If Christian Kracht’s debut novel, Faserland, was considered a “rip-off” of Bret Easton Ellis’ general style, Eurotrash would also like to submit itself for consideration. After all, its autofiction genre is very much in keeping with what Easton Ellis did for 2005’s Lunar Park (back when “metafiction” was the chicer word to use). And while most people associate BEE with Less Than Zero (which also, in its way, dabbled in autofiction) or American Psycho, Lunar Park is what broke his usual mold while simultaneously taking his “signature style” to the next level.
The same holds true for Kracht, who has now inserted a version of himself completely into Eurotrash. Whereas, with Faserland, Kracht’s protagonist was but a “nameless narrator.” And one who shares much in common with the character who will henceforth be referred to as Eurotrash Kracht, particularly with regard to being from a wealthy family, going on an odyssey in search of some grand meaning that isn’t really there and generally reflecting on an unhappy youth. A key contributor to that unhappiness being his eighty-year-old mother, who casts her pall over the narrative from page one (or rather, thirteen—as that’s where the book really begins after all the “filler bullshit pages” at the beginning).
Indeed, Kracht’s first sentences are, “Anyway, so I had to go to Zurich again for a few days. My mother urgently wished to see me. On the phone she’d said I had better come quickly, please, which was so disturbing that I became terribly anxious and constipated the whole weekend long.” Within those three sentences, Kracht brings into play the two most prominent themes of the novel: a fraught, complex relationship with both his mother and motherland. Born in Saanen himself, Kracht will bring up that “municipality” many times in Eurotrash, along with Bern, Zurich, Geneva and Gstaad (in other words, the Swiss mainstays of tourism—and, more specifically, Eurotrash tourism).
All towns and cities that he has mostly contempt for, as Easton Ellis seems to when he writes about Los Angeles (and yeah, even New York, as American Psycho reveals). Except for the fact that, whenever an author cares enough to write about a place so derisively, it’s usually because they care enough about it in general to do so. Maybe the same holds true for Kracht remarking, “I now understand that my mother’s affairs, which had forced me to visit Zurich every other month, this city of poseurs and braggarts and debasements, had completely paralyzed me for years.” So yes, clearly, Zurich, as much as his “mother’s affairs,” is what ails him. Along with Switzerland as a whole and “Europe” at large. Oh yes, and being the grandson of a Nazi.
To that point, the meaning behind the book’s title is more about how Kracht truly sees himself and his “kind.” That is to say, those who have inherited their privilege from some nefarious provenance. In Eurotrash Kracht’s case, that provenance stems from the sale of arms. Then, of course, during World War II, with Eurotrash Kracht’s maternal grandfather being an “Untersturmführer in the SS and employed by the Reichspropagandaleitung of the Nazis in Berlin,” there were plenty of spoils collected at that juncture as well. Begging the question, as a descendant of such a person: How do I deal with that kind of “legacy”?
In George W. Bush’s case (whose grandfather, Prescott Bush, also made bank during WWII, working for the “wrong” side [though not wrong to those who wanted to fill their bag]), it was to continue the cycle of warmongering. But in Eurotrash Christian and his mother’s case, it’s to withdraw 600,000 Swiss francs (roughly 765,595 dollars) from the bank and give it away profligately. To “get rid of it, squander it,” as his mother says.
As if, by doing so, they can purge themselves of their guilt and complicity. By throwing it at whoever they arbitrarily home in on at any given moment during their bizarre trip together. One that starts at the bank itself, where the pair are met with some initial suspicion. After all, as Eurotrash Christian puts it, “I mean, how did this look: an old, half-drunk woman with bruises and greasy hair and bloodshot eyes clinging to her walker and heaving herself out of the elevator, her shadow of a son and a couple of battered travel bags?” Well, they don’t call it “stealth wealth” for nothing. And oh, how wealthy Eurotrash Christian’s mother is—and also quick to point out that he’s the one who’s broke, not her. The automatic assumption always being that children benefit from their family’s financial status. Though, based on Eurotrash Christian’s noticeably privileged/Patrick Bateman-esque descriptions, it’s evident he’s “benefited” plenty. Take, for example, his assessment of Bulgari as the height of gaucheness, of faux luxury:
Often, when old people who have lost touch would like to suggest elegance, they resort to Bulgari. In my youth, there had been a Bulgari glass case with Bulgari jewelry in the dreadful discotheque Club Rotes Kliff on Sylt, in Kampen. And in the dreadful luxury hotels in Marbella and Venice and Positano there were always Bulgari grooming products lying around in the bathrooms. Dreadful places like Qatar and Dubai were serviced by dreadful luxury airlines who likewise offered Bulgari products in their in-flight shower stalls.”
