The Berlin Wall – David Leo Rice

[Whiskey Tit; 2024]

Anticipating the revolutionary period to come in 1848, Marx famously characterized communism as a specter haunting Europe. That specter was a vision of Europe as it could be, of a utopic Europe that could break old ties and shake off stifling order. In David Leo Rice’s novel The Berlin Wall, Europe is haunted still, not by what might be but by what was—the hellish violence that wracked the continent in the twentieth century. The novel is filled with specters, shades, doppelgangers, and pretenders, shuffling through violent, Brueghelian scenes and sucked into plots and roles ripped from the fabric of history. In his follow-up to the novel The New House (2022) and short story collection Drifter (2020), Rice offers a troubling vision of Europe as seen through our screens, threatened by a resurgent fascism.

The Berlin Wall is set in 2020 as Europe suffers from a rising fever. Stark mountain ranges emerge from the sea overnight, ringing the continent; a German right-wing politician, whose face is never shown, stirs up panic and threatens to penetrate the neo-liberal government; the tomb of the last living Nazi is erected in the center of the Black Forest by parties unknown as the centerpiece of a foreboding altar made from the disassembled Holocaust Memorial. The world is “a Rubik’s cube being constantly shuffled by unseen hands, all borders suspect, all compasses faulty, no formations permanent.” News coverage of these events is unreliable and contradictory, and national governments issue analgesic propaganda as circumstances spiral further beyond anyone’s control.

The reader is led into this kettle via three principal characters: Anika, an academic in Berlin who has fallen into professional stagnation; Gyorgy, a student in her class obsessed with right-wing content online and the restoration of a pagan ur-Europe; and Ute, a living fragment of the Berlin Wall wandering Europe in an empty cycle, yearning to be reunited with her siblings and rebuild the Wall in the Russian taiga.

While recovering from her husband’s suicide, Anika is lured away from her university post by the German Chancellor when she agrees to take up residence in the Black Forest and produce a book on the altar that has been erected therein. In an idyllic Bavarian village, she finds herself quickly stymied in her efforts to write, in turns drawn in and repulsed by the sylvan horror lurking beneath the placid exterior. Anika takes refuge in drink and soon finds her writer’s block lifted, producing pages towards a new book altogether, not an academic study of the evil inside the Black Forest but a gloss celebrating German cultural heritage. The village dulls her tools of analysis and beguiles her mind as she attempts to resist total absorption into the profound terror encroaching upon her woodland oasis.

Gyorgy, a recent émigré to Berlin from his native Hungary, is drawn inexorably into more radical right-wing youth politics. He nurses dreams of establishing a world “remade, the buried kernel of its true self dislodged from the colossal heap of manure that’s accrued on top of it since the Middle Ages” in a violent crusade against the liberal status quo. The true self caught within the false is a motif that runs throughout the novel. Originally hoping to study philosophy, Gyorgy instead finds his main source of tutelage in Ragnar of Atlantis, a neo-Nazi performer who tours Europe preaching racial purity and whipping up crowds into pogrom violence.

At a Ragnar rally, Gyorgy meets a small band of Norwegian white supremacists operating under the aegis of Anders Breivik, the perpetrator of the Utoya mass shooting, who they have freed from prison. Breivik is not the only real person fictionalized in The Berlin Wall (the film director Lars von Trier helps stage Ragnar’s shows), but his presence in the fascist groundswell is central. He is an avatar of evil, his act of real-life violence serving in the novel as an attempt to baptize the new age. Breivik seduces Gyorgy, literally and figuratively, and deems him fit only to be a midwife for a new race of men who will be untainted by Europe’s past. As Gyorgy becomes aware of his role within the cell, he must choose between serving as Breivik’s tool or seeking an escape from the rural compound they have made their headquarters.

