Mars in Aries

Last year I discovered the work of Alexander Lernet-Holenia, an Austrian novelist, playwright, screenwriter, and soldier. He served in the Austro-Hungarian Army during the First World War and as an Austrian reservist in the Wehrmacht, Austria having been consumed by the Third Reich in the Anschluß, in the Second. His work—at least what I’ve read so far, and I’m always looking for more—is atmospheric and uncanny, with his protagonists descending or arriving unexpectedly in worlds in which the invisible is made manifest and layered over the day-to-day.

Baron Bagge, the novella I reviewed for Miller’s Book Review last summer, does this with an Austrian cavalryman in the First World War. Count Luna, about an Austrian businessman convinced that a former rival who died in the concentration camps is haunting him, does this in the aftermath of the Second World War. Mars in Aries not only takes place during the Second World War, it was written and published—and banned—while it was yet ongoing.

Mars in Aries tells the story of Lieutenant Wallmoden who, we learn on the first page, is not the novel’s hero, simply its main character. The story takes place over a month or so in the late summer of 1939 as Wallmoden, an Austrian reservist, volunteers to join his unit rather than wait to be called up for mobilization by the Germans. He whiles away this peacetime service talking to his brother officers, conducting training exercises, and—occasionally—experiencing visions.

In an especially vivid one that occurs during training, Wallmoden is leading troops across a field near a village when he finds himself surrounded by ghosts. An army doctor assures him he is in good health, but it unsettles Wallmoden to have experienced this after conversations with another officer, a man of a mystical bent and with an interest in spiritualism, about whether or not one can tell if another person is an apparition.

Being of a well-off background and an officer, Wallmoden also makes social calls. It is during one of these that he meets Baroness Pistohlkors. She claims to have been born in the United States and briefly married there before being dumped—all the result of a misunderstanding—and remarrying a consumptive nobleman who moved her back to Europe and promptly died. Still young and breathtakingly beautiful, she is a titled and wealthy widow. An old man who is, strangely, often in her company, insinuates to Wallmoden that despite the two marriages the Baroness is still a virgin.

Wallmoden finds the old man offputting, the Baroness’s foreign friends strange, and her behavior stranger still—why, for instance, does she sometimes speak to only one other person at parties? or disappear before the parties end? and why do the handful of people who know her warn him of her bad reputation?—but he is smitten.

In just a few weeks, heedless of whatever she has earned a reputation for, he develops a passion for her, but the Baroness plays hard to get. Only after Wallmoden’s dogged pursuit does she, one day, agree to meet him for a tryst. They set a date and time for their rendezvous and Wallmoden returns to his camp.

That night the army deploys.

Wallmoden’s unit drives from Vienna to the Slovakian border with Poland preparatory to the German invasion. Wallmoden is unaware of the geopolitical maneuvers by the higher powers, never named, who control world politics, and is preoccupied with letting Baroness Pistohlkors know why he missed their meeting and with scheduling a belated one. He also continues to have visions or waking dreams, like a crawfish migration across the road leading over the Polish border or a ghostly encounter with two bathing girls from some past time, an encounter invisible to everyone else and that leaves no sign behind except a pair of wet footprints.

I don’t want to reveal anything further. I’ve already worked to conceal a lot about the plot. Wallmoden eagerly awaits word from the Baroness, the invasion comes and his unit strikes into Poland, he gets some surprising bad news, and has a yet more surprising encounter after being wounded. The story ends with a stunning reversal, with Wallmoden content but—both literally and metaphorically—nowhere near where he wanted to be.

Mars in Aries may well be my favorite of Lernet-Holenia’s books so far. It has the atmosphere of Baron Bagge and the absorbing ambiguity of Count Luna, as well as a satisfying streak of mystery. It works as both a romance and a war novel. The first half, in which we follow Wallmoden on his desperate bid for Baroness Pistohlkors’s heart, should prove especially poignant to anyone who ever felt unrequited love, and the second half, covering the invasion of Poland, utterly swamps the first. Lernet-Holenia, basing the book on his own experiences in the Wehrmacht, makes the invasion viscerally real—hot, dusty, exhausting, a parade of destruction and casual violence. The harsh reality of these scenes—which I’ll return to momentarily—make the reversal at the end that much more surprising.

The title, an astrological sign, does not reflect any actual celestial alignments during the invasion but apparently does suggest passion and aggressive desire. This is thematically appropriate, but the novel’s original title, The Blue Hour (Die blaue Stunde), a slang term used within the story for brief romantic trysts, works well on several levels, too.

As an additional layer of interest, Mars in Aries was published in 1941 and immediately banned by the Nazis. Actually banned, as in: sale was legally prohibited and the print run put in storage and destroyed. Reading it now, its apparent inoffensiveness—a love story with some mystical elements—may obscure what the Propaganda Ministry objected to. While the novel portrays German victory in Poland, it shows soldiering as unromantic, unheroic, and laborious; some of Wallmoden’s fellow officers openly talk about annihilating civilian settlements; the Poles, though rarely seen by Wallmoden, accordingly have a undertone of heroism; and some of the strange social gatherings in the first half of the novel suggest criminal activity—as a few other characters point out to Wallmoden—including Resistance work.

Fortunately, Lernet-Holenia had kept his publisher’s proofs and used them to republish the book after the war. I’m glad he did, and that the combined might of real censorship and Allied bombing couldn’t erase Mars in Aries.

This is an unusual novel, with a unique combination of romance, the uncanny or even gothic, and realistic warfare, and its climax is a suspenseful and moving surprise. Mars in Aries is beautifully written, exceptionally well-crafted, and, at about 200 pages, compact and powerful. I look forward to rereading it soon.