But, wanting to get away from all “that sort of thing,” Eurotrash Christian and his mother descend upon a “commune” advertised as the “vegetarian Dirk Hamer Commune.” With a brochure “showing photos of blond Swiss families cultivating their fields, making pottery together and picking apples, all in desaturated colors.” Which probably should have been Eurotrash Christian’s first clue that this “innocent” commune has some decidedly Nazi “values.” And who knows, perhaps they were energetically attracted to it in the first place seeing as how most of Eurotrash Christian’s mother’s millions are “primarily invested in German weapons systems.”
Upon their arrival, Eurotrash Christian eventually encounters the “steward,” so to speak, of the place. Another nameless character, and one who presumes Eurotrash Christian to be author Daniel Kehlmann, which Eurotrash Christian readily goes along with (just as an autofiction version of Bret Easton Ellis would also probably go along with being mistaken for Jay McInerney). However, once he fully comprehends that the place is, let’s say, antisemitic in nature, he’s quick to make his escape (and withhold their originally intended cash donation). Indeed, Dirk Hamer is a real person, as is his father, the oft-mentioned “leader” of the commune’s “ideals,” Ryke Geerd Hamer. Alas, Eurotrash Christian doesn’t realize this until they’re already way up in the mountains trying to give away some of their fortune to the very type of vile people that had made it possible for them to get it in the first place. But, as it is said in different ways throughout the novel, money is a dirty, dirty thing. Literally.
It’s a subject that comes up as Eurotrash Christian and his mother are leaving the bank with their near million dollars in cash. Painting the picture of money’s dirtiness, sordidness and fundamental meaninglessness (save for the meaning humans give to it), Eurotrash Christian describes, “The man handed her a bag, and she dumped the bundle of six hundred one-thousand-franc bills into it. That had surely been what it was like with Gustav Delbanco, too. The thought would never have occurred to anyone that this man, who looked and smelled like a homeless person, was carrying around millions in a plastic bag. I thought about the fact that there was indeed a correlation between money and garbage…” Here, again, Eurotrash Christian speaks to the concept of “stealth wealth” (or “quiet luxury,” to use another adjacent term). The all too accurate notion that a lot of rich fucks are walking around dressed as derelicts mostly for the sake of “throwing people off the scent” of their wealth (and because “poverty cosplay” is their fetish).
The same sentiment is conveyed when Eurotrash Christian and his mother go to a quintessentially fancy restaurant (a term only non-rich people use) and their behavior/appearance is mistaken for what Eurotrash Christian refers to as “reverse snobbery” (and not for the first time). As he tells it, the waiter’s perception of them is likely this: “A nobody would never behave like this in the Saanenland… After all, [the waiter] had enough experience with prominent visitors here in the valley, he had decades of experience with them, and it was written all over their faces that he must cater to their wishes… They had a plastic bag full of money, and a taxi was waiting for them beside the restaurant’s garden. That they weren’t carrying Louis Vuitton bags and hadn’t pulled up in a Porsche Cayenne as C-list celebs would have done, but had the taxi wait, with the meter running, was definitive proof.” Or rather, merely definitive proof that most rich people are trashy and uncouth—if not more so than the “great unwashed.”
Perhaps the only thing more maligned in this book than money, privilege and how both are typically “earned” by the uber wealthy is Switzerland itself. A kind of synecdoche for affluence. Case in point, Eurotrash Christian recalling of his mother, “The fundamental problem was always money, she had once told me, years earlier, when she’d gone to the psychiatric ward for the first time, then in Meiringen. Money is the instrument of oppression, don’t forget that, my boy, she had said, that’s how they get you, especially here in Switzerland… This country, Switzerland that is, didn’t even exist until the English invented it at the end of the eighteenth century, she had said, until it was captured on postcards, as a panorama, as a sight, as a view.”
That Switzerland as both a “concept” and a destination were manufactured by rich, colonialist types continues to come up throughout Eurotrash. Starting perhaps with the Martin Parr photograph that graces select editions of the book’s cover. Front and center in the foreground of it are two rather dowdy-looking, ill-dressed people—a woman and a man. The man standing out slightly more for his “Donald Trump tan.” Their tacky chaise lounges in equally tacky colors are a blight on the otherwise pure white snow. The meaning behind such an image being perhaps twofold: on the one hand, the “pure white snow” represents what Nazi ilk (the right wingers and fascists) believe to be an ideal getting besmirched by the sort of “riffraff” shown on the cover. On the other, it represents the idea that the rich themselves are the scourge upon a pure land. A notion that Eurotrash Christian reiterates when he speaks on the nature of Gstaad today, explaining,
Over in Gstaad the native population was sitting on real estate worth so extravagantly much that even parcels in the middle of Tokyo and London would appear inexpensive by comparison. Thousands of huge chalets had sprung up here in the Saanenland, all constructed in the exact same style… And a peculiar kind of people had sprung up here in the last sixty years: essentially coarse, aloof mountain farmers whose minute plots of land were suddenly worth hundreds of millions of francs, and these fantastic prices depended on which oligarchs showed up to ski in that particular season. It had become a valley of absurdities, my homeland. This entire Debordian spectacle had naturally also extended to the neighboring village of Saanen, even out to Feutersoey, Rougemont and Château-d’Œx.”
