As of: February 15, 2024, 2:24 p.m
By: Markus Thiel
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Best-selling author Paul Auster (left) and photographer Spencer Ostrander worked together on this book.
© Siri Hustvedt
The weapon is considered a holy of holies in the USA.
Paul Auster deals with this - in a sober, laconic essay.
Photos by Spencer Ostrander provoke a bloody mental cinema.
His family's fall from grace occurred in 1919. When the grandmother went into her son's bedroom, took a pistol from under the bed and fired several fatal shots at her husband.
The perpetrator was acquitted due to insanity, and Paul Auster's son and later father was traumatized from then on.
After moving from Kenosha, Wisconsin to Newark, this broken man grew up in a broken family.
In “brutal poverty,” as Paul Auster puts it.
And his family history, which the best-selling author reveals in his new book, is not an isolated case.
It is part of the bad manners of a nation in which the use of firearms is considered holy of holies and self-image.
“Bloodbath Nation” is a slightly different book by Paul Auster.
His writing about the everyday American carnage he tries to understand is pure and unplugged.
No sharp and subtle analysis of US society using fictional characters.
No self-reflection via the detour of fiction.
But not an angry, desperate accusation either: “Bloodbath Nation” is an essay.
Written soberly, laconicly, objectively, as if with a shrug of the shoulders - and ultimately pessimistic.
The right book for Trump's looming re-election
In the year of Donald Trump's looming re-election, this book comes at just the right time.
In an America that finds itself at the greatest crossroads in its history since the Revolutionary Wars, the seriously ill Paul Auster wants to make a sound.
And the well-known statistics that he also cites speak more than enough for this book.
Americans have a 25 times higher chance of being shot than citizens of other advanced (?) countries.
82 percent of all gun deaths are committed by Americans.
Around 40,000 Americans die from gunshot wounds every year.
A madness that is firmly linked to this country.
“It is America’s latest gift to the world,” writes Auster.
“A psychopathic footnote to earlier miracles like the light bulb, jazz or the polio vaccine.”
Auster did not design the book alone.
Printed are a series of captivatingly sober images by photographer Spencer Ostrander.
They show scenes of mass shootings - but long after the crimes.
Parking spaces in front of supermarkets, churches, town halls, school classes.
Empty, clean, peopleless motifs that speak of repression and at the same time provoke a bloody mental cinema.
Deceptive idyll: Spencer Ostrander's photos show scenes where mass shootings took place.
© Spencer Ostrander
Auster's fate was no different than that of millions of other children.
The disguise as a cowboy, the western films: “I had as much fun with these carnage as anyone else.” And yet he didn't become a gunman - because, as is implicitly reflected in his family, reflections prevented something worse from happening.
The right to bear arms, Auster describes, is part of the founding myth of his nation.
Where settlers once relied on a supposedly God-given right to seize land (and to defend it), weapons are still part of the household today.
Life lies included: Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence, condemned slavery - and yet managed an estate with 600 serfs, as Auster coolly states.
So a gun ban?
“If you hand out matches to 20 children at a birthday party, you have to expect that the house will go up in flames.” So Auster becomes cynical: In the case of the car, another fetish not only in the USA, it finally worked.
Traffic rules prevent deaths - strangely enough, even in Germany, the country without a speed limit, this has not penetrated everyone's minds.
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“Bloodbath Nation” is also about Europe
So “Bloodbath Nation” isn’t necessarily a book just about the USA.
It is an essay that is also about a country that has always been divided and irreconcilable.
A nation in which “a nameless, shapeless cloud of unease has settled over all areas of society.”
A cloud that also affects Europe, where Trump's political relatives feed on people's discontent - in order to increase it at the same time, also thanks to the media.
Auster does not see a solution in confrontation, which only deepens rifts.
“There will only be peace when both sides want it.” A noble principle, possibly the only way out.
It is not for nothing that Auster quotes a frequent sentence from his mother: “Keep dreaming, Paul.”
Paul Auster:
Bloodbath Nation.
With photos by Spencer Ostrander.
Translated from the American language by Werner Schmitz.
Rowohlt, Hamburg, 192 pages;
26 euros.