The Nazis in Austria
Kalte
Monde*
Manfred Wieninger
A Marek Miert novel
Haymon Publishing, Innsbruck-Vienna• 2006 • 235 p.
Elfriede Müller
Translation : Anne Foster
Marek
Miert, a former policeman, has changed career, becoming a private
detective with little success and few clients. However this, Manfred
Wieninger's third book, is not a crime novel, even though the profession
of the anti-hero, two related criminal investigations and a few
murders are all the hallmarks of one. When the first-person narrator
says: ‘I thought to myself: ‘There's never anything really
new under the sun'', his words could equally apply to the plot of ‘Kalte
Monde'.
Wieninger has produced a readable and cynical novel about Austria
and its racism at government level and in everyday life, which Marek
Miert talks about with a mixture of sadness and anger. It is set
in Harland, Lower Austria which is about as provincial as it gets.
Miert is taken on as a bodyguard by a rightwing extremist MP and
immediately sets about finding an old cat which is to inherit millions.
The allusion to the split in the two rightwing extremist parties
the Freedom Party of Austria and the Alliance for the Future of Austria
couldn't be more obvious. Wieninger sketches a grim and accusatory
picture of their entrenchment in Austrian society. A third investigation,
which has nothing at all to do with the other two but which allows
the introduction of one of the most sympathetic characters in the
book, indicates that Wieninger doesn't only want to write a good
crime novel, but wants to shed light on all aspects of Austrian society.
An elderly communist woman commissions Miert to find out what happened
to her deserter brother in 1945 so that she can give him a decent
burial. Then there is a convoluted intrigue which is meant to shake
the foundations of the higher echelons of the police force, but which
has as little success as the other two narrative threads.
The strongest parts of the novel are
those describing the death of a homeless man, set up by the rightwing
extremists for whom Miert has been working, and the effect it has
on Miert, reminding him as it does of a similar incident in his
youth when he intervened to prevent his friend Peter (“as unsubstantial as the dole”)
being beaten up by rightwing extremist thugs with chains. But this
time Miert doesn't intervene, not even against the newly-formed
vigilante group which is taking action against the homeless, Chechen
refugee women and immigrants. He looks on helplessly.
Finally there is a murder on a housing
estate. A so-called ‘Ripper'
is killing women. Miert investigates, the vigilantes step in and
everybody except Miert suspect a Yugoslav, who, of course, is completely
innocent: “You don't get a killing spree like this everywhere, only
here.' There is no sense of tension leading up to the solution, but
that doesn't seem to matter in this story. It is a witty and gritty
book about the state of Austria , which the author apparently wasn't
brave enough to write without relying on the classic structure of
the detective novel.
* Cold World
