Kino by Jurgen Fauth

book

This is an elegant book, wrapping the core of a thriller in ideas that play with literary and semiotic conventions. It’s about a man who called himself Kino. In German, this means “cinema”. So the book is about the life and work of a man who, for a time, became so famous within his own country, he was personified as German cinema. It’s also implicitly about the power of film in general and of one film in particular, Tulpendiebe or The Tulip Thief. We have a description of the moving images constituting that one film and then a deconstruction showing how they might be interpreted. From this we might conclude words are a poor substitute for the reality of viewing a film, but then words can always fill in gaps and tell us about what we missed seeing. As text, we have a conventional prose format and a diary. These are words that form a narrative and words that represent a form of continuous consciousness or interior monologue reduced to paper. In other words (sic), the main theme of Kino by Jurgen Fauth (Atticus Books, 2012) is the meaning we attribute to symbols and how that meaning may change over time. A secondary theme is the nature of the relationships we make and break.

As to the first theme, a director uses the medium of film to communicate a message to his immediate audience. “Making a movie is like constructing a creature. The cast is the face, the director the brain, the cinematographer the eyes and the crew the hands.” Then we have to ask why copies of this and other films should have been burned by the Nazis, and why a single copy of Tulpendiebe should suddenly reappear, only to be stolen after a single private viewing. Later, we discover Kino was asked by doctors to write down his thoughts about the past. Yet the moment we learn he was in a hospital, accused of being a danger to himself and others, this labels him an unreliable narrator. How much should we trust this director and his creative intentions in making the film? To answer this question, we should be able to view the film, yet it has been stolen. How much should we trust what he later writes about his life? The answer to this question comes through the story of what happens to the remnants of his family when the copy of the film appears.

Jurgen Fauth, a man equally at home in two different cultures

As the source of these questions, Germany is often considered something of an enigma during the Weimar Republic as the initial chaos following the loss of World War I slowly subsided to be replaced by Goldene Zwanziger (the Golden Twenties). Kino’s diary is a kind of metaphor for the conversion of an innocent from the country to a lionised film director in Berlin, for the transformation of lies into truth, for the evolution of a broken society into a Golden Age where even the children can be wise beyond their years. That all changed, of course, when Hitler became Reichskanzler in 1933. Despite trying to conform, Kino’s films were banned as degenerate. Except he continued to make films. Sadly paradoxical, then, that after he attempted to leave Germany without permission, he had to watch as they were all burned, even those made with state approval.

Then we hear grandma’s version of the same reality. Except she’s high on drugs, alcohol and natural malevolence, so what she says is no more reliable than poor dead granddad. The most interesting accusation she makes is about the power of images to affect the mind. It’s less overt propaganda because the message is in the subtext. Just imagine if you really could weaponise the cinema. . . which, of course, leads our granddaughter as heroine to view the director’s lone US film called The Pirates of Mulberry Island and to hear the backstory of how that film came to be made. Then there’s the possibility a director’s cut of the US film exists. It’s called Twenty-Twelve.

On the secondary theme, we’re offered the chances to understand the nature of family, and explore why couples should decide or refuse to stay with each other. We see relationships under pressure once the Weimar Republic is suspended and the Third Reich begins. This continues into America as it goes through the Second Red Scare and into the more liberal sixties. Time then lurches forward to contemporary America which gives us a whole new perspective on the cultures of the past. Indeed, Jurgen Fauth is demonstrating that history is mutable. We can make different stories from the past seem equally credible by manipulating our interpretation of texts and oral histories. Let’s now put this into a modern context. With only fallible controls over the internet, access to the discourse has been democratised. Thousands of people are prepared to blog and publish their own assertions of truth, so it’s no longer possible to maintain a single, politically correct view of the past.

Perhaps I should offer an apology for all this idle rumination. I’m simply touching vaguely on some postmodernist ideas inspired by the text. Nothing of this appears in the book. Kino is not a dry philosophical tome. As a thriller, it flows rapidly along, told against a background of a bomb threat to a plane, chases across rooftops and, later, gunfire. Life gets exciting for our heroine when she receives a copy of Tulpendiebe and flies out to Germany. Then it’s back to America for an extended family reunion and a resolution that’s satisfying for the more important characters we get to know. I can’t say I’m completely convinced by the motives of those doing the chasing which includes hints of supernatural powers and a possible government conspiracy, but it does not change my opinion of the book. As a final thought, it’s always interesting to meet an author who’s so obviously comfortable in two rather different cultures and languages. I’m pleased Atticus should take a risk and pick up this first novel. Jurgen Fauth has a confident touch and is worth watching in the future. So, if you like a thoughtful thriller, delivering some history that may be true, Kino is the book for you.

A copy of this book was sent to me for review.