The Zone of Interest

by Martin Amis

  There was a long silence. There had been several long silences. And now St Kaspar’s reproachfully sounded the quarter-hour.

  ‘Can we talk more blandly for a while? Go on about your job. And then I’ll calm down.’

  ‘Well, it’s not quite a change of subject,’ I said; but I too felt the need to talk more blandly, for a while. So I told her about my job. The eight million completed questionnaires, and the five grades of classification, all the way from Nonincriminated to Major Offender.

  ‘The fifth one. That’s the one my late husband qualified for.’

  ‘Sorry. Yes.’ I hesitated. ‘But let me – let me be earnest and tell you about the side of it that really interests me.’

  My extracurricular work had little to do with victors’ justice (as if, after a war, there was any other kind). It concerned itself with the Bundesentschadigungsgesetz, or the guidelines on reparations: victims’ justice. In this case indemnities for murdered relatives, for years lost to slavery and terror, and for persisting physical and mental debility (and for the theft of all assets and belongings). My friend David Merlin, a Jewish lawyer and a captain in the US Army (and one of our most brilliant and reviled denazifiers), had recruited me a year earlier; and at first the whole thing felt deeply pertinent and also deeply fanciful – who, at that stage, could imagine a Germany, not only sovereign and solvent, but also sorry? No longer. The new reality – emergent Israel, back in May – was like an injection or an impregnation; and Merlin was already planning an exploratory mission to Tel Aviv. She said,

  ‘That’s the best thing you could be doing. And all power to you.’

  ‘Thanks. Thanks. So, anyway, my days are full. I’m busy at least.’

  ‘Mm. I’m not.’

  She said she was having to do more for her folks now – her mother’s hips, her father’s heart.

  ‘And I teach conversational French for five hours a week. I can’t do any written stuff because of my spelling. You know, the dyslexia. So all I do, really, is raise the girls.’

  Who now appeared, drifting into view at the far end of the pond as the half-hour sounded. They came to a halt – and it was clear that they’d been assigned to come and check on their mother. Hannah waved, and they waved back before drifting off again.

  ‘. . . The twins like you.’

  I swallowed hard and said, ‘Well I’m very glad, because I like them and always have. And isn’t it nice that Paulette can now walk tall with Sybil? There you are, I’ll be a friend of the family. I’ll come down every now and then on the train and take you all out to lunch.’

  ‘. . . I’m sorry, but I can’t take my eyes off that swan. I hate that swan. See? Its neck’s clean enough, but look at the feathers. They’re grimey-grey.’

  ‘Like the snow in Poland.’ First white, then grey, then brown. ‘When did you leave?’

  She said, ‘I probably left the same day you did. When they bundled you off. May the first.’

  ‘Why so soon?’

  ‘Because of the night before. Walpurgisnacht.’ Just for a moment she brightened. ‘Apart from the obvious, what do you know about Walpurgisnacht?’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Back there, the girls were very excited. Not only about the bonfire and the fireworks and the roast potatoes. They had this book they liked terrorising themselves with. Walpurgisnacht is meant to be the time when you can cross the boundary between the seen and the unseen worlds. Between the world of light and the world of darkness. They loved that. Can I have another cigarette?’

  ‘Of course . . . A friend of mine, a late friend of mine said the Third Reich was one long Walpurgisnacht. And he talked about the boundary, but the boundary between life and death, and how it seemed to have disappeared. April the thirtieth. Wasn’t that the night when the curious creature in the Wilhelmstrasse put himself out of his misery?’

  ‘Was it? Well, it’s also my birthday. Anyway.’ In an intent tone she said, ‘I do want to ask you about this because I’m not sure I saw it right. Look how vile-natured that swan is.’

  The swan – the furiously affronted question mark of its neck and beak, its black-eyed stare.

  With slight unease I said, ‘Oh yes. There’s a bit about Walpurgisnacht in – can it be Faust? The witches fuck, the he-goat shits . . .’

  ‘That’s good.’ She flexed her brow and went on, ‘He asked me into the garden. Watch the roman candles. He said Szmul, he said Szmul wanted to give me a birthday present. Now try and imagine you’re there.’

  The three of them in the gaining twilight. Beyond, down the slope, the Walpurgisnacht blaze and, perhaps, the upward whoosh of a rocket. The sunset, the first stars. Sonderkommandofuhrer Szmul was on the other side of the garden fence. In his stripes. The atmosphere, she said, was like nothing she’d ever experienced or read about or heard about. Looking glazed, the prisoner drew from his sleeve a long tool or weapon, a kind of spike with a narrow crosspiece. And all was uncertain, all was pretend.

