Badenheim 1939 by Aharon Applefeld

Some books entertain us.  Some books teach us. Some warn us. In 2018, as our democratic norms are under attack, Badenheim 1939 feels like a warning siren.  Author Aharon Applefeld should know.  He lived through the Holocaust and then moved to Israel.

In the spring of 1939, the fictitious town of Badenheim near Vienna is preparing for its annual summer concert season.  Europe’s best classical musicians, many of them Jewish, will perform. Because we know what awaits the musicians, their Jewish patrons and the whole of European Jewry, the book has a dark, absurdist and ominous mood. After all, it is 1939!

Appelfeld characters are neither heroes nor villains. What they have in common is their myopic focus on the minute details and larger plans of their own live, oblivious to the horrors to come.  The dialogue focuses on the dimensions of the upcoming summer arts program: the artists, the pieces, and the instrumentation. Hitler, who is never mentioned, will invade Poland by fall.

As the season changes to fall, those who are Jewish are not allowed to leave Badenheim. Then there is a shortage of food. Then, mail and newspapers are no longer delivered.  The insularity allows the citizens and guests of Badenheim to comfort themselves with stories emanating from their hopes but not from facts. They are told to register with the Badenheim authorities and the word Jew creeps into the language.  Who is Jewish? Who isn’t it? The capricious authorities begin to decide who must stay and who can leave Badenheim.

Denial dominates the story.  Eventually the Jews are told they are going to be sent to Poland. Those trapped in Badenheim imagine that they will board trains and arrive in Poland where they will begin their lives anew.  The musicians will find receptive new audiences and many others will reconnect with their homeland.  Some of those confined to Badenheim view their forced departure as a positive development.

Appelfeld does not mock his characters, but rather highlights the universal human trait of denial, both as necessity and tragic flaw. As the musicians and tourists soon experience the daily encroachments of their personal freedoms, they seem incurious (or maybe petrified) of what their entrapment might signal and they simply adapt to each new diminishment of their rights. You can’t blame them. No one could have imagined the depravity and horrors of the Nazis and their enablers. Even if the residents and visitors of Badenheim knew what was coming, could have stopped the horror of Hitler and the Holocaust?

Like a Kafka or Orwellian novel, there is an ominous and absurd tone that permeates the novel. Because Appelfeld’s readers know the barbarity waiting in Poland, the book is terrifying. From the opening chapter, I wanted to climb into the novel and tell the characters to stop talking about the summer musical performances and leave Europe immediately.  But they cannot. It is too late