Jaroslav Rudis’s latest novel follows the 99-year-old Wenzel Winterberg, a Sudetenland German, and his middle-aged Czech carer, Jan Kraus, on what is a quirky European take on the buddy road-trip story. Marx claimed that ‘men make their own history’, but do so under the burden of the past, with the weight of dead generations upon them. The tragedy soon to become a farce begins, according to Winterberg, at the site of the Battle of Königgrätz, with the old man proclaiming: ‘The Battle of Königgrätz runs through my heart.’ He then rambles on about its ‘half a million ghosts’, their roles and where they lie now, before blaming the battle for the loss of his first wife, the madness of his second, and then the death of his third. Königgrätz, he says, killed two of his ancestors, who fought on opposing sides, and condemned the surviving families and the rest of Central Europe to the tragic 20th century. It is difficult for the reader to distinguish the wit from the calamity, but the writing is all the more compelling for that.
Following this dramatically reductive introduction to modern European history, told through the ranting of a nonagenarian, we find ourselves journeying with the unlikely couple on a rail journey from Berlin to Sarajevo, to investigate the death of Winterberg’s fiancée in 1938. Despite being married three times, Winterberg remains obsessed with the fate of Lenka Morgenstern and decides that before he dies he must discover who her murderer was. Kraus, not quite believing what is happening, allows himself to be ‘kidnapped’, and both men find themselves leaving Berlin by train.
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