Yo-de-lay-hee-hoo

Eurotrash by Christian Kracht, translated from German by Daniel Bowles. Liveright, 192 pages. 2024.

Some literary reputations take shape over decades; others, like Christian Kracht’s arrive fully formed. The very first page of his 1995 debut introduced the twenty-eight-year-old Kracht to the world: standing in his Barbour jacket on the tony island of Sylt, nauseous from some bad shrimp scampi he’d gotten at the northernmost fish stall in Germany, trying to make it with a girl named Karin, also wearing a Barbour jacket. What Karin is thinking, feeling, the reader never learns. “We know each other from Salem, even though we never spoke back then, and I saw her a few times at Traxx in Hamburg and at P1 in Munich.” In two short paragraphs, Kracht brings to life the character he’d play for the next three decades in the world of German letters—the disaffected piece of eurotrash, drifting from one luxurious travel destination to the next in high-end menswear—his Barbour, his Kiton.

The era-defining success of Faserland can be hard to explain to English readers. Brand names and pop culture instead of characterization, interiority, and plot; miscommunication and mistaken identity played first as comedy, then as tragedy; the mask of blank-eyed hedonism not quite obscuring a moony romanticism; the emptiness of life as a member of the moneyed class, hadn’t Brett Easton Ellis done all that ten years ago? All Kracht’s novel really seemed to add to the Ellis formula was some structure—a travelogue, moving through Germany from its northernmost edge, to Zurich, in Switzerland—and some German cultural references in place of the American ones. Instead of the St. Paul’s, Kracht’s characters went to prep school at Schloss Salem. They bragged that they lived in the same apartment building as Jil Sander, not Tom Cruise. Was that the whole appeal? Germans were used to their literature being formally inventive, philosophically dense. It had never been cool before. Catnip, surely, for a cultural public and, for that matter, a nation endlessly concerned with its own provincialism.

And yet, it’s precisely Faserland’s Germanness, and not its coolness, such as it is, to which it owes its enduring reputation. Ellis’s characters were dipshits, stumbling through a haze of meaningless signifiers—the sought-after reservation at Dorsia—so thick not even the most shocking acts of violence could break through. Kracht’s characters were also dipshits, but they were stumbling through the Germany of 1995, a nation tripping on a powerful historical speedball, a blend of the euphoria of reunification and the agonizing, unallayable guilt of its new official culture of remembrance. The signing of the Treaty of Maastricht three years before had dissolved the last of the economic barriers that separated the nations of Western Europe. In response a counter-wave of nationalist nostalgia and commemoration swept through the country. New road signs on the Autobahn marked every church, every battlefield, every brewery, every concentration camp. What made the novel a smash, rather than a cult hit, was Kracht’s attentiveness to, and appreciation for, the little bits of national identity that remained buried beneath the placeless blandness of haute-bourgeois living in the European Union: from the dunes on Sylt where Hermann Göring once lived and, so the narrator claims, lost his Reichsmarshall’s dagger while taking a piss to the sterility of the new high speed ICE train; Mercedes taxis; youths in orange T-shirts and Bunderswehr pants; Ehrmann yogurt; the hassle of the Frankfurt airport. For all his enfant terrible posturing, Faserland was really Kracht’s pop-intellectual tribute to the ineffable Germanness of the Germans, one part Lieux de Mémoire, one part Parklife.

In the thirty years since, Kracht has embraced his role as novelist who chronicles travel and upscale German consumer culture, taking part in collaborative performance pieces at Berlin’s Hotel Adlon or with hip culture world-adjacent figures like the Mitte shelf-maker Rafael Horzon that walk, and often stumble over, the line between frivolity and profundity. His novels, meanwhile, are downright respectable riffs on globalization and historical memory along the lines of W.G. Sebald—paragon of the kind of German high literary seriousness that Faserland sent up so gleefully. Kracht surprised the literary establishment with 1979, a novel that came out in Germany less than two weeks after 9/11, on the last days of a complacent liberalism in Iran. This was the first in a string of historical fictions where, appropriately for a national literary tradition whose revolutionary impulses have always been rather difficult to tell from its reactionary ones, utopia and dystopia were jumbled up into a historical hash. In Ich werde hier im Sonnenschein und im Schatten, Kracht imagined a world where Lenin never left Zurich and instead founded a Swiss Soviet republic. In Imperium, a racist vegetarian and nudist colony on the Bismarck Archipelago dedicated to the worship of sun and coconuts. None of the three are successes, exactly—they’re economical, bordering on hasty, where the ideas behind them want some sprawl. Nonetheless, Kracht did pick up a shift in the world of German letters that has come to dominate the 2020s: the interest in, and longing for, a Germany beyond the borders of Germany, embodied in the globetrotting figure of Kracht himself.

