A REVIEW OF
RESEDA BY ALFRED GRÜNEWALD

by C. Caunter, December 2024

Pedantic, benign, conscientious, frugal, a tad humourless. Some characteristics of Gustav Reseda, a 50-year-old accountant with an export firm whose life centres on his uneventful penpushery. The peaceful, predictable rhythm of his existence is upended when he falls under the spell – unexpectedly, and at first without understanding it – of his girlfriend’s nephew Walter, a beautiful but haughty boy of 15. At the same time, Reseda himself becomes the object of increasingly intimate attention from a new colleague, Lazarus, an intern fresh out of school whom he finds ugly and obsequious. The novella recounting these events was discovered in a Swiss archive and was first published some seventy years after the murder in Auschwitz of its author, the Austrian Alfred Grünewald (1884-1942), whose life I’ve written about here.

In diary entries, Reseda admits he aspires to nothing loftier than the quiet, punctilious performance of his job. ‘Ich bin ein mittelmäßiger Mensch’, he declares: I’m a middling person. The author is quick to create distance between himself and his protagonist by having him state that he has no use for poetry – Grünewald, by contrast, lived for his poetry above all else. To Reseda’s horror, the fawning Lazarus (I picture Gareth from The Office) appears at work one day wearing the exact same cut of suit as himself, having previously asked him for the name of his tailor. The intern also turns out to be a stamp collector just like Reseda and uses this hobby to try to get in his good books, offering him attractive stamp swaps and even gifting him ostensible duplicates. As a result, their coworkers increasingly associate the two with each other, which Reseda resents. The womanising Herr Tuckil, notorious for his bad jokes, even mixes them up in jest.

Reseda finds stability and contentment in his relationship of many years with Maria, a married woman who lives on her own and whose husband is absent. When her nephew, the well-off schoolboy Walter von Kilian, is sent to lodge with her following his mother’s death, Maria becomes slavishly devoted to the boy. His striking beauty reminds her of Walter’s late mother – Maria’s sister – as a girl. Maria’s indulgence of her nephew raises Reseda’s hackles, but the diary entries make it clear that he himself fast becomes obsessed with Walter. He is fascinated by the contrast between the boy’s still childlike looks and his imperious voice and demeanour. Walter likes to get under his skin with pedantic pronouncements which are essentially barbs aimed at the accountant’s change-resistant lifestyle. Walter will posit a cocksure axiom – it is foolish to be thrifty; one should regularly change one’s wardrobe; one shouldn’t live in the same town for more than a year on end – which Reseda will then testily take issue with. He notes in his diary: ‘These are the theories of someone not yet sixteen and can therefore not be taken seriously, but in spite of this they throw me into turmoil.’

At Maria’s insistence he invites the boy to his home. Lying on Reseda’s divan, Walter launches into a fantasy of being the Lord of the Manse and Reseda being his servant, the dwarf Largolasso. Reseda goes along with the role-play, singing for the boy even though he hasn’t sung since childhood. Afterwards he writes in his diary: ‘What has happened? Something, a grain of sand perhaps, has found its way into the clockwork of my life.’ And: ‘My God, what kind of eyes are those! Icy cold and yet gleaming. I have never seen such eyes. It hurts to think of them. Around the pupil the grey shades into green. How it frightens me!’

Reseda is unsettled by his poorly understood infatuation to the point where his life threatens to come unstuck. He spies on Walter in the street one evening and, on visits to Maria, sneaks into the boy’s room when Walter isn’t there. In a letter to his girlfriend which he doesn’t send, he writes: ‘Maria, something has come between us which is destroying our happiness. Can you guess what I mean, can you guess who I mean? Yes: it’s Walter, the dauphin, the teenager in patent leather shoes.’ Lazarus, meanwhile, moves from ingratiating to downright seductive behaviour. He appears to be mirroring and acting out Reseda’s longing for Walter. At one point he reveals he has been keeping tabs on his mentor and is aware of the passion to which Reseda had not wanted to admit even for himself.

Reseda is a very well-written novella and therefore a smooth read. It is dense in symbolism, so much so that one keeps one’s fingers crossed for fear that the symbolist sprawl will overgrow the concrete narrative. Lazarus wearing the same suit as Reseda suggests he is a facet of him; one that the repressed, uptight accountant hates and attempts to deny. Lazarus is cross-eyed, yet sees things more clearly. In view of his biblical name, his function may be to try to rouse Reseda from his timid, changeless life, which almost seems like a quiet preparation for death. This interpretation is suggested by Lazarus of Bethany, whom Jesus raises from the dead in John 11.

The novella borrows its core symbolism from the beggar Lazarus in Luke 16, however. This Lazarus is covered in sores and desires to be fed with the crumbs which fall from a stonyhearted rich man’s table. Reseda is as this beggar to the privileged, untouchable Walter. In one scene, Reseda, Maria and Walter have dinner with a slightly older friend of Walter’s, Baron Krümel (the name meaning crumb), whose face puts Reseda in mind of a skull. When a teaspoon falls to the floor next to Walter’s foot, both Reseda and Krümel duck under the table to retrieve it, and he notes the baron’s face is contorted with hate. The suggestion is that Reseda’s efforts to get closer to Walter must lead to the ultimate act of change: death.

It is hard to read this and not think of the various characters who stand for decay, death and the grotesque in Thomas Mann’s equally heavily symbolic 1912 novella Der Tod in Venedig (Death in Venice). Reseda’s first name is Gustav, and Grünewald would doubtless have read the masterpiece about the ill-fated Gustav von Aschenbach. Another author who comes to mind is Kafka, like Grünewald a German-language writer from Austria-Hungary, whose nightmarish absurdism is present in comparatively subdued doses in Reseda. Grünewald would not inevitably have read Kafka, though, as the latter had only just set off on his trajectory to posthumous fame when Reseda was written, at the start of the 1930s. Grünewald, known to have had a lifelong predilection for the bizarre and bizarre humour, may not have needed the example of his contemporary from Prague. For my money, in any case, Grünewald is easily the better stylist of the two.

With Reseda we have a skilfully composed burlesque on the effects of self-repression and the limits of imagination. Reseda. Novelle und andere Prosa, with an afterword by Grünewald biographer (and discoverer of the manuscript) Volker Bühn, was published by Männerschwarm Verlag in 2013. The edition includes 19 short prose pieces that originally appeared in newspapers and magazines in the author’s lifetime. Some of these pieces are mere brief sketches or end too suddenly to amount to much, while others are beautiful short stories – such as Der Page, in which the teenaged protagonist falls in love with a page boy in a shopwindow advertisement. Publishers outside of the German-speaking world, step forward.