ABSTRACT
In Christoph Ransmayr's first novel The Terrors of Ice and Darkness, he moves between real and imagined Polar adventures. Using archival material, he returns to the 1872 Austro-Hungarian Arctic expedition led by Julius Payer and Carl Weyprecht, supplementing historical accounts with his own descriptions. Through its protagonist, The Terrors of Ice and Darkness attempts to come to terms with the losses of history, which is to say, it attempts a sort of mourning work. Eric L. Santner argues that the opposition of mourning and melancholia is of particular significance in a postwar context, because it has to do with the suppression of otherness and a fantasy of omnipotence, aspects that are both characteristic of National Socialist ideology. Ransmayr's text makes use of images in order to render horrific aspects of reality — the terrors of ice and darkness —visible, but as representations they constitute an indirect, mediated encounter with these things.
