In black-and-white footage filmed by the Royal Air Force bomber command in November 1944, British planes the shape of winged torpedoes drop bombs on a small city called Düren, in Germany. The city—the last major population center before the Allied Army’s Rhine River crossing—was obliterated, and 3,127 people were killed. 3,100 of them make it into Michael Lentz’s novel Schattenfroh, in the form of a 70-page list handwritten by the narrator in a bid to remember each of the dead. Remembrance, as Lentz sees it, an anxiety-laden affair. The stakes are existential in proportion: if our narrator forgets someone, “then they’ll be snuffed out for a second time,” he worries. In other words, they’ll be snuffed out of history after being snuffed out of life. “My son, be careful in your work,” a voice calls out to him, “for your work is the work of Heaven. Should you omit a single letter or add an extra letter, you may find yourself destroying the entire world, all of it.”
That world, the world of Düren, has already been destroyed. Forever in the heart of the story of this small German city will be annihilation—of buildings and people, of course, but also of history. In the years since its rebuilding, Düren nevertheless remains—in Lentz’s telling—a cityscape of “annihilated history,” a city whose “historylessness” causes its residents to “scurry around like ants, but haphazardly, aimlessly, driven by constant fear, they’re suicidal.” The ants have lost their queen: their reason to live. Barring suicide, they go to their city’s monuments and “end up weeping for hours because they too are so deplorable.” What’s left for those surviving citizens is the meager opportunity—the simultaneously imperative task—to “remember the dead.” They are desperate to add to the annals of history, to offer some artifact attesting to what has been irrevocably lost.
Michael Lentz’s Schattenfroh attempts to tell the history of the annihilated world. The mammoth novel, published by Deep Vellum Press this August and subtitled “A Requiem,” opens with a pronouncement: “My mission is to write everything down from the beginning.” The narrator, named Nobody, continues, “I said it can’t be done. I don’t know when the beginning is and I don’t know what everything is.” Although for nearly 1,000 pages, writing everything down from the beginning is exactly what Nobody attempts to do. What that means in practical terms is to follow the historical arc of the city of Düren, from the year 748, to 1543, to 1644, to 1944, to 2018, from its first documented reference, to its complete destruction, finally to its contemporary furnishings. Though, to be sure, geography is no constraint, either; Nobody’s travels take him through Bangladesh, paintings by Hieronymus Bosch, and through language itself. Lentz’s toolkit gives the appearance of “everything,” too: the book makes painstaking use of the Kabbalah, the history and mechanics of the printing press, the Bible, the Spanish language, Shakespeare, even structural engineering in its attempt to capture the entire world, from beginning to end.
The world according to Schattenfroh, then, is one indebted to and created by history. Yet Lentz constantly prods his reader to ask who the author of that history is, and what they might be leaving out, despite their claims to completeness. Schattenfroh, after all, is a document produced under duress: Nobody is a prisoner locked in darkness and isolation, whose every thought is being forcibly transcribed into the very book we are reading. His jailor, named Schattenfroh—who is, by turns, God, the Devil, and Nobody’s already dead father—leads the mysterious Frightbearing Society, which hopes the encyclopedic book Nobody writes will serve as the society’s foundational, quasi-religious text. The Frightbearing Society is invested in nothing short of the creation of a new world. It will remember certain things and not others, it will revise history, and it will thereby create a new kind of person: Its members must “be shown to be honorable, utilizable, and delightful,” and “preserve the High German Tongue in every way viable and possible.” To be a member of this society, one must believe in the greatness of a particular German past, and one must worship that past. As Schattenfroh demands of Nobody: “Sanctify yourself to me!”
One learns fairly quickly in Schattenfroh that the Frightbearing Society’s desire to create a new world, and their desire to control the editorial direction of Nobody’s book, are exactly the same project: history writing as an act of literal world building. This world is completely constructed out of text, where the gap between artifice and “real life,” between textuality and reality, is completely collapsed. It is rather like certain interpretations of the Bible, which hold that the Word is not simply an expression of God’s love but is love itself. The sentences of Schattenfroh similarly do not express or represent anything so much as they are the real thing (the book is regularly referred to in biblical terms, as the Book of Life, of Revelation, of death, of the Dead, and as the Book of Books). What Nobody imagines—and what therefore is translated to text, against Nobody’s will (or not)—comes to life the moment he imagines it: Nobody’s father disappears into a black page (a nod to Sterne’s Tristram Shandy); text is literally consumed, eaten for sustenance; Nobody spends a chunk of the novel traveling on the alphabet, through language itself; he’s built of language, too: “my arms are the letters that I put to paper,” he writes, “two capital I’s hang down from the shoulders.” Such is the power and potential of this strange book called Schattenfroh to build a world from scratch using history and the written Word.
