Fractal Histories: Constructing Psychoanalytic Truth in Gerhard Roth's The Lake

Gerhard Roth (b. ) is Austria's subtlest and most complex truth-teller. The first of his two monumental cycles, The Archives of Silence ( to ), details in seven tightly connected literary, essayistic, and photographic texts the troubled relationship Austrians have to their layered, turbulent past. The range of perspectives—from direct engagement with a “remigrant” Jew who returned to Vienna after decades of forced exile in Britain to allusive literary experimentation via the figure of a (voluntarily or involuntarily?) mute mental patient in three interlocking novels—reflects Roth's own experience. His first memory is a traumatic one: fleeing the Red Army with his mother and brothers at the age of three, Gerhard narrowly escaped death from an air attack by the RAF. The general panic, his mother's tremendous fear, and the sight of the dead and injured in the field surrounding the train they had had to abandon made a profound impression on the young boy. Roth vividly remembers trailing along through the Styrian countryside after his physician father when he was slightly older (G. Roth, personal communication, August 11, 2014). As a former member of the Nazi party, and as an officially stateless “Siebenburger Saxon,” Roth's father was initially denied the right to practice in immediate post-war Austria, so had to make a living accepting produce, meat, and eggs from his rural house-call patients. It was here, and during the occasional trips with his mother to the Feldhof asylum near Graz to visit her mentally ill cousin, that Roth developed his lifelong fascination with extraordinary physical and psychological phenomena (see Schütte, 2013, pp. 12-14). The fact that his experiences with illness and death were closely linked, on multiple levels, to his family's imbrication in the horrors associated with Austria in the Second World War meant Roth has spent the rest of his life