Books September 29, 2014 Issue 

The Death Factory

Martin Amis’s “The Zone of Interest.”

By Joyce Carol Oates 

When Theodor Adorno declared, in 1949, that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric,” he could hardly have anticipated the ensuing quantity of poetry and prose that actually concerned itself with the Holocaust, still less its astonishing range and depth. The category now encompasses the densely narrated psychological-historical realism of André Schwarz-Bart and Imre Kertész, the Kafka-inspired dreamscapes of Aharon Appelfeld, and, later, the elliptical, deeply original fictions of W. G. Sebald. As the generations of firsthand witnesses give way to younger generations, literary works that confront the subject have often been more circumspect; recent novels by Susanna Moore and Ayelet Waldman achieve their emotional power by focussing upon characters peripheral to the terrible European history that has nonetheless altered their lives. The conflagration must be glimpsed indirectly, following Appelfeld’s admonition that “one does not look directly into the sun.”

 

Such circumspection has not been Martin Amis’s strategy in approaching the Holocaust. The Nazi death camps at Auschwitz provide a setting for Amis’s tour de force “Time’s Arrow: or The Nature of the Offense” (1991), in which the lifetime of a Nazi doctor-experimenter is presented in reverse chronological order, from the instant of his death (as the affable American Tod Friendly) to his conception (as the ominously named German Odilo Unverdorben), witnessed by a part of himself that seems to be his conscience, or his soul. Nearly a quarter century later, Amis’s new and equally risky Nazi novel, “The Zone of Interest” (Knopf), revisits the town of Auschwitz, more specifically the Zone of Interest, which contains one of the death camps and the headquarters and domiciles of its Nazi staffers and assistants, a “dumping ground for 2nd-rate blunderers,” as its commandant wryly observes. Amis’s considerable historical research into the horrific absurdities of what he calls, in the novel’s afterword, “the exceptionalism of the Third Reich” is everywhere in evidence. The Zone is a place to which Jewish “evacuees” are brought by train to be used as forced labor or to be gassed straightaway, their remains deposited in the euphemistically named but foul-smelling Spring Meadow. (“If what we’re doing is so good,” the commandant wonders, “why does it smell so lancingly bad?”) In this hellish place, in August, 1942, there are several narrators; none is quite so eloquent in Nabokovian irony as the unidentified narrator of “Time’s Arrow,” but each bears witness to the unspeakable in his own way.

 

The first of the narrators is Obersturmfuhrer Angelus (Golo) Thomsen, a mid-level Nazi officer in charge of the Buna-Werke factory, and the favored nephew of the high-ranking Nazi Martin Bormann—“the man who controls the appointment book of the Deliverer.” (For some reason, no one in “The Zone of Interest” calls Adolf Hitler by his name; elevated circumlocutions are used.) Thomsen’s commitment to the Nazi war effort is haphazard and expedient: “We were obstruktiv Mitlaufere. We went along. We went along, we went along with, doing all we could to drag our feet . . . but we went along. There were hundreds of thousands like us, maybe millions like us.” Yet Thomsen is a self-described Aryan specimen—six feet three, with cobalt-blue “arctic eyes” and “thighs as solid as hewn masts.” A compulsive womanizer and a sexual braggart, he is erotically obsessed with the wife of the camp commandant, Paul Doll—the elusive and haughty Hannah, who “conformed to the national ideal of young femininity, stolid, countrified, and built for procreation and heavy work.”

 

Paul Doll is the second narrator, a vainglorious buffoon stricken with self-pity for being ill-treated by his wife (who loathes him) and overworked by his superiors (who disdain him). He is responsible for overseeing the frequent arrival of evacuees and their subsequent fates at Auschwitz. Accordingly, he is caught between the demand of the Economic Administration Head Office to help “swell the labour strength (for the munitions industries)” and the demand of the Reich Central Security Department to direct “the disposal of as many evacuees as possible, for obvious reasons of self-defense.” He sits through Nazi concerts calculating “how long it would take . . . to gas the audience.” Amis clearly takes pleasure in throwing his satirical voice into Doll’s rants, as he complains of being stuck in the Zone of Interest “offing old ladies and little boys, whilst other men gave a luminescent display of valour.” Here is a wickedly funny Monty Python figure in Nazi regalia:

 

And mind you, disposing of the young and the elderly requires other strengths and virtues—fanaticism, radicalism, severity, implacability, hardness, iciness, mercilessness, und so weiter. After all . . . somebody’s got to do it—the Jews’d give us the same treatment if they had ½ a chance, as everybody knows. 

 

As in a stage comedy routine, at times the buffoon-Nazi mask falls away and we hear a startled voice break through, as in this reverie of Doll’s: “She is a personable and knowing young female, albeit too flachbrustig (though her Arsch is perfectly all right, and if you hoiked up that tight skirt you’d . . . Don’t quite see why I write like this. It isn’t my style at all).”

 

There is little irony, much less humor, in the figure of Amis’s third narrator, Sonderkommandofuhrer Szmul, the head of a team of “Sonders,” Jewish prisoners who assist the Nazis in killing and disposing of their fellow-Jews—“vultures of the crematory” who appear to “go about their ghastly tasks with the dumbest indifference.” Szmul perceives himself in very different terms, as a martyr/witness to the horror: “I feel that if you knew every day, every hour, every minute of human history, you would find no exemplum, no model, no precedent.” Like all those conscripted for such work among the doomed and their cadavers (from whose teeth gold must be carefully extracted), Szmul understands that he, too, is doomed, even as he hopes that in some way his testimony will prevail:

 

 

Somebody will one day come to the ghetto or the Lager and account for the near-farcical assiduity of the German hatred.

