Arrival in the Mist

Mieczysław Wojnicz, a frail, introspective student from Lwów, arrives at the remote mountain health resort of Görbersdorf in 1913, seeking a cure for tuberculosis. The journey is shrouded in mist and melancholy, foreshadowing the otherworldly atmosphere of the sanatorium. Wojnicz is greeted by the enigmatic proprietor, Opitz, and quickly introduced to the routines and anxieties of the Guesthouse for Gentlemen, a boarding house for men awaiting places in the main sanatorium. The setting is both cozy and unsettling, with the ever-present threat of illness and death lurking beneath the surface. Wojnicz's arrival is marked by a sense of being watched, a motif that will haunt him throughout his stay, as he becomes aware of the invisible eyes and hidden histories embedded in the walls and the landscape.

The Guesthouse's Dark Secret

Shortly after Wojnicz's arrival, the guesthouse is shaken by the sudden suicide of Opitz's wife, a woman Wojnicz barely noticed in life but whose death leaves a lingering sense of unease. The men gather for a tense supper at the very table where her body had lain, and their conversation quickly turns to the inscrutability of women, the nature of madness, and the boundaries between the living and the dead. The event exposes the emotional repression and misogyny of the male residents, who rationalize the tragedy through pseudo-scientific and philosophical arguments. For Wojnicz, the death triggers memories of his own mother's absence and the women who shaped his childhood, deepening his sense of alienation and vulnerability in this male-dominated enclave.

Death at the Table

The men's circle at the guesthouse becomes a microcosm of early twentieth-century European anxieties: nationalism, gender, science, and the decline of civilization. Over meals and glasses of the mysterious local liqueur, Schwärmerei, the men debate the nature of women, the soul, and the meaning of progress, often descending into bigotry and self-congratulation. The absence of women—except as servants, objects of desire, or corpses—becomes increasingly conspicuous. Wojnicz, both participant and outsider, is drawn into these rituals of masculinity, even as he senses the violence and emptiness at their core. The guesthouse itself seems to conspire in the erasure of women, its architecture and routines designed to exclude or consume the feminine.

Rituals of Healing

Wojnicz submits to the strict regimen of the sanatorium: early rising, measured walks, cold showers, and endless rest cures. The routines are meant to restore health, but they also enforce conformity and suppress individuality. The patients, a cosmopolitan mix of nationalities and ideologies, cling to the hope of recovery, but death is ever-present, sanitized and hidden from view. The landscape is both beautiful and oppressive, its stillness masking a latent violence. Wojnicz's interactions with the other patients—August, Lukas, Frommer, Thilo—reveal a spectrum of coping mechanisms: denial, intellectualization, mysticism, and despair. The sanatorium becomes a stage for the performance of health, masculinity, and civilization, even as its foundations are undermined by disease and decay.

The Men's Circle

The men's evening debates, fueled by Schwärmerei, oscillate between high-minded philosophy and petty squabbles. Topics range from the nature of art and the decline of the West to the supposed inferiority of women and Jews. Beneath the surface, however, are deep insecurities: fear of death, impotence, and the loss of social status. The men's camaraderie is fragile, maintained by rituals of exclusion and scapegoating. Wojnicz, increasingly aware of his own difference—his sensitivity, his ambiguous sexuality—finds both solace and danger in these interactions. The guesthouse becomes a crucible in which the men's anxieties are projected onto outsiders, women, and the supernatural.

The Forest's Hunger

The surrounding forest, at first a place of healing walks and mushroom hunts, reveals a darker side. Local legends speak of the Tuntschi, effigies made by charcoal burners to satisfy their desires in the absence of women, and of annual sacrifices demanded by the landscape. Thilo, the young artist, confides in Wojnicz his belief that the forest is cursed, that men are murdered and dismembered each year, their deaths covered up by the community. The boundaries between folklore and reality blur as Wojnicz encounters the Tuntschi effigies and senses a predatory presence in the woods. The forest becomes a symbol of repressed violence, sexuality, and the collective guilt of the village.

