A Comedy on Giving Away Inherited Guilt

A Farce Unravels. It is also an Elegy

Christian Kracht opens Eurotrash by summoning the ghost of his own first book. A quarter of a century earlier, a young Swiss novelist had published Faserland, a slim, poisonous, brand-obsessed monologue that ended with its narrator swimming out into Lake Zurich, apparently to drown, or perhaps merely to stop performing. Now that narrator, older, greyer, is called back to the same city by a mother who has never once summoned him before. This is not accident but architecture: Kracht is asking his readers to hold two texts in mind at once, the youthful nihilist and the middle-aged son, and to watch what a quarter-century of unexamined family history does to a man who once thought disaffection was the only honest posture available to him. The novel that results is formally slight, a hundred-odd pages of a single restless road trip through Switzerland, and thematically enormous: it is trying to work out whether a fortune assembled from looted art, arms manufacturing, and a grandfather's career in Nazi propaganda can be discharged, laughed away, or given to strangers before the money's last living beneficiaries die and take the question with them.

The premise, stripped to its skeleton, is almost a joke: a son takes his elderly, alcoholic, physically disintegrating mother on an improvised journey across the Bernese Oberland with a plastic bag containing several hundred thousand francs, much of it liquidated from an arms manufacturer's shares, determined that they will give it all away before she dies. Nearly everyone they try to give it to either refuses it, steals it, or turns out to be worse than they are. A vegetarian commune is run by disciples of a real-life pseudo-medical Nazi-adjacent quack. A taxi pilot and his accomplice attempt to rob them at a private airfield. A gust of wind carries eighty thousand francs into a mountain ravine while three bewildered Indian tourists watch. By the time mother and son reach a cemetery in Geneva to find Borges's grave in the dark, the money problem has become almost incidental; what the novel has actually been measuring, all along, is whether two damaged people who share a language of jokes, brand names, and old grief can say anything true to each other before it is too late.

Does it succeed? Substantially, and in a manner that will surprise readers who come to Kracht expecting only the glassy nihilism of Faserland. Eurotrash is very funny, often cruel, and then, without any change of register that a lesser writer could have managed, suddenly moving. Kracht's great trick is refusing to signal the transition: the same sentence that catalogues a colostomy bag with the clinical relish of a consumer-goods inventory will, three lines later, deliver a moment of unbearable filial tenderness, and the reader is never given the courtesy of a paragraph break to recover. This is a book about the impossibility of inheriting a clean conscience, and it is also, more quietly, a book about a son learning, at the age of fifty-five, to hold his mother's hand.

The Prose Style of Compulsive Enumeration

Kracht's sentences in Eurotrash owe an obvious and openly acknowledged debt to Thomas Bernhard: the long, hinge-clause constructions that pile subordinate thought upon subordinate thought, circling a wound rather than naming it directly, so that grief and grievance arrive grammatically indistinguishable from one another. But where Bernhard's rants are engines of pure, self-consuming rage, Kracht's cascades keep softening at the last possible moment into something closer to elegy. A sentence about his mother's psychiatric ward will suddenly, without warning, resolve into a memory of her scent, Ashes of Roses and a trace of lemon, and the reader realises that what looked like satire has been grief in disguise the entire time. This is a harder trick than it looks, because it requires the author to trust that irony and tenderness can occupy the same syntax without cancelling each other out.

The novel's other great stylistic signature is the brand-name inventory: Ferragamo, Hermès, Bulgari, Loro Piana, the untouched fur coats stacked in five separate Zurich storage units, the Tiffany lamps his father gave his mother in lieu of the Nolde painting he had promised her. In Faserland, this cataloguing was flat affect, the narrator's only available vocabulary for a world he could not otherwise describe. Here the same technique has curdled into indictment. Each brand name is doing double duty: it is still, as in the earlier book, a marker of a certain deracinated European luxury, but it has also become an index of money that will not wash, an inventory of objects hoarded by a family that cannot metabolise its own history and so simply keeps buying more coats it will never wear. The compulsive shopping, we come to understand, is itself a symptom of the unexamined past, an attempt to fill with acquisition a hole that only confession could close.

