Christian Kracht's Imperium: A Review

Christian Kracht, Imperium: A Fiction of the South Seas (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015). 179 páginas. Trans. by Daniel Bowles.

The beginning is the end, and the end is the beginning. At least that is the case in Imperium, a half-fictitious, half-truthful narrative on the life and the death of one August Engelhardt, the German youth who in 1902 travelled to what today is Papua New Guinea, having decided that he was going to live his life as a nudist and an absolute vegetarian. His belief that sunlight and coconuts were sufficient to maintain his organism healthy, strong and in harmony with the universe had been enshrined in an 1898 manifesto titled Eine Sorgenfreie Zukunft (A Carefree Future).

Kracht rewrites his life an at times weird parody. While it echoes the turn-of-the-century imperial adventure novels by favourites of mine such as Conrad, Stevenson and Melville (whose works I must needs reread one day, I keep telling myself), Engelhardt the character is depicted in broad strokes, in episodic fractions with hardly any depth to them. Kracht indulges in the creation of a humorous tropical setting where mozzies, poverty, disease and white colonialist blokes are abundant. They may be clichés, only maybe – yet they are effective in leading towards the demise of the obsessive and pig-headed Engelhardt. The author delights in conveying the consequences of his resulting malnutrition and the many ailments that affect his body: loss of teeth, bleeding gums, ulcerous spots, unhealing wounds, parasitical infestations … you name it.

The real August Engelhardt in 1911. 

It is an apt allegory: Fanaticism corrodes reason and generates a rottenness not just in the body but also in the spirit. It is, after all, the Germany of the early 20^th century and we all know what happened a hundred years ago. Nothing good came out of it.

The hapless Engelhardt buys an island and hires locals to develop a coconut plantation. His pretty much useless investment soon puts him in debt. He was probably already crazy in 1906, his body reduced to a skeleton, and by the second decade of the century he had become sort of a tourist curiosity. In Imperium, however, Engelhardt lives until the end of World War II, when US Navy officers find him on Kolombangara Island. His is “one heck of a story”; “Just wait ‘til Hollywood gets wind of this”. The officer who interviews him avers Engelhardt’s story will be in the pictures.

Hopefully someone in Hollywood will one day decide to film this story using Kracht’s acerbic lens, for it will be unmissable! Some of the episodes invented by Kracht in his narrative caused me to laugh out loud, even though they are actually gruesome and bloody. Like the deadly ending to the celebration of the wedding between Rabaul tycoon Queen Emma (who had sold the island to the nudist coconut eater) and Berliner musician Lützow.

Given its brevity and the fact that it is excellently researched, Imperium is a great read. Bowles’s translation is impeccable and reflects the author’s deliberately derisive attitude to the characters and the historical period. The ironies are delicious and generously scattered throughout its 179 pages; it is a comedy of imperialistic horrors in the South Pacific, not quite as frivolous as it could have been.