Critics, Monsters, Fanatics, and Other Literary Essays

by Cynthia Ozick

  In the historic facticity of the camps, does Hannah Doll have a real-life counterpart? And does it matter if she does or doesn’t? The women of the camps have left a substantial record, not only the grisly SS Helferinnen with their uniforms and whips, but the SS wives in their well-appointed villas, shamelessly flaunting rings and necklaces seized from the doomed. The base activities of many such women are documented in Wendy Lower’s Hitler’s Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields, a volume not included among Amis’s acknowledgments—though Hannah is proof of his copious knowledge of these spousal miscreants: she is their purposefully contrapuntal projection.

  “What is especially striking about these wives,” Lower writes, “is that . . . they were not officially given any direct role in the division of labor that made the Holocaust possible. Yet their proximity to the murderers and their own ideological fanaticism made many of them into potential participants.” She instances Erna Petri, the wife of Horst Petri—an SS officer attached to the Race and Settlement Office (a euphemism for the mass annihilation of Jews)—who found cowering at a roadside six half-naked little boys somehow escaped from a death-bound freight car. She took them home, fed them, and then, one by one, shot each child in the back of the neck. Liesel Willhaus, another SS wife and a crack shot, delighted in picking off Jews from her balcony. SS honeymooners celebrated their love in the midst of deportations and mass executions. All in all, exemplars of SS wives reveling in atrocities abound—and still this heinous chronicle yields not a single Hannah Doll.

  Golo Thomsen, Hannah’s aspiring lover, is made of the same exceptionalism. From his position defending slow starvation of the Buna slave laborers—against a proposal that a few more daily calories would speed the work—he at length comes to welcome Germany’s defeat. So much so that, calling on the little English he can muster, he quietly joins a British prisoner of war in reciting “Rule Britannia”—even as he recognizes that the man is a likely Buna saboteur. (As it happens, not an ounce of the synthetic rubber vaunted by the Germans ever emerged from the Buna-Werke.) That an SS official, the nephew of Martin Bormann, a Nazi of such elevated rank that he dines with the Führer at his gilded mountain retreat, should end as a turncoat in the harshest hour of Germany’s eastern Blitzkrieg . . . ah, but isn’t this the very conundrum woven by the twining of history and fiction? Has a believably disaffected Golo Thomsen ever been known to recant in an actual Zone of Interest? Do the oceanic testimonies of this fraught period throw up any evidence of even one SS officer who, while within earshot of the cries of the doomed, decried those cries? And if not, it must be asked again: does it matter?

  History commands communal representation—nations, movements, the reigning Zeitgeist. Fiction champions the individuated figure. Bovary is Bovary, not an insubstantiation of the overall nature of the French bourgeoisie. Characters in novels (unless those novels are meant to be allegories) are no one but themselves, not stand-ins or symbols of societies or populations. History is ineluctably bound to the authenticity of documents; but all things are permitted to fiction, however contradictory it may be of the known record. It is this freedom to posit redemptive phantoms that justifies the historic anomalies that are Hannah Doll and Golo Thomsen. And further: no literary framework is more liberated from obligation to the claims of history than comedy, with its manifold jesters: parody, satire, farce, caricature, pratfall. All these are entertainments—and so it is that we are frankly entertained by Kommandant Doll, even as he stands “with sturdy fists planted on jodhpured hips” on the murderous ramp. And still further: something there is in the resistance to parody that is obtuse, dense, dully unread. What of Gulliver, what of Quixote? To resist the legacy of their majestic makers is to deny literature itself. Then why resist Amis, their daringly obsessed if lesser colleague? And why pursue skepticism of love in a concentration camp? Or of latecomer dissidents who nevertheless eat and drink in comfort on the lip of the merciless inferno?