The mother is the novel's great formal achievement, and Kracht's control of her voice is close to virtuosic. She lies fluently, quotes Talleyrand and Malherbe with a precision that may or may not be genuine erudition, performs helplessness and monstrousness in alternating registers within the same page, and repeatedly out-manoeuvres her son in scenes that should, by rights, belong to him as narrator. The running joke that she can read his mind, guess his numbers, know his colours, functions as more than comic business: it dramatises the son's suspicion, never quite resolved, that she has always seen through his performances more clearly than he has seen through hers, and that the entire distinction between her manipulative "posture of an old woman" and some more authentic self beneath it may not exist at all.

Kracht is a Confessor: A Very Brief Genealogy of Inherited Guilt

The novel's closest literary relative is not, as its road-trip structure might suggest, Kerouac, but Thomas Bernhard's Extinction, in which a narrator inherits an Austrian family estate soaked in Nazi complicity and resolves, in prose of comparable relentlessness, to erase it. Kracht's inheritance is more liquid, arms-manufacturer shares rather than a landed estate, but the underlying problem is identical: what does a son do with property he did not choose and cannot in good conscience keep, when the very act of disposing of it requires him to handle it, catalogue it, and therefore, in some sense, possess it a little longer? Bernhard's answer was total negation, an imagined bequest of the entire estate to the Jewish community of Vienna, delivered as pure rhetorical gesture. Kracht's answer is messier and more honest about its own failure: the money keeps not leaving, the commune turns out to be corrupt, the wind takes what charity could not, and the novel refuses Bernhard's tidy, furious closure in favour of something closer to comic exhaustion.

The book also belongs to the specific German-language tradition of what critics have called Väterliteratur, the literature of the children of perpetrators and bystanders confronting their parents' silence: Bernward Vesper's unfinished Die Reise, Uwe Timm's In My Brother's Shadow, and, at some remove, W. G. Sebald's entire late fiction, in which buried complicity surfaces through fragmented travel and architecture rather than direct testimony. Kracht places himself explicitly in this lineage by having his narrator name Sebald and Marcel Beyer within the text itself, and by structuring his own novel as a journey through inherited landscape, Gstaad, Sylt, Zurich, Geneva, that keeps surfacing buried family material at each stop, much as Austerlitz's railway stations surface his own erased childhood. The crucial difference is tonal: Sebald's melancholy is unbroken by comedy, while Kracht insists, almost perversely, on keeping the reader laughing at a hedgehog-themed children's book illustrated by a former SS war painter even as the historical weight of that detail lands with its full force.

Any honest account of this novel's context must also address Kracht's own biographical shadow. In 2012, he became the subject of a bitter controversy in the German press over an essay that critics read as sympathetic to an aestheticised, ironic proximity to fascist imagery, an episode that trailed him for years and that shaped how German critics received everything he subsequently wrote. Eurotrash cannot be read innocently of this history. It arrives, whether by design or necessity, as a kind of answer: a book in which the SS grandfather is named, his crimes specified rather than aestheticised, and the family's complicity confronted directly rather than gestured at through cool detachment. Whether it fully discharges that debt is a separate question, addressed further on, but the attempt itself changes how the earlier controversy should be read in retrospect.

On the Impossibility of Giving Away Blood Money as Clean

The novel's philosophical spine is an idea it borrows, half-seriously, from Georges Bataille: that wealth accumulated beyond any possible use becomes morally inert unless it is expended, wasted, given away without return, what Bataille called dépense, the sovereign act of pure loss that alone redeems accumulation from mere hoarding. The mother, in one of the novel's sharpest exchanges, is made to have read Bataille as a young woman in Montreux, and to recognise, decades later, that her own instinct to dispose of the family's arms-manufacturer money by simply throwing it away is a kind of vulgarised potlatch. But Kracht is too skeptical a writer to let this idea function as genuine absolution. Every attempt at expenditure in the novel is thwarted, co-opted, or comically deflated: the commune turns out to be ideologically contaminated, the pilot tries to steal the bag outright, and it is finally a gust of wind, not moral will, that disposes of the largest single sum. The novel's real argument is that money cannot, in fact, be given away clean; it can only be lost, and losing is not the same as atoning.

This connects to the book's other recurring, half-comic obsession: the idea, repeated almost as a private joke between mother and son, that trauma is transmitted epigenetically, at the level of the cell rather than the story. The narrator invokes this pseudo-scientific vocabulary partly to mock his own tendency toward grand explanatory theories, and partly because he genuinely cannot otherwise account for the fact that he shares his mother's phobias, his father's mannerisms, his grandfather's silences, without ever having been taught any of them directly. The joke and the genuine anguish are inseparable, which is precisely the point: this is a novel suspicious of any framework, therapeutic, historical, or biological, that promises to fully explain inherited damage, while being unable to stop reaching for such frameworks anyway.

