Dackerl

By Michael Buergermeister

Dackerl is a c.40,000 word novella set in 1948 about the quest of a young man to avenge his father, a prominent writer who has been murdered by a Nazi named Dackerl. The young man travels to Vienna where he meets a variety of people, including a renowned physicist, a Jewish scholar, a famous film director and an aristocratic Russian refugee, in whom he falls madly in love. The young man enters a world of smoke and mirrors in which nothing is what it seems.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Michael Buergermeister
• Release date: Sep 11, 2018
• ISBN: 9780463565278

Michael Buergermeister

Born in Vienna in 1967 Michael Buergermeister was brought up in London. He studied at the University of Edinburgh, the University of Vienna and Max Reinhardt Seminar. A writer, filmmaker and video artist he lives and works in Vienna, Austria.

Book preview

Dackerl

by Michael Buergermeister

Copyright Michael Buergermeister

Smashwords Edition

Chapter One

Had the Nazi Reinhold Nierlich murdered my father? It was impossible to tell. It wasn’t even clear whether the man in question was really called Reinhold Nierlich at all. Perhaps his true name was Hannes Planek. Perhaps it was something entirely different. I simply couldn’t tell. The only thing I knew for certain was that his code name was Dackerl

I realized that Professor Wittgenstein, my teacher in Cambridge, was right: uncertainty reaches down into the roots of everything.

Professor Wittgenstein taught me that for a solution to be found a problem has to be looked at in the correct fashion. I couldn’t tell though what the correct fashion in this particular instance was.

It is not merely a question, my professor stated, of what is to be said about a particular issue but how one talks about it to begin with. One always has to learn a particular method, which is then applied. But what was the particular method in this case? Again I wasn’t sure.

I had just turned twenty when I learned of my father’s death. I immediately broke off my studies in Cambridge and journeyed to Vienna to exact my revenge.

The only thing I knew for certain was that my father had been involved in an investigation of a drugs cartel. Had he been killed because his investigation had been too successful or because he’d been opposed to the Nazis before, during and after the war? His fiercely anti-Nazi stance was well known and he’d frequently been viciously denounced as a traitor.

My father had sent both my mother and I to England in 1938 and had continued on to Hollywood, where he’d earned a living as a screenwriter. He’d been persuaded to return to help his native country by a famous film director, Fritz Reimann, and had been killed as a direct consequence of this act of folly.

As I caught the train to Vienna I couldn’t help but think of my sister, Judith, who’d disappeared. There were rumors that she’d returned to Vienna. I suspected that this was the real reason my father had returned to that particular city. He’d come to look for her. The job of tackling the drugs trade had only been the ostensible reason. Of course these concerns were intertwined. My sister was a drug addict.

When I saw her in London Judith complained of being a mere refugee who everyone detested. Our loss of home (the word she used was: Heimatlosigkeit), is not merely social and intellectual, it is artistic too. The sadness of the war had quite paralyzed her. Her one comfort was laudanum.

She was tired of being treated as an outsider and was bored of being asked whether she really wanted her own country to lose the war.

She railed against Germans, calling them boorish (ungehobelt), stupid (stumpfsinning) and mad (verrueckt). They were wholly without reason or politeness. It was their mixture of brutality and hysteria that made them the scourge of civilization. She avoided them like the plague.

As I stared out the window I thought of London during the war. I remembered its perennial mist mingled with tufts of smoke from burning houses. I thought of the traffic jams caused by streets being blown up and the desolate ruins where squares had once been. I recalled how the old, red bricks had been reduced to powder. The scenes reminded me of a builder’s yard.

Once I went, together with my sister and a mutual friend, to Buszards where we ate turkey and pancakes. We discussed whether civilization had come to an end. Of course, the friend opined, one’s true life is in ideas. My sister, I recalled, had been depressed. We live without a future, she lamented with a melancholic tone in her voice.

On another occasion I invited her to Cambridge where I put her up in the Bull Hotel. In the evening we had a curious dinner of haddock and sausage meat followed by marmalade and spiced buns at Newnham College.

A don said that this war was better than the last, which we both considered a curious observation, to say the least.

My sister stated that it would be better if the invasion came. Then there would be an end to the perennial uncertainty, which she could no longer stand. At least it would put an end to our misery, she muttered. She’d been bombed out in London and now led what she termed a vegetable existence. She was only able to salvage a fraction of her books and furniture.

When the siren went off she no longer paid it any heed. She complained that she was going mad and was forever hearing voices. She feared she wouldn’t be able to get over it. It was quite impossible for her to think clearly anymore. The war had driven her quite insane.

My sister told me of how, while on the train from London, she watched haystacks blazing on the Downs.

I could sympathize with her emotional swings, her moments of despair followed by apathy. I could understand how, for many a night, she’d been close to suicide. Only the thought of friends and former lovers kept her alive. We debated, in all seriousness, whether it was better to live or to die.

