Imagining the Nazis
ROSENFELD, ALVIN H.
Imagining the Nazis Götz and Meyer By David Albahari Translated by Ellen Elias-Bursac Harcourt. 168 pp. $23.00. Reviewed by AI vin H. Rosenfeld Professor of English; director, Institute...
...Over a period of some 50 days, about 5,000 Jews, most of them women and children, were removed from a detention camp at the Belgrade Fairgrounds where they had been held and told they were being transferred to a work camp in Romania or Poland...
...A soul that remembers can never be lost," Albahari's narrator exclaims, yet by book's end he is so destabilized by his efforts to conjure Götz and Meyer that he seems little more than a lost soul himself...
...For me to truly understand real people like my relatives," he concludes, "I had first to understand unreal people like Götz and Meyer...
...Despite all of his efforts, he turns up disappointingly little about his forebears, more than 60 of whom were killed by the Nazis...
...Meyer, if it is Meyer, likes children too and enjoys giving chocolates to the Jewish youngsters at the Belgrade Fairgrounds, whom he will soon carry away in his truck...
...One of them—is it Götz?—wants to be a pilot...
...is pursued tenaciously, but it eludes clear answers...
...Götz, or is it Meyer?—the narrator is never sure who is who—is married and worries about his daughter back home who is suffering a sore throat...
...his companion dreams about other possibilities...
...The face-to-face killing, however, took a heavy toll on the spirits of the German riflemen...
...Initially, he knows nothing about Wilhelm Götz and Erwin Meyer, except their names and the fact that, as German soldiers, they were connected to the SS and drove a large "special purpose" truck every day into and out of the Belgrade Fairgrounds...
...It also puts the narrator's mind at risk, for to imagine Götz and Meyer is, in some sense, to become them...
...Although their names are constantly mixed up and they are in many ways indistinguishable from each other, Götz and Meyer are not presented as caricatures but as individuals joined together in a common enterprise: "The truck was a Saurer, a five-tonner with a boxlike body, 1.7 meters high and 5.8 meters long...
...With only rare exceptions, though, do such works treat in any depth those who actually ran the large, efficient killing machine, who carried out the slaughter...
...The cargo of fresh corpses would then be unloaded and buried by Serbian prisoners, who themselves would later be shot...
...The Serbian Jewish writer David Albahari's short yet intensely concentrated novel, Götz and Meyer, now fills in some of the blank spaces...
...I constantly had the feeling that I was slipping," the narrator confesses, "even when I was walking on solid ground...
...There was always something to do...
...Daniel Jonah Goldhagen prefers to see them as "ordinary Germans...
...and if it's about Auschwitz, it cannot be a novel...
...Obsessed with reconstructing his decimated family tree, he becomes a diligent researcher in archives, libraries and museums, gathering books and assiduously searching through files from the War years...
...Albahari's unnamed narrator is a Belgrade literature teacher in his early 50s who ruminates endlessly about the wartime destruction of Serbian Jewry...
...This act of murder-on-wheels so fascinates and repels the narrator that it sets his mind ablaze with the imagined details: "Once they'd crossed the bridge and covered a little distance, they'd pull over, and Götz, or Meyer, would get out, crawl under the Saurer, and hook the exhaust pipe up to an opening on the underside of the truck...
...Both Kertész and Albahari are unusually gifted, dedicated memorialists...
...And so, day in and day out, they would repeat their practiced routine...
...One of its central questions—"Really, what sort of human beings were Götz and Meyer...
...Each of these conceptual categories is applicable to Götz and Meyer, but finally none suffices to define what sort of human beings would grieve more over the broken axle of their truck than the thousands of innocent people they routinely gassed to death in the truck's hold...
...And long before the work of either of these scholars attempted to explain what kind of individuals would willingly participate in acts of genocide, Hannah Arendt drew attention to them as exemplars of "the banality of evil...
...Jews were nothing more than mildew on the face of the world...
...Instead, they were loaded into the Saurer and, on the way to the nearby town of Jajinci, asphyxiated by carbon monoxide piped into the back of the hermetically sealed truck...
...That is the case also in nonfictional writings about the Holocaust...
...Perhaps all one can do with Götz and Meyer, Albahari suggests, is tell their story, which he does movingly...
...Having never seen them, I can only imagine them," he repeats time and again, and his acute need to envisage them in their daily round with the truck is what drives Albahari's novel...
...Albahari's novel ventures brilliantly onto terrain that most other writers have shied away from...
...The book's formal qualities—it is written as a single torrential outpouring, with no chapter breaks, no paragraph indentations, and no quotation marks— disturbingly reveal what can happen to a mind that confronts a degree of extremity and absurdity it cannot readily contain...
...During these trips, the souls became real souls, no longer human in form...
...A full hundred people could stand in the back...
...To supplement such massacres in the field and make them less personal, gas vans were employed...
...While the latter are still going about their gruesome task, the narrator imagines Götz and Meyer "chatting with the commander, one of them was certainly smoking, and there was the business of crawling back under the truck and reattaching the exhaust pipe...
...After all, the people they were driving had no souls, that, at least, was a commonly known fact...
...It brings into view the identities and activities of some of the previously faceless perpetrators...
...director, Institute for Jewish Culture and the Arts, Indiana University The writer Elie Wiesel once famously remarked about Holocaust fiction: If it's a novel, it is not about Auschwitz...
...Reading them can be painful, for they are often unsparing in depicting the sufferings of the countless men, women and children who became the victims of Nazi genocide...
...This deadpan, sardonic tone is pervasive and gives Götz and Meyer a bizarre, even comic quality, but it is comedy that emerges from a mind fixated on horror and becoming increasingly unhinged...
...After that, Götz and Meyer no longer had anything to do but drive, of course...
...Many victims, the narrator learns from the historical sources he consults, were murdered by SS shooting squads...
...Their fiction shows how something close to madness accompanies and eventually overwhelms sustained meditations on the Nazi catastrophe...
...Little by little, the day would pass...
...Götz and Meyer most certainly knew what was happening in the back of the truck, but they definitely would never have described it like that...
...The historian ofNazi Germany, Christopher Browning, has called the Nazi killers "ordinary men...
...The routine, as it is related, actively but dispassionately involved Götz and Meyer in the destruction of Serbian Jewry...
...One feels the haunting presence of Kafka in Albahari's pages, as well as some of the intensities of the contemporary Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard...
...His reservations notwithstanding, a large body of prose fiction has been produced over the years about the Nazi persecution and mass murder of European Jewry, and new books of this kind continue to appear...
...A parallel text is Imre Kertész' Kaddishfor an Unborn Child, another short, relentlessly wrought novel thatruminates obsessively on the Nazi crimes and the need to understand and preserve them in memory...
Vol. 88 • November 2005 • No. 6
