In Wilderer, Jakob calls Luisa a "useless" and selfish creature who left her parents' farm early and leads an unsettled and reprehensible life in Hamburg. Because she thinks her half-brother is a failure, "a retarded something," and likes to provoke him, he sometimes has violent fantasies about her.

At the age of 15, Luisa learns during a heated argument with her mother that her supposed father Robert, whom she subsequently only calls Bob, is not actually her biological father. She felt attracted to him as a child - and sexually as a young woman. Because of this incestuous desire and the many conflicts, especially with her mother, she leaves her parental home at a young age. Twenty years later, Bob suddenly appears on Luisa's doorstep in Hamburg. The two become a couple, whereupon contact with her mother breaks off completely.

Beloved murderer

The novel describes how Luisa returns to her home village, together with Bob. He keeps disappearing, especially at night. Once he comes home badly beaten up, she finds out that he is going on raids in the neighbouring farms. He poses as an avenger of the Jews who were expropriated during the Nazi era. One night, Bob is shot dead. The village community declares it a tragic accident, but Luisa believes it was murder.

If the liaison with her stepfather was already strange, it is no less bizarre that Luisa subsequently enters into a relationship with Ferdinand, the very man who killed Bob. When she loses Bob, she suddenly, only now, feels "a kind of shame that she had never felt all these years." Strangely enough, she feels this shame towards the "murderer" Ferdinand, as if he had rightly ended "this unnatural connection" with his deed.

Ferdinand has an autistic son named Anton. He struggles to come to terms with the new woman in his father's life. But over time, Luisa succeeds in gaining Anton's trust, something she is proud of. In contrast to Luisa's efforts on Anton's behalf, Luisa's behavior towards her own underage children stands in stark contrast. She is a mother of two, and both children live far away with their respective fathers. She pays them no more than spontaneous visits. Since Luisa always thinks that everything that happens to her is the fault of others, she justifies her distance from her children by saying that the two fathers "took the children away from her". Soon, however, Luisa also sees Anton as a burden.

Invisible inner processes

"Barren and empty, that's how everything seemed to her" - Luisa often thinks these words, and they aptly characterise her inner state. Luisa is a narcissistic, deeply insecure and contradictory person who depends heavily on the approval of others and at the same time despises herself for it. On the one hand, she idealises men and becomes very emotionally dependent on them. On the other hand, Luisa demonises these same men when she believes she no longer receives enough recognition and love from them.

Another of Luisa's ambitions is to become a writer - also motivated by the desire to receive attention and recognition. It was "enough for her to be recognised not just as his appendage, but as something independent and special, actually for the first time in her life". Her thoughts on writing run through the novel. Some of these thoughts are banal, but others may also provide insights into the author's world of thought. For example, it is said that, when it comes to writing and reading, Luisa is "most interested in the invisible and nameless inner processes that are reflected in outer processes  - in doing and not doing". A description that could also apply to the writer Kaiser-Mühlecker.

Unreliable narrator

Luisa's deep inner insecurity and her delusional thinking make her a ticking time bomb. It is constantly bubbling under the surface. When Luisa finds a book by the Macedonian writer Petre M. Andreevski at Ferdinand's, she comes across this telling sentence: "There are many things that people do not want to do and yet do." In the end, she poses a (life-threatening) danger to others, and her life is also threatened.

In Brennende Felder, Reinhard Kaiser-Mühlecker has opted for the third-person limited narration, describing the story only from Luisa's point of view. As a result, readers are confronted with an unreliable narrator who can only be mistrusted due to her personality.

The novel reveals all these interpersonal monstrosities in a calm and casual tone. His characters are guilty, contradictory and unredeemed. Kaiser-Mühlecker received the Austrian Book Prize 2024, and quite rightly so:
"Through unexpected twists and turns, he plays not only with his characters, but also with the readers. In this way, he constructs and deconstructs this abysmal, cold and dark world again and again," said the jury.