MISSING ANGELS

Soul, wilt thou toss again?

By just such a hazard

Hundreds have lost, indeed,

But tens have won an all.

Angels' breathless ballot

Lingers to record thee;

Imps in eager caucus

Raffle for my soul.

by Emily Dickinson (Life; III)

By Kohinoor Dasgupta

László Krasznahorkai’s post-pandemic novel Herscht 07769: Florian Herscht Bach-regénye: elbeszélés was originally published in 2021 by Magvetó Kladó, Budapest. It was translated from the Hungarian by Ottile Mulzet and published in 2024 as Herscht 07769: Florian Herscht’s Bach Novel by New Directions Books, New York.

Krasznahorkai delivered his Nobel Prize lecture at Stockholm on December 7, 2025. He wouldn’t talk about hope, he said, because he ran out of hope. The epigraph of Herscht 07769 goes a step further: “Hope is a mistake” sounds like a warning.

The epigraph is brief, in keeping with its definition and tradition, and tremendously solitary in comparison with the sentence which follows. This single sentence is the novel in 406 pages.

It begins with Florian Herscht heading to the post office to post a letter to Angela Merkel, Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany. Florian is in his early twenties. He trained to be a baker but works as a surface cleaner. He is a man of superhuman physical strength who clearly would be considered a prize in many professions, but he doesn’t know that. He has little book learning (though Physics interested him even in childhood, few resources were available to him to make progress) and no friends of his own age. Of unknown origin and brought up in an orphanage, the Ranis Kinderheim in Jena, Thuringia, he is a millennial without a phone and a computer, and he lives in an almost bare apartment on the seventh story of the Hochhaus, which was once a part of a porcelain factory. The letter he is about to post is handwritten. Florian doesn’t know discontentment, but he is anxious about the future of the universe. The vacuum question, he is convinced, needs urgent attention from the UN Security Council. Florian is the soul of humility in his communication, and he has faith in the Chancellor’s ability to get the world to grapple with this all-important existential problem.

The insight came to Florian only recently, when retired high school Math and Physics teacher Herr Köhler started tutoring him one-on-one on the subject of elementary particles. Herr Köhler and Florian met two years ago when the latter enrolled in his adult education class on ‘Modern Paths of Physics’. Florian couldn’t understand a lot and took the same class for another year. Their association would have ended there but for Herr Köhler’s indulgent attitude towards “the child, surprisingly clever”, and his awareness of Florian’s utility as a herculean handyman. He offered to teach Florian every Thursday evening.

Florian owes his present life to his employer, “Boss”. Five years ago, Boss turned up at Florian’s institution as if to claim him. Florian earns 90 Euros a week as the sole worker (under Boss’ supervision) of the All Will Be Clean Company. Boss exerts considerable control over Florian’s personal life, and the things he doesn’t tell him (get qualified for a more suitable trade, hang out with young people, maybe) are as remarkable as his interdictions (don’t drive, don’t get a car, don’t get a laptop, don’t get a phone) and his exhortations (sing the National anthem, the first verse as loudly as possible, learn to appreciate Bach’s music, get tattoos). Boss is fifty-three, few know his real name, and his pals are either ex-cons or still doing time for rioting ages ago. He is a man of intimidating appearance (Florian is even more impressive and two heads taller). Boss lives alone (Florian isn’t allowed inside his house and is scared of the Rottweiler outside the door) and is the leader of a local neo-Nazi group of youngish drifters. Boss adores Johann Sebastian Bach and is the founder of the Kana Symphony which he keeps ensnarled in an impossible mission i.e. delivering a Bach concert. He himself plays the timpani and bullies the amateur musicians. Herr Feldmann, the wealthy retired German and Latin teacher and first violin, is the de facto conductor.

