Amis' Auschwitz a sardonic take on evil
Amid reports of rising anti-Semitism in Europe — most chillingly, perhaps, in Germany — the time is prime for Martin Amis' bravely nuanced new novel to pour insightful light on the enduring darkness of the Holocaust. But The Zone of Interest is, inevitably, not only a project that risks condemnation but also a question —"Why?" — without an answer.
Those who agree with traumatized post-World War II dictums against turning the death-camp horrors of Naziism into art may shun this book. Meanwhile, some publishers in France and Germany have already said no to it, perhaps because its blackly comic tonalities are steeped in a British idiom that could resist the most sensitive translation.
Nothing is beyond art, though, and Amis is a major novelist who has taken on the Holocaust before, more than two decades ago, with Time's Arrow, an experimental tour-de-force in which a Nazi sadist is revealed to us in reverse chronology, beginning with his death and concluding with his birth. The Zone of Interest is a more traditional narrative, a blighted love story that begins as a comedy of boorish manners — the banality of evil, indeed — before descending into a sensorium of pathetic detail, with brilliantly sardonic dialogue.
It's told from alternating points of view. There's the swinish Nazi necrocrat Paul Doll, who struggles to rout endless trainloads of "evacuees" to their death or enslavement at Auschwitz. His haplessness, his twisted master-race pride and denial as it becomes clear that Hitler's war is lost, is the book's satiric underpinning ("If what we're doing is good, why does it smell so lancingly bad?"). He must also endure the contempt of his wife, Hannah, a towering Frau whose lover, the Communist Dieter Kruger, has disappeared into Nazi prisons.
Then there's Szmul, who leads the camp's Jewish crew of "Sonders" who stay alive by assisting in the gassing of the arriving Jews, gently misleading them all the way to the ovens. Szmul is the numbed blackness at the heart of the book, symbolizing the Holocaust's sheer death of the soul: "The Jews can only prolong their lives by helping the enemy to victory — a victory that for the Jews means what?"
The near-protagonist is Obersturmfuhrer Angelus (Golo) Thomsen, a privileged nephew of uber-Nazi Martin Bormann, Hitler's chief of staff. Golo is a womanizing cynic who goes along to get along, despite the genocide's affront to his humanity ("Let it go. Let it go. What, let that go? Yes. Let it go."). At first he lusts after Hannah, but she stirs his conscience, and so their relationship rises to platonic heights. Their ironic union, amid the stink and savagery of Auschwitz, provides a burst of plotted momentum that only falters as the war unravels everything.
This is just as well, since the hellishness of the Holocaust won't allow for true redemption. The final scene echoes that of the film Casablanca, but Golo's and Hannah's delicate farewell falls a bit flat, as Amis strives for an elegiac, empathetic conclusion that can't carry the weight of his horror.
Still, he conducts a powerful inquisition into the Nazi sensibility, suggesting how the endlessly compounded nouns of the German language can create such distance from reality that a bureaucracy of industrialized death can flourish. But, as Amis admits in his afterword, explanations fail: "Very cautiously I submit that part of the exceptionalism of the Third Reich lies in… the electric severity with which it repels our contact and our grip."
The Zone of Interest
By Martin Amis
Knopf
*** 1/2 stars out of four