The Tuntschi's Shadow

As November approaches, the atmosphere in Görbersdorf grows increasingly tense. The annual pattern of male deaths—always in November, always young men—emerges as a sinister ritual, tacitly accepted by the villagers and the sanatorium staff. The Tuntschi, both effigy and supernatural force, embodies the community's need to expel or consume its outsiders. Wojnicz realizes that the men's circle, for all its rationalism and progress, is complicit in this cycle of sacrifice. The Schwärmerei liqueur, made with psychoactive mushrooms, blurs the men's perceptions and facilitates their participation in the ritual. The guesthouse, the sanatorium, and the forest are revealed as interconnected sites of repression, violence, and collective amnesia.

The Art of Disappearance

Wojnicz's sense of self becomes increasingly unstable. Haunted by memories of his mother, his nanny Gliceria, and his ambiguous desires, he finds solace in cross-dressing with the clothes of the dead Frau Opitz. The act is both a retreat from the violence of masculinity and a gesture of self-creation. The boundaries between male and female, self and other, living and dead, become porous. The painting by de Bles, with its hidden images and shifting perspectives, becomes a metaphor for Wojnicz's own experience of reality: layered, ambiguous, and resistant to fixed meanings. The only way to survive, he senses, is to disappear, to become someone else.

The Landscape Kills

Thilo's fevered conviction that "the landscape kills" takes on new urgency as his health deteriorates. The mountains, the underground lake, the stillness of the air—all are implicated in the cycle of death that grips Görbersdorf. The sanatorium's promise of healing is exposed as a lie; the landscape demands its annual sacrifice, and the community complies. The men's attempts to rationalize or deny the violence—through science, philosophy, or myth—only deepen their complicity. The natural world, indifferent and implacable, becomes both accomplice and judge, erasing the traces of violence with snow and silence.

The Weakest Spot

Dr. Semperweiss, the sanatorium's psychoanalyst, offers Wojnicz a diagnosis that is both medical and existential: each person is defined not by their strengths, but by their weakest spot, their wound, their anomaly. The soul, he suggests, is located in this place of vulnerability. For Wojnicz, this means accepting his difference—not as a defect, but as the source of his identity and creativity. The doctor's insight is both liberating and terrifying, as it exposes the mechanisms of hypocrisy, conformity, and scapegoating that sustain the community. The only way to survive, Semperweiss implies, is to embrace one's own fiction, to create a self that can withstand the violence of the world.

Schwärmerei and Madness

The consumption of Schwärmerei, the hallucinogenic liqueur, becomes a ritual that binds the men together and prepares them for the annual sacrifice. Under its influence, the boundaries between self and other, past and present, reality and hallucination dissolve. The men's memories become unreliable, their actions mechanical, their complicity in violence obscured by collective amnesia. The sanatorium's routines, the men's debates, and the rituals of healing are revealed as mechanisms for channeling and containing the community's madness. The only escape is through disappearance, transformation, or death.

The Night of Sacrifice

On the night of the full moon, the annual ritual unfolds. Wojnicz, lured into the forest by Raimund and the charcoal burners, is bound and offered as a sacrifice to the Tuntschi. The men of the village, including the sanatorium patients, are drawn into a trance-like procession, compelled by forces they cannot name. Opitz, the proprietor, is also bound and ultimately torn apart by the supernatural force that haunts the forest. The violence is both collective and impersonal, a mechanism for preserving the community at the expense of its outsiders. Wojnicz narrowly escapes, wounded and transformed, as the snow begins to fall and the village returns to its routines, erasing all memory of the night's events.

Becoming Klara

In the aftermath of the ritual, Wojnicz assumes the identity of Klara Opitz, the dead woman whose clothes he has been secretly wearing. With the help of her passport, he leaves Görbersdorf, disappearing into the anonymity of postwar Europe. The act is both an escape from violence and an assertion of agency: by becoming someone else, Wojnicz survives the forces that would have destroyed him. The transformation is not without cost—he is marked by trauma and loss—but it offers a fragile hope of renewal. The painting by de Bles, with its hidden images and shifting perspectives, becomes a talisman of survival, a reminder that identity is always provisional and contested.

