Mesmerized by the puzzling notion of space flight, the inhabitants of a small mountain village in Cold War Communist Romania ruminate about whether the space race will prove the existence of the Virgin Mary and her assumption to heaven.
Along with the novel’s lighter subject, the author offers a sarcastic and brutally graphic parallel story of the Communist state’s corruption and inhumanity.
Rolf Bauerdick’s The Madonna on the Moon has taken Europe by storm — winning the prestigious European Book Prize in 2012 for the best novel. This novel by Bauerdick, the German writer and essayist, invites comparison to the work of Herta Müller, a Romanian writer of German ethnicity. Like Müller’s novels, The Madonna on the Moon describes the way Romania dealt with its past and its present.
When the Nazis invaded Eastern Europe and Mussolini attempted to grab Yugoslavia, adjacent to Romania, many ethnic Germans joined the Nazi Waffen SS to fight the Soviets. The interwar monarchy returned after the war but was short lived before the Romanian Communists seized power in 1947. With increasing pressure from the USSR, Romania was subsumed under the Russian social, political and military sphere of influence. Many Germans were sent to forced labor camps in the USSR and within Romania.
Under communism, the Warsaw Pact country often was seen as a maverick among Eastern Bloc nations, showing independence from the Soviets during the 1970s and early-1980s under Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej’s successor, Nikolae Ceauşescu. The regime lasted until demonstrations toppled Ceauşescu in December 1989. A firing squad summarily executed him and his wife on Christmas Day of that year. The Romanian revolution was the only bloody fall of a government during the months of revolt in 1989 when the bloodless revolutions of Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary led to the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe.
This historical context is crucial to Bauerdick’s book, which deals with life in Romania before and during the height of the Cold War. Told through the eyes of a teenage boy, Pavel Botev, The Madonna on the Moon begins in 1957, the year of the author’s birth and the year that in launching Sputnik 1 the Soviets trumped the U.S. in the superpowers’ race for space. The novel’s first chapter recounts the marvel of a dog zooming through space: “He’s flying! He’s flying! Long live Socialism! Three cheers for the party!”
Even though Bauerdick never identifies the setting of the novel, it is obvious that Baia Luna, a small, isolated mountain village of 250 souls, is located in Romania. The village inhabitants are mesmerized by the puzzling notion of space flight. Through complicated twists and turns, a colorful cast of characters ruminates about whether the space race will prove, or not prove, the existence of the Virgin Mary and her assumption to heaven. Bauerdick cleverly uses his imaginary landmarks to hint at the many meanings of the word “moon” (loony, lunacy, moonstruck): the mountain near the village is called Mondberg, while the village itself incorporates the Latin for “moon.”
Bauerdick’s ironic tone differs significantly from Müller’s stark and often dismal descriptions of life under an authoritarian regime and her references to the “Madonna of the crescent” in The Hunger Angel. Madonna on the Moon, by contrast, demonstrates some of the comic absurdities of a government that tries to instill a sense of “progress” in an assortment of sympathetically portrayed Gypsies, illiterate peasants, tavern keepers and others who cannot quite understand the new scientific breakthroughs. The novel interweaves religious, social and diplomatic theories as to why the Russians wanted to preempt the U.S. in space flight, namely to prove that there was no God and remain true to communist atheist ideology. However, to one of the novel’s main protagonists, the Gypsy Dimitru Gabor, the Virgin Mary actually resides on the moon, and her heavenly assumption ultimately is proven through the use of telescopes and photographs.
Along with the debate about the nature of the heavens and space and the Nietzschean notion of the death of God, the novel contains a parallel story of sexual abuse, intrigue and the violent murder of the village’s schoolteacher, Angela Barbulescu. In this narrative, Bauerdick describes the corruption and inhumanity of Romania’s Communist state in sarcastic and brutally graphic terms. Some of the descriptions are not for the faint of heart, with their lethal mix of pornography and gratuitous violence.
Although the novel ends happily, with the party bigwigs who damaged lives, literally and figuratively, properly punished in the immediate aftermath of the 1989 revolution, its ending is a bit too tidily wrapped up, with all the ribbons neatly knotted. The reader, however, will derive pleasure from the author’s clever descriptions of how historical and current events are naively processed by a colorful assortment of characters in a remote Romanian village. Bauerdick’s use of language, ably aided by an excellent translation, will bring to life the absurdities of love, life, history, religion and politics in a colorful lingual brew.
Marion F. Deshmukh is the Robert T. Hawkes Professor of History at George Mason University where she teaches courses on 19th- and 20th-century German culture and history. She has curated exhibits on German art and politics and has published on German impressionist painters, Berlin Museums, German exiles to the U.S. in the 1930s, East German cultural politics and 19th-century Art Unions.
