Frankfurt Book Fair | Old, dark bills in the west of the Czech Republic

No, it was never a long, calm river: Is there an opportunity to overcome trauma on the Vltava? Photo: Image/Shotshop The Czech Republic is this year's guest country at the Frankfurt Book Fair. Petra Klabouchová was born in 1980 in Prachatice, one of the few towns in the poorly populated and wooded extreme west of Bohemia. The southern half of the region is called Šumava in Czech, in contrast to Český les in the north; both parts border on the Bavarian Forest. In the past, all of these areas were subsumed under the term “Bohemian Forest” on the German side. Its residents got along quite well with each other for a long time, in the Habsburg Empire and, to a lesser extent, in the first Czechoslovak Republic. Until the Germans liquidated them shortly before the Second World War: That is the crux of Klabouchová's novel.

The fact that the Czech border region still seems so empty today is due to the expulsion of the German residents after the Second World War, of whom only ten percent remained. Attempts to settle new residents from the east of what was then Czechoslovakia on the western border failed due to the harsh Bohemian Forest climate. However, the expulsion also had a history. At the Munich Conference in the fall of 1938, the Western powers abandoned Czechoslovakia and prepared the ground for its destruction, which was called “appeasement” and strengthened fascist Germany, which annexed Bohemia and Moravia in March 1939. Today's Czech Republic degenerated into a "protectorate", a six-year reign of terror. The German occupiers behaved as masters, for which the harassed Czechs retaliated after the end of the war.

Petra Klabouchová's "At the Source of the Moldau", according to the subtitle, a crime novel, takes place in this climate of mistrust, injustice and the need for revenge. It is her first book, published five years ago and now translated into German. A girl is murdered and a suspect is soon identified. Until the complete truth comes to light, the plot takes many twists, which requires concentrated reading, but is worth it, not only because of the shocking, brutally conclusive ending.

Klabouchová includes numerous actors: the victim's surviving relatives, who are also perpetrators; a police officer who allows himself to be led on false trails; a doctor who seems to wallow in the role of suspect; Czech and German-born residents who have old scores to settle; and an avenging angel who appears at the end, which no one had noticed until then.

Everything that happens in the book is based on the negative experiences during the war and in the post-war period.

It's not always easy to keep track of things, also because, as is usual in crime thrillers, there is a lack of a halfway likable leading actor. Behind this lies the author's noble intention not to make things easy for herself and her audience. You shouldn't identify with any of the characters and instead keep your distance. It is precisely this distance that is necessary in order to process the sometimes drastic plot.

“At the Source of the Moldau” is at best a crime novel pro forma. There is a history lesson behind it, highly entertaining and informative; designed and maintained in the knowledge that history is never over and continues to shape the present. Everything that happens in the book is based on the negative experiences during the war and in the post-war period. Although the plot of the novel is fictional, the basics are real. And as long as these are not brought to awareness - with the excuse that it would be better to finally let what happened rest - the past will continue to catch up with younger generations and condemn their relatives to repeat the mistakes of their ancestors.

When "Prameny Vltavy" - the original is called "The Sources of the Moldau", the German title leaves less room for interpretation - came out five years ago, a reader wrote in an online forum: "The book leaves me with one impression: the Bohemian Forest is a dark, tragic and poor place that you really don't want to go to. Which of course isn't true. As a resident, I am angry." A person of German origin, whether part of the vast majority of those displaced or the remaining ten percent after 1946, could have written the same thing.

Reading Klabouchová's book as a crime novel may be enough for an uninitiated readership. But the irreconcilable end cannot satisfy anyone. From the author's point of view, the best of all solutions would be an audience whose interest in further literature has been aroused; also to find answers to the questions she raised: How could the relationship between Czechs and Germans (not only) in the Bohemian Forest become so poisoned? Who is to blame? Why have both sides taken few steps towards reconciliation for a long time? And what drives an author to write such a book, eight decades after the “resettlement” (“Odsun,” is the Czech paraphrase of the expulsion)? What unites both peoples is that they are chafed by the suffering of the past. There is a binational trauma in Šumava and Český les, or in the Bohemian Forest. Does this commonality perhaps hold potential that could finally be positively built upon?

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