First published in 1980, Aharon Appelfeld’s story’s set in an imagined spa town somewhere in the Austrian countryside. It’s spring 1939, holidaymakers are flocking in: a few are recuperating from illness; many are here for the annual music festival directed by Viennese impresario Dr Pappenheim who’s led proceedings for over thirty years. On the surface this is an idyllic place, despite the gloomy forest surrounding it, the streets are lined with fragrant, blossoming trees, visitors devour pink ice cream and delicate strawberry tarts in the village square. Yet some people are strangely restless, one local woman, frail, sickly Trude is plagued by Cassandra-like visions of doom, of a diseased and dangerous society. And this year something unexpected happens a mysterious organisation, known only as the Sanitation Department, sends an inspector to pry into individuals’ circumstances and compile a report.

Time passes, the Sanitation Department sends more and more representatives, setting up a Badenheim office, then requiring anyone of Jewish descent to visit to register in the Golden Book. Gradually the Sanitation Department steps up its activities, bringing in wire fencing, pouring concrete; advertising the benefits of migrating to Poland. Rumours start to spread, divisions come to the fore, those who see themselves as thoroughly Austrian wonder if registration is the fault of the Ostjuden – Yiddish-speaking, Eastern European Jews forced to leave their homes after WW1. Ostjuden whose culture’s perceived as alien by established, liberal Westjuden (Western Jews). It’s a divide which invokes the use of the Ostjuden as scapegoats, immigrants whose presence was politicised to fuel virulent nationalism and antisemitism in Nazi Germany. Although Appelfeld’s narrative, which often resembles a nightmarish fairy tale, rarely refers to historical or current events, except in the most elliptical manner. He relies on his title as a framing device to position his readers.

Badenheim’s slowly transformed, cut off from the outside: the Post Office closes, supplies dry up, and amenities shut down one by one. Trude sees wolves ravening all around, something blamed on her inability to forget her childhood in Poland – a veiled reference to the brutal pogroms that spurred an earlier wave of immigration. Others deny that there’s a problem, that their Jewishness is overridden by their status as Austrian citizens with generations of Austrian ancestors. They cling to a faith in law and order - they can’t see why they should worry about things that took place long ago, in countries not their own. The atmosphere in Badenheim’s increasingly ominous, frenetic, relationships are fractious, fractured. There’s a sense of time being disrupted. As large numbers of strangers start to arrive, Viennese Jews abruptly uprooted from their homes, some insist things can return to normal if just the Ostjuden are sent to Poland. But Pappenheim, who seems to be a stand-in for collaborationists, urges everyone to embrace Poland as a marvellous opportunity for radical change.

Appelfeld’s piece has an allegorical flavour that reminded me of T. F. Powy’s Mr Weston’s Good Wine and Barbara Comyns at her most surreal. It’s disorientating and episodic – the imagery’s a tad heavy-handed at times – but it’s also uncomfortably timely, with a chilling, hypnotic quality I found gripping. Appelfeld’s perspective’s intriguing, unsettling and contradictory. Phillip Roth, an admirer of his work, dubbed him a writer primarily engaged with dislocation and displacement, these are certainly key themes - both internal and external. Badenheim itself gradually morphs into a version of the ghettoes and transit camps set up during WW2. But Appelfeld’s also writing as a survivor who escaped a concentration camp. He’s clearly invested in exploring why some Jews survived the Holocaust and others didn’t: caught up in questions about culpability; debates around submission versus resistance. He sometimes seems disdainful of his characters, portraying them as incapable of learning from history, decadent and deluded - they ultimately accept, perhaps even embrace their situation. Translated by Dalya Bilyu.

Set in an Austrian resort town during the summer of 1939, the residents and visitors are preparing for the arts festival; meanwhile, the sanitation department are wanting the news in the town to register with them, and later there is talk of moving them to Poland. It's a slim novel about one of the darkest periods of 20th century history, and get I found that I felt very little. The characters weren't very well drawn, there were too many of them - I didn't feel that I got to know any of them, it probably didn't help that many weren't even named, they were known as the head waiter etc; as such felt no emotional connection to them. It was an unsettling read, for a lot of it I just felt I was waiting for something to happen. I don't know if this is to do with the original text or the translation. I wish I had liked it more than I did.

*Many thanks to Netgalley and Penguin for a copy in exchange for an honest opinion*

This is a true anomaly of a novel, in a coruscating manner of wit, surrealism, skittish hope and horror, akin to a perpetual stay in Hesse‘s Magic Theatre notably for Madmen Only. In fact this sense of an inexorable holiday in a place that interests you, superficially wants you, ideologically stuns you, emotionally guts you, and physically repudiated you is a rather fitting way of describing, not just Harry Haller’s escapades, but Badenheim as a setting also. One is ever unsure what this town is, or represents, for it seems to depend on the opening and closing of institutions; the flitting phantasms of promises. The scene tilts, with discomfiting drunkenness, between access to delectable pastries, fruity ice creams, scintillating arts festivals, and a clawing prohibition, dragging the oddest despair that conceals nature, heightens senses, dulls reactions, and pathologises the very fish of the hotel aquarium. There is so much sickness in this novel, it is barely alleviated by such flashes of possibility and pleasantry; like when travel sickness settles in and you try to hold a conversation or suck on a sweet for pathetic saccharine distractions.

