The Cold One

A study of Austria’s political myths, attempts at forgetting, and the adequacy of memory

Austria, 1985 to 1989: three separate »culture wars« are raging side-by-side, all three inextricably linked. The battle between the Right and the Left to elect a new president, the controversy surrounding a proposed memorial against fascism, and the row over the most iconic theatre in the country, the Burgtheater. And in the midst of all these battles, one man fights alone, fights against the forgetting and repression of the Nazi period: the veteran of the Spanish Civil War and Holocaust survivor Edmund Fraul. Fraul is the focal point for all the action: he’s never truly escaped the camp, he is frozen to the core. He himself senses that he is incapable of expressing his feelings, that he is incapable of feeling anything at all. Until one day while wandering aimlessly through the streets of Vienna he runs into Rosinger, his former prison guard from the concentration camp, and strikes up a conversation with him: about Auschwitz.

And while Fraul is torturing Rosinger with their joint memories and the two grow ever closer, his son Karl is drinking to drown his feeling of guilt at his ex-girlfriend’s suicide and trying to make it as a stage actor in an attempt to free himself of his father. Meanwhile Stefan, in the midst of mourning his older sister, falls in love for the first time, with a Jewish girl in his class whose family is about to emigrate to Israel owing to developments in Austria. Astrid, the celebrated actress with whom Karl cheated on his girlfriend, is aging visibly due to her affair with the erratic young man and is slowly consumed by her role as Racine’s Phaedra. Her long-time partner, an actor whose star is steadily fading, is given a new lease on life when he unexpectedly gets a young journalist pregnant…

In his long-awaited second novel, Robert Schindel takes us on a journey into the world of Vienna: a world of political, artistic, and personal contradictions, enmity, love, connections, and tests of character. Into a densely woven fabric of tragedies and love stories whose endings can just as easily be happy as deadly. With a rich palette of characters and narrative perspectives, this is a cosmopolitan novel with close attention to detail, belligerent and tender, written in an intensely beautiful prose – and carried forward by the hope that the blood and warmth of a new day will flow back into these frozen characters and into the body of a society transformed.

English review by New Books in German >>

»With multiple shifts in perspective and numerous first-person narrators, Schindel presents an ambitious and aesthetically masterful engagement with recent Austrian history.« Kleine Zeitung Wien

»Robert Schindel creates magnificent scenes [...] he writes haunting dialogues.« derStandard.at

»Almost none of the characters in this book can be described as good, and that is one of its most fundamental strengths: Schindel eschews black-and-white moral contrasts, such as those which have cast the anti-fascist camp in a glorious, glittering light and plunged its opponents on the right into inky shadows.« Wiener Zeitung

»Robert Schindel has given us the most comprehensive, the only imaginable novel about these years, the Waldheim, Peymann, Bernhard, Hrdlicka, Sinowatz, Vranitzky and the early Haider years.« Die Presse, Wien online

»This novel is in some respects a roman à clef dealing with the events leading up to the ›Waldheim affair‹, whose name is ›Wais‹ in the book. But Schindel’s novel is much more than that. It not only deals with the problems of memory and forgetting, it also shows that […] we have to admit to ourselves that that which continues to preoccupy us is the return of the repressed.« ORF

»A magnificent, sad, gripping, consolatory novel about this period in our history [...]« Maxim Biller, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

»[…] the story is both exciting and funny, told from multiple perspectives, in parallel storylines, lively dialogues, and vivid metaphors […] The Cold is not just theatre novel, it’s also a love story, a political thriller, and a psychological study of the relations between men and women, fathers and sons, perpetrators and victims.« Deutschlandradio Kultur