Conspirators

Where does family end and history begin? Moritz Rotenburg, the wealthiest businessman in the crumbling Hapsburg dynasty, cannot answer that. He knows only one thing: he must save his son.
It is 1913, and the embers of the splintering Austro-Hungarian Empire are about to become the spark for the most terrible war the world has ever seen. The tension is palpable in the castle of a provincial town on the border between Imperial Austria and Czarist Russia. From the wealthy aristocrats in their luxurious country estates to the impoverished Jews in the tenements of the Josef Quarter, words are whispered and plans are being made. The residents are engaged in a daily battle of wits for survival with their aristocratic Count-Governor, who rules the province as though it were his own private estate. Hans Rotenburg, Moritz’s privileged son and a budding revolutionary, is also thinking about assassination, as well as the affections of a beautiful woman. In the makeshift synagogues on the other side of town, Moses Brugger, the enigmatic “wonder rabbi,” has thrust himself into the town’s cauldron of political, sexual and religious turmoil, his fanatical followers proclaiming him the next Jewish messiah. Bruggerand every other player in this dystopian worldis watched over by Jacob Tausk, the Count-Governor’s unlikely spy master, a brilliant former rabbinical student who is determined to revenge himself to ease his tormented soul.
All of these players are about to clash in mutual suspicions, erotic attractions and conflicting schemes, culminating in an attempt of political and religious murder that will shatter lives and change the course of history. At the heart of it all lies a fundamental questioncan a father’s love overcome his son’s need to destroy their entire world and way of life?
International literary sensation Michael André Bernstein has crafted a thrilling novel that twists and turns to its gripping conclusion. But this is much more than an absorbing story that stands in sharp relief against one of the darkest tableaux of world history: it is also a compelling and accomplished exploration of what drives us as flawed and fearful beings; of the choices we must make for love, for money, and for the acknowledgment of our own personal history.
Conspirators evokes a completely believable world on the edge of collapse, peopled by characters who are each standing at the edge of their own precipice. An altogether singular and imaginative story, one that readers and critics will hail as an intense emotional and intellectual experience, Conspirators marks the debut of a major Canadian voice.

Literature & Fiction

Bernstein, Michæl André

Literary

HarperCollins, Publishers

"Beautifully written, intricate and entrancing."--Jaroslaw Anders, Los Angeles Times Book Review
Galicia, Austria-Hungary, 1913. In the castle of a frontier town, on the border between Europe and the East, the corrupt Count-Governor Wiladowski watches helplessly while a wave of assassinations sweeps the empire, and his province. When a member of his own family is murdered, the count gives broad police powers to his spymaster, Jakob Tausk: a brilliant young Jew whose ruthless war on terror extends into every corner of the province and beyond, enlisting union organizers, financiers, aristocrats and their servants, and a young novelist and playwright, newly arrived in the Vienna of Franz Josef and Freud, hungry for literary success.

Conspirators: A Novel

United States

Picador

Galicia, Austria-Hungary, 1913. In the castle of a frontier town, on the border between Europe and the East, the worldly, corrupt Count-Governor Wiladowski watches helplessly while a wave of assassinations sweeps the empire, and his province. When a member of his own family is murdered, the count gives broad police powers to his spymaster, Jakob Tausk: a brilliant young Jew whose ruthless war on terror extends into every corner of the province and beyond, enlisting union organizers, financiers, aristocrats and their servants, and a young novelist and playwright, newly arrived in the Vienna of Franz Josef and Freud, hungry for literary success. In the wake of new terrorist attacks, a mysterious preacher appears in the provincial capital--one of the so-called "wonder rabbis" from the shtetls of the East-trailing a band of fanatical disciples who proclaim him the messiah. Word of the charismatic leader spreads quickly from the Jewish quarter to the castle itself, and soon Tausk finds himself serving two masters: the count and the richest man in the province, Moritz Rotenburg, who has a private interest in the wonder rabbi and whose only son has returned from university, burning for revolution, to gather disciples of his own. Moving from underground meetings and makeshift synagogues to the bedrooms of country estates and the secret high councils of the ailing thousand-year-old Habsburg Empire, Michael André Bernstein's compelling first novel evokes a densely believable world on the edge of collapse, full of the haunting suggestiveness of a fable or nightmare, and the erotic, mystical, and apocalyptic passions of an age.

