Literature "Die Holländerinnen": in the jungle of helplessness and violence
"Die Holländerinnen" is the fourth book by award-winning Zurich author Dorothee Elmiger, who has been translated many times. In her new novel, crime fiction, horror and theatrical moments overlap to raise many questions about our present and also about writing.
19.08.2025, 06:30
SDA
Dorothee Elmiger is one of the most subtle observers of our society. Her writing to date has been characterized by a simultaneity of current and historical facts as well as fictional snippets, by a fragmentary nature whose gaps allow new connections to be glimpsed. "There is a brain at work here that wants our cooperation," was the comment on the nomination for the 2020 Swiss Book Prize for her last book "Die Zuckerfabrik".
The new novel "Die Holländerinnen" surprises with a seemingly conventional flowing text. At the beginning, a small, older woman steps up to the lectern and thanks the audience for allowing her to speak here today and in the coming weeks. But instead of presenting a poetic theory as planned, she, who is introduced as an "important narrator", talks about a journey that took place several years ago.
This is the second level of the novel: with a documentary theater group, she got lost in the tropical jungle on the trail of two missing Dutch women. These Dutch women, who give the novel its title, are something of a crime story in this novel: "I find the theory interesting that women's preoccupation with crime fiction or true crime actually stems from an attempt to understand something that they themselves perceive as a potential or actual threat," says Elmiger in an interview with the Keystone-SDA news agency.
"Alone and lost in the forest"
Elmiger is not concerned with solving this criminal case. What interests the author about the Dutch women is their abandonment, which is particularly evident in this case, as the two left behind photos. Hardly anything is recognizable on them.
In the novel, the "important narrator" and the theater group follow these supposed traces deeper and deeper into the jungle - despite sprained joints, disorientation and increasing exhaustion. "These characters find themselves alone and lost in the forest. It's a confrontation with a kind of nature that most of us here don't even know, because we as a society think we control nature," says Elmiger. "The fear of the irrational and uncontrollable is very characteristic of our entire culture: despite all the progress and possibilities, we are still afraid of ghosts, of the dark or of any creature with glowing eyes in the forest."
Traces of violence
The attempts to control and tame nature are omnipresent in Elmiger's work: for example, in a subordinate clause on the "deserted roads that the United Fruit Company had drawn like a grid through the former forest area almost a hundred years earlier". Such snippets are also reminiscent of the colonial past.
Elmiger also makes traces of violence clear in the structure of the theater group: the theater maker is clearly at the top of the hierarchy, and it is certainly no coincidence that he works his way through cult filmmaker Werner Herzog and repeatedly refers to his films "Aguirre" and "Fitzcarraldo". Among other things, he sends a set designer to Machu Picchu to measure and document a hotel corridor in order to produce a true-to-scale copy on this basis.
Elmiger is concerned with questions of consideration and ruthlessness and whether art is possible without these violent hierarchies: "How do I reconcile the fact that I am completely entangled and profit from certain circumstances with the fact that I write texts that claim to be able to gain some kind of insight into possibly better circumstances?"
Writing against helplessness
Elmiger now lives in New York: "As my whole life now takes place in a different language, I have a lot of questions about writing, about translating and also fundamentally about who to address." The impact of political events - not only in the USA - and the current wars and catastrophes leave her feeling a certain disillusionment, also with regard to writing, understanding and literature. Elmiger's narrator carries this crisis within her in the novel: "This helplessness that she feels, triggered on the one hand by the events in the text, but also in view of the state of the world in the present and the question of how we can react to it in writing, how to deal with it or not, these are central questions for her - which most writers know in one form or another," says Elmiger, and with "Die Holländerinnen" she confronts this helplessness with a multi-layered, narrative-rich and very topical novel.
*This text by Philine Erni, Keystone-SDA, was realized with the help of the Gottlieb and Hans Vogt Foundation.