  Doll kicked the gate open and said, Come on then . . .

  Szmul stood his ground. He parted his shirt and put the point to his chest. (As she said this she held out her joined hands at arm’s length.) And Szmul looked her in the eye and said to her,

  Eigentlich wolte er dass ich Ihnen das antun.

  And Doll said, Oh, what use are you then?

  And shot him in the face. He had his gun out and he shot him in the face. Then he crouched down and shot him in the back of the neck.

  When Szmul stopped quivering Doll turned slowly on his haunches and stared up at her.

  Eigentlich wolte er dass ich Ihnen das antun. Really he wanted me to do this to you.

  ‘As he said it Szmul looked me in the eye. I used to see him almost every day and he never did that. Looked me in the eye.’ For a moment she seemed surprised by the cigarette she was holding, and drew on it and dropped it to the ground. ‘Doll was covered in blood. God, what a bullet does . . . And still trying to smile. I suddenly knew who he’d been all along. There he was, a nightmarish little boy. Caught doing something plainly disgusting. And still trying to smile.’

  ‘So you . . .’

  ‘Oh. Straight away I got the girls and took them to Romhilde Seedig’s. And we left the minute we could.’ She placed a flat hand just beneath her throat. ‘And I knew who he was. Now, Herr Thomsen, the Referendar, what do you make of all that?’

  I spread my hands. ‘You’ve had five years to think. You must’ve got somewhere with it.’

  ‘Mm. Well in the end the worst thing, really, was that he stopped Szmul from killing himself by his own hand. Instead he destroyed his face. You know, I used to say good morning to Szmul in the lane. And whatever else he was he wasn’t a violent man . . . Now this is right, isn’t it? Doll had, I don’t know, persuaded Szmul to hurt me or even kill me.’

  ‘The thing I always feared. Persuaded him, put pressure on him. I wonder how.’

  ‘That’s what I wonder too.’

  ‘For the rest you saw it right, I think.’

  St Kaspar’s ponderously reminded us that it was eleven forty-five. A Sunday, but no other church bells were audible, in this city of a hundred spires.

  ‘Do you want to know what happened to Dieter? What did Doll say happened to him?’

  ‘Well he said he was dead. Which is the case, isn’t it? Oh, Doll said all kinds of things. And kept misremembering and contradicting himself. He said they cut all the nerves in his groin. They locked him naked in a kind of fridge of dry ice. Then they—’

  ‘No, no, none of that’s true.’

  ‘I could tell it couldn’t all be true.’

  ‘He was martyred,’ I said firmly. ‘He died for his cause, but it was quick. And early on. January ’34. I learned that from the Reichsleiter.’

  ‘. . . You were in prison, weren’t you? Not in a camp.’

  ‘Camps at first, then prison, thank God. Compared to camp, prison is bliss. Stadelheim, eighteen months in the political wing . . . I’ll tell you about
it another time. If there is another time.’

  It was eleven fifty-four, and I had to speak.

  ‘Hannah, I wasn’t imagining it, was I? You did have some feeling for me, back then?’

  She lifted her face and said, ‘No, you weren’t imagining it. And it seemed, I don’t know, it felt right when you hugged me in the pavilion that time. And I went out into the garden for you and I was glad to do it. I thought about you a lot. A lot. And I wished I hadn’t had to destroy your letter. And I tracked down the poem you quoted from. “The Exiles”.’

  ‘Gas-light in shops, The fate of ships.’

  ‘And the tide-wind Touch the old wound . . .’

  She nodded sorrowfully and went on, ‘But something’s happened. Back then, you were my figure for what was sane. For what was decent and normal and civilised. And now all that’s been turned on its head. I’m . . . It’s sad. You aren’t normal any longer, not to me. When I see you, I’m there again. When I see you I smell it. And I don’t want to smell it.’

  I eventually said it grieved me to admit that this made a kind of sense.

  ‘Can you believe, I was married to one of the most prolific murderers in history. Me. And he was so coarse, and so . . . prissy, and so ugly, and so cowardly, and so stupid. Dieter was hopeless too in his way. A head full of someone else’s ideas. Stalin’s. See? I’m no good at it. I’m just not up to it. Doll. Doll. The thought of being with a man is alien to me now. I haven’t given them a glance in years. I’m finished with them. I’m so finished.’