Perhaps that is the best way to describe this warping tale; nauseating with potential. No matter how jolly, enthused, or intriguing Dr Pappenheim, his elusive musicians, and the hodge-podge coterie of Badenheim residents (or are they holiday-makers; perhaps ghosts, perhaps the cast of a fairy-tale?) are, one is never comfortable amongst them. They seem to push and prod at the palings of overt reality and the kind of itching saturation that gave us Keun, Mann, Kirchner, and Werefkin. Occasionally, one thinks they’ve got it, ‘Sanitation Department appearing in a rural Germanic town, asking for each citizen’s records, heritage - obviously, they’re the Nazis?!’ Then there’s a swimming pool, Viennese dresses, cigarettes, drugs and artists turning upon artists; the scene is a pungent summation of the dead Weimar days with the added complication of manufactured identities. There are Jews, intellectuals, rabble-rousers, artisans, the insane, the regal, and the idiosyncratic; these are their nominal descriptors sequestering much more malleable characters. The artisan may despise, may betray the Jew whilst the regal espouses new ancestral connections, and the idiosyncratic sips black coffee calmly while a man is beaten in the room above his head. War is between people, and people are terrifyingly more complex than classificatory persecution. Family, in all its definitions and forms, can be awfully hollow at times but allegiances, nigh-on friendship, is plastic.

So it is that this ensemble appears, increasingly taciturn and insouciant, they only wonder over one coming glory: a train that will take them to Poland. This is another moment wherein one believes they’ve penetrated the whole analytical depth of the story, ‘Train to Poland? Well, it must be going to a concentration camp.’ What is of such consequence in reading this book is to hold off from ultimatums and expectations, a bit like the modern train system that never fails to adorn one’s journeys with delays, or lack of digestive biscuits. Yes, this story should scare you, seeping into your bone marrow like petroleum, burning and caramelising in turn; however, it is not a history lesson, it is a psychological invasion. Yes, this eldritch train may be coming from Auschwitz but these people are currently corresponding with dogs and trying to save fish from a tank. They drink lemonade and devour chocolate, they dress up for the impalpable walk to the station. The town shrinks and expands, its people have a habit of running away, of bleeding personalities and pathologies into one another, of believing in the forest’s Arcadian powers. They are so much more than their allegory, their social status, their place in history, that death train.

That train only takes them forward, but their lives are vibrant, bizarre, frightful, and joyous in meandrous form, like the Klein bottle. Such sinuosity may be enough for one to also wish for the train to hurry up, for regularity to return and the inevitability of reality to quell one’s biliousness of shifting experience. Of course, in doing so we become part of what makes modernity so callous, so easy; we take our seats in a better carriage, where the air-conditioning can be controlled, the table isn’t sticky with Pret-a-manger remnants, and the journey is so smooth one doesn’t even feel the need to look out the window and play the role of passenger. The world out there doesn’t have to mean so much after all, the brush doesn’t have to conceal manifold ecosystems and the rickety church steeples don’t have to betoken centuries of lives, deaths, and systemic injustices. I am in a train and as long as I move relentlessly, easily forward, you must too. Those begrimed cattle trucks look familiar but I don’t wish to encounter them in obliquity - the queasiness.

Steel your stomach, mind the gap between the history books and real people, and carefully imbibe this wondrous little book.

A stunning and moving account of a town on the verge of persecution. A very different kind of story telling, of its time, which understatement and hindsight makes very poignant.

The story takes place in the fictional Austrian town of Badenheim. The various characters are all hoping to return to Poland and their previous lives. A train is going to be provided for them.
It is an allegorical novel about fascism and the train that will not be taking them home but to a concentration camp. The characters sleep walk into this horror. The book is slow moving but I guess that is it's point. Interesting.

Badenheim, 1939 is a slightly surreal and atmospheric allegorical novella set in a small Jewish town in Austria on the cusp of the Holocaust. There are moments of real poignancy as the community enters states of despair and denial when facing the unknowable future.

It's a work that started life as a short story and has also been made into a play - both forms which feel more suited to the narrative - but it remains a powerful and disturbing read.

A surrealist allegory - the story of a small town in Austria on the even of WW2, where the Jewish population is enjoying summer holidays and frolicking. As the noose around its neck tightens, the proclivities become increasingly surreal, while the mood changes from opposing any population transfer to Poland to accepting it, to, finally, welcoming it, while realising that "if the coaches are so dirty it must mean that we have not far to go".