  Read beforehand, as one is tempted to do, Amis’s afterword becomes the novel’s mentor and conscience. In it he echoes Paul Celan’s “coldly muted” naming of the Holocaust as “that which happened”—a phrase again reminiscent of the biblical refusal of elaboration—and adds, “I am reminded of W. G. Sebald’s dry aside to the effect that no serious person ever thinks of anything else.” In this way the afterword, in combination with Sonderkommando Szmul, the novel’s third interior voice, repudiates and virtually annuls all other voices, the farcical with the ahistorical; and nearly erases also the dominating voice of the novel itself. For Szmul, no suspension of disbelief, fiction’s busy handmaiden, is required, and no element of caricature can touch him. He alone is immune to the reader’s skepticism, he alone is safe from even the possibility of diminishment through parody; and this holds both within the novel’s pliancy and in the tougher arena of historical truth.

  It is Szmul who speaks of “the extraterritorial nature of the Lager”: “I feel we are dealing with propositions and alternatives that have never been discussed before, have never needed to be discussed before—I feel that if you knew every minute, every hour, every day of history, you would find no exemplum, no model, no precedent.” His macabre task (“the detail,” as he obliquely calls it) is to shepherd the doomed to the gas, and then to dispose of their close-packed corpses first to the ovens, and then to the limitless and undulating fields of ash. As a secret-bearing witness, he will soon be consumed by the very fire that he himself facilitated:

  When squads of heavily armed men come to the crematoria and this or that section of the detail knows that it is time, the chosen Sonders take their leave with a nod or a word or a wave of the hand—or not even that. They take their leave with their eyes on the floor. And later, when I say Kaddish for the departed, they are already forgotten.

  Szmul is one of the chosen—chosen by the power of the jackboot to be the servant of these gruesome rites. Ruth Franklin, reviewing the novel in the New York Times, describes the “crematory ravens” of the Sonderkommando as “the nadir of degradation,” “a portrait of depravity.” But Amis’s Szmul is a presence of lacerating pathos and unrelenting mourning. In a brittle tone so colloquially matter-of-fact as to shatter its burden, he ruminates, “I used to have the greatest respect for nightmares—for their intelligence and artistry. Now I think nightmares are pathetic. They are quite incapable of coming up with anything as remotely terrible as what I do all day.” He recalls a time at Chelmno when the quantities of carcasses were so overwhelming that the SS “selected another hundred Jews to help the Sonders drag the bodies to the mass grave. This supplementary Kommando consisted of teenage boys. They were given no food or water, and they worked for twelve hours under the lash, naked in the snow and the petrified mud.” Szmul’s two sons were among them; and in this plainspoken account we can perhaps hear (yet only if we are open to it) a judgment on the omnipresent misuse and abuse of “that which happened.” Amis’s crematory raven flies out from the novel as its single invincibly convincing voice.

  Despite the afterword’s dismissal of “the sphinxists, the anti-explainers,” it is they, knowing what is at stake, who are finally in the right. And what is at stake is the conviction that premeditated and cocksure evil is its own representation, sealed and sufficient. A hardened heart needs no reason beyond its own opacity. The ripened deed is all; to riff on it is to veil it. This is not to say that The Zone of Interest ought never to have departed the wilder precincts of Amis’s cunning imaginings. It is good to have this fractious novel. It makes the best argument against itself.

  An Empty Coffin: H. G. Adler

  Of Homer we know nothing, of Jane Austen not enough, of Kafka more and more, sometimes hour by hour; and yet Achilles and Elizabeth Bennet and Joseph K press imperially on, independent of their makers. Lasting works hardly require us to be acquainted with the lives of the masters who bore them—they have pulsing hearts of their own. Still, on occasion there emerges a tale that refuses to let go of its teller, that is unwilling, even
in the name of art, to break free; or cannot. This is less a question of autobiographical influence or persuasion than of an uncanny attachment: call it a haunting, the relentlessly obsessive permeation of a book by its author. Or imagine a man condemned for the rest of his days to carry, and care for, and inconsolably preserve his own umbilical cord.

