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"Jáchymov" is a triangular story. The angles – in a well constructed network of tensions kept up to the very last page of the book – are formed by Bohumil Modrý, Blanka Modra and Anselm Findeisen. The first two are historical figures, the third a fictitious character. Anselm Findeisen, who runs a small publishing house in Vienna, and Blanka Modra, a dancer, meet each other by chance. Findesen is trying to find relief from his Ankylosing Spondylitis (AS) disease in a hotel in the Czech spa town of Jáchymov, without knowing what a place of horror this Czech military base used to be.
The dancer begins to tell him her story, or rather that of her father’s life, which has always accompanied her. As a tragedy.
Bohumil Modrý was the goalkeeper of the Czechoslovak national ice-hockey team and had been a star since the 1930s. As a sportsman he had achieved everything, and yet his successes did not protect him from the arbitrary way the Communists used their power. ‘The entire national ice-hockey team was arrested.’ And why, ‘Anyone who after 1948 drew attention to themselves through their independent thinking was thrown into prison,’ like Eduard Goldstücker or Václav Havel. (p. 56, p. 57)
Bohumil Nodrý was arrested, deported to the labour camp at Jáchymov and was held there like an animal in catastrophic conditions for five years. When it came to torture methods the Communists were also devilishly inventive.
There is nothing else that his family, that is to say his wife Erika and his daughter Blanka, who tells the story to the publisher and finally hands it over to him in the form of a manuscript, can do apart from watch their husband and father die a wretched death.
Later Blanka makes the records of the trial available to the author Josef Haslinger and allows him to quote from the letters her father wrote from prison. The novel begins by quoting Radka Denemarková, ‘They let themselves be infected by the filthiness of the Nazis, without being aware of this.’ Haslinger provides evidence of this claim throughout the book and shows Stalin’s vassals in the right light. The novel is a "tour d’horizon" of the entire postwar Eastern bloc.
In his book Josef Haslinger has fitted private details into the overall historical picture and drawn an impressive picture of just how forcefully the big world of politics determines personal fortune or misfortune.

Abridged from a review by Janko Ferk. English translation by Leigh H. Bailey. Full German text: http://www.literaturhaus.at/index.php?id=9087

[ book info ] Haslinger, Josef: Jáchymov. (original language: Deutsch) S. Fischer, Frankfurt/Main, 2011 . ISBN: 978-3-10-030061-4.