 

And I would start by asking—why were we conscripted, why were we impressed, in the drive towards our own destruction?

 

. . . There it is, you see. The Jews can only prolong their lives by helping the enemy to victory—a victory that for the Jews means what?

 

Far from being a vulture of the crematory, Szmul is a kind of saint of Auschwitz, ascetic and selfless. If he is not an altogether convincing character, it’s a nearly impossible task to give a convincing voice to such a person (and such a person very likely existed). Szmul leaves all that he has written as a witness to Auschwitz in a thermos flask beneath a gooseberry bush: “And by reason of that, not all of me will die.”

 

It is the opportunistic Thomsen who survives the defeat of the German Army. Reconstituted in September, 1948, at the novel’s end, as a “reformed character”—a de-Nazified German—Thomsen has a job working with Americans on the Bundesentschadigungsgesetz, or the guidelines for reparations: “victims’ justice.” He’s heard that Germany’s new national anthem is “Ich Wusste Nichts Uber Es” (“I Didn’t Know Anything About It”). Yet Thomsen can’t construct for himself a “self-sufficient inner life; and this was perhaps the great national failure.” In the Zone of Interest, he reflects, “I felt doubled (this is me but it is also not me; there is a further me); after the war, I felt halved.”

 

Martin Amis is at his most compelling as a satiric vivisectionist with a cool eye and an unwavering scalpel. The novel, in its most inspired moments, is a compendium of epiphanies, appalled asides, anecdotes, and radically condensed history. With virtually every page of the novel reporting some horror, including the awful stench of death en masse, it is a stretch of the reader’s imagination to credit the “love interest” of Thomsen for Hannah Doll as much more than an expedient MacGuffin.

 

Amis’s great gift is a corrosively satiric voice, often very funny, zestfully profane, obscene, and scatological. Jonathan Swift’s “savage indignation,” backed with Swift’s passionate morality, infuses Amis’s most characteristic work. But, in his new Holocaust novel, Amis is too humane, finally, to do more than attempt a few swipes at such humor. The effect of the Holocaust isn’t singular but cumulative. At a poorly executed Selektion (a “selection” of prisoners: some to live as forced laborers, others to be gassed), the Commandant has to rely upon a small group of violinists to play music masking screams of terror (“the first strains of the violins could do no more than duplicate and reinforce that helpless, quavering cry. But then the melody took hold”), and it’s the stuff of blackest humor. Yet, when such cruelties are repeated and repeated, even the satirist is apt to lose heart and concur with Thomsen: “I used to be numb; now I’m raw.” It’s a further anomaly that isolated passages of prose in the text are rendered in German (styled without umlauts, for some reason), when surely all the dialogue and the introspective material would have been in German. In an exchange between the Dolls, one speaks in English and the other in German, and Szmul, in one of his reveries, thinks, “The Sonders have suffered Seelenmord—death of the soul,” as if a German-speaking character would translate his thoughts in this way. The author of the novel, not the narrator of the chapter, wants to highlight certain phrases for the benefit of the reader, but the mannerism is as distracting as a nudge in the ribs.

 

Indeed, it seems a relief to the author, as to the reader, when the strained fiction of “fiction” is set aside and we get Amis’s own unmediated (and very engaging) voice in the afterword, titled “That Which Happened.” Here, Amis makes note of the impressively many works of history and memoir he has read in preparation for writing “The Zone of Interest,” and also of his fascination with the Führer of all Führers: “He has so far gone unnamed in this book; but now I am obliged to type out the words ‘Adolf Hitler.’ ” Amis joins in a general bewilderment among historians about “understanding” Hitler: “We know a great deal about the how—about how he did what he did; but we seem to know almost nothing about the why.” Given this fascination, it’s curious that Hitler has no presence in “The Zone of Interest” except as a quasi-mythic figure revered and feared by more ordinary Nazis. 

Amis acknowledges, too, his longtime obsession with the Holocaust:
 

My own inner narrative is one of chronic stasis, followed by a kind of reprieve. . . . I first read Martin Gilbert’s classic The Holocaust: The Jewish Tragedy in 1987, and I read it with incredulity; in 2011 I read it again, and my incredulity was intact and entire. . . . Between those dates I had worked my way through scores of books on the subject; and while I might have gained in knowledge, I had gained nothing at all in penetration. The facts, set down in a historiography of tens of thousands of volumes, are not in the slightest doubt; but they remain in some sense unbelievable, or beyond belief, and cannot quite be assimilated. Very cautiously I submit that part of the exceptionalism of the Third Reich lies in its unyieldingness, the electric severity with which it repels our contact and our grip.

 

One could argue, just as plausibly, that Hitler and his henchmen were not at all “exceptional” in a human history that has always included warfare, unspeakable cruelty, and attempted genocide; what set the Nazis apart from less efficient predecessors was their twentieth-century access to the instruments of industrialized warfare and annihilation, and a propaganda machine that excluded all other avenues of information for an essentially captive German population.

 

“The Zone of Interest,” like “Time’s Arrow,” focusses upon the vicissitudes of personality and situation, and does not take up such larger questions, except fleetingly. The author’s rage at Holocaust horrors is portioned into scenes and sentences; it does not gather into a powerful swell, to overwhelm or terrify. Is it inherent in postmodernism that, no matter the subject, such emotions are likely to be held at bay? “To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme,” as Melville declares in “Moby-Dick”; but such mightiness may be precluded by a mode of writing whose ground bass is irony rather than empathy. In the afterword, Amis cites the famous passage in Primo Levi’s Auschwitz memoir in which Levi asks a German guard, “Warum?,” and is told by the guard, “Hier ist kein warum”—“There is no why here.” Perhaps that terse reply is the only adequate response to all questions of “Why?” relating to the Holocaust. ♦