I'm sure that the short book is one of the first to deal with the issue of Jewish response to the first signs of the holocaust, and exploring their naivete as they were being prepared to be led to the slaughter. It is a poignant depiction of 1930s Western European Jews as that famous frog being cooked alive in gradually boiling water. It must have been controversial when it was written, when so many Holocaust survivors were still alive in Israel. In some ways, it is still controversial - asking why they stayed despite all the signs pointing in the direction they did.

While the book is indeed important, from a literary perspective it is harder to like. There is something of the Brecht and Strindberg traditions governing it, and, as I recognise it, I can't bring myself to like it. It's too fantastical and erratic. Form takes over function almost entirely. The characters are mere pawns in the broader agenda, and any fascination with the story doesn't just get lost - it never gets a chance in the first instance.

I recommend to anyone interested in the genre (whether Epic Theatre or Expressionism in theatre). For character driven stories of the Holocaust and the debate of why Jews allowed themselves to be led like lambs to the slaughter - perhaps worth seeking elsewhere.

My thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for providing me with an early copy of this translation in return for an honest review.

A book that could be considered satire, except that we all know later how it turned out. An almost dreamlike tale of almost unconnected sentences and characters, which at times, instead of simplifying the reading, broke it up and fragmented it, but it was probably also the author's wish that we not "get comfortable reading it." I cannot say that I would recommend it lightly.

Un libro che potrebbe essere considerato di satira, se non fosse che tutti sappiamo poi com'é andata a finire. Un racconto quasi onirico, fatto di frasi e personaggi quasi mai connessi tra di loro, che a volte, invece di semplificare la lettura, la spezzava e la frammentava, ma probabilmente era anche il desiderio dell'autore che non ci si "mettesse comodi a leggerlo". Non posso dire che lo consiglierei a cuor leggero.

I received a complimentary digital advanced review copy, in exchange for a honest review.

'Badenheim 1939' was first published in the late 1970s, by Israeli author Aharon Appelfeld, who had survived the Holocaust. It is a haunting, strangely detached novella, with a sense of being divorced from reality. The fact the author lived through events similar to those described gives it an extra power. The story begins in the spring of 1939, in a fictional Austrian town popular with tourists. The residents are preparing for the annual music festival and associated influx of tourists and musicians. But at the same time, the sinister Sanitation Department has started its inspections, and requirements for Jewish people to register with it. Initially the townsfolk are too busy getting on with their lives, but as summer wears on, it becomes clear that life as they know it has changed forever.

Appelfeld's style is neat and factual - he doesn't employ lots of flourishes and he doesn't go in for great emotional wallowing. In some ways this makes it harder to follow, but it also enables the reader to more deeply imagine the anguish underlying the dry statements. Because how do you really put that depth of despair and hopelessly into words? The most heartbreaking thing is the way some of the characters try determinedly to make the best of the situation, promising a better life after they are deported to Poland. The reader, knowing their history, knows that won't be the case, and you get the feeling the characters do too even without the benefit of hindsight. The novel's last line brought tears to my eyes - on seeing the filthy freight wagons the townsfolk are to be taken away in, the main character comments that if the carriages are dirty, it means they can't be going far.

It isn't a happy read at all, not that you would expect it to be, and there is something really haunting and disturbing about it that is difficult to describe. It feels like some post-apocalyptic horror story, but this is what really happened in the not too distant past, and only someone naive would think it couldn't happen again. In fact, ethnic cleansing is going on today in parts of the world.

This isn't a story to pick up if you want to be cheered, but it is a worthwhile read for when you are in the mood to be challenged and to confront the horrible truth of things that can happen in this world if we don't guard our freedoms carefully.

This was a surreal experience, one that I wish had more depth to it. I initially enjoyed the writing and the characters, but by the middle of the novella I really struggled with the plot pace. I can see what social commentary the author is trying to make, it just feels a little two dimensional and surface level.

3.5 stars. A concentrated story, which allows the reader the freedom to fill in the blanks, form their own perspectives and imagine the behind the scenes. The style is plain and subtle with the allegories playing in the background. I have not read much about the Holocaust in relation to Austria at the time. Well, I wish, this book and any other book about Holocaust never existed and the Holocaust never happened in the first place.

This was interesting to read, but for me wasn't enough.
The characters in "Badenheim 1939" are richly drawn, each representing different facets of Jewish society. Their interactions and reactions to the increasing restrictions reflect a range of human responses to oppression, from denial and rationalization to fear and helplessness.
Appelfeld’s prose is minimalist and evocative, creating a subtle, foreboding atmosphere. His sparse writing style, while effective in building tension, might leave some readers wanting more detailed descriptions and emotional depth. The novel’s indirect approach to the impending catastrophe requires readers to engage deeply with the text and infer much from what is left unsaid, which can be both a strength and a limitation depending on one’s reading preferences.
"Badenheim 1939" is an important work in Holocaust literature, offering a unique perspective on the period just before the Holocaust.