The group, then, will go to any length to wrest control of the historical narrative. Like the ruins of post-war Düren, Nobody is himself a kind of void—he is nobody, after all—which Schattenfroh and another mysterious jailor, Mateo, attempt to fill. Schattenfroh has gotten “in my head,” Nobody writes, by way of the same futuristic contraption that transcribes his every thought to the page. Schattenfroh “is a dictator, he leads the quill that I don’t have.” And if there were any questions about it: “I am not a free individual in my head either.” Everything one reads, then, must be read with some degree of suspicion. When an altered version of the novel’s opening appears, announcing that Nobody’s original mission to write “everything” down is in fact “no problem,” and that “I know when the beginning is and I know what everything is,” Nobody is quick to say “I didn’t write that.” Mateo replies matter-of-factly that the passage is in his book. How could he not have written it? “Yes, now it is in my book, only now,” Nobody says, “but it is false, its meaning is distorted.” In Schattenfroh, history, the past—in other words, the world—is a site of brutal contestation, subject to endless revisionism.
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We are surely familiar with such a brutally contested world. Yet it seems particularly meaningful that a novel, which takes the contestation of history as its central theme, should arise from a German writer and should take place in a German city. For Lentz’s home country is certainly one of the most salient examples of contested history over the last century; moreover, the country has furnished an image of itself as the only nation that takes responsibility for the remembrance of its genocidal past and makes it, as Tony Judt wrote, “the very measure of their national identity.” But it bears reminding that it wasn’t always so; it took a sixty-year period of repression, denial, and debate, for the Holocaust to become an established fact of German public memory. As Judt writes, Germans in the immediate postwar period had little idea how the rest of the world saw them, nor did they care very much to know. Chancellor Adenauer of the newly established Federal Republic complained publicly about the ills of de-Nazification. Polling of the German citizenry in 1946 showed that 37 percent still believed that “the extermination of the Jews and Poles and other non-Aryans was necessary for the security of Germans,” and by 1952 a quarter of the West German population confessed to having a “good opinion” of Hitler.
That history is anything but past. In Lentz’s Düren, the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) candidate won 20 percent of the vote in the 2025 election to the Bundestag, an 11-point increase from 2021. Aside from the rise of a political party that maintains flirtations with its country’s Nazi past, public remembrance of the Holocaust in Germany is “wielded” still, often taking the form of a strategic and paternalistic philosemitism, used variously as a cover to support genocide in Gaza and to harass Muslim residents inside the borders of the German state. (These residents are blamed for their purported antisemitic views despite the fact that, as Pankaj Mishra has written, “90 per cent of antisemitic crimes are committed by right-wing white Germans.”)
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History hangs heavy upon the present, even when—especially when, perhaps—we convince ourselves that we have learned all we can from the past and can move forward unabashed and unburdened into our newfangled, “unprecedented,” and techno-utopian times. Lentz’s Schattenfroh attempts to demolish the idea that one can be freed completely from one’s past. Though the novel’s multi-dimensional odyssey charts a path through the German Peasants’ War, Jesus’s crucifixion, World War II, old oil paintings, Schattenfroh is not lost in those distant and not-so-distant pasts. Lentz, rather, wrests the past forward into the present. He refuses to dress the present in the garments of a purple past. And he refuses to dress the present in the garish garments of the future. We live in a time where both these costumes somehow define “progress” in our politics, our culture, and our art. Lentz gives an emphatic rebuttal: Art, culture, and politics exist together, everywhere, all at once.
The central device by which the novel accomplishes this is a tapestry hung in Nobody’s father’s office. The tapestry allows for more than just time travel and the recording of history; it creates “the simultaneity of non-simultaneities, the spatial diversification of time, in which one can move back and forth as one pleases, in a few days’ march, one traverses the historic townscapes of the city from the early Middle Ages to the present day.” Thus Nobody can travel through Düren’s past and present simultaneously, the city’s “reconstruction and its contemporary appearance all juxtaposed.” There is indeed “no end of the tapestry in sight.” The tapestry, rather,
“weave[s] itself through all walls and across all borders, in such a way that what we no longer experience—what nobody will ever experience—shall join itself on the left on a day that is merely thought, but not actively thunk, by which it shall be definitively proven, should such a proof be required, that time and space are round and what is round clasps itself onto itself.”
The past, in other words, is literally woven into the present, independently of whether we experience it as such.
We often don’t. And what this means is that we often repeat ourselves, are doomed to repeat ourselves, even. What we repeat is all too often the most violent moments of our human history. Thus is Nobody crucified while inside the Hieronymous Bosch painting: “My body is a Corpus Christi marked by no wounds and nailed into the air,” he writes, bestowed with the “grace of a pietà.” Thus does Nobody become the 16th-century preacher Thomas Müntzer, leader of the German peasant uprising of 1525, “tortured at Helderungen Castle for twelve days before he was released,” and executed thereafter. Thus is Düren destroyed not once but twice. And much of this violence—particularly the violence against Nobody—is perpetrated by the same jailors of the authoritarian Frightbearing Society, who also appear in numerous different guises under different names in different time periods, through to the present day.
Schattenfroh’s history of the world is meant to be discomforting, disenchanting. The novel demonstrates just how often the struggle for political, religious, artistic freedom has been a losing battle. But if Schattenfroh has any instructive element for its readers, it is to remind them of the sheer vastness of that history, the great extent to which it will be unknown to us, and the great importance of learning as much as we can from it.
