By Bob Thompson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, July 10, 2006; C01
"If you want, I can start the slide show now," Fred Reuss says.
Sure, you tell him. How often do you get to examine the raw materials of a work of fiction, clicked into life on the writer's laptop one by one?
Bavarian hamlet, picture-postcard mountains.
Old chalet with balcony and overhanging eaves.
Laughing girl.
Man and woman sitting at a table: handsome, unsmiling, staring into a future that they cannot know.
This last photograph was taken in 1934, Reuss tells you, not long before the man sailed off to Shanghai, leaving the woman and the laughing girl behind. He is Max Mohr: a physician, minor German literary figure and Reuss's great-uncle. She is Mohr's wife, Kathe, and the girl is their daughter, Eva. Long drawn to their story -- and having discovered a trove of photos, letters and other documents about them -- Reuss set out to reimagine their lives.
The result was "Mohr: A Novel" -- an unusually close collaboration between fiction and fact.
The book is driven, on one level, by a psychological conundrum the documents cannot resolve. Mohr was Jewish, and for him to want to leave the encroaching darkness of Nazi Germany seems understandable enough. And yet: How could he possibly have left behind a beloved wife and daughter?
But Reuss chose to highlight a different level of question, as well. For he didn't just use that trove of photographs to inspire his storytelling -- he layered them into the novel itself. "Mohr" is constructed around a selection of almost 50 images through which the story flows.
Mostly it flows in straightforward, third-person narration, moving back and forth between Max in China and Kathe and Eva at home. But at times the voice changes, and Reuss considers those haunting images directly.
He's hoping his readers will be inspired, as he was, to puzzle out the links between photography and memory, between "truth" and the reconstructed past.
" There are moments when you can imagine them suddenly appearing beside you, breathing the same air. Max and Kathe Mohr, little flecks of captured light."
-- From "Mohr," by Frederick Reuss
He greets you at the door of his basement-apartment studio near American University -- a slim, dark-haired man in torn jeans and bare feet who looks closer to 40 than his actual 46 years. Can it be that writing ambitious, uncommercial fiction for pennies per hour keeps one young?
Not likely.
"Needless to say, it's not a good way to make a living," says Reuss, who has two preteen daughters. His wife holds down the family's real-world job, as a manufacturers' rep in the gift business, and Reuss had a freelance day job -- as a writer at the Smithsonian -- for a decade or so after the couple settled in Washington in 1989. At any time, he says, he could end up "pounding down the doors at the museum again."
A Foreign Service brat, he was born in Ethiopia and spent his high school years in Dusseldorf, Germany, where he became fluent in German. He started writing then, too, but in college, at Antioch, he gravitated to philosophy, which he studied for one postgraduate year before reverting to fiction.
Maybe it's the philosophy that did it: Reuss's novels have all been high-concept, high-wire acts.
His first -- not counting the one published only electronically, in an experiment Reuss calls "a magnificent flop" -- was "Horace Afoot." It's the story of a "small-town iconoclast," as the jacket copy describes him, who "has assumed the name of a Roman poet and forsworn automobiles, and entertains himself by telephoning strangers to ask them what love is and what they think of St. Bernards."
Somehow, it worked. "Charming, unexpectedly poignant," was the verdict in the New York Times.
"Henry of Atlantic City" continued the high-concept trend. It boasts a 6-year-old title character who memorizes the Gnostic gospels, prepares himself for sainthood and tends to conflate the world in and around Caesars Palace -- his father's workplace -- with the Byzantine Empire.
A Washington Post review, while appreciative of Reuss's accomplishment, underlined the precariousness of his career:
"It's a miracle that books like this get published at all," Carolyn See wrote, "but they do, thank God."
That miracle had been worked by MacMurray & Beck, an enterprising small press based in Denver. Unfortunately, the company got sold -- but by then, Reuss had managed to attract a bit of attention in New York. He signed on with Pantheon and pocketed his first serious advance.
It bought him two years, which he used to write the story of a man with a strange neurological disorder (Reuss dubbed it "the Wasties," which gave the book its title). A former English professor, the main character finds himself with no personal memories, yet "awash in snippets and shards of his learning."
This plunge into the publishing mainstream was not a success.
" 'The Wasties' died a mercifully short and painless death," Reuss says. "The big houses, if you're not buzzing right up to speed, they just, you know" -- he snaps his fingers three or four times -- "you're gone. They don't put any effort into things that they don't see immediate results from."
Back to small-press land he went, signing on with Unbridled Books, a new company launched by the former principals from MacMurray & Beck.
The good news: A writer like Reuss is better off with a smaller house for a couple of reasons, according to Unbridled co-founder Fred Ramey. For one thing, he'll get more editorial attention. And the small press can also be more patient when it comes to marketing books -- like Reuss's -- that aren't easy to sum up in a phrase or two.
The bad news: Small press advances are tiny. Marketing budgets, too.
This does not appear to bother Reuss. Right now, he's too happy about "Mohr."
