Imperium: A Fiction of the South Seas

by Christian Kracht

  A detachment of Australian soldiers ultimately ends up on Kabakon, too. Engelhardt, who steps toward them on the beach, naked, amid the laughter of the uniformed men, is dispossessed forthwith. He is handed the sum of six pounds sterling for the run-down plantation, and it’s left up to him whether to return to Germany. Six pounds for this life. He casts the puny sum of money at the Australian officer’s feet, does an about-face, and vanishes into the shady jungle. He is not followed.

  Captain Slütter, cruising with the Jeddah off Samoa in these confusing, peculiar times, reports to the commander of the SMS Cormoran, which is also lingering in the warm waters of the South Pacific; coal is in short supply, it is no longer safe to put to harbor anywhere, but they can’t remain at sea, either, they are sitting ducks, as the British say. The crew of the Cormoran hopes for the expeditious arrival of the large German battleship Scharnhorst; in the meantime, Slütter, who has placed himself and his ship at the disposal of the Cormoran, is ordered to capture an unarmed French collier, recover the cargo, and torpedo the bugger.

  And thus the aged Jeddah becomes a warship. She isn’t allowed to hoist the colors of the German Imperial Navy, but Apirana, Slütter, and November do in fact manage to capsize the collier by affixing an explosive device to the prow of the Jeddah, setting a collision course, and escaping to safety with the tiny lifeboat just in time. The black plume of smoke can be seen for miles around. And so they bob, rowing off to the arranged meeting point with the Cormoran, which of course never appears. In its stead—it is nearly unbearable—two Australian warships show up; they take Slütter captive and land on a nameless island to collect water. Slütter is accused of piracy, stood against a palm tree, and executed. He acquiesces calmly, unshaven, refusing the blindfold. Another captive German sailor loans him his uniform coat so that Slütter doesn’t have to die in civvies. When the bullets pierce him, he sees neither Pandora in his mind nor the soldiers aiming at him, just the solemn and distressingly unforgiving deep blue ocean. Cigarettes are distributed among the firing squad. The sailor’s coat is returned after the sentence is carried out, and he wears it with head held high and a straight back; he will never sew up those four punctures at the height of his heart.

  Escaping the soldiers by some ruse, Apirana, after long odysseys that send him sailing over the inexhaustibly vast quilt of the Pacific, that star field of his ancestors, and that blow the fancies of white men out of his soul good and proper, joins the New Zealand Navy on a whim. November, who had accompanied him, is swept overboard in a typhoon. He sinks with open eyes miles down into the calm, night-blue cosmos of the sea. Many decades later, Apirana will be the first Maori in the New Zealand Parliament. He dies somewhere in midcentury, ubiquitously honored, bearing a rank beyond reproach, as Sir Apirana Turupa Ngata.

  After having cheated their way around the Pacific for a long while with extremely profitable cardsharping, the two crooks Govindarajan and Mittenzwey are arrested on Samoa and deported in chains to Australia on a prisoner convoy; the latter is torpedoed en route by a German cruiser and sinks with all hands into the surges of the Pacific Ocean.

  Albert Hahl returns to a wintry, silent Berlin that is no longer quite so euphoric about the war, and there, over ten years—using as a reference his card index filled with aperçus, diverse discoveries, philosophical observations, and inventions—works on his memoirs, which for want of an interested press remain sadly unpublished. The helicopter Hahl envisioned, finally, that he once dreamt up in a bright, flower-strewn kingdom by the sea while observing the hovering flight of the hummingbird, will be developed much later, in the next war, as most splendid inventions of humanity are products of its feuds. Granted a halfhearted appanage by the Imperial Colonial Office, he devotes himself increasingly to private scholarship. As politics irritate him, he writes the long letters of an aging man who no longer occupies center stage. Even the philosopher Edmund Husserl receives mail from Albert Hahl, a densely inked, eighty-page epistle in which it is set forth that we men are living in a kind of highly complex motion picture or theatrical work, but suspect nothing because the illusion is so perfectly staged by the director. The letter is half skimmed by Husserl, dismissed as childish, and not dignified with a reply. Hahl—his hair has long since turned gray when the sun-crossed Führer of the Germans becomes swinishly insufferable—then conspires with the wife of Wilhelm Solf (erstwhile governor of German Samoa) by joining a resistance group whose brutish end on the piano-wire gallows of the imperium Hahl will not live to see.

  Emma Forsayth-Lützow dies in Monte Carlo at the gambling table of the longed-for casino after placing her last ten-thousand-franc chip on the color red. Black 35 wins. She slumps down in her chair without a word, two gloved casino employees rush to fan air at her, a third brings her a glass of cognac that is spilled amid the commotion, leaving a dark stain on the bottle-green frieze of the gaming table, which will have vanished the next day. The Société des bains de mer de Monaco erects a headstone for her that reads Emma, Reine des Mers du Sud. Today the inscription is weathered but still quite decipherable.