The deeper question the novel raises, and does not resolve, is whether comedy itself is a form of complicity. When the narrator describes his SS grandfather's post-war hobby of designing a children's hedgehog character, or catalogues the grandfather's collection of runic esoterica with the same deadpan precision he applies to his mother's unworn cashmere, is the reader being invited to see the grotesque continuity between kitsch and atrocity, or is the comic frame quietly domesticating the horror, making it safe to laugh at and therefore safe to forget? Hannah Arendt's insight about the banality of evil, that atrocity is compatible with, and often enabled by, an almost comic ordinariness of manner, hovers over these passages without being named. Kracht seems to want the reader to feel both possibilities at once, the indictment and the risk of aestheticisation, rather than resolving the tension in either direction, and whether that ambivalence constitutes intellectual honesty or a failure of nerve is the question the next section takes up directly.

What the Novel's Comedy Cannot Quite Metabolise

The most serious charge available against Eurotrash is the one its author's own history makes unavoidable: does the black comedy surrounding the grandfather's SS career risk converting atrocity into collectible anecdote? The scenes involving the grandfather's post-war career designing a beloved children's hedgehog character, his runic esoterica, his Antarctic and Tibetan expedition fantasies, are among the novel's funniest, and the humour depends on a kind of connoisseurship of absurd detail that is uncomfortably close to nostalgia. Kracht clearly intends the comedy to indict rather than caress, and mostly it does, but the discomfort is not incidental; it is the price of writing about atrocity through irony at all, and a more cautious novelist might have insisted on distancing signals the text largely declines to provide.

The second difficulty is one of narrative gravity: the mother is such a vivid, seductive, theatrically monstrous creation that she risks eclipsing the moral argument she is meant to embody. Readers may well finish the novel loving her more than they judge her family, charmed by her Talleyrand quotations and her comic timing in ways that soften rather than sharpen the reader's sense of what her father actually was and did. This is a genuine structural risk, not merely a matter of taste: a novel that wants its reader to sit with inherited complicity needs that complicity to remain uncomfortable, and a sufficiently charming monster can absorb discomfort the way a black hole absorbs light.

Third, and more quietly, the narrator's self-implication is frequently gestural rather than sustained. He indicts his teenage vanity, his brand of face powder, his hypocritical purchase of an ethically-sourced wool sweater, with real specificity, but rarely turns the same scrutiny on the more structurally serious fact of his own adult wealth and mobility: he still flies, still stays in hotels, still spends without financial anxiety, throughout a novel ostensibly about the impossibility of clean money. The confession is real, but it is calibrated to indict the easiest targets, the vanities of youth, rather than the continuing comforts of the present, and a more exacting version of this book might have pressed harder there.

Finally, the ending's flight to an evidently invented or hallucinated Africa, arriving without any of the narrative groundwork, an airport, a booking, a flight, that the rest of the novel takes such scrupulous care to provide, allows the book to exit the specific historical difficulty of Switzerland and Germany altogether rather than resolving it. This is formally beautiful and emotionally devastating, and it is also, on reflection, a kind of evasion: the hardest question the novel raises, what a family does with inherited complicity once the elders who bore direct responsibility are gone, is answered not with resolution but with departure into fiction's oldest escape hatch, the invented elsewhere.

The commune that was worse than the family. The novel's sharpest and least remarked-upon irony occurs when the family's guilt money is nearly given to a vegetarian mountain commune that turns out to be run by adherents of a real pseudo-medical ideology, the assertion that all disease originates in unresolved psychological conflict, promoted by its founder as a specifically "Germanic" alternative medicine. The son wants to give away Nazi-adjacent money and very nearly hands it to a different, still-active strain of the same ideological lineage, dressed now in wool jumpers and vegetarianism instead of uniforms. Kracht plays this for slapstick, complete with a sinister concierge and a locked-door escape scene, and the comic register is so assured that a reader can easily miss what the episode is actually arguing: that the ideology his grandfather served did not end in 1945, it simply changed its wardrobe, and money laundered through good intentions can still find its way home.