Aftermath and Oblivion

The epilogue traces the fates of the main characters through the upheavals of war and modernity. The sanatorium is nationalized, the old rituals forgotten, and the survivors scattered or dead. Tuberculosis is conquered by science, but the deeper wounds—of violence, exclusion, and the erasure of the feminine—remain. The narrative closes with the suggestion that the forces embodied by the Tuntschi, the landscape, and the rituals of sacrifice are never truly vanquished; they persist in new forms, watching from the shadows, waiting for the next opportunity to claim their due.

Characters

Mieczysław (Mieczyś) Wojnicz

Wojnicz is a young, sickly student from Lwów, marked by physical frailty, psychological sensitivity, and a deep sense of otherness. Haunted by the absence of his mother and the emotional distance of his father, he is both drawn to and repelled by the rituals of masculinity that dominate the guesthouse. His ambiguous sexuality and affinity for the feminine make him a target for suspicion and violence, but also enable him to see through the community's fictions. Over the course of the novel, Wojnicz undergoes a profound transformation, ultimately escaping the cycle of sacrifice by assuming a new identity. His journey is one of self-discovery, survival, and the embrace of difference.

Wilhelm (Willi) Opitz

Opitz is the robust, affable proprietor of the Guesthouse for Gentlemen, a man who embodies the values and hypocrisies of the community. Outwardly genial and pragmatic, he is deeply complicit in the rituals of exclusion and sacrifice that sustain the village. His relationships with women are marked by violence and control, and his role as host masks a capacity for cruelty. Opitz's eventual fate—being torn apart in the forest—reveals the costs of complicity and the fragility of the social order he upholds.

Thilo von Hahn

Thilo is a young, feverish art student from Berlin, whose sensitivity and insight set him apart from the other men. He is Wojnicz's closest friend and confidant, and his belief that "the landscape kills" becomes a central motif of the novel. Thilo's illness and eventual death are both literal and symbolic: he is a sacrificial victim, a seer whose warnings go unheeded. His relationship with Wojnicz is marked by tenderness, desire, and a shared sense of alienation.

August August

August is a classical philologist and writer, a man of erudition and affectation who delights in aphorisms and debate. He is both a participant in and a critic of the rituals of masculinity, using his intellect to mask his insecurities and desires. August's relationship with Wojnicz is ambivalent, oscillating between mentorship, rivalry, and predation. His ultimate fate—death in Görbersdorf—underscores the limits of intellectualism in the face of collective violence.

Longin Lukas

Lukas is a history teacher and self-styled philosopher from Königsberg, whose worldview is shaped by conservatism, nationalism, and misogyny. He is a forceful presence in the men's debates, quick to dismiss dissent and enforce conformity. Lukas's rigidity masks a deep fear of chaos and a longing for control. His complicity in the rituals of sacrifice is both conscious and unconscious, and his eventual death is both a personal and symbolic defeat.

Walter Frommer

Frommer is a theosophist and spiritualist from Breslau, whose interest in the supernatural masks his role as a police investigator. He is both an insider and an outsider, privy to the community's secrets but unable to prevent the cycle of violence. Frommer's conversations with Wojnicz reveal the limits of rational explanation and the persistence of the irrational. His survival through the war, only to die in the siege of Breslau, suggests the futility of individual resistance to collective forces.

Dr. Semperweiss

Semperweiss is the sanatorium's doctor and psychoanalyst, a man of science and skepticism who nonetheless recognizes the power of myth and ritual. His interactions with Wojnicz are marked by a mixture of empathy, condescension, and insight. Semperweiss's theory that the soul resides in the weakest spot becomes a key to understanding the novel's psychological and social dynamics. His death in the war is both a personal tragedy and a symbol of the collapse of the old order.