" She once thought that with memories, a person had everything; not a ruptured then and now, but a gift ready to be opened anytime."
Back in Reuss's studio, the "Mohr" slide show continues:
Here are Max and Kathe, side by side, looking careless and young. Max plays his accordion. He wears boots he brought home from World War I.
Here is a smiling Kathe by a woodpile in that Bavarian hamlet -- Wolfsgrub is its name -- where the couple tried to leave their bourgeois roots behind. Here are four uniformed soldiers outside the house, sometime after Mohr left. Kathe found it prudent to offer the Nazis tea. Eva, her daughter, most likely found it prudent to disappear.
"This one is out his bedroom window," Reuss says.
He means Mohr's window in Shanghai, in 1937. Smoke billows over the rooftops: A suburb burns as Chinese troops retreat from the Japanese. How was Mohr to know, when he left Europe for the Far East, that war's chaos would engulf him there?
So many photographs: There's not time for Reuss to show them all. Strange to think that when he was first drawn to Mohr's story, he had only a single photo. Passed on by Reuss's grandfather, who was not forthcoming on the subject of Uncle Max, it showed a stiff, haughty-looking youth in the high-collared uniform of a military cadet. There was nothing in the image to spark an emotional connection.
Curious nonetheless, Reuss read the correspondence between Mohr and D.H. Lawrence -- the two had been friends -- and looked up Mohr's plays and other writings in the Library of Congress. But he figured that was the end of the line.
How wrong he was became apparent when a German publisher put out a previously unknown Max Mohr novel called "Das Einhorn" ("The Unicorn"). It turned out to include an afterword by someone at least as fascinated with Mohr as Reuss was, a German filmmaker named Nicolas Humbert who'd done a documentary on the life of Eva Mohr and who turned out to be -- her son! Mohr's grandson!
Reuss hadn't known that anyone on that side of the family was left.
He wrote to Humbert, who wrote back. In 2001, the two men met in Munich, and Reuss was promptly bundled off to the house in Wolfsgrub, in which Humbert had grown up and which he had maintained -- 17th-century stove and all -- much as it had been when Mohr and his wife had bought it eight decades before.
By the time their ecstatic week together ended, Humbert says, he and Reuss "felt like brothers" and they'd taken an extensive tour through their shared family history. Reuss had absorbed masses of letters and photographs, spreading them out on the same table where Max and Kathe had posed, tense and unsmiling, just before Max departed for China.
As Reuss now knew, they never saw one another again. He wanted to tell their story.
The question was: How?
"He looks again at Eva's picture on the desk. A twelve-year-old looks back at him from the photograph, but she is fixed in his mind as a younger child . . ."
Nonfiction was never an option, he says. He's a novelist, and he thinks truth is inseparable from imagination. "I wanted to be as inside Max Mohr as I could get -- inside his subjectivity," he explains. "And that subjectivity I could only represent in a fiction."
But Reuss was after more than a literary reimagining. The philosopher in him -- the writer of books that can't be summed up simply -- yearned to capture something more complex: the unresolved confrontation with the past that had "completely overwhelmed" him as he sat at that old table, gazing at vivid, vanished lives.
"I lack the precision of language to describe it," he says. Seeking help, he pulls books from shelves, tracks down quotes from the likes of philosopher Paul Ricoeur and novelist and art critic John Berger. Ah, here's the Berger passage he's after:
"Unlike memory, photographs do not in themselves preserve meaning" he reads. "Only that which narrates can make us understand."
Sounds good, but when you stop to think about it, you're not exactly sure what Berger means. Maybe looking at this particular photograph will help.
It's a perfectly captured moment, a la Henri Cartier-Bresson. A sack race: five blurred and gleeful children, hopping across a sloping lawn. The shadow of the photographer -- Mohr, with shoulders hunched and elbows out -- juts toward them across the grass.
Whose story is it part of? The children's? Mohr's?
None of the above. It's Reuss's now.
"Other photos were taken that day," he writes, accepting Berger's narrative challenge, "but this sack race is the one that carries the fullest measure of the moment. On that day, as Mohr chased around, photographing the children's games, had he already known he would leave? Had he told Kathe yet?"
Reuss doesn't answer these questions directly, as a more didactic storyteller might. Nor does he venture a definite answer to the broader question that underlies them: Why does Mohr choose to go at all?
Does he not love Kathe and Eva? Of course he does.
Is it his need, as a Jew, to be elsewhere? All the more reason to bring his family along.
Are feelings of artistic failure, of uselessness and generalized angst, creating a psychic imperative to start again? That's surely part of it . . .
"The simple why eludes him," Reuss writes. "It always will."
Soon enough, death will make the question moot.
One more photograph, then, to consider. In the book, it's been placed just after the passage in which Mohr despairs of finding the "simple why" of what he's done. Eva sits alone on a lush hillside, hands on lap, head thrown back in delighted, childish mirth.
What do you feel, when you see that laughing girl?
Whatever it is -- and this must be what Reuss was after -- it can't be conveyed by words alone.