Farrar. Straus and Giroux

Michael Andr Bernstein's passionate denunciation of apocalyptic thinking provides a moral, philosophical, and literary challenge to the way most of us make sense of our worlds. In our search for coherence, Bernstein argues, we tend to see our lives as moving toward a predetermined fate. This "foreshadowing" demeans the variety, the richness, and especially the unpredictability of everyday life. Apocalyptic history denies the openness and choice available to its actors. Bernstein chooses the Holocaust as the prime example of our tendency toward foregone conclusions. He argues eloquently against politicians and theologians who depict the Holocaust as foreordained and its victims as somehow implicated in a fate they should have been able to foresee. But his argument ranges wider. From recent biographies of Kafka to the Israeli-P.L.O. peace accords, from campus cultural diversity debates to the Crown Heights riots, Bernstein warns against our passive acceptance of historical or personal victimization. An essential contribution to Holocaust studies, this book is also a lucid call to transform the way we read and write history and the way we make sense of our lives.

Foregone Conclusions: Against Apocalyptic History

History & Criticism

University of California Press

We are continually trying to make sense of our world through the stories we tell and are told, but in our search for coherence, we often sacrifice our freedom and the rich randomness of life. In this passionate and lucid book, Michael André Bernstein challenges our practice of "foreshadowing," in which we see our lives as moving toward a predetermined goal or as controlled by fate. Foreshadowing, he argues, demeans the variety and openness that exist in even the most ordinary moments of life. And it is precisely ordinary life, with its random, haphazard, and contradictory choices, that Bernstein celebrates in his call for "sideshadowing"—an alternative practice that reminds us that every present is dense with possible futures. Bernstein sees the Holocaust as the prime example of how our tendency to "foreshadow" and "backshadow" misrepresents history. He argues eloquently against politicians and theologians who posit the Holocaust as foreordained and who depict its victims as somehow complicit with a fate that they should have been able to foresee. Instead, Bernstein proposes a radically new understanding of the relationship between the Holocaust and earlier Jewish experience, transforming how we read and write both individual and communal history. Foregone Conclusions is an extraordinarily wide-ranging book, both in its scope and in its broader intellectual and moral implications. From the latest biographies of Kafka to the peace accords between Israel and the PLO, from the role of cultural diversity in universities to the Crown Heights riots, Bernstein warns us against passively accepting our identities as being shaped primarily by historical or personal victimization. His book liberates us from stereotyped patterns of understanding the relationship between our lives as individuals and as members of racial, sexual, and historic/ethnic communities. Berstein ultimately opens a powerful new way to understand the principles governing how we read and write narratives--whether historical, personal, or literary. In striking original juxtapositions and critical evaluations of Marcel Proust, Robert Musil, and Aharon Appelfeld, Bernstein sugests the need for a new literary model based on the prosaics of daily life. Bernstein speaks directly and persuasively to many of the most pressing issues in Jewish history, Holocaust studies, literary criticism, and cultural history. Foregone Conclusions is a provocative and poignant attempt to find coherence in our world without accepting either ineluctable destiny of pure coincidence. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1994.

Foregone Conclusions: Against Apocalyptic History (Contraversions: Critical Studies in Jewish Literature, Culture, and Society) (Volume 4)

Politics & Social Sciences

Philosophy

Foregone Conclusions: Against Apocalyptic History (Volume 4) (Contraversions: Critical Studies in Jewish Literature, Culture, and Society)

Genre Fiction

Faber and Faber

The Tale of the Tribe: Ezra Pound and the Modern Verse Epic (Princeton Legacy Library)

Princeton University Press

"You people put importance on your lives. Well, my life has never been important to anyone. I haven't got any guilt about anything," bragged the mass-murderer Charles Manson. "These children that come at you with knives, they are your children. You taught them. I didn't teach them. . . . They are running in the streets--and they are coming right at you!" When a real murderer accuses the society he has brutalized, we are shocked, but we are thrilled by the same accusations when they are mouthed by a fictional rebel, outlaw, or monster. In Bitter Carnival, Michael Andr Bernstein explores this contradiction and defines a new figure: the Abject Hero. Standing at the junction of contestation and conformity, the Abject Hero occupies the logically impossible space created by the intersection of the satanic and the servile. Bernstein shows that we heroicize the Abject Hero because he represents a convention that has become a staple of our common mythology, as seductive in mass culture as it is in high art. Moving from an examination of classical Latin satire; through radically new analyses of Diderot, Dostoevsky, and Cline; and culminating in the courtroom testimony of Charles Manson, Bitter Carnival offers a revisionist rereading of the entire tradition of the "Saturnalian dialogue" between masters and slaves, monarchs and fools, philosophers and madmen, citizens and malcontents. It contests the supposedly regenerative power of the carnivalesque and challenges the pieties of utopian radicalism fashionable in contemporary academic thinking. The clarity of its argument and literary style compel us to confront a powerful dilemma that engages some of the most central issues in literary studies, ethics, cultural history, and critical theory today.

Bitter Carnival: Ressentiment and the Abject Hero

Humor & Satire

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