Marius Goldhorn | "The Trials": Neo-feudal reality

It begins on a pale September morning on the beach at Ostend. T., the chronicler of the events, wakes up next to his friend Ezra, a shadowy figure of light, whose tropical disease, which remains ominous for much of the novel, is about to break out. Upon their return to rainy Brussels, in Arab cafés among young men discussing the Hajj, a festive yet unsettling atmosphere prevails. "Everyone could feel it," we are told at one point.

"The Trials," the second novel by author Marius Goldhorn (born in 1991), notoriously eludes definitiveness. It's a parable, a cipher, a foil for our own present— you name it . Hardly anything is certain in the rainy late summer of 2030, as this unlikely German couple wanders through Europe, leaving shimmering uncertainty in their wake.

In Brussels, this place especially for the African diaspora, the colonial legacy of Belgium, and indeed of the European Union, is unfolding. The independence of the Democratic Republic of Congo is being celebrated, but the celebration soon takes on a revolutionary dynamic, which T. and his friends are also swept along by. The identity of the young insurgents slowly taking over the streets remains as unclear as their goals and the question of why even the police are allying themselves with them.

Are the insurgents good, bad, left, right, or politically completely different? By leaving these questions unanswered, the text itself resembles the present itself, in which things are not yet over. This openness turns the readers themselves into seekers.

The anniversary celebration originates from the author's fiction, but not entirely. There is no such celebration in real Belgium, which still struggles with its violent history. However, the play "Une Saison au congo" (German: "In the Congo") by Aimé Césaire is the eponym, as are many African resistance fighters, opponents of apartheid, and Black intellectuals. Equally, it is about their real, superior opponents, such as CIA chief Allen W. Dulles. The architect of Western security policy was involved with the King of Belgium in the assassination of the first Congolese Prime Minister, Patrice Lumumba. By uncovering these layers of the past, the novel reveals the faults upon which Europe is built, like a foundation stone.

But this old order is dissolving. This can be observed on a small scale in "Egregore," an infinite open-world game for which the narrator, a 3D artist, is supposed to contribute. In the medieval game world, even the NPCs—the characters not controlled by human players, who are supposed to be impersonal and subaltern—develop self-sufficient rituals. A bizarre sub-narrative about the increasing indistinguishability between rulers and ruled, between virtual and actual reality.

Ezra, too, feels the anger at the ambiguous texts of his online persona, Deborn. His forum posts about the Sixth Mass Extinction not only have a large following. He embraces the already-dismissed OPV-HIV theory, the misogynistic and racist writings of the Austrian philosopher Otto Weininger, or speaks fondly about seemingly disparate topics, such as the development of the PlayStation, which, through overexploitation, is closely intertwined with colonization. His profile picture: Paul Klee's "Angel of History," who travels into the future while gazing into the past. Western progress and exploitation, even violence, are closely intertwined for Goldhorn.

After an attack on Ezra, the couple flees to the coast of northern Italy, a landscape ravaged by drought and storms. Instead of an idyll far removed from civilization, the couple encounters a clear-sighted, taciturn woman who has created a wild paradise that adapts to the new climatic conditions. A kind of positively charged utopia in an ailing world that harbors the self-healing powers of nature.

After a brief dramatic climax, T. returns alone to Brussels, to a different, albeit already tainted, utopia. A new sense of community is to emerge in the insurgents' commune. Chickens roam a square, the communards eat together. It's all very ironic, yet at the same time not in this neo-feudal vision of the future with its cheerful medieval kitsch. Things are quite left-wing authoritarian in this commune, which reproduces the violence of the world it seeks to break away from. The funny twist: It's located in a kind of state-subsidized micro-enclave at the heart of EU finance capital, the House of European History, and is itself a curated staging of revolt. The rebellion is always contained within existing, all-dominating and regulating power structures.

In Goldhorn's exploration of the European abysses, trimmed in shimmering hyperrealism, we don't escape the old world. In uncovering the insane deformations and layers of violence, which the author points to like an interested researcher without forcing us to interpret them, lies the promise of uncovering the underlying processes even beyond the novel.

Marius Goldhorn: The Trials. Kiepenheuer and Witsch Verlag, 288 pp., hardcover, €23.