The Weight of Things

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Many of the names in The Weight of Things have secondary meanings: Faust, Berta’s maiden name, means fist, as well as recollecting Goethe’s famous play; Schrei, Wilhelm’s surname, means scream or cry; Reichmann is analogous to Richman in English, and so on. The place-names are particularly significant: the town of Donaublau or Danube-blue invokes the waltz by Johann Strauss, and Allerseelengasse, where Berta was born, is named for All Souls’ Day, when the dead are mourned. We have elected to leave these proper names in the original to avoid giving the text a parodic tone that would stray from the sense of the original, where they are less obtrusive than they would be in English. There are also scattered allusions to literature and politics from the time of the book’s writing: when Berta and her children sing “I know not what it means,” this is the first line of Heinrich Heine’s Lorelei, and the Isle of the Blessed, a notion Wilhelm hits upon in describing his home country, was a favorite term of Chancellor Bruno Kreisky in his praises of Austria’s alleged social harmony.

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