Despite the novel’s serious merits on this account, I could not shake the eerie sense throughout my reading that Lentz himself was repeating a familiar mistake found easily enough—dispiritingly enough—in the recent annals of history. For despite the novel’s self-professed goal of creating an encyclopedic account of history, it sidesteps the most important tragedy of World War II: the Holocaust.
The tragedy that one follows throughout the war years is not the one of genocide but rather the persecution of Nobody’s grandfather, a Catholic priest who refused to conform to Nazi rule. (German Catholic Bishop Clemens August Graf von Galen, who protested against Nazi lawlessness and the Nazi T4 euthanasia program, is also given some attention in the novel, as well as Pope Pius XII.) First a member of the Luftnachrichtentruppen—the Air Intelligence Troop—the grandfather is dismissed from his military service and held “in solitary confinement at Windstraße Prison for three months—for both high and national treason—was interrogated, harassed, forgotten for days.” His crime: “you betrayed Germany to the Luxembourgers,” a guard hisses, by maintaining friendly contact there, by continuing to buy from Jewish sellers in his neighborhood, by refusing to Heil Hitler. After he is freed and after the fall of the Third Reich, Nobody’s father explains that “Grandpa did not have a rigid need for punishment. His children couldn’t believe that, Father says, they were too cognizant of the fears they’d endured and the humiliations they’d experienced.” His father goes on: “the nightly patrols of Nazis before the house, Father’s denunciation, his Gestapo detention, his being threatened with the pistol when he broke off from the Schanztruppe, all that should remain unpunished?” I struggled through these passages. The fears they’d endured, the humiliations they’d experienced: indeed, should all that remain unpunished? Readers are given the impression that the chief crimes of the Nazis amounted to harassment and political persecution of its Catholic non-conformers, rather than the attempted wholesale extermination of Europe’s Jews, Roma, homosexuals, people with disabilities, and political dissidents.
The price paid for non-conformity in Germany was steep, the consequences were serious. But those rebels brave enough to speak out against the Reich were so clearly the exception and not the rule, which was the overwhelming indifference of the German citizenry to the plight of their neighbors. And for a novel that includes a 70-page list of Düren’s dead, a novel which is called a requiem, which includes the line: “The task of literature is to remember the dead,” the scant engagement with the genocidal crimes of the Nazis is a shocking elision (made stranger by the novel’s clear indebtedness to Jewish mysticism). What of the hundred Jews from Düren who were held at Buchenwald? Or those sent to the death camps from Düren in 1941? I’m reminded of the East German writer Stephan Hermlin recounting de-Nazification efforts in Frankfurt, where Germans were shown documentaries on Dachau and Buchenwald as a prerequisite to receiving ration cards: “Most people,” he could see, “turned away their faces after the beginning of the film and stayed that way until the film was over. Today I think that that turned-away face was indeed the attitude of many millions…The unfortunate people to which I belonged was both sentimental and callous. It was not interested in being shaken by events, in any ‘know thyself.’”
I imagine a rebuttal: that Schattenfroh, after all, is about revisionism, mis-memory, diaskeuasis, and surely a novel which is about revision will also be the subject of revision. Perhaps Schattenfroh and the Frightbearing Society purposefully excised from the book any emphasis or meditation on the Holocaust. But the Holocaust is mentioned, if only in passing and as a reflection of the limits Nobody’s grandfather’s non-conformity—“He fell silent too soon. But if he hadn’t fallen silent, that still wouldn’t have prevented the Holocaust.” And there are at least two books on the Holocaust in the 7-page bibliography Lentz inserts halfway into the book. If Schattenfroh wanted to excise the Holocaust from the historical record, why would he allow any mention of it, or the Nazis, at all? This seems to me evidence of a refusal to engage with the urgent ethical and artistic questions posed by atrocity, and how atrocity is remembered and represented in literature and public life.
Another rebuttal might be that the Holocaust is such an established fact of public memory in Germany and the West that it need not be given such emphasis in the novel; readers are expected to arrive with that history already in mind. Yet the undergirding logic of Schattenfroh is that history must be taught again and again to provide our present—here again from Judt—’with admonitory meaning and moral purpose.’ History must be struggled over, or else it will be revised by those who have nefarious designs for it, or else that history will be entirely forgotten.
Without history, we risk becoming those ants of post-war Düren, struggling without their queen, scurrying around, aimless, suicidal, and without purpose, bound to repeat our worst mistakes. “The task of literature is to remember the dead,” we are told in Schattenfroh, and of course that’s impossible. The history of the world is a history of annihilation, of all that’s been lost, left out, and cannot be recovered. We simply can’t remember all the dead, even if our present is built upon their bones. But we can and should still make the offering of a meager, incomplete remembrance, hoping that we may come to grips with the complexity, madness, and deprivation—the goodness and beauty, too—of the world. At its best, Schattenfroh is an offering of astonishing subtly, breadth, and dexterity. So it is a shame that Lentz cheapens the offering by forgetting, or at least eliding, the most important thing to know about the last hundred years of German history.
Gus O'Connor
Gus O’Connor is a writer living in New York City.