Terminal Lost and Found

The Zone of InterestBy Martin AmisKnopf, 2014What would a wised-up Holocaust novel look like? It’s difficult to imagine. The most prominent literature dealing with the Shoah—the poetry of Paul Celan, the fiction of Heinrich Böll, among others—is characterized by shuddering disbelief not only at the horrors of Nazism, but that life could go on in light of them. It seems too much to deal with in a knowing manner—that is, in a novelistic manner. The only apparent options are to weep or, God forbid, to play. But who would be so callous as to play with this material?It is not surprising, then, that in discussing Martin Amis’ The Zone of Interest, a novel set in Auschwitz, many reviewers have referred to Theodor Adorno’s famous dictum that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.” An even more appropriate challenge to the task Amis set himself is Elie Wiesel’s statement that “a novel about Auschwitz is not a novel—or else it is not about Auschwitz.” So: is it possible to write a novel about the Holocaust?Amis has spent much of his career thinking, writing, and speaking about the Holocaust. His other attempt at grappling with the genocide was 1991’s Time’s Arrow. In that novel, he seems to have had more respect for the injunctions to artistic silence: it recounts the life of a Nazi doctor in a brisk 165 pages, in reverse order. This conceit, while conceptually interesting (Amis has summarized it as the Germans taking a race down from the heavens, fattening them up, and reuniting them with their families), ultimately served to sterilize of the trauma, since the organic shock of evil’s drastic intrusion into civilized life is covered over and made theoretical by the artificial and unsustainable shock of literary flourish. All of the ideas are present in Time’s Arrow, but, in meek deference to the monumental task of reckoning with the real experience of the Holocaust, human beings are absent.What Amis has done in The Zone of Interest is far more radical. He has, in the mode of an experienced, mature novelist, willingly dispensed with the popular warnings regarding Holocaust literature, and crafted an incisive psychological portrait of several characters populating the Kat Zet, shorthand used throughout the novel for the Konzentrationslager at Auschwitz. The effects of this bold entrance into the minds of Nazis, devout or subversive, as well as the imprisoned, be they Jews or German wives, are staggering.The novel is told in the first person, primarily by three characters. There is Angelus ‘Golo’ Thomsen, a strikingly Aryan officer and nephew of Martin Bormann. Also narrating are Paul Doll, Kommandant of the camp, whose violent, neurotic obsessions include the success of the Reich (which, as the consummate middle-manager, he feels he has a direct influence on) and with his beautiful, miserable wife’s potential affair with Thomsen. The most enigmatic of the narrators is Szmul, head of the Sonderkommandos, Jewish prisoners forced to work at the camps until they, themselves are killed. The changes between these speakers are marked by simple, un-ironic chapter titles. The novel is largely without Amis’s characteristic gamesmanship, the few examples resting at the beginning of the novel. In one such instance, Doll (known to his inferiors as the ‘Old Boozer,’) tells a supremely unfunny story at a supremely boring dinner party about bringing Heinrich Himmler to one of the Nazi rabbit farms; 'We farm them, you know, by the hundred. For their fur, nicht?"Fur nicht, meaning “for nothing, for not,” which is what Doll’s life work comes to, both literally and philosophically. His continued use of ‘nicht’ at the end of his jokes will eventually become the object of his much more intelligent wife’s scorn.But this kind of linguistic play, at which Amis has long since proven himself an adept practitioner, is thankfully far less important to the novel than the actual settings and encounters between the characters.What strikes the reader in the opening chapters is Amis’s depth of imagination. But it is the imagination not into the murder and degradation of those times (this comes later), but of office politics, and the various responses to bureaucracy. This is a subtle narrative gambit on Amis’s part: we are willing to follow him into the mind of a mass murderer because he begins by so brilliantly exploring the mind of a middle-management drone. That these two personalities make up the same man (i.e., Doll) is illustrative of the book’s structural achievement, which expands equally (and often simultaneously) into the grotesque and the profound.

Smoking cigarillos, and drinking kir from conical glasses, we looked out at Kalifornia, which resembled, simultaneously and on a massive compass, an emptied block-long department store, a wide-spectrum jumble sale, an auction room, customs house, trade fair, agora, mart, soukh, chowk—a planetary, a terminal Lost and Found.

If Doll is a binary case of these two distinct yet complementary features, ‘Golo’ Thomsen is a more recognizable—dare I say relatable?—confusion of inner forces. He is also the character who undergoes the most change by novel’s end. His primary motivation throughout is his ‘love’ for Hannah Doll, the Commandant’s wife. Yet this passion does not begin as love, a distinction he is sure to point out to his brutish but nevertheless close officer friend, Boris, who is stationed at Kat Zet for “yet another fistfight”:

“For a moment I was young again. It was like love.”“Love?”“I said like love. Don’t look so stricken. Like love. A feeling of inevitability. You know. Like the birth of a long and wonderful romance. Romantic love.”

At this early stage, Thomsen, too, is concerned primarily with his bureaucratic duties and minor domestic interests. He takes in a cat for his mouse trouble. He fights relocation of his ‘labor force’. But all the while, these trivialities play out in the context of the absolute terror of the camps, with the two spheres in constant intersection. Here is Doll, explaining that the pollution levels are becoming unreasonable.