  In this way The Wall, the final novel of an exilic trilogy by H. G. (Hans Günther) Adler, is inseparable from the lacerating fortunes of the writer’s life; the chronicle he gave birth to continues to claim him. It matters, then, that Adler was reared in a linguistically fraught Prague, and that like Kafka before him, he was a Jew steeped culturally in German within a society vigorously Czech. At Charles University he studied musicology, but as poet, scholar, historian, philosopher with a theological bent, and novelist above all, he subsequently encompassed far more. On February 8, 1942, three years after Germany’s invasion of Czechoslovakia, he and his family were, as we have learned to say, deported—a Nazi palliative, with its elevated aura of Napoleon on Elba, for violent criminal abduction. He endured two and a half years in Theresienstadt, and in 1944 was sent by freight car to Auschwitz, where his physician wife and her mother were promptly gassed. His parents and sixteen relatives were similarly dispatched. Liberated in 1945, Adler returned to Prague, only to find it under rigid Soviet influence. In 1947 he escaped to London, where, buffeted by the forlorn displacements of a melancholic exile, he nevertheless completed a comprehensive and searingly definitive sociological study of Theresienstadt.

  Arthur Landau, the voice and central consciousness of The Wall, traces a nearly identical trajectory, but so powerfully and strangely transfigured as to drive history into unsettling phantasmagoria. Names and habitations are veiled: Prague is “over there,” London is “the metropolis,” Jews go unmentioned, Germans and their deathly devisings the same; yet grief and terror and wounding memory beat on, unappeased. And meanwhile, in his modest new household in an unprepossessing neighborhood of the metropolis, where he lives quietly with Johanna, his sympathetic second wife, and their two children, Landau is laboring over an immense work of historiography, The Sociology of Oppressed People. He turns for support to an earlier wave of refugees from “over there,” who by now are well situated either in business or as an established intellectual cohort. At first, remembering old friendships, they rally round him with bright promises of funding, then fail to follow through, until finally he is rawly rebuffed. The scholars disdain his ideas. The entrepreneurs scoff at his elitist impracticality, and offer inferior jobs in wallpaper and artificial pearls. “Unfortunately,” he reflects, “it was too late for me. The time for refugees was past; they had all attached themselves to something or someone, and there was nothing left for foreigners. . . . I soon appreciated that there was one too many people in the world, and that was me. I simply couldn’t be allowed to exist.”

  Existence, often as straightforwardly spoken as here, but more frequently mournfully eloquent, is the great clamor that tolls through the undulating passages of this wild-hearted novel. “I have ceased to exist,” Landau laments, “called it quits, am completely spent, the vestige of a memory of who I no longer am. . . . I never even rise to the level of a dubious existence, the fragile bearing of a single nature, because I am homeless in every sense, belonging nowhere, therefore expendable, never missed.” And again, in the voice of God to Adam: “You have eaten of the fruit; that cannot be undone. Your mistake is this: that you wish to exist; what’s more, that you have done so from the very beginning and forevermore. You concern yourself much too intensely with that. Your will to be is inexhaustible.”

  The will to be becomes manifest in grotesque scenes and gargoyle-like figures thrown up by intimations of an elusive history of atrocity. And always an insinuating image, in the guise of a wall, stalks and oppresses Landau, now representing the unremitting ache of exile and loss, now the anguished past (although no more than a single paragraph in more than six hundred pages hints at the explicit reality of Auschwitz). Steadily encroaching, the wall is sometimes almost palpable, sometimes hidden. Even when it is absent, its influence is tormentingly theatrical, as when a pair of pallbearers come with a hearse to take Landau to be cremated. He refuses to go, though Johanna, out of courtesy, urges it, while politely inviting the pallbearers to eat dinner with the family beforehand. When the two return at a later time, promising a trip to a sociological conference, Landau agrees to sit uncomfortably on top of the empty coffin while Johanna and the children follow the hearse in a neighbor’s vegetable truck. The conference turns out to be a street fair organized in honor of Landau himself, where all his old scorners and adversaries are selling tickets to the booths and bumper cars.

  So it is that fantasy alternates with panic, and panic with sardonic realism. How to classify a work so circuitously and exhaustively structured? Adler’s prose is tidal, surge after narrative surge rushing forward and then enigmatically receding, the moment displaced by memory, and memory by introspective soliloquy. In Peter Filkins’s patiently loyal rendering, all these movements of telling and withdrawal are joined by smaller eddyings in the form of participle clauses that coat Adler’s serpentine sentences with a Germanic otherness. The translator, or his publisher, has also appended a dramatis personae accompanied by a chapter-by-chapter summary. Rather than a help, these additions are a disservice, as if this majestic novel could not breathe on its own.

