2024-02-29 10:16:24
From July 1888, Klara was unaware that she carried in her womb the incarnation of absolute evil: Adolf Hitler. Between proven facts and fiction, Régis Jauffret masterfully juggles to describe the daily life and torments of a bigot submitted to her husband, sexually abused and inhabited by the unspeakable.
Nine months of pranks, violence and suffering to question, shared between the love to give to an unborn child and unbearable visions of horror that a fetus transmits to its parent. Magic of literature: Régis Jauffret masterfully takes us on a journey to the end of hell, to probe the human soul in what it can offer at its most pitiful and barbaric.
With “In the Belly of Klara”, the French author reconstructs the daily life of Hitler’s parents – a fantasy life although certain facts are proven – while showing the Shoah which, at that time, was still a beastly atrocity that no human might imagine.
…the condemned arrive singing “Lily Marlene” and their heads are slipped into the nooses with the indifference of butchers who hang the carcasses from steel hooks and they neither flinch nor utter the slightest complaint for fear of be executed with a flamethrower and the trapdoors open and the bodies fall into the void…
Régis Jauffret, extract from “In the Belly of Klara”
Family influence
1888, in Austria: the impecunious Klara moves in with her uncle to run the house, while her aunt dies from coughing up her lungs. Her uncle, whom she constantly calls “Uncle” even following their marriage, is a bad guy who works as a customs officer in the service of the Empire. He does not hesitate to rob young Klara, without the knowledge of a dying wife.
Even though she knows this relationship is unwelcome, unhealthy, abnormal and immoral, Klara remains subject to Uncle, an emblematic figure of patriarchy in all its abomination, an ungrateful ogre who disposes of the young girl’s body and life as he pleases.
When her aunt dies, Klara takes over and becomes pregnant. Uncle the stingy decides to marry on the sly and every day, Klara relies on Father Probst to hope for forgiveness. Terrified by this unborn child, the rotten fruit of a diabolical unnatural union, he gives her reprimands and penances, even hopes to be able to excommunicate this lost girl. To contain her unhappiness, Klara writes. A devouring, obsessive activity, but too superfluous to dare admit it to Uncle who, if he found out, would rebuke her sharply.
Salvation in writing?
Klara is a slave to her writing frenzy, to these sentences that burst forth like volcanic eruptions, geysers of words that clash and collide, violently. The description of gas chambers, camps, images of deportation, trains, kapos, deaths… These flashes always arrive without warning in the middle of a dialogue or a thought, words drawn out in bursts, which take sometimes storming several paragraphs, text within text, dark, without punctuation.
More suspicious and afraid than ever, Klara exchanges her notebook for a blackboard which she erases, barely covered with her prose, so as not to be discovered. But even gone, these atrocious sentences remain anchored in his head. So Klara thinks.
God should send the offending newborns straight to hell before they utter their first cry. During pregnancy, they have had time to develop enough for their true nature to appear.
Régis Jauffret, extract from “In the Belly of Klara”
Impossible to put down this novel, as Régis Jauffret’s galloping imagination and his style, even if he hates that we use this term, make all the difference. As soon as the reading begins, the readership is held in apnea until the epilogue, although known: the deliverance of childbirth for Klara, the enslavement of a part of humanity to Nazism years later.
Philippe Congiusti/mh
Régis Jauffret, “In the belly of Klara”, ed. Récamier, January 2024
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