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Badenheim 1939 (1978) - Frenuyum - 12-03-2025
It is spring 1939 in the age of anxiety. In months Europe will be Hitler's. And Badenheim, a resort town vaguely in the orbit of Vienna, is preparing for its summer season. The vacationers arrive as they always have, a sampling of Jewish middle-class life: the impresario Dr. Pappenheim, his musicians, and their conductor; the gay Frau Tsauberblit; the historian, Dr. Fussholdt, and his much younger wife; the "readers," twins whose passion for Rilke is featured on their program; a child prodigy; a commercial traveler; a rabbi. The list waxes as the summer wanes. To receive them in the town are the pharmacist and his worried wife, the hotelier and his large staff, the pastry shop owner and his irritable baker, Sally and Gertie (two quite respectable prostitutes), and, mysteriously, the bland inspectors from the "Sanitation Department." Badenheim 1939 owes everything to its author's astonishing capacity to recreate the energies and confusions of innocent and uncomprehending victims who, always loyal to civility and social graces, fail to even dimly see the cruel terms of their imminent fate.
"The writing flows seamlessly...a small masterpiece."
Irving Howe, NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW
"As real as Kafka's unnamed Prague...imbued with a Watteau-like melancholy."
Gabriel Annan, NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS
"Magical...gliding from a kind of romantic realism into universal allegory."
Peter Prescott, NEWSWEEK
"The sorcery of *Badenheim 1939* [lies in] the success with which the author has concocted a drab narrative involving rather ordinary characters and made their experienced profoundly symbolic yet never hollow."
Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, NEW YORK TIMES