Kracht’s latest, Eurotrash, out now with Liveright, ties together all of these dangling threads of his literary output—the louche, self-absorbed jet-setter, the historical fabulist, the remixer of cultural and national identity. This one, too, is narrated by an eponymous Christian, the author of smash hit Faserland, picking up where the previous novel left off, thirty years later, in Zurich. What has brought Christian here is not drugged-out drift, but rather that most urgent of responsibilities at the end of history, as the Western world slides into senescence—elder care. His eighty-year-old mother is a grande dame who once spent her days lounging in a bikini in the Krachts’ summer home in Cap Ferrat. Now she spends her days swigging supermarket wine in an empty apartment “surrounded by empty vodka bottles rolling about, unopened invoices from various Zurich sable fur warehouses and the crinkling foils of her packs of pain medication.” Together, the Krachts hire a driver and, with the 600,000 francs Mutter Kracht has made from her holdings in various arms companies—no one, it seems, ever lost money betting against the end of history—embark on a trip through Switzerland, another country that somehow managed through sheer imaginative will to turn centuries of fractious, bloody history into a national identity, to give the money away.

Kracht has become a much surer writer in the last thirty years. He has more ideas, more voices, a more varied emotional palate at his disposal. The addition of Kracht’s mother in particular, as an object of observation, interlocutor, and emotional core opens up Eurotrash in a way that would have been beyond the author of Faserland. Snobby, rude, cheap, impulsively generous, given over to bouts of self-pity and faux sophistication, Frau Kracht doubles as a kind of Mephistophelean companion, arguing, mocking, cajoling, squirming out form the under the narrative of mother-son reconciliation Christian seems to have planned for them. “Don’t give me those syrupy looks. You always look like a wet dog when you come see me,” she tells Christian. Then, a beat later, “And if you think I look terrible, just look at yourself in the mirror.” But more than this, her frail, elderly body, and its jumbled memories, adds historical weight to the dead-eyed cataloguing of luxury goods in Faserland, attesting to the decline of a once glamorous and culturally vibrant elite. The golden memories Kracht attempts to wrangle of the days when the family owned Kirchners and Munchs and spent summers at the homes of Axel Springer and Peter Suhrkamp seem as far removed from the blandness and mediocrity of present-day Europe as the demented and incontinent woman beside him is from the photograph of her beautiful and young, wrapped in a Hermès scarf on the island of Sylt Kracht returns to throughout the novel. The novel still pauses to offer the usual Krachtian riffs on luxury goods, only now these have an air of plangent melancholy about them. They’re decadent in the full sense of the word, like the tubercular members of the haute bourgeoisie in Mann’s Magic Mountain—another novel set in Switzerland—who don their finest clothes for mealtimes at the sanitarium where they’re waiting to die. As Kracht writes:

In the dreadful luxury hotels in Marbella and Venice and Positano there were always Bulgari grooming products lying around in the bathrooms. . . . Over the years my mother had internalized the idea that Bulgari must embody something elegant, something desirable, while in reality these products and this name only triggered depression and thoughts of suicide.

What’s the cause of the illness among Europe’s upper class? One obvious source of the ailment is that class’s entanglement with the crimes of Nazism, covered up by the avalanche of wealth that fell over Europe during the sleepy years of consensus following the war. The book’s most jolting and darkly amusing chapters are the early ones in which Christian recounts his family’s entanglements with National Socialism. His mother’s father, he recalls, had been the personal assistant to Horst Dressler-Andress, the head of the Nazis’ office for radio and founder of the Strength Through Joy program, while his godfather kept a collection of sadomasochistic toys—gold dildos, gas masks with no eyeholes—that he used in his affairs with the various au pairs of Nordic extraction that worked for the family. Those that weren’t Nazis were phonies, grubby social climbers like Kracht’s father, a taxi driver who, with the help of a good tailor, was able to make it into the milieu of right-wing publisher Axel Springer. The same grubbiness attaches to the wealthy themselves, for whom a layer of filth and was a sign of good breeding and class confidence:

The tailored shirts whose collars had be tattered and full of holes. They had to be foxed, just about to fall apart in fact. Nor did he understand how to wear suede ankle boots, known as chukkas, which had to be perfectly unsightly, suffered and stained as though the wearer had tramped through multiple puddles the day before and then forgotten to clean them.