But it seems, for all his ire for Gstaad, he has it doubly for Zurich, railing against it by noting that essentially everything about it is claustrophobic:
Zurich was claustrophobic; the little flower shop was claustrophobic, the old city made me claustrophobic, the fifteenth-century buildings, never destroyed in World War II, made me claustrophobic, the ladies with their shopping bags from Kaufhaus Grieder made me claustrophobic and cut me off, the streetcars made me claustrophobic and cut me off, the bankers walking to their banks to accumulate more gold beneath Paradeplatz made me claustrophobic and cut me off. Recently, a few months earlier, I had seen a banana peel lying on the cobblestones, and I’d stood awhile to wait and see what would happen, but no one slipped on it. The residents of Zurich were of course too shrewd to slip on a banana peel. They were too superior, too confident, too steeped in that grand Zurich world of theirs, in which they shopped in boutiques whose vertiginous monthly rents continued to sustain this, their Zurich.”
It is here that Zurich (instead of the entirety of Switzerland) becomes the synecdoche for wealth, the embodiment of how nothing can penetrate the bubble they’ve created for themselves. Least of all criticism from some writer. Or worse still, someone who could be seen as nouveau riche. Yet for all his disdain for Zurich and Switzerland, Eurotrash Christian must at least admit,
…I was actually fortunate to be in Switzerland and not have to be in Germany, where the blood of murdered Jews still stained the streets and the people were not the least bit shy about anything, although of course it would suit them to be a little more introverted and humble, the Germans. A Germany whose manly Germans would shout into their manly mobile phones in public, especially when they were in Switzerland, and where it looked and sounded like they were on the phone with the Reichspropagandaleitung, slouched and spread-eagled on the sofas or the first-class lounge at Zurich Airport, whereas in reality they were merely speaking with an ad agency or with their department manager. What luck, I thought, what luck, how lucky that I was in Switzerland.”
To be sure, the distaste for Germany crops up before the book even begins, with Kracht choosing as one of the quotes used to offer an overarching sense of the narrative, “If you love Germany, you shouldn’t visit it.” That Jorge Luis Borges (whose grave they inevitably visit) “ism” preceded by Jiddu Krishnamurti’s “What is fully completely understood leaves no trace as memory.” So maybe that’s why all Eurotrash Christian has are memories, particularly from the past twenty-five, thirty years. All boiling to the surface as he takes his mother on this crackpot journey, ultimately in a bid to convince her that they’re going on a trip to Africa together when, in fact, he’s putting her in the last “institution” that will take her, likely never to see her again once she goes in. Something he feels almost as guilty about as he does his familial background, and the way they secured their wealth.
So it is that Eurotrash Christian decides that maybe it’s a good thing—a sign of “generational progress,” if you will—that he was never capable of “identifying” with his family. In this regard, he comments, “Sometimes, often I’d told myself, really, it wasn’t an indication of mental health to be able to adapt to such a deeply disturbed family. And how I had ever succeeded, how it had ever been possible to succeed in extricating myself from my family’s misery and mental illness, from these abysses that couldn’t have been more profound or unfathomable or miserable, and in becoming a halfway normal human being—this I was incapable of puzzling out as I lay on the hotel bed in Zurich staring at the ceiling, while outside, beneath my window, intoxicated Zurich youths caterwauled and celebrated their depressing intoxication.” With that increasingly signature brand of Zurich scorn also thrown in for good measure.
As for the family scorn element, it’s also something Easton Ellis would get on board with. This is, lest anyone forget, the man who based Patrick Bateman on his own father. And Bateman, too, is a synecdoche for wealth and privilege. More specifically, what those who are born into it always end up doing, simply because they can and because it was what their forebears did too: pillage and destroy and cause complete and utter misery and chaos in the lives of others. Those “others” almost always being members of the “hoi polloi.” And so, while Eurotrash Christian and his mother can feel as “guilty” and “self-hating” as they want about where their money comes from, they continue to engage in the same cycle as always, even while in the midst of trying to “unload” a fortune. But still treating “the little people” along the way like their own personal servants, put solely on this Earth to do what they’re commanded to by people like Eurotrash Christian and his mother. Such is the unending ouroboros of abuse. The unwavering “food chain” of capitalism.
Or, as Eurotrash Christian sums it up at one point early on in the novel, “My goodness, this life, what a perfidious, sordid, miserable melodrama it was, I thought, while continuing to stare at the ceiling of the hotel room, realizing that this was in fact the eternal return, our inability to pinpoint any beginning of time—aeterniatas a parte ante, as a priest in Florence had once tried to explain it to me. Should one ever succeed in interrupting the cycle of history, one could influence not only the future but the past as well.” Unfortunately for the broke asses of this world, the past remains unchanged. And is always present.