Bärfuss, Lukas. One Hundred Days.

This prize-winning novel written by Lukas Bärfuss narrates the experiences of Swiss humanitarian aid official David Hohl during his time in Rwanda, before and during the hundred-day period of the genocide. It starts with the first-person account of an unknown narrator in conversation with the protagonist, who will soon become the main narrative voice, also in first-person account. He shares the memories of his experience after being back in Switzerland for an undetermined amount of time. Hohl tells how, after living in Rwanda for a few years, he disobeys the order of leaving in the days leading up to the genocide only to regret his decision very soon after, which will force him to hide for a hundred days in a house in the middle of the conflict. Through Hohl’s eyes, the reader learns of the interaction between international institutions, the Rwandan Government, the members of the Hutu and Tutsi ethnicity, the press, and so on. Hereby, Bärfuss critically emphasizes how, in carrying out actions guided by supposedly  good intentions—though often tainted with a willful ignorance—Swiss foreign aid obliquely helped to create the conditions which made the highly efficient mass-killing possible. Also portrayed is the complicated romantic relationship between David and a Rwandan Hutu woman named Agathe, a relationship that positions him even closer to the conflict. The climax of the novel is, however, the complexity of his own morally and physically precarious situation during the worst days of the Genocide, which results in his becoming dependent on men who were clearly murderers.

One Hundred Days  presents a great variety of positions within the conflict – victims, perpetrators, collaborators, enablers, accomplices, etc.—showing, moreover, how all these positions shift  and develop over time. However, through the figure of Hohl, the focus and emphasis lie especially on the figure of the bystander. In this sense, the novel challenges the notion of the bystander as a neutral figure external to the victim-perpetrator dynamics—both in regard to individuals and collectives, be they organizations or even nations. Instead, it shows that in a context of state violence there is no “outside” of the conflict and explores the multiple and ambivalent ways in which all by-standing parties – NGOs, humanitarian aid, the press, etc. – are implicated in this violence. Moreover, the novel questions the idea of the bystander as a passive, fixed, and static figure, exploring rather how it transforms in space and time. In this sense, it traces various kinds of developments through which bystanders actively—and often also strategically—position themselves within the spectrum delimited by the extreme poles of victim and perpetrator. In this way, One Hundred Days gestures towards the inherent instability and porosity of the paradigmatic triad victim-perpetrator-bystander. Finally, through the narrator’s perspective—highly unreliable and partial to his own privileged view of the world—the novel discusses ongoing legacies of colonialism, racism and sexism.

Authors of this entry: Sofia Forchieri and Claudia Vasquez-Caicedo Rainero

Bärfuss, Lukas. Hundert Tage. Göttingen: Verlag, 2008.

Bärfuss, Lukas. One Hundred Days. Translated by Tess Lewis. London: Granta, 2013.