Although Florian is very real, he is never less than fantastic. For a giant doing menial work most of the day, he eats little – he is on a subsistence wage, plus Hartz IV benefits and rent subsidy and saving to buy a laptop despite Boss’s strictures. Hunger isn’t uppermost in his mind till it is, when he just grabs a Bockwurst and a Jim Him raspberry soda at Ilona's buffet. He can single-handedly carry the huge trunk of a spruce tree. He can lift Boss’s Opel out of a ditch. Thoughts flow in his letters to the Chancellor. Very rarely does he need to edit, and he rewrites only if something unrelated to the content needs to be fixed, for instance, if a sentence overflowed onto the table as he wrote feverishly, as if in a trance. Yet, his docility and hopefulness make him childlike, persuading us that the fantastic traits don’t define him because he doesn’t know how to use his powers for himself or on his own.

Like other townspeople, Florian steers clear of Boss’s neo-Nazi hangout, the Burg, the house at Burgstraße 19. He avoids getting tattooed. Although he must hear Boss’s hateful speech for hours daily and on occasion witness his road rage, Florian resists judging Boss. Unsure of and afraid to comprehend his own might and morality, he allows Boss to dominate him. Florian believes that Boss will never deceive or harm him. With far less evidence, he believes that Boss will not harm anyone else, not really.

While Florian worries about the universe, the people of Kana with whom he is acquainted have their own hopes and fears to contend with. Florian’s social world is chock-a-block with retirees and middle-aged people. He doesn’t run into those college students who are rooming in Kana to economize. Although the neo-Nazis are on the younger side, Florian is not as non-judgmental about them as he is about Boss, while they view him with scorn, dislike, suspicion and perhaps not a little fear. Frau Ringer, the librarian, Florian regards as his confidante, someone to whom he can disclose that he is sending urgent missives to Chancellor Merkel. She is well-meaning and unseeing, not a close companion in Florian’s breakneck journey to self-discovery, although Florian takes her to the turning points. Her library doesn’t have a single book on Physics. She doesn’t understand his sudden immersion in Bach’s music. He is a sweet oddity, non-violent, helpful, sometimes somewhat embarrassing, annoying, even arousing suspicion over a disappearance which tests the townspeople, among several other things, such as the pandemic (and people wearing medical masks), graffiti spraypainted on Bach memorials in nearby towns, Eisenach, Mühlhausen, Wechmar and Ohrdruf, and a horrendous wolf attack up on the mountains, at Leuchtenberg Castle. All told, Chancellor Merkel, while dealing with potentially career-ending national and international crises during the time, is also the one person to whom Florian feels free to write his thoughts on what Herr Köhler (who is increasingly disturbed by the transformation of Florian from star-struck “child” tutee to Hertz 00769, letter-sender) describes as “abstruse theories of potentially apocalyptic occurrences”, on Bach, on Herr Köhler’s blamelessness and, ultimately, on the elemental message of Bach which the UNSC needs to hear.

All this happens and we are only halfway along the long sentence! It is up to you to make it to the end and then seesaw back to the grim epigraph.

Here is an excerpt from László Krasznahorkai’s Nobel Prize lecture, delivered in Oslo on December 7, 2025, where he talks about our angels, new ones:

“… my stethoscope detects the horrific story of these new angels that stand before me, the story that they are sacrifices, sacrifices: and not for us, but because of us, for every single one of us, because of every single one of us, angels without wings and angels without a message, and all the while knowing that there is war, war and only war, war in nature, war in society, and this war is being waged not only with weapons, not only with torture, not only with destruction: of course, this is one end of the scale, but this war proceeds at the opposite of the scale as well, because one single bad word is enough, one single bad word tossed towards one of these new angels, one unjust, thoughtless, undignified act is enough, one single wounding of body and soul, because when they were born they were not meant for this, they are defenceless in the face of this, defenceless against crushing, defenceless against vileness, in the face of cynical mercilessness against their harmlessness and chastity, just one deed is enough, but even one bad word is enough for them to be wounded for all eternity — which I cannot remedy with even ten thousand words, because it is beyond all remedy.”

Courtesy: nobelprize.org