  I considered for a moment – or for a moment I stopped considering. ‘You haven’t got the right to say that.’

  ‘Haven’t got the right?’

  ‘No, you haven’t, I don’t think you have. Only a victim has the right to say there’s no coming back from it. And they hardly ever do. They’re desperate to restart their lives. The ones that are truly broken are the ones we never hear from. They’re not talking to – they’re not talking to anybody. You, you were always your husband’s victim, but you were never a victim.’

  She shook her square head at me. ‘It depends on the person, doesn’t it? Suffering isn’t relative. Don’t they say that?’

  ‘But oh yes suffering is. Did you lose your hair and half your body weight? Do you laugh at funerals because there’s all this fuss and only one person died? Did your life depend on the state of your shoes? Were your parents murdered? Were your girls? Do you fear uniforms and crowds and naked flames and the smell of wet garbage? Are you terrified of sleep? Does it hurt and hurt and hurt? Is there a tattoo on your soul?’

  She straightened again and was still for a moment, but then said steadily, ‘No. Of course not. But that’s exactly what I mean. The thing is we don’t deserve to come back from it. After that.’

  I said, ‘So they’ve prevailed, have they? In the case of Hannah Schmidt? True? Till your nerves are numb And your now is a time Too late for love. Saying Alas To less and less.’

  ‘Exactly. Grown used at last To having lost. And I don’t mean the war.’

  ‘No. No. You’re a fighter. Like the time you gave Doll those black eyes. With one punch – Christ, you’re like Boris. You’re a fighter – that’s who you really are.’

  ‘No it isn’t. I was never less myself than I was back then.’

  ‘And is this who you really are? Cowering in Rosenheim. And finished.’

  She folded her arms and looked to the side.

  ‘Who I am doesn’t matter,’ she said. ‘It’s simpler than that. You and me. Listen. Imagine how disgusting it would be if anything good came out of that place. There.’

  The first gong sounded: thirty-six seconds.

  ‘I will arise and go now.’

  And I arose. Overhead, above the grey – more grey, and no ghosts of blue. Again I swallowed hard, and said quietly,

  ‘May I write? May I visit? Allowed? Forbidden?’

  The refolded arms, the second look to the side.

  ‘Well I’m – well I’m not forbidding it, am I. That would be . . . But you’re wasting your time. And my time. Sorry. I’m sorry.’

  I swayed before her. ‘You know, I came to Rosenheim hoping to find you. And now you’re near and not lost, I can’t give up.’

  She looked out at me. ‘I’m not asking you to stay away. But I am asking you to – to give up.’

  My knees creaked as I made a shallow bow and said with a show of briskness, ‘I’ll let you know when I’m coming. Please prepare the girls for high tea in the Grand. With their Uncle Angelus.’

  The tower tolled nine, tolled ten.

  ‘You can of course be trusted to remember your flowers.’ My legs felt even weaker, and I had the knuckles of my left hand pressed tight against my brow. ‘Will you do something for me? When we part, this Sunday afternoon, say so long softly.’

  ‘Mm, I remember. Yes, all right. Sure.’ She breathed out. ‘. . . So long.’

  Now the twins were drifting back into sight, beyond the tall white bird in the round water.

  ‘So long,’ I answered, and turned and walked away.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS AND AFTERWORD: ‘THAT WHICH HAPPENED’

  I am of course greatly indebted to the loci classici of the field – the works of Yehuda Bauer, Raul Hilberg, Norman Cohn, Alan Bullock, H. R. Trevor-Roper, Hannah Arendt, Lucy S. Dawidowicz, Martin Gilbert, Ian Kershaw, Joachim C. Fest, Saul Friedländer, Richard J. Evans, Richard Overy, Gitta Sereny, Christopher R. Browning, Michael Burleigh, Mark Mazower, and Timothy Snyder, among many others. These writers have established the macrocosm. I now intend to discharge some obligations on the level of the meso and the micro.

  For the moods and textures of daily life in the Third Reich: Victor Klemperer’s magisterial I Shall Bear Witness and To the Bitter End; Friedrich Reck’s spitefully intelligent Diary of a Man in Despair; Marie Vassiltchikov’s captivating and politically incisive Berlin Diaries, 1940–1945; and Helmuth James von Moltke’s Letters to Freya, a monument of moral solidity (and uxoriousness), all the more convincing for his self-confessed equivocation after the defeat of France in June 1940.

