On Michael Lentz’s “Schattenfroh”

In black-and-white footage filmed by the Royal Air Force bomber command in November 1944, British planes the shape of winged torpedoes drop bombs on a small city called Düren, in Germany. The city—the last major population center before the Allied Army’s Rhine River crossing—was obliterated, and 3,127 people were killed. 3,100 of them make it into Michael Lentz’s novel Schattenfroh, in the form of a 70-page list handwritten by the narrator in a bid to remember each of the dead. Remembrance, as Lentz sees it, an anxiety-laden affair.  The stakes are existential in proportion: if our narrator forgets someone, “then they’ll be snuffed out for a second time,” he worries. In other words, they’ll be snuffed out of history after being snuffed out of life. “My son, be careful in your work,” a voice calls out to him, “for your work is the work of Heaven. Should you omit a single letter or add an extra letter, you may find yourself destroying the entire world, all of it.”