Nor did the wealthy know anything about art. The family’s masterpieces, once acquired during the Nazi rapine of Europe, were kept rolled up under his father’s bed, never appreciated, beside a pile of Swiss francs. Christian, the narrator of Faserland, had already surmised that money, elegance, and taste did not buy the good life. They were, in fact, a sign of its absence. The mature Christian of Eurotrash goes a step further and recognizes wealth as an act of cruelty and domination: “I never said anything against my father. Our relationship consisted of a total affirmation of his feudalistic being. It was never possible to be of a different mind . . . You fell in life, agreed with him, and received money for it.” This time around, the bits of culture and the brands sprinkled through the narrative aren’t a sign of cool detachment. Instead, they’re touched and corroded by their association with absolute evil and the swinish acquisitiveness that tolerated it.

The Krachts encounter that same sense of wrongness in their abortive journey through the Swiss countryside. The bulk of the novel’s middle takes place at a chalet in Gstaad housing a vegetarian commune that raises sheep for wool to make sweaters, and to whom mother and son plan to donate their ill-gotten money. Passing their stall in Zurich’s faceless shopping district at the novel’s very beginning, Christian finds himself moved by the promise of a pure, untainted life the sweater promises. “These simple, woolen items possessed for me a homespun sort of authenticity, just as the women’s smiles seemed, there’s no other way to put it, suffused with reality and meaning.” Perhaps this was what the narrator of Faserland was searching for all over Germany. The chalet, it turns out, is run by the son of a Ryke Geerd Hamer, an adherent of the Third Reich’s New Germanic Medicine movement, who founded a cult of vegetarians and fresh-air freaks bent on purging the toxins of modern Jewish science from the body of the master race. Stopping cancer in the Germanic way, his son Dirk tells Kracht, that’s what the commune is working toward. The trout at the Rössli, where the Krachts had dined forty-five years ago, is a disappointment. There turns out to be no edelweiss on the Alpine peaks, only Indian tourists, and they don’t want the Krachts’ money, either.

This past summer, Germany was shaken by footage of a group of wealthy teenagers partying on the island of Sylt chanting “Germany for the Germans” to the melody of a classic Euro-techno track by Gigi D’Agostoni. What’s wrong with that, really? Does a longing for home, for a homeland you can move through and be in, have to be a poisoned one? And if we know better, can we ever be rid of it? Eurotrash is skeptical. But a counter-impulse drives the novel too. To pass the time in the car, and later, when they are stuck in a gondola over the abyss, Kracht tells his mother stories about Roald Dahl’s adventures as an RAF pilot in North Africa, of the Australian folk heroine Mary Watson adrift in a cauldron off the coast of Lizard Island in the Great Barrier Reef, of their gardener at Cap Ferrat, Gerard. “He would come in from Nice every morning on his moped. He had a black bushy moustache and smelled like machine oil. And there was a swimming teacher, over at the Hotel Du Cap.” Later, Christian goes on, “And he would say: grenouille, ciseaux, crayon.” This is the longing Mignon, the exotic child of the circus, sang of in Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, the longing for the faraway, in space and in time—dahin. Perhaps the jet set of old was onto something. Maybe this was what today’s eurotrash has lost, now that the center of every European city from Barcelona to Riga is lined with the same H&Ms, the same Desiguals, the same Peek & Cloppenburgs, the ability to travel through a world that hadn’t yet lost its worldliness, when one place was still different from another. “I had always lived in dreams, among the ghosts of language,” writes Kracht. This was why he is raising a child “who remembered being able to understand Swahili, being able to understand Italian, being able to understand Hindi, being able to understand Swiss German, being able to understand Spanish, and being able to understand Argentine Castilian, that soft, limp Spanish with the shsh sounds.” The recent wave of nostalgia for the 1990s has by and large looked back with disdain on the dream of global living that seemed so close at hand when Faserland made Kracht’s name, of passing freely across borders and across histories amid a common humanity. Kracht is reluctant to let it go, even if, like all dreams, it dissipates into cold reality. “It had always been the German language,” he says, ruefully:

It had always been the scorched earth, the sufferings of the ill-treated earth itself . . . It had always been the ghetto purged with the flamethrower, it had always been the tailored, pale gray uniforms, the attractive blonde officers with their ice-cube-filled gullets, whispering, smiling.