  For IG Farben, the Buna-Werke, and Auschwitz III: Diarmuid Jeffreys’s finely executed Hell’s Cartel; Robert Jay Lifton’s The Nazi Doctors; Rudolf Vrba’s I Escaped from Auschwitz; Laurence Rees’s Auschwitz; Witold Pilecki’s The Auschwitz Volunteer: Beyond Bravery; and the Primo Levi of If This Is a Man, Moments of Reprieve, and The Drowned and the Saved. For the ethos and structure of the SS, Heinz Höhne’s The Order of the Death’s Head (with its excellent appendices) and Adrian Weale’s The SS: A New History.

  For background, and for random details and insights: Golo Mann’s The History of Germany Since 1789; Robert Conquest’s Reflections on a Ravaged Century; Peter Watson’s The German Genius and A Terrible Beauty; Paul Johnson’s A History of the Jews and A History of the Modern World; Antony Beevor’s Stalingrad, Berlin: The Downfall, and The Second World War; Niall Ferguson’s The Pity of War and The War of the World; the three-volume Nazism: A History in Documents and Eyewitness Accounts, edited by J. Noakes and G. Pridham; Bomber Command, Armageddon, and All Hell Let Loose, by Max Hastings; Heike B. Görtemaker’s Eva Braun; Jochen von Lang’s The Secretary (on Bormann); Eric A. Johnson’s Nazi Terror: The Gestapo, Jews, and Ordinary Germans; Edward Crankshaw’s Gestapo and, more especially, his exquisite Bismarck; and the death-cell memoir, Commandant of Auschwitz, by the fuddled mass murderer Rudolf Höss (from Primo Levi’s introduction: ‘despite his efforts at defending himself, the author comes across as what he is: a coarse, stupid, arrogant, long-winded scoundrel’).

  For the tics and rhythms of German speech my principal guide was Alison Owings and her Frauen: German Women Recall the Third Reich. Time and again Owings probes, coaxes, humours, and inveigles her way into cosy intimacy with a wide range of housewives, heroines, diehards, dissenters, ex-prisoners, ex-guards. Her subjects are historically anonymous except for one; and the centrepiece of this amusing, frightening, and consistently illuminating bo
ok is a long interview, in Vermont, with Freya von Moltke, close to half a century after the execution of her husband. Owings writes:

  I had assumed, while nervously boarding ever smaller planes to get to her home, that I would find a woman of bravery and dignity, and I did. I was not prepared to find a woman in love.

  . . . ‘Women who lost husbands in the horrendous war and even here, in this country, experienced far worse than I. For them it was horrible, the men going off to war and then never coming back. Many lost husbands who hated [the regime] and they nonetheless were killed. That is bitter. But for me, everything was worthwhile. I thought, he has fulfilled his life. And he did. Definitely.

  ‘When you talk with me for a long while,’ she said, ‘you understand that one lives a whole lifetime from such an experience. When he was killed, I had two delightful children, two dear sons. I thought, so. That is enough for a whole life.’

  For the survivors and their testimonies I want to single out from the huge and forbidding archive a volume that deserves permanent currency: Anton Gill’s The Journey Back from Hell. It is an extraordinarily inspiring treasury of voices, and one grounded and marshalled by the author with both flair and decorum. Indeed, these reminiscences, these dramatic monologues, reshape our tentative answer to the unavoidable question: What did you have to have to survive?

  What you had to have is usually tabulated as follows: luck; the ability to adapt, immediately and radically; a talent for inconspicuousness; solidarity with another individual or with a group; the preservation of decency (‘the people who had no tenets to live by – of whatever nature – generally succumbed’ no matter how ruthlessly they struggled); the constantly nurtured conviction of innocence (an essential repeatedly emphasised by Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago); immunity to despair; and, again, luck.

  Having communed with the presences in Gill’s book, with their stoicism, eloquence, aphoristic wisdom, humour, poetry, and uniformly high level of perception, one can suggest an additional desideratum. In a conclusive rebuke to the Nazi idea, these ‘subhumans’, it turns out, were the cream of humankind. And a rich, delicate, and responsive sensibility – how surprising do we find this? – was not a hindrance but a strength. Together with a nearly unanimous rejection of revenge (and a wholly unanimous rejection of forgiveness), the testimonies assembled here have something else in common. There is a shared thread of guilt, the feeling that, while they themselves were saved, someone more deserving, someone ‘better’ was tragically drowned. And this must amount to a magnanimous illusion; with due respect to all, there could have been no one better.