"Eros": A creepy love story entwined with Germany history

"Eros"

by Helmut Krausser

Europa Editions, 352 pp., $16.95

A writer whose name we never learn is summoned to the secluded forest castle of an eccentric, reclusive, rich, dying industrialist named Alexander von Brücken. The dying man offers the writer, a novelist, a fabulous sum to write what von Brücken refers to as "the story of a love, my love."

The novelist will have a week at the creepy but fully staffed Bavarian castle with von Brücken to listen to the wealthy man tell his story, then the writer will have a free hand to invent any details he likes. The one stipulation is that the book be published only after von Brücken's death.

That is the appealing gambit upon which the German author Helmut Krausser hangs his page-turner of a new novel, "Eros." And as von Brücken recounts his life's story — which begins when he is an adolescent during World War II and ends in the twilight of the 20th century — the tale becomes inextricably entwined with Germany's tumultuous mid-20th century history.

There are Nazis, air raids and political exiles, followed by the terrorism perpetuated by Germany's homegrown political radicals in the 1960s and 1970s. Later the story moves behind the Berlin Wall to the bleak police state that was the euphemistically named German Democratic Republic.

As von Brücken tells his tale, it quickly becomes obvious that his entire life has been spent in a fervid state of unrequited love, or what is really unrequited obsession.

The few happy, truly euphoric moments in his life are the result of his yearning for a girl whose parents worked at his father's munitions factory during the Nazi regime. After the war von Brücken retools the factory and becomes wealthier and more powerful than his dilettantish, Nazi-sympathizing father ever dreamed of.

But for von Brücken, his wealth and power are useful for only one purpose — to service his obsession with the elusive woman he refers to as his "beloved."

Besides writing novels and poetry, Krausser is a screenwriter, and his skills at pacing and setting up cliffhangers are part of what makes this book a fun, fast read. In fact, with its cinematic leaps from the present back to previous decades, and its sure-handed limning of German political and cultural history, the novel seems ready-made for film.

And as details of the "beloved's" life are parsed out by von Brücken, questions arise not only about the veracity of von Brücken himself but about the morality of the bizarre extremes to which he slavishly follows his obsession. Is the man crazy? And what about von Brücken's tight-lipped major-domo, a man whose own life has been spent aiding von Brücken's in his unrelenting quest?

Unfortunately the end of "Eros" is brief, flat-footed and too tidy about some plot twists while leaving others dangling. Still, for those with a taste for mystery and 20th-century German history, "Eros" is a good late-summer beach read.