London in winter, during the war, was no pleasant affair. The buses didn’t run, the trains were hours late or lost entirely, the pipes were frozen, the electricity frequently failed and newspapers only arrived in the afternoons. The Black Out was murderous while prices were forever rising. My sister lived in a particularly miserable flat, with mouldy carpets and water oozing from the bricks.

The cups rattled in her hand during the raids while the windows shook. She complained that she couldn’t sleep for thinking of them.

We occasionally retreated to the National Gallery, which had been emptied of its pictures, in order to listen to Stravinsky’s Petruschka, to the Globe Theatre, where we were entertained by a performance of The Importance of Being Ernest or to the cinema where we watched "The Philadelphia Story."

We discussed the merits of The Grapes of Wrath or Ninochka as well as the performances of Fonda and Garbo. We read Malte Laurids Bruegge or Les Enfants Terribles and chatted about the ideas of E.M. Forster or T.S. Eliot.

My sister envied me on account of the fact that I’d been sent to England at an early age and been educated there. Writing and speaking English was, for her, pure torment. She found her own texts appalling and was quite miserable as a result. She worried that she’d never be able to make a living as a writer.

She was in despair, close to tears, and strained to breaking point. The excess of work and excitement hadn’t helped. Nor had her abuse of Benzedrine for that matter.

Her exile had now lasted three years. When would it end? Would it ever do so? Austria had grown stranger, more distant and she herself had grown more indifferent toward it. At the same time her anxiety had increased. She needed a home, a place to call her own. She was homesick for Vienna.

My sister said that she felt sadness beyond expression. The political situation made her uneasy and depressed. She also had money worries and debts. Her desire for death had become palpable and she’d felt quite frozen by her loneliness. The collective catastrophe had plunged her into utter despair while death had become a friend to her.

We discussed suicide in my gradually darkening room should Hitler land. What point was there in waiting, my sister opined? It was better to turn on the gas oven now and get it over with. For this reason she always carried opiates.

The French were beaten, the invasion was imminent and we’d most probably be killed or interned as fifth columnists or put in a concentration camp, along with all the Jews, should the Germans actually land. The Germans would appoint a pro-consul while the English government would undoubtedly flee to Canada.

I told her that the war was mere bombast. It couldn’t possibly last with the same intensity. It was just like an illness that had to run its course. The sad truth is that one obsesses about war but after a while the faculty of feeling dismisses it and one becomes quite indifferent to it all. When not appalled or frightened one grows quite bored with the entire affair.

Of course the war had driven many mad, I conceded. There were those raving, like drunkards, claiming all Germans were devils and that every single one of them should be killed.

There was also a flood of patriotic speeches and there were insane rumors of Germans dressing up as nuns. There were also innumerable horror stories. Of men dying from sheer shock rather than actual wounds or of them shooting themselves as planes swooped down from above.

Every newspaper and every radio program churned out the same dreary drivel with the same emotional falsity, all worked assiduously at weaving the same myths and illusions. Real feeling was parodied. I was tired of how every paper, every broadcast rose to the same mock-heroic strain. It was all, I had to confess, quite appalling.

The worst thing about the war, my sister said, apart from her feelings of pressure, danger and horror, was the sacrifice of pleasure. Margarine was rationed while meat was bad and scarce. This meant that all she had every evening was egg or fish. She was bored and appalled. For hours she just sat waiting for a bomb to fall and put an end to her misery.

There were though moments of poetry among the darkness such as the thick clumps of crocuses in her garden, the daffodils that hadn’t as yet opened and the searchlights at night but they were seldom. This is what had saved her.

The most extraordinary thing was that one was alive at all, my sister once remarked. One still struggles and dreams. One still has wishes and thoughts. Of course she sought to save herself in mechanical activity, meaningless love affairs and with the help of laudanum or Benzedrine. Was it really her world that was falling apart, she once asked me? She was no longer sure.

How could war be prevented? What had been the cause of this particular catastrophe? Had our family done enough to stop it? All these questions plagued her.

We discussed Eliot’s idea that the business of a poet is to preserve tradition. Literature, Eliot opined, is not consecrated by time; it is beyond time.

For Virginia Woolf, I explained, novels are like music. There is such a mass of detail that the only way to hold a work together is by abstracting it into themes. Virginia Woolf tried to state them in the first chapter, brought in variations and developments and then made them all heard together. She ended by bringing back the first themes in the last chapters.

Once my sister had been blown out of her bed by an explosion. She had taken shelter in a church and had sat on a hard, cold seat. She cradled a small boy, a complete and utter stranger, an orphan, in her arms, and felt ashamed of her cowardice. Whenever a bomb fell she felt like jumping up and running out into the street.

When she emerged the next morning she noticed how the faces of the people were set and their eyes bleary. A man in his pajamas wheeled away a barrow full of books while another walked slowly down the empty street.

The house next door was reduced to a pile of bricks. Scraps of cloth still hung to a bare wall while a looking glass swung in the wind.

A bookshop was entirely destroyed, a hotel gutted while a wine shop wholly without windows.

Some people stood at the tables while others cleared away heaps of blue-green glass. Others tore off fragments left