Ute, part human and part concrete, rebar and grout, has been banished since 1989 to wander the alleys and trash heaps of Europe in a nomadic existence. She evokes the body-modification horror of David Cronenberg’s 2022 horror film Crimes of the Future, neither totally organic nor man-made but a grinding, aching fusion thereof. Dreaming of reuniting with the other shattered embodiments of communism’s fall and rebuilding the Wall, Ute must survive harsh encounters with men for whom her constitution is a sexual fetish, and would-be fragments, fully human but pretending to be fellow human-concrete hybrids. If the demolition of the Berlin Wall represented the early terminus of the twentieth century, the conclusion of the titanic struggle between East and West of which it was symbolic, then this fall represents for Ute a trauma that has broken her off into singular consciousness and consigned her to a slow, desperate existence. She has only ataraxic reunion with her lost siblings for a purpose, hoping to rewire their innards and re-fuse their flesh in the wintry Russian landscape that is their promised land: “[Ute] pictures all the atomized pieces on journeys congruent with her own, all of us burning off time until Europe finishes its interminable decay and leaves us, finally, free to abandon it.”

These three characters’ separate journeys converge in a Second Europe, a zone both apart from and the essence of the narrative space traversed thus far. The primary Europe is modern, globalized, and rife with conflict; the second, feudal, quaint, and placid. Anika, Gyogry, and Ute fall into a makeshift family, going for strudel and coffee each Sunday in a world in which every day seems to be Sunday. They are granted this brief reprieve from the modern within a fascist daydream, a reconstructed Bavaria of the reactionary imagination. Yet, the first Europe impinges upon their consciousness: failing to repress memories of her old life, Anika “sees a mass of roaches and flies sealed inside a translucent plastic container, only their outlines visible. As long as the lid doesn’t come off, it hardly matters who, or what, is inside.” Her vision illustrates the tenuous retreat offered in the Second Europe, its thin borders barely keeping the chaos and ugliness beyond at bay. The trio emerges from this soporific Second Europe in order to consummate their destinies back in the first: Anika hopes to publish her book, Gyorgy to become the embodiment of the Hungarian spirit, and Ute to reconstitute the Wall.

The Berlin Wall is constructed from parallel worlds and people, their boundaries crossed and their governing logics transgressed. Dreams, YouTube clips, and video games enact tangible influence on the real world, layers of which soon emerge and break off from their source. The purely psychic becomes physical and incarnate. Characters die, change sex, discover they have been replaced or are themselves the replacement, with rapidity. Rice illustrates scenes of intense and surreal violence, sex, and cannibalism with precision as he guides the reader through layers of the real, some fantastic, some horrifying. The transgressive content is not deployed merely to shock, though the sex particularly is visceral, often coercive and rarely pleasant; the material is presented unflinchingly to make concrete the horror implicit in fascism that is abstracted in political rhetoric. Breivik and his neo-Nazi horde seek to embark on a pitiless campaign to build their Aryan utopia, leaving Europe a charnel. The novel does not avert its gaze from their cruelty, and the result is a provocative but compelling depiction of the extreme price they are willing to make their victims pay.

Rice’s imagery resists symbolic interpretation: There are eggs that birth men, folds of living skin that envelop buildings and swallow up people, and floating cityscapes that loom upside-down above the earth. In a surrealist tradition that recalls Hieronymus Bosch and David Lynch, his images are not meant to function as means to an interpretive end, but irreducible aesthetic atoms, indivisible unto themselves, forcing the reader to reckon with them on their own terms. Rice presents these images with a dry candor in a forward prose style. The novel is a startling declaration of artistic purpose, a capstone of Rice’s work hitherto, and a revolt against established genre. As an American writing about Europe, he has a remove that adds bite to the satire and a consanguinity that lends depth to the tragedy. Faced with his singular style, the reader must ask which Europe is true and which is fantasy, stalking the dreams of its citizens.

A new Europe was indeed born when the coup of Louis Napoleon put a reactionary capstone on the cycle begun in 1848, prompting Marx’s remark on the repetition of history: first as tragedy, then as farce. The new Europe was to be not a utopia but a killing field, not transcendent but base, not unified but split. In The Berlin Wall, the cycle between tragedy and farce spins on, gaining speed as spells of incredible violence are desperately suppressed by the forces of order, only for the boil to begin bubbling against the lid once more. As Europe’s twenty-first century takes shape, Rice shows that the continent cannot shake off the atavistic grip of its twentieth, a specter whose haunting persists yet.

Theodore Sovinski is a writer living in Worthington, Ohio.