Raimund

Raimund is Opitz's young assistant, a boy of few words who serves as a go-between and enforcer. His role in luring Wojnicz into the forest and tying up Opitz reveals his complicity in the rituals of sacrifice. Raimund embodies the transmission of violence across generations, the apprenticeship of cruelty.

Frau Opitz / Klara Opitz

Frau Opitz, the proprietor's wife, is a marginal presence in life and a catalyst in death. Her suicide exposes the violence and misogyny of the community, and her clothes become the means by which Wojnicz escapes. As Klara Opitz, Wojnicz assumes a new identity, embodying both the erasure and the persistence of the feminine.

The Tuntschi

The Tuntschi is both a literal effigy—constructed by men to satisfy their desires—and a supernatural presence that demands annual sacrifice. It embodies the community's repressed violence, sexuality, and guilt, and serves as the agent of the landscape's hunger. The Tuntschi's power lies in its ability to blur boundaries: between human and nonhuman, male and female, victim and perpetrator.

Plot Devices

Ritual and Repetition

The novel is structured around the repetition of rituals: the routines of the sanatorium, the men's debates, the annual sacrifice in the forest. These cycles serve to contain and channel the community's anxieties, but also to erase memory and responsibility. The recurrence of November deaths, the use of Schwärmerei, and the collective amnesia that follows each sacrifice reveal the mechanisms by which violence is normalized and perpetuated.

Doubling and Disguise

Characters in the novel are frequently doubled or disguised: Wojnicz becomes Klara; the Tuntschi is both effigy and spirit; the men's circle is both a community and a conspiracy. The use of cross-dressing, false names, and hidden rooms underscores the instability of identity and the permeability of boundaries. Disguise becomes both a means of survival and a symptom of the community's sickness.

The Uncanny Landscape

The landscape of Görbersdorf is both beautiful and menacing, a site of healing and of death. The forest, the underground lake, and the mountains are imbued with supernatural power, demanding sacrifice and erasing memory. The motif of the landscape that kills, articulated by Thilo, becomes a metaphor for the community's complicity in violence and its inability to confront its own history.

Psychoanalysis and the Weak Spot

Dr. Semperweiss's psychoanalytic theory—that the soul resides in the weakest spot, the anomaly, the wound—serves as both a diagnostic tool and a narrative device. Characters are defined by their vulnerabilities, and the community's rituals are designed to identify, isolate, and expel those who deviate from the norm. The plot's resolution hinges on Wojnicz's acceptance of his own difference and his ability to transform it into a means of escape.

Hallucination and Collective Madness

The hallucinogenic liqueur Schwärmerei functions as both a literal and symbolic agent of collective madness. Its consumption blurs the boundaries between reality and hallucination, self and other, past and present. Under its influence, the men become both perpetrators and victims, their actions dictated by forces they cannot name or resist. The liqueur is a vehicle for the transmission of violence and the erasure of memory.

Analysis

The Empusium is a masterful reimagining of the European sanatorium novel, blending gothic horror, psychoanalytic insight, and biting social satire. Tokarczuk exposes the mechanisms by which communities construct and enforce norms—of gender, health, and belonging—through rituals of exclusion, scapegoating, and violence. The novel's men, for all their intellectual posturing, are revealed as complicit in cycles of sacrifice that target the weak, the different, and the feminine. The landscape itself becomes an accomplice, demanding annual offerings and erasing the traces of violence with snow and silence. Through the figure of Wojnicz/Klara, Tokarczuk offers a fragile hope: that survival is possible through transformation, self-creation, and the embrace of one's own anomaly. Yet the novel's final note is one of caution: the forces of repression, violence, and forgetting are never truly vanquished—they persist, watching from the shadows, ready to return. The Empusium is a chilling meditation on the costs of conformity, the dangers of collective amnesia, and the enduring power of the outsider to disrupt and renew.

Last updated: May 19, 2025