  But it does breathe, and with a secret knowledge of untrammeled capacities. Adler has the courage of his idiosyncratic art, and though The Wall has been acclaimed a modernist masterwork, it is perversely premodern in its lavish freedom to go whither it will, and to ponder, and to linger, and to suffer felt experience to the lees. The ruined scenes of “over there” are visited again and again, the ghosts together with the remnant of the living. Landau, returned to his native city, searches for his father’s shop and finds desolation. The apparitions who are his parents (his mother is seen sewing his shroud) shun him and drive him off. His old teacher, turning on him, reports him to the authorities. He toils in a museum of the doomed, collecting the cherished properties of a vanished population: paintings of family members, masses of abandoned prayer books. He is warmly befriended by Anna, the sister of a schoolmate who, like so many others, has not returned. Wandering with Anna along once familiar mountain trails, he remembers earlier excursions with the lost wife of his youth. And then the nervous flight across the border to attain, finally, the foreign metropolis. All this in disregard of sequential chronology; instead, time’s elastic wooing, Now melting into Then, Then devouring Now.

  In his richly authoritative introduction, Filkins refers to The Wall and the two novels that precede it, The Journey and Panorama, as Adler’s Shoah trilogy. “However,” he notes, “what is often most missing . . . is particulars.” And here is a poignant conundrum. Fifty years on, encountering a narrative frame made purposefully abstract, where cities go nameless and horrors are loosened from their history, who will have the means to recognize Landau’s wall for what it is? Or, at so increased a distance from the Europe of the last century, will Adler’s universe, lacking in identifiable specificity (Theresienstadt, Auschwitz, Nuremberg Laws, Wehrmacht, SS, abductions, gassings, shootings, refugees, survivors), have fallen by then into piteous yet anodyne myth? A name is in itself a concrete history; namelessness is erasure. Even so universalized an image as hell has a name. It is called hell.

  Permissions Credits

  The author is grateful for permission to quote from the following: The Journey Abandoned by Lionel Trilling, edited by Geraldine Murphy, copyright © 2009 Columbia University Press, reprinted with permission of the publisher. Saul Bellow: Letters by Saul Bellow, edited by Benjamin Taylor, copyright © 2010 by Janis Bellow, used by permission of Viking Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. “Letter to Lord Byron,” copyright © 1937 and renewed 1962 by W. H. Auden; “In Memory of W. B. Yeats” and “September 1, 1939,” copyright © 1940
and renewed 1968 by W. H. Auden; and “At the Grave of Henry James,” copyright © 1941 and renewed 1969 by W. H. Auden, from W. H. Auden Collected Poems by W. H. Auden, used by permission of Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, and by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd., all rights reserved. Kafka: Die jahre der Entscheidungen by Reiner Stach, translated by Shelley Frisch as Kafka: The Decisive Years, copyright © 2002 by S. Fischer Verlag GmbH, Frankfurt am Main, reprinted with permission of the publisher. Sanctuary in the Wilderness: A Critical Introduction to American Hebrew Poetry by Alan Mintz, copyright © 2012 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Jr. University, all rights reserved, reprinted by permission of the publisher, Stanford University Press, sup.org. The Daemon Knows by Harold Bloom, copyright © 2015 by Harold Bloom, used by permission of Spiegel & Grau, an imprint of Random House Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. “K’tov be’iparon bakaron hahatum,” copyright © Dan Pagis and ACUM, used by permission of ACUM; translated by Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi as “Written in Pencil in the Sealed Freightcar,” in By Words Alone: The Holocaust in Literature, copyright © 1980 by The University of Chicago, all rights reserved, reprinted by permission of the publisher, The University of Chicago Press. The Zone of Interest by Martin Amis, copyright © 2014 by Martin Amis, used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, and by permission of Alfred A. Knopf Canada, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.