Mohr

When a solitary man stumbles upon a cache of photographs, sometimes—and only sometimes—he can sense the lives of the people in them. Sometimes he can find in their faces and in the way they hold themselves or the way they perform before the camera, the light trace of their story. Following just that path, acclaimed novelist Frederick Reuss has created a love story of historic proportions. Mohr: A Novel is about a man and wife whose life together is marked irreparably by a deeply troubled and world-testing era. With the sort of enthralling narrative step that always marks his work, Reuss allows their story to rise from a cache of photographs he uncovered in Germany—photographs from the 1920s and '30s of the exiled Jewish playwright and novelist Max Mohr; Käthe, the beautiful wife he left behind; and Eva, their daughter, who would live through it all but would never really understand what had happened. The interplay between Reuss's revealing prose and the real faces in nearly 50 photographs offers a reading experience that may be unprecedented in novels.

From the first paragraph and that first creased image, which Eva may have taken, of the Mohrs at their table in Germany just before Max walked away from their lives, this beautiful and powerful novel works as deeply on the reader as a family photo album.

"Reuss follows up the antic infantilism of The Wasties (2002) with what might be called a documentary historical. At the novel's center is the real-life German-Jewish novelist and playwright Max Mohr; exiled from Germany in 1934, he chose to emigrate to China, leaving his wife, Kthe, and daughter, Eva, at their Bavarian home, and working as a doctor (for which he was trained) as China's war with Japan raged. The book is Reuss's explicit attempt to write Mohr back into the historical record and to understand his choices. To that end, he includes 47 actual photographs of Mohr, his family and their surroundings (some of which Reuss interprets), and Reuss also foregrounds his own place in the work. After an extended second-person address, Reuss tells his character Mohr, 'I say you, but I mean me. In novels, personal pronouns can be misleading. This is not an easy idea to express, and some will call the notion absurd. But why not? Why can't I be you? Or him or her?' The results are mixed as a novel, but Reuss succeeds in giving vivid shape to Mohr's life — the major events (including possible WWII spy intrigue in China) and the mundane (taking foxglove to keep his pulse regular). If not a man in full, the book contains a man kaleidoscopic." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

"Certain writers tower over their subjects so commandingly that anyone coming to them afterward must stand in their shadow — Flaubert on adultery, for instance, or Hemingway on bullfighting. So it is with W.G. Sebald on the ghosts of World War II. In works such as 'The Emigrants' and 'Austerlitz,' he used personal histories, photographs and other documentary materials to create uniquely powerful fiction... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) about the enduring effects of Hitler's Germany on the lives of those who came after. 'Only in literature,' he once wrote, 'can there be an attempt at restitution over and above the mere recital of facts.'

'Mohr,' the new novel by Frederick Reuss, explicitly follows Sebald in both its theme and execution: It tells of Max Mohr, a real-life Jewish writer (and distant relative of Reuss) who left Germany for Shanghai in 1934 and died there three years later, and it makes generous use of archival materials, particularly photographs, which are reproduced in the text in a manner similar to Sebald's. (Just in case anybody missed the connection, the epigraph is taken from Sebald's poem 'After Nature.') In a note at the end of his novel, Reuss explains that his grandfather had told him the outline of Mohr's life, but Reuss had been able to discover nothing more about him until Mohr's novel 'The Unicorn,' with an afterword by Mohr's grandson, was published in Germany in 1997, 60 years after Mohr's death. 'I went to Munich to meet this unknown relative,' Reuss writes, 'and was immediately overwhelmed by the feeling of having stepped into Mohr's life.'

Reuss tries to re-create this experience of discovery for the reader, but he is not entirely successful. The novel begins with an image of the author at Mohr's house, watching the sun rise over the mountains across the valley, then sitting at his desk in the attic poring over old notes and photographs: 'A shiver of cold concentrates your thoughts of what might have been. Glance up.' But despite Reuss' exhortations — and the wealth of family history on which he has built his fiction — Mohr and Kathe, the German wife he left behind, feel more like wax effigies than fully realized characters. They may have once been real figures, but they don't come alive here.

After giving an account of Mohr's departure, the novel alternates between Shanghai, where Mohr practices medicine among the indigent (he was trained as a doctor before becoming a writer), and Wolfsgrub, the family home, where Kathe and Eva, the Mohrs' 12-year-old daughter, try to carry on in his absence. The China sections offer ample room for drama: Mohr has a love affair with a mysterious nurse, the Japanese attack the city, his downstairs neighbor turns out to be a communist rebel leader, and more. But the various episodes, constantly intercut with flashbacks to Mohr's earlier life, never build enough momentum to come together as a coherent whole. Even the war scenes are shorn of the details that could make them visible to the reader, relying on lazy abstractions ('They returned to a completely broken city') instead of concrete observations.

As for the novel's underlying premise — did Mohr ever intend for Kathe and Eva to join him in China, and if not, why did he abandon them? — the mystery is never fully addressed, though hints are dropped, sometimes leadenly. (At one point Mohr, concerned about some physical symptoms, thinks: 'Is being in love different from being sick? Or being in exile? Cliche questions. ... Is something wrong with his heart?') Worse, though the great love between Max and Kathe is repeatedly asserted ('When they said good-bye, it was with the feeling that they'd never loved one another more than at that moment'), the reader is unable to believe in it.

The sections that focus on Kathe are more successful, perhaps because her motivations are easier to understand: We see her going through the motions of life without her husband, trying to protect her daughter from the ultimate disappointment they both fear. But even here, the scenes from the couple's prehistory feel randomly chosen, transparently inspired by the photographs plopped into the text to illustrate them. For instance, we are shown a picture of Eva chasing a small boy through the garden, and the next page tells of a prank Eva and her friends play on a young neighbor. Such episodes seem to have been created for their relevance to the archival materials, not as agents to advance an independent plot.

The so-called 'documentary novel' has become something of a trend lately, with practitioners such as William T. Vollmann, whose 'Europe Central' features Kathe Kollwitz and Dmitri Shostakovich, and Per Olov Enquist, author of 'The Book About Blanche and Marie,' which was inspired by biographical material about Marie Curie and her circle. Despite their sometimes overwhelming preponderance of evidence (the endnotes for Vollmann's novel run to more than 50 pages), these books suffer from the same paradox as 'Mohr': They are too deeply indebted to historical reality to produce a convincing fictional reality. W.G. Sebald remains unsurpassed in transmuting the 'mere recital of facts' into a resonant literature.

Ruth Franklin is a senior editor at the New Republic." Reviewed by Ruth Franklin, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
(hide most of this review)

With the sort of enthralling narrative step that always marks his work, Reuss reveals the story of the troubled relationship between a husband and wife--the husband being an exiled Jewish playwright who always meant to go back for Kthe, the beautiful wife he left behind, and Eva, their daughter.

Frederick Reuss is the acclaimed author of Horace Afoot, Henry of Atlantic City,

and The Wasties. He lives in Washington, DC, with his wife and two daughters.