What Eurotrash Genuinely Accomplishes, and Why It Matters

Whatever reservations the preceding section registers, what Kracht has achieved here is considerable, and rare enough in contemporary autofiction to deserve emphasis. The portrait of the mother is a genuine addition to the literature of impossible parents: monstrous and magnificent in the same sentence, manipulative and clairvoyant, capable of both real cruelty and a wit sharp enough to disarm the reader's judgment of her. Few recent novels have managed a character this contradictory without the contradictions reading as authorial indecision; here they read, correctly, as the actual texture of loving someone you cannot trust.

The novel's political satire, in particular the extended, chilling improvised story the narrator tells his mother about a Switzerland that slides by degrees into fascism, complete with rebranded parties, armed police, and executions broadcast on national television, is the book's most formally audacious passage, and its placement, embedded as a bedtime story told to calm an anxious old woman, is a small structural masterstroke. It converts a familiar dystopian-satire mode into something more disturbing: a fiction offered as comfort that turns out to describe, in only slightly exaggerated form, mechanisms of complicity the family has already lived through once.

The recurring image of wool, the ethically-sourced sweater bought from libertarian knitters at the novel's opening, worn, removed, returned, smelling of earth and wet lanolin, functions as the book's quietest and most effective symbol: an attempt to purchase authenticity that the narrator half-knows is itself a performance, no less compromised than his father's bespoke English tailoring, but performed, at least, in the direction of humility rather than status. That Kracht can make a cheap wool jumper carry this much thematic weight without ever pausing to explain the symbol is a mark of real formal control.

Above all, the novel accomplishes something structurally difficult: it makes the reader feel, by the final chapters, that comedy and grief were never actually separable registers in this family's language, that the jokes, the brand names, the demanded stories, were always the only vocabulary available for saying I am afraid and I love you in a household that had no other words for either.

The Story Only a Dying Woman Would Ask to Hear Again

There is a small, unremarked-upon detail late in the novel that I think unlocks more of the book than its historical apparatus, its SS grandfather, its arms shares, its ruined art collections, altogether. Whenever the mother is frightened, in pain, or facing a task she cannot manage alone, she does not ask her son for comfort, reassurance, or explanation. She asks him for a story. It does not matter whether the story is true, borrowed from an encyclopaedia entry about a shipwrecked Victorian woman, or invented on the spot about a Kenyan bush pilot's miraculous survival. What matters is only that he supply one, on demand, indefinitely, and that he supply it well. This is, I would argue, the novel's real subject, hiding in plain sight beneath the more visible machinery of historical guilt: a family in which narrative itself, rather than money, rather than confession, rather than even love in its more ordinary vocabulary, became the only currency anyone in it ever learned to exchange.

Read this way, the entire apparatus of inherited Nazi guilt, satisfying and necessary as it is as a subject, functions almost as a decoy for a more intimate and more universal problem: what do you owe a parent who taught you, without ever saying so, that being interesting was the price of being loved? The narrator's every gift to his mother across this novel, a swimming memory recovered, a shipwreck story extended past its natural length, a fictional Africa conjured whole in the final pages because she asked for zebras and there was no time left to find any real ones, is the same gift, offered in different costumes: proof that he can still perform for her, competently, on command, one more time.

This is why the ending, whatever one decides about its evasiveness on the historical question, is nearly unbearable on the more private one. The son does not resolve his family's complicity in atrocity. He does not even fully resolve his relationship with his mother, who exits into an invented savanna still lying, still charming, still withholding the one plain sentence of acknowledgment he has spent the whole book failing to extract from her. What he does instead, in the last exchange of the novel, is give her the story she has always actually wanted: not the truth, which she has spent eighty years deflecting, but a good tale, delivered on cue, with a satisfying and false ending. It is a small, devastating admission that in this family, at least, invention was always the more reliable form of love.

The unexpected realisation that Eurotrash leaves a careful reader with, then, is not primarily about Switzerland's complicity, or Germany's guilt, or the moral status of arms-manufacturer dividends, urgent as those questions are. It is this: that the inherited damage a family cannot speak about directly does not disappear when the direct perpetrators die. It simply changes its currency, passing from silence to anecdote, from atrocity to inventory, from guilt to story, and the children of the guilty inherit not the crime itself but the family's peculiar, practiced fluency in never quite naming it. Kracht has written a very funny book about a very serious inheritance, and the funniest, saddest thing about it is that the fluency is, in the end, exactly what got passed down.