  XV

  And our more-than-bewildered friend, our problem child? He does materialize once more, you know. Shortly after the end of the Second World War, in the Solomon Islands, on the battle-ravaged isle of Kolombangara, not far from the flattened peak of a smoking volcano, American naval units discover an ancient white man who is missing both thumbs living in a cave. He seems to have subsisted on nuts, grasses, and beetles. A young woman Navy doctor examines the old man, skeletally emaciated yet still oddly strong, and notes with great astonishment that he suffered for decades from a multibacillary form of leprosy, but that it has by some amazing miracle completely healed.

  The long-haired graybeard is taken to and shown around a confusingly large military base on the island of Guadalcanal, which was wrested away from the Japanese. Wide-eyed, he sees everywhere friendly black GIs whose teeth, quite unlike his own ruinously rotten heap of dental wreckage, gleam with a secret, surreal luminosity; everyone appears so extraordinarily clean, their hair parted and clothes pressed; he is given a dark brown, sugary, rather tasty liquid to drink from a glass bottle slightly tapered in the middle; sedulous fighter planes set down on runways at minute intervals and take off again (the pilots smile, waving, from glass cockpits, radiant in the sunlight); with an expression of rapt attention, an officer holds a metal box with small perforations to his ear, from which enigmatic, heavily rhythmic, but still not at all unpleasant-sounding music emanates; the old man’s hair and beard are combed; an immaculately white cotton collarless camisole is pulled over his head; he’s given a wristwatch; they pat him gaily on the back; this is now the imperium; he is served a type of sausage brushed with garishly bright-colored sauce that lies in a bed of oblong bread as soft as a down pillow, as a result of which Engelhardt, for the first time in long over half a century, ingests a piece of animal flesh; here, a soldier of German extraction (his parents simply forgot their language of origin—it was assimilated pars pro toto into the E Pluribus Unum), one Lieutenant Kinnboot, in shirtsleeves, preparing with patient affability to ask Engelhardt dozens of questions for a newspaper, is mightily impressed when Engelhardt suddenly recalls the English language—which of course has grown somewhat rusty over the decades—and begins to speak, at first haltingly, then with increasing vivacity, of the age before the world war, no, not the one favorably just ended, but the one before that, even. And Kinnboot, quite riveted, lighting one cigarette after the other, forgetting to offer the bearded old man one, is unable to make notes anywhere but in the margins of a steno pad long since filled with scribbles, shakes his head again and again, and, smiling incredulously, he professes: Sweet bejesus, that’s one heck of a story, and: Just wait ’til Hollywood gets wind of this, and: You, sir, will be in pictures.

  And in fact, several years later—Engelhardt has now already left us—solemn, monumental orchestral music will surge before audiences. The director is present at the premiere, first-row s
eats; he is sitting there, biting at the crescent moon of the fingernail on his pinkie, chewing up the sharp keratin particles, the projector clatters, no, hundreds of projectors are flickering and beaming their cones of light, accompanied by wildly dancing dust motes, onto hundreds of screens, in Cincinnati, Los Angeles, Chicago, Miami, San Francisco, Boston, on which a white postal steamer, beneath long white clouds, is sailing through an endless ocean. The camera zooms in; a tooting, the ship’s bell sounds the midday hour, and a dark-skinned extra (who will not appear again in the film) strides, gentle-footed and quiet, the length of the upper deck so as to wake with a circumspect squeeze of the shoulder those passengers who had drifted off to sleep again just after their lavish breakfast.

  The author would like to thank Frauke Finsterwalder, Carol and Lars Korschen, Errol Tzrebinski, Angelika Schütz, Rafael Horzon, Humphrey Kithi, Ernst August of Hanover, and Frank Feremans for helping him write this book.

  A Note About the Author

  Christian Kracht is a Swiss novelist whose books have been translated into twenty-seven languages. His previous novels include Faserland; 1979; and I Will Be Here, in Sunshine and in Shadow. Imperium was the recipient of the 2012 Wilhelm Raabe literature prize. You can sign up for email updates here.

  A Note About the Translator

  Daniel Bowles teaches German studies at Boston College. His previous translations include novels by Thomas Meinecke and short texts by Alexander Kluge and Rainald Goetz.

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  Copyright © 2012 by Verlag Kiepenheuer & Witsch

  Translation copyright © 2015 by Daniel Bowles

  All rights reserved

  Originally published in 2012 by Verlag Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Germany

  English translation published in the United States by Farrar, Straus and Giroux

  First edition, 2015

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Kracht, Christian, 1966–

  [Imperium. English]

  Imperium: a fiction of the South Seas / Christian Kracht; translated from the German by Daniel Bowles. — First edition.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-0-374-17524-5 (hardcover) — ISBN 978-0-374-70986-0 (e-book)

  1. Engelhardt, August, 1877–1919—Fiction. 2. Germany—Colonies—Oceania—Fiction. I. Bowles, Daniel, translator. II. Title.

  PT2671.R225 I5713 2015

  833'.92—dc23

  2014039370

  www.fsgbooks.com

  www.twitter.com/fsgbooks • www.facebook.com/fsgbooks

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Part One

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  Part Two

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  Part Three

  X

  XI

  XII

  XIII

  XIV

  XV

  Acknowledgments

  A Note About the Author

  A Note About the Translator

  Copyright