“Yesterday, Prufer, I was cordially invited to the civic centre in the Old Town. To face a delegation of local worthies. They said it’s undrinkable no matter how many times you boil it. The pieces have started to ferment, Hauptsturmfuhrer. The water table’s breached. There’s no alternative. The smell is going to be unbelievable.

The real trouble, according Commandant Doll, is that the cremated bodies (which, we are told later, reach into the hundreds of thousands during his tenure) are affecting the water supply. It is this attitude (a malaise in the face of horror which pervades the camp), along with his increasingly sincere attachment to Hannah, which brings Thomsen around to becoming an active saboteur of the Kat Zet’s operations. His initial callousness (“The fact that Hannah had married the Commandant: this was not a good reason to be in love with her—but it was a good reason to be in bed with her”) gives way to extremes of sensitivity and allows Amis to explore the range of his lyricism. Thomsen finds himself in the camps as though for the first time and is unsure of what to do. Suddenly, this well-connected (if never fully convinced) Nazi gains a perspective on the Shoah approaching the disbelief which has been for so long the mode of survivors and witnesses.

And now I feel I am starting again—and starting from nothing. I am perpetually harassed by first principles, like a child or a neurotic, or like a trite poet in an ingenuous novelette. But that is the state of the artist, I’m sure: the diametrical opposite of what we call taking things for granted. Why does a hand have five digits? What is a woman’s shoe? Why ants, why suns? Then I look, with definitive incredulity, at the bald stickmen and bald stickwomen, huge headed, in lines of five, scurrying back to slavery while the band plays. Something like hope—even something like love. And love: what is that?

Doll’s wife Hannah, meanwhile, presents a more difficult case for sympathy. We discover, as the novel goes on, that she had once been in love with her Communist professor, had even gone to meetings with him. Then, when the professor questioned her commitment to the cause (that is, got tired of her), she allowed herself to be taken in by the uncharismatic but stout-hearted Brown Shirt, Doll. True, she spends most of the novel actively undermining the Nazi, terrorizing him in such a way that his work notably suffers. But her past action, as well as the specifically sexual cruelty which she displays at his expense, cause the reader to ask whether and at what point a person is unforgivable. Near the end of the novel, several years after the War, a conversation with Thomsen, quoting Auden together, makes this explicit:

I said, “So they’ve prevailed, have they? In the case of Hannah Schmidt [her maiden name]? True? Till your nerves are numb And your now is a time Too late for Love. Saying Alas To less and less.”“Exactly. Grown and 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.”

If we take this, the case of Hannah Doll née Schmidt seriously, we, too, will have to decide when we are truly ourselves. Is it in sin, or in penance? Or, perhaps, there is a third option.The recreation (or, at least, the representation) of trauma, which eluded Amis in Time’s Arrow, is never stronger than in the case of Szmul, the Sonderkommandofuhrer. His narration is the most oblique of the speakers, and it is not difficult to understand why. Here, Amis makes his most direct attempt at evoking the pain and suffering of life as a victim of perhaps the most brutal genocide in human history. Szmul’s case is, naturally, difficult to describe: his suffering is so beyond the range of ordinary experience that the forces within him cannot be adequately brought into a coherent shape—Amis can only lay them out, side by side and as they occur, in hopes that the sympathetic reader fills in the pregnant pauses, the crude simple asides, with an imagined hell.

The Sonders have suffered Seelenmord—death of the soul. But the Germans have suffered it, too; I know this; it could not possibly be otherwise.I am no longer afraid of death, though I am still afraid of dying. I am afraid of dying because it is going to hurt. That’s all there is attaching me to life: the fact that leaving it is going to hurt. It’ll hurt.

Things get worse. Szmul spends the novel in scorchingly lyrical misery, made all the more acute by Commandant Doll’s constant, gloating presence. And yet he refuses to die. He lives from one moment to the next, constantly reminding himself, even when he is given an execution date, that he is not dead yet.And it is this example which the echoers of Adorno and Wiesel fail to recognize. The full implication of the injunction against art post-Holocaust is that the culture which produced the literary tradition also produced the Holocaust. Yet this is precisely why we must stare intently on the subject and do our best to understand, to see how things went so horrifyingly wrong. The real terror, then, is not simply that this happened, but also that it could happen again, since all the cruelty, delusion, and folly are contained within each of us. If we turn away, we let it fester. Not only is it possible to write a Holocaust novel, it is necessary.Amis has been accused in the past of feigning profundity, and, at certain points, he has been guilty. Indeed, Time’s Arrow, in its willingness to hide its trepidation behind artifice, might be cited as an example. But it seems that the weight of this subject, and his commitment to sparing no actor his or her implications, has been equal to the author’s lofty ambitions. His heroes, Nabokov and Bellow, in particular, despite their many differences, both wrote world-encompassing novels characterized by crystalline prose and unwaveringly moral vision. It will be a long while before anyone can decide whether Amis belongs in that class, but novels like this will make him impossible to leave out of the conversation.____Jack Hanson's previous reviews & poetry for Open Letters can be found here.