Der Verlorene—Text und Kommentar

by Hans Ulrich-Treichel, Commentary by Jürgen Krätzer, (1998, commentary 2005), published by Suhrkamp BasisBibliothek. 175 pages.

6 October 2007; pp. 1-129

In German, “Der Verlorene” basically means, “the lost person,” but there’s some subtlety in the title that’s hard to describe in English. “Verloren,” related to the English word “forlorn,” is simply an adjective: lost. In German, it’s possible to take an adjective like this and turn it into a noun. Usually this is done when the noun itself is clear. If you’re talking about two men, one short and one tall, you can say “Der Große,” and it’s clear you’re referring to “Der große Mann,” or “the tall man.” But In the title of Hans-Ulrich Treichel’s novel, it’s almost as if the noun itself is what’s missing. Something or someone is lost, so very lost that it can’t even be given an true identity. All we know about it is that it’s really and truly gone.
The literal answer to the question of who or what has been lost: a child, Arnold, the infant child of a German couple at the end of World War II. In a moment of panic, when Arnold’s mother thought she was going to be accosted and killed by Russian soldiers, she gave the infant Arnold to a passing woman. As it turned out, she was neither accosted nor killed; she and her husband made it safely to the West of Germany and managed to start a new life, but they never recovered their son, and never recovered from the pain of losing him so suddenly and so pointlessly.
The story is narrated by Arnold’s younger brother, born after the war, who’s lived out the early years of his life in Arnold’s shadow, never quite understanding what happened to Arnold, but always burdened with a sense of shame that pervaded his household. As the novel progresses, it becomes clear that not only is Arnold lost, but also the younger brother has lost something. He’s never experienced a moment of kindness from his father. He’s never experienced a loving embrace from his mother. Most of all, without understanding what really happened to Arnold, he’s never been able to understand who his parents are and who he is.
Treichel has mastered the sort of humor that characterizes a lot of my favorite German fiction, where the joke is rooted in the way a child’s mind tries to come to terms with all the metaphors, euphemisms and half-truths that characterize adult speech. As the plot rolls on and the parents try everything they can to try and find their lost child, the narrator grapples with a sense of jealousy that defies logic but nevertheless makes a lot of sense: he’s jealous of how easy Arnold has things, how he has two parents who are willing to sacrifice so much to find him, and yet never has to suffer the father’s coldness, the mother’s tragic mood swings, the anxiety of having one’s life invaded and eclipsed by an older brother who’s been elevated to a sort of mythic perfection by the fact of his perpetual absence.
The best parts of the story are the characterization of the father, who seems in some ways to be the most lost of all the figures in the book; the story of the kindly policeman Herr Rudolf, who stands as a perfect counterpart to the cold, remote father figure; and the strange monologue of the hearse driver who enters the story midway through and plays the same role as the gravediggers in “Hamlet,” reminding us that death is unrelenting and ever-present, unglamorous, not glorious, redemptive, nor particularly tragic—and that in our struggle to deny it, we ultimately turn ourselves into the basest of comedians.