Caught in a dark history

Pick up any of the Viennese journals, one of the characters says in Michael Andre Bernstein’s “Conspirators,” “and you will see right away that in our politics, in our dreams ... and certainly in our fashionable plays and novellas, all we talk about is murder.” Murder, sedition and betrayal are indeed everyone’s favorite occupations in this strange, hypnotic first novel that takes us into the murky, perplexed heart of Mitteleuropa on the eve of World War I. It is a world well known from the writings of Franz Kafka, Robert Musil, Bruno Schulz, Joseph Roth and Thomas Mann -- a world of literary cafes, decadent art, military parades, psychoanalysis, secret police, poverty and catastrophic premonitions.

We can almost feel blood lust and madness rising beneath the surface of gentility. Bernstein reminds us that although the modern era may have been born in the great industrial centers of the West, its more malodorous aspects have their source in the peripheries -- in Central and Eastern Europe, where epochs blended into each other, the new social dynamism clashed with old slowness and apathy and marginalized, impotent thinking classes dreamt of cleansing conflagrations. Not without significance for the plot of “Conspirators” is the fact that in this bleak, threatening domain, the political, intellectual and artistic life of the European Jews experienced sudden, unprecedented flourishing before it was all but erased in the fires of the Holocaust.

This familiar setting serves in “Conspirators” as a backdrop for a number of uncanny plots that transform a seemingly straightforward historical narrative into a bit of a literary puzzle. In an unnamed Galician town run by the sarcastic Austro-Hungarian aristocrat Count-Governor Wiladowski, but quietly held together by reclusive, disillusioned Jewish potentate Moritz Rotenburg, a group of bored young gentlemen led by Rotenburg’s son Hans establishes a revolutionary terrorist cell for assassinating imperial officials.

In the same town, a mysterious wonder rabbi from the East, Moses Elch Brugger, attracts crowds of followers by preaching a message of purification through transgression and violence. Some believe he is the Messiah who comes not to heal the world but to rend its wounds wide open and, as one of his acolytes puts it, allow Jews to taste “the voluptuousness of destruction without guilt.” Whatever Brugger’s real plans, he clearly has an eye on Moritz Rotenburg’s fortune, which seems on the scale of the Rothschilds’. In the meantime, the chief of Wiladowski’s secret police, former rabbinical student Jakob Tausk, looms as a dark wizard watching Hans and Brugger, keeping various evils in uneasy balance and pondering when the inevitable spark of violence will strike.

Each of those unordinary characters carries a personal secret that is never fully revealed. We shall never learn, for example, what Moritz is really planning to do with his fortune or what intentions drive his son down the road to self-destruction. We can only guess what demonic powers Brugger is wrestling with (or trying to unleash), and why Tausk eagerly accepts the job of a spymaster after being expelled from rabbinical school. What is certain, however, is that with all their uncanny genius for intrigue, Bernstein’s conspirators appear trapped within their own plots like chess masters unable to see the world beyond their chessboard. They are despicable, deceiving and ruthless, but also humanly complex, touchingly vulnerable and forlorn.

The intriguing opacity of the characters and the strange interweaving of their unusual fates make “Conspirators” a gripping and seductive read -- so seductive, in fact, that it takes some time to realize the novel’s concealed preoccupation: Why are we tempted to revisit the past, especially its dark and disturbing areas?

A literary scholar and critic, Bernstein believes that our visits to the past are motivated less often by a curiosity about life as it was than by the fact that we have a privileged, analytical relationship to it. Put simply, the past is a country we know much better than the present or the future. Time has already assigned meaning to events, revealed their consequences, separated the substantial from the accidental. More often than not, it has already judged the past actors, which allows us to be a bit judgmental without appearing presumptuous.

Though the present is mostly the domain of irony -- since everything can still turn out a farce instead of a tragedy -- the past appears to us as the last refuge of “moral seriousness.” That is why, with Bernstein’s narrative ending in 1925, the reader cannot help seeking for some portents of what may await his protagonists in the not-so-distant future -- some clue about the way they will confront the horror of the Holocaust. Who will be the hero, the passive victim or the collaborator?

