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.
At first, we, too, become mesmerised by the memories of the main character. Then we sympathise with his carer, forced to listen to endlessly repeated stories, before we begin to realise that their dialogue is European history being retold as a beautiful tragicomedy. The couple make very odd travelling companions, but their relationship develops as Winterberg is shown in different phases as an aging Everyman: sometimes funny, sometimes wise, irritating and misunderstood – but mostly ignored.
As the journey progresses, we witness more of his ‘historical fits’, uniting Kraus and their fellow train passengers in bemusement as Winterberg, reading aloud from a 1913 edition ofBaedekker’s Rail Travel Guide to Europe, provides century-old insights into the small stations and stops in what were once the Sudetenland, Bohemia, Moravia and beyond. We suffer with Kraus when the old man refuses to stop yammering. We learn more about Lenka and her disappearance; about Winterberg’s family; about 19th-century battles and those of the 20th century, too. We laugh at the absurdity of using the old guidebook’s recommendations of where to stay. We laugh again when we find the hotels are still there. Together with Kraus, we are attentive to the details of Winterberg’s life as he tells it – missing out great chunks, and never seeming to hear Kraus’s repeated questions.
As Winterberg tells it, the Battle of Königgrätz was the birth of Europe’s tragedy. Yet before the reader can absorb that, he goes on to explain that his own personal tragedy is compounded by his attraction to women, even at 99. One could grow dizzy wondering what’s true and what’s fiction; yet the farcical plot twists provide a gripping account of the collateral damage done to the survivors of European battles, both military and political, from the late 19th century to the present day. In Winterberg’s Last Journey, Rudis has created a European Forrest Gump.
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