He gives us no clues. On a melancholy and inconclusive note, the story really does end in 1925 -- any guess about the protagonists’ coming fate is as good as any other. Bernstein seems to suggest that the odd mixture of evil, good and impenetrable elements at play in his characters can still push them in any possible direction.

This reticence seems a result of Bernstein’s theory of historical fiction, which he presented in his 1994 book of essays, “Foregone Conclusions.” There he argues against “the sense-making authority of the future,” which tends to limit our interest in the past only to what foreshadows the future and “implies a closed universe in which all choices have already been made.” In Bernstein’s view, the true homage to the past, especially a past irreversibly destroyed, is an approach he calls “sideshadowing.” He describes it as “a gesturing to the side, to a present dense with multiple and mutually exclusive possibilities of what is to come.”

Sidestepping events that lead only to the known conclusions is especially important, Bernstein argues, when dealing with an event such as the Holocaust. There is a temptation for the novelist to disregard anything that does not portend the calamity, to reduce the dense, complex matter of life to the skeleton of historical inevitability. Such an approach, Bernstein warns, ignores what was really precious in the past -- all the contingent, perplexing hopes, strivings and desires of human beings:

“[O]nly when narratives about pre-Shoah European Jewry are able to incorporate the different ways individuals evaluated their circumstances at the time, and do so without flaunting a foreknowledge of the impending catastrophe,” Bernstein wrote in “Foregone Conclusions,” “can a genuine sense of grief, unadulterated by anger or condescension at the ‘inevitable’ truth that went unnoticed, be heard clearly.”

This may be why, in “Conspirators,” Bernstein takes evident pleasure in portraying ambiguous, paradoxical characters, like a Jewish mystic infatuated with the “liberating embrace of destruction” or a young Jewish heir who breaks into aristocratic society by founding a terrorist organization.

Nothing in their actions or in their world heralds the approaching historical catastrophe. Competing nationalisms tearing the Austro-Hungarian Empire apart or proto-Nazi excesses are only a distant echo in this story. Austro-Hungarian anti-Semitism is often debated by the protagonists, who see it, however, as an obstacle to Jewish advancement, an annoying relic of the past rather than an ominous threat to their existence.

There is certainly a general sense of foreboding, indeterminate anxiety and restlessness in this novel, but nobody is able to foresee from where the blow will fall. Only Brugger predicts that the House of Israel is in peril, but he completely misplaces the source of danger. He chastises his followers for trying to be “like other people” and regrets that Jews no longer live in the fear and trembling that has marked and, for him, sanctified their existence.

As Bernstein seems to suggest, the Shoah has robbed Jewish life in Europe of its many unrealized possibilities, its good and ugly strands, its hypothetical branches that never had a chance to bloom or die on their own. When faced with such loss, Bernstein says, a writer’s task is to look away and avoid the piety that the knowledge of the future imposes. Instead, the writer must pay attention to the odd, bizarre, disturbing and marginal, which -- in the author’s view -- contain “the seeds of diverse and mutually exclusive possible futures.”

We know, of course, what happened to the world Bernstein portrays. In another essay, he has written that “[t]o write history blind to the future is less difficult than to read it blind to the past that has intervened since the time of the narrative.” But this awareness exists outside the novelistic universe: It waits for the reader at its boundaries. Inside the novel, we are given only fragmented visions, limited perspectives -- what Musil called the “reality of indetermination.” In Bernstein’s view, a storyteller revisiting the past should mine such contingencies rather than trace historical regularities.

In “Conspirators,” a successful Jewish writer named Alexander Garber tries to make sense of the novel’s mysterious events and compares his findings to an illuminated manuscript in the Albertina Museum in Vienna. He thinks of “the way the figures in the different scenes are always completely absorbed in their own activities, oblivious of what their neighbors are doing, even if they are standing only a few feet away, caught up in the most desperate situations....But the anonymous artists who painted those scenes knew it was necessary to include everything, no matter how ridiculous, because that is the only way to represent what is essential and still remain human.” Bernstein’s beautifully written, intricate and entrancing novel seems to prove that to show true love of the past, or true love of life, a writer must resist the urge to treat the past as prologue.